The Downside of the Boom: China's Poison for the Planet

Chinese factories are already producing three times as many air conditioning units as they did five years ago. And although few people drive cars in China compared to industrialized countries, in Beijing alone the number of vehicles is growing by a thousand each day. In order to feed its appetite for energy, China is building coal-fired power plants as fast as it can. Every seven to ten days a new plant begins spewing smoke into the sky. The amount by which China increased its power production last year alone is greater than Britain's entire capacity.

Coal heavily pollutes the air, but China's leaders see little alternative to a dirty resource that is available in ample quantities around the country. Some 69 percent of all Chinese power plants are run on coal. China used 2.1 billion tons of it in 2004 -- more than the United States, the European Union and Japan together. Even if the Chinese economy only continues to grow seven percent annually, its coal usage would double to 4 million tons within ten years.

Slowly, politicians and scientists are recognizing the path of destruction caused by China's industrial revolution. Yet, communist China has a long tradition of abusing nature. Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong spoke of "dominating nature" and during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1959) he ordered the construction of numerous factories. In an attempt to overtake Britain as an industrial power, the Chinese were instructed to build mini blast furnaces across the entire land. The absurd project failed, but the environmental destruction is still visible. To heat the steel furnaces China chopped down an estimated ten percent of its forests.

A poison-producing factory

The country opened itself to the world in the late 1970s, its bizarre mixture of communism and capitalism has since produced growth rates that Western politicians can only dream of. But China was simultaneously turned into one massive, poison-producing factory.

The country is home to 16 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities. The inhabitants of every third metropolis are forced to breathe polluted air, causing the deaths of an estimated 400,000 Chinese each year. Half of China's 696 cities and counties suffer from acid rain. Two-thirds of its major rivers and lakes are cesspools and more than 340 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. The Yangtze River, once China's proud artery of life, is biologically dead for long stretches. Many other rivers flow with blackened water and along their banks there are the notorious "cancer villages" where many people die early.

It's now begun to dawn on Beijing's politicians what China's economy is doing to China's ecology. Experts like Pan Yue, the deputy minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), are already fearful that environmental pollution will destroy the impressive economic growth of recent years. SO2 emissions cause damages worth €50 billion each year and the World Bank estimates environmental pollution already shaves eight to 12 percent off of China's gross national product (GNP).

"China has gone through an industrialization in the past 20 years that many developing countries needed 100 years to complete. That's why the country now has to deal with environmental problems that would also take 100 years to solve in many Western nations," says Pan.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has also distanced himself from the country's raping of the environment to promote "sustainable growth," which includes an ambitious nuclear program. At least 20 new nuclear power plants are to be built by 2020 -- but the communist leadership doesn't say where the radioactive waste will end up. Beijing also wants at least ten percent of the country's energy needs to be covered by renewable sources such as solar, wind and hydro. Photovoltaic facilities have already been erected in thousands of villages and giant wind parks dot China's eastern coast.

Beijing also actively participates in the international emissions trade and provides foreign environmental polluters with opportunities to buy their way out of their obligations by financing somewhat clean chemical plants. The Chinese government plans to spend around $125 billion on sewage treatment facilities and new water pipes over the next five years.

But such impressive-sounding announcements, measured by the scope and speed of China's environmental destruction, fall far short of what's needed. And despite any good intentions, the Communist Party members make no secret that their most important goals remain those that will ensure their continuing power: raising the living standard of China's citizens and eliminating the massive gap between rich and poor, as well as East and West.

Putting growth before the environment

China's leaders are certainly pushing for tougher laws to allow for stricter punishments for criminal officials and unscrupulous factory managers. But the misery is partially caused by the country's authoritarian system, which neither allows for an independent judiciary nor democratic supervision. SEPA's 167,000 employees aren't empowered enough to clamp down on polluters in every single province, especially if there's an influential employer there. And often local officials simply consider impressive growth rates more important for their careers than a clean environment.

Of 661 Chinese cities, 278 did not have a sewage treatment plant at the end of 2005. But wealthy polluters can often pay any fines incurred with petty cash. Many recently built power plants shouldn't actually even exist. Roughly half of them are illegal -- many simply on formal grounds, but others due to corrupt or negligent officials who ignore environmental rules. Instead of falling as they should, emissions in 17 provinces have risen.

These grim facts aren't kept secret, as some government officials apparently still believe in spite of everything that they have the dramatic situation under control. SEPA official Li Xinmin claims it remains unproven that pollution from Chinese power plants reaches other countries. "That's a false, irresponsible argument," says Li.

Climate expert Liu Deshun from Beijing's Tsinghua University seemingly has a reassuring statistic or sensible Communist Party decree for almost any pressing environmental problem. But he avoids the key question: How much is China contributing to global warming and what is the government doing to try to stop it?

Liu wears a small green cap and an oversized pair of sunglasses. "We are a developing country," he says. "We aren't yet in the position to take on international obligations." Beijing has signed the Kyoto Protocol -- which aims to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide by 2012 -- but as a developing nation China is not obligated to make cuts. Still, the professor claims Beijing's leaders have made an important contribution to efforts to protect the environment: the country's strict population control policies have ensured that 300 million fewer people live on the planet and use its limited resources.

A disaster in the making

When a chemical plant exploded in the northeastern Jilin province in November 2005, the industrial city Harbin had to cut water supplies for four days to prevent its 9 million inhabitants from being poisoned. But that didn't keep the catastrophe from spreading, as a thick benzene film traveled from the Songhua River into the Amur River, where it slowly dissipated in Russia's Far East.

Alexei Makinov, saw the disaster in the making. "It wasn't just a problem since the accident," says the 54-year-old Russian geologist and head of the hydrology lab of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Far East in Khabarovsk. "The river has been stinking since 1997." The scientist's desk is covered with tables and statistics and his cabinet with its glass door is crammed full of papers. All of it is environmental data on the Amur.

But it's easy to see with the naked eye just how much damage the river has suffered. The Sungari -- as the Songhua River is known in Russia -- carries tons of poisonous sludge hundreds of kilometers downstream to the Amur. When fishers cut a hole in the river ice during the winter, a horrible odor is released. Makinov thinks the smell is from dying plant life and tells of residents complaining of infections, rashes and diarrhea.

The ailing Amur River has become the most important patient of 65-year-old doctor Vladena Rybakova as the end of her career nears. "The river began to stink of phenol," she says. "And at first we thought it was a natural phenomenon." But soon Rybakova and her colleagues found the actual cause -- over the Chinese border. Whereas 65 million people live on the Chinese side of the Amur, there are only 4 million on the Russian side. Since the Chinese authorities offered the Russian scientists no information on what their factories were producing and what poisons they might be releasing into the waters, the Russians began investigating on their own in the early 1990s. After Rybakova fed lab rats fish from the river and then dissected them, she discovered that "their livers decomposed before you could start cutting."

The road to Sikachi-Alyan leads past barracks and massive radar equipment. It is home to the ethnic Nanai minority, which has always lived from fishing. During Soviet times there was fishing collective here, but now the village of wooden houses has fallen into bitter poverty. These days no one will buy what the locals catch.

"For the past 12 years, the fish have smelled like chemicals," says village leader Nina Druzhinina, a thin woman with a towering hairdo. "At first we thought it was Russian plants letting untreated water into the river. But now we know most of the filth comes from China."

Damned by dams

In order to secure their future, the Chinese also intend to dominate the Mekong River, which is known as the Lancang in China. In Yunnan province there are two major dams holding back the waters of Southeast Asia's longest river without regard for China's neighbors. Six further dams are planned. At the construction site of the Xiaowan Dam, an army of workers is transforming the once green gorges into a barren Martian landscape. Xiaowan will be one of the world's biggest hydroelectric plants -- almost as huge as the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

A few hundred kilometers further southward, the Mekong flows through fertile rice paddies and cornfields. Here and there, bamboo groves crowd the banks. But the lives of millions people, who depend on the river's natural rhythms, have been disrupted. The Chinese now have a dam in place and they flood the Mekong as they please -- when, for example, the water is too low and the Chinese need a big ship to enter the Thai river harbor of Chiang Saen.

In Cambodia, where river fish are one of the most important sources of food, the size of the catch is shrinking -- especially in the important Tonle Sap lake and river system. But even down south in the Mekong Delta the river has become unpredictable, according to residents. Sometimes floods wash away houses and at other times there's not enough water for the rice paddies.

Suthep Teowtrakul, district head of the small Thai town Chiang Khong, observes the river every day. He wears a yellow polo shirt sporting the words "I Love the King" and has four Buddha figures in his office. But neither his monarch nor the bodhisattva can help him counter the Chinese affects on the Mekong. "My motto is: 'Leave the river alone'," he says, while admitting that's unlikely to happen. "Because the Chinese think the Mekong belongs to them." Just like the fields they destroy or the air they pollute.

Setting its own course to the detriment of others

At a recent United Nations conference on climate change in Nairobi, the Chinese demanded that developing nations not be forced to make cuts in greenhouse gases. Only after pushing through this condition -- from which China has the most to gain -- did the Chinese delegates vote to work towards a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.

China is a big country, a future superpower. Its leaders, accountable only to themselves, don't care for economic or environmental advice. They set their own path.

But each year, each month, almost every week, China experiences some sort of major environmental catastrophe. The mess spreads across the land, in its waterways and the air. And far too often, the rest of the world gets sprinkled with some of it too.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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