This is China! BLOG

Inexorable China

I’ve been thinking about business and social trends in China I would consider inexorable; that is, there is little short of natural or man-made catastrophe that would halt the momentum of the trend. The list I came up with covers four basic areas: Environmental, Industrialization, Policy and Social trends.

Articles in the series explore each of the following trends in turn:
1. Land: Going, Going, Gone
2. Increasing Water Demands
3. Increased Infrastructure Availability
4. Going West for Cheap Sneakers
5. China at Your Services
6. Re-making the Military
7. The Information Age Meets Traditional Chinese Censorship
8. The Anxious Middle Class
9. City Mouse, Country Mouse and the Urbanization of China
10. Increasing Energy Usage

The first article in the series is:
Tightening Environmental Regulations
During the summer of 2007 I along with other residents of the south-central Chinese city of Suzhou held its collective breath in anticipation of provincial authorities shutting off the city’s water. The neighboring city of Wuxi had already had its taps to its water source shut off for two weeks. Lake Tai (or Tai Hu, as the Chinese call it), had become so polluted the only life that seemed to thrive in the third largest lake in China was a luminescent green algae that was blooming out of control. Even some parts of Shanghai were in danger of having their potable water contaminated.

But this was not an isolated incident of environmental degradation in China affecting the lives of millions. There have been many others that were far more life-threatening:

• In early 2006 in the eastern province of Shandong a 60 kilometer-long (37 mile) diesel oil slick flowed down the Yellow River, China’s second longest river;
• In late-2005 100-tons of benzene spewed into the Songhua River after tanks in a chemical plant exploded, forcing the north Chinese city of Harbin to close its taps to water from the River;
• Also in 2005 in the central province of Hunan a mismanaged silt clean-up project allowed the industrial chemical cadmium to flood out of a smelting works and into the Xiangjiang River

China currently has sixteen of twenty cities in the world whose air is the most polluted. Air quality in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing has become so poor that mounting healthcare costs directly linked to bad air are bringing the attention of national and local authorities to the reality that all-out economic development with few constraints is counter-productive.

Indeed, the need for China to address environmental degradation issues became a central plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in its 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010). Since then, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) is gradually gaining the teeth it needs to enforce environmental protection policies at a local level.

For example, just after the algae bloom on Lake Tai, in July of 2007, SEPA gained authority to close down nearly a dozen chemical factories in the lakeside city of Yixing, and near Changshu, where textile companies were dumping untreated waste into the Yangtze River water that feeds the Lake. Since July 2007 SEPA has closed down four hundred industrial firms that violated pollution standards. The Agency also fined 1,162 companies and suspended the operations of others while environmental improvements are made to their facilities. The campaign recovered US$96 million in pollution fines.

The trend toward the Chinese government’s tightening environmental policy and enforcement is inextricable. The Chinese government is under pressure from its citizenry, which is protesting ever-more frequently, in greater numbers, and more vociferously than ever before about the toxins factories spew into the country’s air, water and land. The government is seeing its healthcare costs rise in proportion to the degree to which it industrializes without adequate enforcement of environmental standards. And China is seeing greater pressure from other countries to curb its enthusiasm, most of which have accepted the realities of Global Warming and its impact on temperature, water levels, air quality and land mass.

Who knows, one day there may be no Taiwan to fight over … it will have sunk under the rising sea levels born of melting polar caps.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China