The Ecologist - W. 16 Of 20 Dirtiest Cities Anywhere, China Now Outsourcing Its Pollution

[hatrack]

EDIT

Despite its well publicised investment in green technology, China today has an unenviable list of ecological problems; its reliance on coal has left it with 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world; the north of the country is prone to frequent water shortages which have created hundreds of thousands of ‘environmental refugees’; and the dumping of chemicals into the Yangtze and other rivers means half the Chinese population drink water contaminated with human and animal excrement.

In a new book, ‘As China Goes, So Goes the World', Oxford professor Karl Gerth, claims that many of these problems have been directly caused by China’s move towards a more consumerist society. In just twenty years, writes Gerth, China has gone from being almost exclusively an exporter of consumer goods, to being ‘the world’s largest consumers of everything from mobile phones to beer.’

The decision to stimulate consumer demand in China was a conscious one taken by the country’s government. With a growing saturation of its products in Western markets, Chinese industry needed new consumers to ensure continued economic growth, and the only obvious place to turn was their own population.

EDIT

In reality, environmental policies are hampered by the structural problems in China’s system of government. As Geall explains, whilst many government directives ‘might look good on paper’, they are often sidestepped at a local level, and frequently conflict with previous directives, even those issued by the same government department. There are countless failed initiatives which attest to this inefficiency and corruption. For example, in 2006 the National Bureau of Statistics abandoned attempts to calculate a ‘Green GDP’, due to the difficulty of gathering the necessary information. This difficulty was largely caused by companies falsifying their emissions statistics, something which they had been doing for years with their economic figures.

EDIT

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1036243/china_exports_its_environmental_problems_as_consumer_culture_booms.html