A friend of mine went to Bejing a few yrs ago and her biggest impression was the pollution. She is not chemically sensitive or anything (she smokes a pack aday), but the 30 ft trip from the cab to the hotel door left her wheezing and dizzy.
China has a long track record of ecological “rape”. A few yrs ago they killed an entire river system with a spill of toxins. The people living downstrem from the spill only learned of it from international/internet sources.
We buy real cheap products from China… socket sets for $19.99, shoes for under $15… etc. Walmart, Target and many other retailers keep theior prices low by using China’s cheap labour and lax enviromental laws.
They use dirty coal to make electricity to smelt dirty metals and dirty plastics at a rate that makes the excesses of the western industrial revolution look like a picnic.
China will be a toxic dessert in 50 yrs (or less) if they keep this up.
Hmmm. I wonder how she would have coped during the Great Smog of London which led to 4,000-12,000 deaths depending on how you slice the numbers. My mother worked in London during the sixties and would commute with a scarf over her nose & mouth, which would be black with soot and dirt after a single journey.
Assuming you mean a desert rather than e.g. a mercury pavlova, then yes, it will. We await the future with hope and trepidation, to see whether China does what Europe and the US did when they were in exactly the same situation and cleans itself up.
One difference being that China is ruled by authoritarians who may well choose the ‘Ignore it’ method of solving such problems. Not the sort of people who’ll care about the fate of a bunch of “cancer villages” if it means they can make more profits in the short term by dumping more poison.
China’s autocratic rule means that they can basically get away with it long beyond what would be considered a social “tipping point” in the western world.
Given that, which I failed to mention, I really do feel as if China has really “bet the farm” on its current rush towards heavy industrialization…
Is this not a necessary part of China’s development? After all, the West went through this stage. They’ll deal with it when they can afford to do so. Sure it may be 50 or 100 years, but the Chinese do take the longer view.
Certainly true. What’s interesting to see in China is that the people at the top care more about stability than about money (since the economy is, if anything overheating) but that officials at middle and bottom levels are concentrating on making money for themselves and for their local areas. So you get rules being set at the top and ignored by the people who are supposed to be enforcing them.
However, more and more protests and social disruption are being generated by pollution and related problems like land theft. There is a possibility that this will escalate to the point where the social unrest becomes a major concern, and the Politburo issue an edict that anyone breaking the pollution rules will get an immediate bullet in the back of the head. Or they might decide that it’s better to just shoot the protestors and keep pumping out muck. So it could go either way - it’s really too early to tell.
It also means, however, that once the government decides they’ve had enough, they won’t have to deal with big business interests, lobbying groups and all that democratic hassle before they can change things around. Running up to the olympics, Beijing officials pulled several 100.000 extra polluting vehicles of the road. They’re not allowed back on until after the Olympic Games. Could you imagine a city in the US or Europe just doing that?
I think that China’s authoritarian system might be its saviour.
The situation isn’t really analogous. The technology and population are both very different. From what I’ve read about the pollution in China, if they wait 50 years to do anything there won’t be much worth saving. And they aren’t even likely to profit too much from it as a country in the long run; sick workers don’t do as good a job, and polluted enough water and such will damage machinery.
"Beijing officials pulled several 100.000 extra polluting vehicles of the road. They’re not allowed back on until after the Olympic Games. "
so they are just pushing the problem into the future for short term “cosmetic gain”… hardly a solution, just another example of the weakness of the uathoritarian sysem…
so by hiding the problem , they are some how fixing it?
FML
I didn’t read that they were fixing the problem. I read Švejk using that example to show that an authoritarian system can demand change quickly.
Let’s say that, in the interest of national fuel consumption, the U.S. government decided that SUVs would no longer be permitted on roads. (Silly example and I’m not proposing it). How fast would that happen? Could it even happen?
In China, it would be quick, and if they wanted it to happen, it would.
So, when China decides it is a problem, they can use measures to fix the problem unavailable to the U.S. Totalitarian governments may not be the most responsive to the individual, but they can move very quickly.
But only if theyn do. I admit, I never understood why, at least in the handful of elite cities, this was not already done. “If I were King”… I wouldn’t live in a polluted cesspit. But they seem quite fine with it.
I think this is key to the idea. The Chinese have a very different idea of what’s tolerable than we Americans or Europeans, or even troubled societies like Brazil. And that may or may not change for a long while.
I disagree: for example, not many years ago the Thames was a dead river, and the London smogs were notorious. In the northern midlands, factories used to routinely belch out ruinous fumes. Tremendous piles of slag and rubbish. Think Dante’s Inferno at night. Yet we’ve cleared up tremendously in the past 50 years. Those slag piles have been landscaped and grassed over. The Thames now has fish, the Clean Air Acts have done their jobs. We’re not there yet but this makes me much more sanguine about China’s present situation and optimistic about the longer term.
Historical comparisons may not apply. It’s true that the United States and Western Europe were able to clean up their countries after earlier periods of rampant pollution. But China is polluting at a 21st century level - they’re going to create a lot more pollution during their development period than past countries did during theirs.
Business and the government in China are completely intertwined. There is no real separation. I think it will actually be more difficult for the Chinese to enact real solutions to their problems than it is in a western style democracy. Simply put, it’s because the ‘big business interests’ ARE the government…and the folks who govern in China have a direct and vested interest in keeping the money flowing in because they are both the government and the business.
Your example of pulling cars off the road is cosmetic only. To be sure, you couldn’t do that in the US or Europe or any other western style democracy. But, you see, those things only effected the people. I imagine that such a ruling had zero effect on the party elite. The same would go for any kind of environmental reforms. Oh, as window dressing China could legislate all kinds of changes (in fact, IIRC, they have a lot of environmental protection type laws on the books)…however, enforcement would be at the whim of those same party elites. Now…if it’s your factory we are talking about, to be sure…I’ll throw the book at you. However, if it’s my own…well, you can see how I may want to make an exception in this case, aye? For the good of the people and all that.
Couldn’t disagree more…I think it’s their authoritarian system that is holding them back, and that will make their ecological disaster far worse than it ever was here in the west. And this despite the fact that when WE were doing all the polluting the technology for doing it cleaner and better was not available or still in development. The Chinese today really have no excuse…except that they don’t bother with it because in the short term it costs more.
Well, I’m not saying that the authoritarian system is doing much to help alleviate the situation now, or that issuing a decree to the effect that several 100.000 cars stay off the road for a couple of months is a solution. I’m just saying that the fact that China has a command economy (that is, xtisme, they are indeed intertwined, and there is no real separation - big business = the state) may play a helpful role when the time comes that really drastic measures need to be implemented. Please note that western democracies, and the US especially if you don’t mind me saying so, have not been particularly quick on the uptake when it comes to environmental problems, and that democracies are generally slow when it comes to implementing drastic changes.