The Best And Worst Of Times For China's Environment

There's great progress afoot. Just don't breath the air or drink the water.

 
Gordon G. Chang,

It is the best of times for China's environment.

Chinese officials are determined to clean up their air, land and water. This month Beijing said it would subsidize purchases of electric cars and plug-in hybrids in a pilot program in five cities. The central government already offers a tax break for purchasers of smaller-engine vehicles and will follow up this year with a nationwide subsidy for gasoline-powered cars with engines no larger than 1.6 liters. These programs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, will cover more than 4 million vehicles by 2012. The finance ministry, in recent days, announced it will also subsidize the manufacture of high-efficiency electric motors and power generators.

While cap-and-trade legislation is stalled in the swamp we call "Congress," the Chinese are racing ahead. At the end of last month Beijing said it would start a domestic market for trading carbon emissions by 2014. Just about half of the credits granted pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism are for projects in China. The Chinese government is committed to reducing, by 2020, carbon emissions intensity--the amount of energy used per unit of gross domestic product--by as much as 45% over 2005 levels.

Even Beijing's social engineering programs are helping Mother Earth. The one-child policy, for example, saves 1.83 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year according to official estimates.

Last year China spent $34.6 billion in clean-energy initiatives, about twice the U.S.,which has an economy three times as large. "The Chinese aren't waiting around," noted Senator John Kerry last month. They have, he said, "surpassed us in renewable energy investment."

China is now the world's number one market for wind energy, the number one manufacturer of solar panels and the number one builder of nuclear energy generating stations. "Well, folks," writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "Sputnik just went up again: China's going clean-tech." The country is no longer "Red," he assures us. We should, on the contrary, call it "Green China" now.

That's a catchy moniker, but you still wouldn't want to live there. It is also the worst of times for China's environment. The country stands on the edge of a monumental environmental crisis, perhaps the worst in world history, or at least the worst since the flood in Biblical times. Sixteen of the world's 20 dirtiest cities are located in the People's Republic, including the worst, Linfen, a coal-mining center in Shanxi province.

The rivers run black, the skies are dark gray, the land poisoned by a deadly brew of chemicals and metals. Weather patterns are changing, and storms seem more violent. Parts of the country are now uninhabitable due to sustained environmental degradation. Conditions across Green China are, in general, deteriorating. There are around 750,000 premature deaths each year due to air pollution alone.

That was the conclusion of the World Bank, relying on official Chinese data, in 2007. The Financial Times reported that Beijing forced the institution to suppress this ghastly statistic. "The World Bank was told that it could not publish this information," an unnamed advisor to the bank told the FT. "It was too sensitive and could cause social unrest."

A statistic could cause social unrest? This unfortunate episode illustrates why, despite all the money spent by the government, China's environment continues to get worse. The country's one-party state is suppressing information that could lead to citizens promoting, demanding and working for positive change. China does not have an environmental problem as much as it has a political one. To cripple potential rivals, the increasingly insecure Communist Party stepped up its campaign this year to suppress citizen groups, including those that have been so effective in creating environmental awareness.

Thomas Friedman extols the virtues of Chinese authoritarian leaders--he referred to them as a "reasonably enlightened group of people" last September--and thinks they do a swell job when it comes to the environment, but the regime that puts together wind turbines also built the disastrous Three Gorges Dam and is now working on the monumentally misconceived South-to-North Water Diversion Project. Today's leaders, unfortunately, are still waging Mao's war against nature.

And they are losing. Energy intensity, for instance, is going up. In the first quarter it jumped 3.2%, reversing the trend of the last half-decade. This unwelcome development is a direct result of Beijing's emphasis on heavy industry in its most recent fiscal stimulus campaign. Due to this and other factors, Chinese officials said this month they are "not very optimistic" on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, emissions are going in the wrong direction as well, up 1.2% in the first quarter of this year, a reversal of another trend.

We should not be surprised: Communist Party plans to promote economic growth trump just about everything else. That's why Beijing no longer publishes Green GDP statistics, which measure growth minus the cost of environmental degradation.

The Chinese may one day live in a green society with a clean environment, but that will only happen after they demand and build a new, open political system.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

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