Developing Into Oblivion

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN CHINA

Environmental problems in China are already at a critical level and they are getting worse. Rapid development has transformed huge swaths of the country into environmental wastelands. Acid rain corrodes the Great Wall; parts of the Grand Canal resemble open sewers; parts of Shanghai are slowly sinking because water beneath them has been sucked out; and some cities are so clogged with air pollution they don't appear in satellite pictures. Reports indicate that only 32 percent of China's industrial waste is treated in any sort of way. Already there are concerns of millions of environmental refugees in China and sulfurous rain clouds drifting from China to Japan and Korea.
Canadian scholar Vaclav Smith, an expert of China's environment, has called China "the world's most worrisome case of environmental degradation." "The Chinese," wrote Theroux, have “moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy...In Chinese terms prosperity always spelled pollution.”
The main problem is China’s greatest success—it phenomenal economic growth—is the main forces behind its environmental problems. Factories that dump pollutants into the air and water produce cheaper products than ones that filter out pollutants and treat waste water. It is hard to see the Chinese making sacrifices to improve their environment if it means slowing economic growth. Jennifer Turner of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars told Discover magazine, “What’s different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation...It’s like nothing the world has ever seen.”

China Faces ‘Very Grave’ Environmental Situation

 

Ian Johnson of Reuters wrote: “China’s three decades of rapid economic growth have left it with a “very grave” environmental situation even as it tries to move away from a development-at-all-costs strategy, senior government officials. In a blunt assessment of the problems facing the world’s most populous country, officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection delivered their 2010 annual report. They pointed to major improvements in water and air quality — goals that the ministry had set for itself over a five-year period ending in December. The targets were met, with pollutants in surface water down 32 percent, and sulfur dioxide emissions in cities down 19 percent. [Source: Ian Johnson, Reuters, June 3, 2011]

But officials cautioned that many other problems were serious and scarcely under control. “The overall environmental situation is still very grave and is facing many difficulties and challenges,” said Li Ganjie, the vice minister. Mr. Li said biodiversity was declining with “a continuous loss and drain of genetic resources.” The countryside was becoming more polluted, he added, as dirty industries were moved out of cities and into rural areas. Mr. Li pledged to control contamination by heavy metals, which resulted in many cases of lead poisoning. He said China needed a law to regulate heavy metals, and he was confident it would be written and passed soon.” [Ibid]

“But the signs are growing that environmental neglect is causing instability,” Johnson wrote. “Protests in Inner Mongolia last week were partly due to concerns that industries like coal and mining — largely dominated by ethnic Chinese — are destroying the grasslands used for herding by the indigenous Mongolians. Similar conflicts have arisen in other sensitive ethnic areas like Tibet and Xinjiang. “In some of these areas that are very fragile, we will strictly limit development,” Mr. Li pledged. He Li said that more than a fifth of the land that has been set aside as nature reserves had been illegally developed by companies, often with local government collusion.” [Ibid]

 

Cancer Villages and Deformed Babies in China

Increases in cancer rates of 19 percent in urban areas and 23 percent in rural area have been blamed on air and water pollution.
The most awful and shameful examples of how bad China’s pollution has become are the so-called cancer villages, where pollution in the water and air is blamed for surges in cancer rates. One such place is Yangqiao, a town in the wetlands of southeastern China that has been so fouled by the waste from chemical plants, the air is acrid and make people dizzy and yellow waste water seeps into irrigation ditches, producing sick dogs, dead fish, stunted crops and high cancer rates.
In March 2006, 130 people were hospitalized outside the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province in eastern China following a leak of poisonous gas from a chemical plant. Villagers reported seeing a cloud of gas floating across farmland killing crops and poultry and several days later began experiencing dizziness, sore throats, chest pains and skin irritation.
Pollution is also blamed for the increase in the number of deformed children in places where pollution levels are high. Babies born with deformities such as cleft palates, neural tube defects, congenital heart disease, water on the brain, and extra fingers and toes is up 6 percent a year nationwide—and 40 percent between 2001 and 2006—with rates much higher in place like the major coal-mining areas of Shanxi Province.
Shanxi is home to the world’s three most polluted cities. In addition to coal mining there is pollution from coke, steel and chemical industries. It also lead the world in the incidents of cleft palates and extra fingers among babies. Some parents whose children are born with extra toes cut them off so it is easier to buy shoes.
The river that flows through the village of Shangba in Guangdong Province is polluted by heavy metals. It varies in color from murky white to bright orange and is so viscous that it barely moves when winds blow on it. One villager told AP, “All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank the water died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch...Last years alone, six people in our villages died from cancer, and they were in their 30s and 40s.” Two girls, who often played in the river died at the ages of 12 and 18 from kidney and stomach cancer, which are rare among you people.
The source of much of the pollution is the state-owned Daboshan mine, which produces huge piles of tailing discarded next to rice fields and dumps large amounts of cadmium, a known carcinogen, as well as lead, zinc, indium and other metals into water supplies. Tests have shown high levels of cadmium and zinc in the drinking water and the rice. Stomach, liver kidney and colon cancer account for 85 percent of the cancers acquired by villagers.
Publicity on Shangba’s plight convinced the government to help foot the bill for a new reservoir and water system for the town. Liangqiao is a village contaminated by the same mine. The local river has a reddish color. Since the late 1990s cancer has caused two thirds of the deaths in the village. One villager there told Time, “We have to use the polluted water to irrigate our fields, since we don’t have any money to start a water project. We know very well that we are being poisoned by eating the grain. What more can we do? We can’t just wait to starve to death.’

  

River turned blood red from chemical dyes

 

Children Poisoned by Lead and Attempts to Cover It Up
In January 2011, it was revealed a lead factories in Huaining County in Anhui Province sickened more than 200 children with lead poisoning. Twenty children need hospitalization. Testing of 307 children found that 228 of them had high levels of lead in their blood. An environmental official in Huaining was suspended. Xinhua said the factories just across the street from people’s home despite regulations that required them to be at least 500 meters from residential areas.
Sharon Lafraniere wrote in the New York Times, “Near Jiyuan City, in Henan Province, nearly 1,000 children from 10 villages were found to have elevated blood lead levels in 2009. Government officials ordered the children treated, families relocated and the smelters cleaned up. But a visitor there in 2011 found children still playing in the streets of one village literally in the shadow of a privately-owned lead smelter that nightly belches plumes of dark smoke. In interviews, their parents and grandparents said that local hospitals now refuse to administer new blood lead level tests, even if the families pay out of their own pockets.” [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, June 15, 2011]
“The children are not healthy. We don’t know how sick they are, and we can’t find out,” a 66-year-old villager told the New York Times. His two grandsons were found to have blood lead levels two and three times above the norm when tested in 2009. Local officials appeared determined to suppress such complaints. Within a few hours of a visitor’s arrival this month, Jiyuan City’s propaganda chief appeared with three carloads of plainclothes officers, bringing all reporting and interviewing to a screeching halt. [Ibid]
Near Suji battery factory in Zhejiang Province test showed 53 children and 120 adults suffered from excessive lead level. Local officials told residents: “Whoever makes noise will not receive compensation or medical treatment.” Migrant workers and their families were also left out of the program, villagers said. Yang Fufen, 40, said her 2-year-old son tested at more than three times the allowable blood lead level in March, but has received no medical attention, apparently because her legal residence is elsewhere.

Chinese Pollution Outside of China

China’s environmental negligence sometimes seeps abroad. In April 2010, a Chinese coal carrier ran aground off Australia on a shoal in the Great Barrier reef, leaking three tons of oil and pulverizing part of a shoal. Reef scientists said that it could take 20 years for the reef to completely recover. The owners of the ship—Shenzhen Energy Transport—admitted that the ship had strayed off course and apologized for the mishap.

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