China on the Brink

There has been increasing evidence that China’s economic growth has come at the cost of its environment and natural resources.

As air quality lowers and water becomes scarcer, many important environmental and political figures, including Pan Yue, Vice-Minister of the former Chinese State Environmental Protection Administration (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection), have claimed that the resulting damage will decisively end China’s economic successes. ¹ With its population of 1.3 billion, China has an extremely small amount of natural resources per capita, including arable land, forest cover, and freshwater, that are put under tremendous strain by a government seeking to improve the quality of life of its citizens. The problem is not that it is an undesirable goal, but that the resulting political decisions to attain this goal have dangerous short and long- term consequences. Though the CCP has begun a reform process to help bring in environmentally friendly policies, and Chinese ENGOs are gaining prominence and political clout, China’s current political and business system is still geared towards short term economic growth. As economic processes take on a higher priority during the current economic crisis, China’s comparatively few natural resources are being pushed to the limit and will push China into an unprecedented environmental crisis, which could potentially destabilize its economy and the livelihood of its citizens.

China’s cycles of environmental degradation have historical roots, the most obvious ones beginning with Mao Zedong’s rule after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. Though there was an initial push for conservation after the Communist victory, even as early as 1940 Mao believed that nature was an enemy against which man would fight against for the sake of progress. ² It was Mao’s belief that by having a large population, China would have a large production base that would conquer all natural boundaries. ³ This thinking was put into practice during the Great Leap Forward, where 10% of China’s forests were cut down to fire ‘backyard steel furnaces’ as part of a self-reliant industrialization program, ⁴ and forests and wetlands were destroyed for the agricultural collectives and factories formed by the CCP. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was similarly devastating. Vaclav Smil notes a problematic cycle that began in the Cultural Revolution that still plagues China today; that the need for intense agriculture eroded the soil and made it less productive. Therefore, more land was required to achieve the same results as previous years, leading to deforestation that would then inevitably lead to extreme erosion until the land eventually became unusable. ⁵ In this case, Mao continued a political and social attitude that has maintained itself throughout most of Chinese history; that progress, whether economic or otherwise, should be made without fear or consideration of environmental consequences.

With Mao’s death, China’s political ideology rapidly shifted, developing a reform program that still shapes China today, where market forces are used to drive the economy. Centralized state planning has now been dismantled, and local regions are now mostly in charge of their own economic growth and development. SOE (state-owned enterprises) have now been replaced by smaller scale TVEs (township and village enterprises). These TVEs are estimated to be responsible for 50% of all nationally produced pollutants, as business targets are met at the cost of environmental regulation. ⁶ Also, as China has integrated itself with the global economy, it has become a haven for the world’s most environmentally damaging industries, such as strip mining and petrochemical plants, where environmental regulations are not as strict. In this process, Mao’s economic policies focusing on interior rural areas have been overturned in favour of coastal metropolises. This has lead to a much higher urbanization rate of a large population, thereby increasing the pressure on natural resources for the upkeep of urban areas, especially for food, energy, and water. ⁷ Though the economy may be different, and Chinese lives improved since Mao’s time, environmental consequences threaten to destabilize this progress.

In terms of available natural resources at its disposal, China has not been dealt a very good hand. Its per capita availability of productive land is rather low by world standards. 95% of the Chinese population is packed into the eastern half of the country, where large rivers have created valleys and alluvial plains. ⁸ With 22% of the world’s population, China only has 7% of the world’s arable land, which is already pushed to the limit. ⁹ More than a quarter of the country is now desert, with the rate of desertification reaching up to 3,400 square kilometres a year in the latter 1990s. ¹⁰ Though China’s water supply stands a bit above the World Bank’s definition of a water-scarce country with a per capita freshwater supply of 2,700 cubic meters, ¹¹ the figure does not take into account the extreme regional disparities within the country. Much of this water is used in irrigation, where 85% of arable land is irrigated (in comparison to 10% in the US). ¹²

With these fairly scarce resources China has driven itself into nothing less than an environmental social crisis. Industrial pollution has created bad air quality in many Chinese cities. According to EU standards, only 1% of China’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered ‘safe’. ¹³ Water quality and quantity is rapidly declining, with 75% of all Chinese lakes declared polluted, and aquifers becoming severely depleted. China also has the world’s worst cessation of river flows, as water is drawn up mostly for agricultural or industrial purposes. ¹⁴ China’s biodiversity is also under threat. 15-20% of plant and animal species are considered endangered, largely because of human activity. ¹⁵ Soil erosion affects 19% of Chinese land area, especially around the Loess Plateau and Inner Mongolia. This has led to increasing amounts of sediment discharge in the Yangtze River, therefore affecting water supplies for power, consumption, and use in various sectors, namely industry and agriculture. Social pressures brought about by economic growth are causing an environmental crisis, which then turns into a social crisis as environmental damage begins to affect the industries upon which economic growth relies.

The push for arable land at all costs has led to serious environmental stresses. Similar issues have also risen in the search for energy security, where environmentally damaging coal is at the forefront of Chinese energy use. Other energy sources include the controversial use of hydropower embodied in the massive Three Gorges Dam. The consequences around these kinds of large-scale transformations of land include de-forestation, forced relocation of citizens, soil erosion, decreased water supplies and quality, and deteriorating air quality. These concerns often weave together in regional case studies. Examples include the 1998 flooding of the Yangtze River, where 52 million acres of land was inundated with over 3,000 dead, and an estimated economic loss of $20 billion. The cause of this was decades of deforestation and destruction of wetlands for agriculture, meaning that there was no ecological check to the flooding. ¹⁶ Another concern is the rising quantities of dust being kicked up by storms in Inner Mongolia to Beijing, Japan, North and South Korea, and even the US. These storms have caused serious infrastructure and health problems as the dust combines with industrial particulates in the air. The culprit here has been overgrazing and unsustainable water-use, leading to soil erosion where Inner Mongolia’s strong winds do the rest. This in turn has led to increased desertification and loss of agricultural land. ¹⁷

These environmental issues and their social consequences have started to make themselves felt politically, especially as the world’s eyes were on China in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in polluted Beijing. Even before Olympic preparations, however, China’s environmental woes had started to be addressed by the central government. In the wake of many natural disasters and as China’s terrible environmental record began to be exposed during the 1990s, China has become involved in international environmental discussions, and has set up institutional bodies to deal with environmental problems., These include the MEP, an environmental commission affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission, and various local bodies. New laws have been established, such as supporting the move of polluting industries to rural locations, or trying to enforce a fee payment system for polluting water resources. ¹⁸ Large amounts of money have also been allocated to tackle problems. Beijing was allocated $7.85 billion for environmental efforts in 2002 alone, ¹⁹ and $8 billion has been pledged in the continual construction of ‘The Great Green Wall’, a 2,800 mile wide forest belt with the purpose of stopping increased desertification in northern China. ²⁰

Yet despite these large amounts of resources being spent, an interesting trend can be seen. Many of the leadership’s environmental steps have been taken as broad sweeping gestures that take on the aspect of seeming like magic bullets. The Great Green Wall is a perfect example. The project was meant to serve as a full-stop counter to desertification in northern China but so far there have been many difficulties in both its conception and execution. ²¹

The problem with lofty goals and throwing money at these concerns is that political structural issues are largely ignored. In encouraging market forces and business production, political responsibility for economic progress, and inevitably environmental progress, has been handed down to regional authorities. This has so far provided more harm than good. Since local governments are encouraged to sustain economic growth, they have largely placed their interests in supporting local industrial activity or commerce. Doing so provides not only employment opportunities for the working-age population but also money to their coffers. ²² Another important problem is that environmental issues like those related to the use and pollution of the Yangtze River often are cross-regional issues that would depend on committed regional cooperation for successful results. As Elizabeth Economy points out in her thorough case study of the political administration of the Huai River, cooperation is usually the exception and not the rule. ²³

Could the worsening social crisis brought on by economic development and environmental deterioration start destabilizing China’s political system? China’s government is currently trying to reconcile economic growth with effective environmental policies. Beyond administrational reform, the environment has been the sector through which political civil society has been allowed to express itself. Usually, popular movements with politically critical views have tended to be repressed, and governing authoritarian apparatuses kept secure. This time however, ENGOs have been allowed to operate quite freely. Since the founding of Friends of Nature in 1994, ENGOs now engage in all kinds of work ranging from conservation to policy advocacy. Yang states that ‘Closer to institutionalized than non-institutionalized politics, this repertoire aims more at publicity and participation than at protest and disruption.’ ²⁴ As a result, the government has not interfered too much with their activity, though it keeps a wary eye in case these groups begin to ideologically start opposing state policy.

What has made this movement particularly healthy is that it receives active, positive support from the Chinese media. Sandwiched between economic market forces and political constraints from the government, the media has taken advantage of global interest in environmental problems, but more importantly, it has enjoyed political autonomy in that moral and policy suggestions and criticisms within stories fall in line with government ‘sustainable development’ policies. ²⁵ Environmental reporting allows criticism without undermining state authority. This is largely because criticism of the government does not necessarily come baggaged with ideological implications. However, if serious environmental reforms are to be made, structural accountability of various political processes will need to take place. China will be facing a political crisis if the current environmental challenges that are costing anywhere between 7 to 20% of the GDP are not dealt with. ²⁶

After centuries of following a tradition of environmental degradation, China currently is facing a Malthusian crisis, where the needs of an increasingly urbanized population are too much to bear for available natural resources. The political leadership has begun to address these issues, but given the money-heavy, results-intensive campaign mentality of most political responses, it is an unwieldy system so far. More important is to start addressing damaging practices though proper enforcement of existing environmental legislation, like the proper shutting down of polluting local TVEs, ²⁷ rather than building massive politically symbolic dams which often act as pollution reservoirs. China’s experimentation with market forces should also be extended to help solve urgent environmental concerns, particularly those based around pollution or water use. A failure to address these issues comprehensively will lead to increasing socio-economic pressures that will eventually begin to affect China’s political structures for the worse. It may already be too late, and in a few years time a present socio-environmental crisis will turn into a catastrophe, and the CCP will truly be driving itself into a brick wall.

Water Resources in Northeast China’, 3rd October, 2005, Environmental Management, Vol.36, Issue 5, http://www.springerlink.com/content/k05315r7l0qn5268/

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