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Part IV: A Hitchhiker’S Guide To The Chinese Gulag. Chapter 12. Death To A Big Planet: Do You Want To Be Fried With That Apocalypse?
hina’s environmental problems are mounting.189 Water pollution and water scarcity are burdening the economy, rising levels of air pollution are endangering the health of millions of Chinese, and much of the country’s land is rapidly turning into desert.
—Foreign Affairs
This soot-blackened city of Linfen190 in China’s inland Shanxi province makes Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park. Shanxi is the heart of China’s coal belt, and the hills around Linfen are dotted with mines, legal and illegal, and the air is filled with burning coal. Don’t bother hanging your laundry—it’ll turn black before it dries.
—Time
The Chinese people are not generally known for being stupid. But what China’s business and government leaders are doing to the air, land, and waters of their country—with the tacit acceptance of much of the population—has to be one of the dumbest, most shortsighted, and self-destructive acts of mass violence against Mother Nature the world has ever witnessed. Whether it is the eye-stinging, throat-scratching, lung-busting toxic air pollution belching up from China’s factory floor, or the tsunami of cancerous chemicals and raw feces inundating great rivers like the Yellow and Yangtze, or the ubiquitous heavy metals, pesticide residues, and deadly “e-waste” marinating prime farmland or China’s Long March of deforestation and desertification from the westernmost province of Xinjiang to the very gates of Beijing, it’s becoming an ever more Silent Spring virtually year round.
Of course, Communist Party officials are wont to excuse their crimes against Mother Nature by arguing that their budding empire is still in a relatively early stage of its economic development. They insist that at least some environmental damage is to be expected before Red China makes the “inevitable” transition to Green China. And at least some “jobs now, environment later” party apparatchiks are quick to point out that when industrial America was first developing over a century ago, Pittsburgh was encased in a coal-encrusted shroud and Cleveland was a city where, if you couldn’t walk on the water, you could at least set that water on fire.
Well, we hear that China. But China please hear this: Anything that America has ever done in its environmental history or that Victorian England ever did during the Industrial Revolution or that Brazil or Indonesia or Mexico or indeed any other big country anywhere today is now doing pales in comparison to the wholesale and retail environmental desecration now going on in China. And you don’t have to be Al Gore to understand this inconvenient truth: Much of the environmental damage being done is not just irreversible; China’s industrial “slash and burn” spillover effects are spreading quite literally like a cancer around the world.
It is because of this last observation that all of us outside of China must ultimately be concerned about the Chinese government’s myopic willingness to wantonly trade off its air, water, and soil for 30 pieces of silver and a bigger global market share. For unlike in Las Vegas, “What happens in China doesn’t stay in China.” To bring this slogan right to our doorstep, consider that the toxic gases rising up like locusts from China’s factory floor now befoul the air basins not just of Japan, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula but also of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver.
Consider also, as Chapter 2, “Death by Chinese Poison,” has graphically illustrated, that the bacteria, dioxins, heavy metals, and toxic pesticide residues that pollute the waters and soil of China are winding up in our apple juice, chicken, fish, garlic, honey, vitamins, and other foods and drugs that America imports from China.
And looking into our children’s future, as air and water pollution, desertification, over-development, increasing soil toxicity, and climate change increasingly shrink or contaminate the Chinese harvests of key staples like wheat, rice, and soybeans, China will increasingly compete for food supplies from around the world—and prices will spike accordingly, from the village markets of Africa to the supermarkets of Europe to the food aisles of Walmart in America.
For all these reasons and many more—including China’s role as the world’s most egregious global warmer—all of us around the world need to clearly understand the “Tragedy of the Global Commons” now unfolding and confront China accordingly.
Don’t It Make Our Blue Skies Brown
In America, we take city kids out to farms to show them cows and where milk comes from. In China, that’s the same kind of trip many adults raised in industrial cities like Beijing, Chongqing, and Chengdu must take to realize that the sky is actually blue during the day and has stars out at night.
I learned this lesson firsthand on a humanitarian mission helping some urban Chinese doctors screen rural children for congenital heart defects and adults for hypertension. When these city mice got out to the countryside, they were amazed to actually see stars.
The funny part was that the air was still so polluted even in the mountains of Yunnan, that rather than witnessing the amazing spectacle of two thousand stars that awes an American child on a camping trip to Joshua Tree or Mount Washington, all we actually saw was the handful of twinkling smudges you’d catch most any night in Los Angeles.
—Greg Autry
Anybody who has traveled to China to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, or that great graveyard of democracy otherwise known as Tiananmen Square knows exactly what the problem is: You just shouldn’t be able to see, taste—or have to choke on—the air you need to breathe. But that is the daily lot in life for hundreds of millions of chronically coughing Chinese citizens, most of whom really and truly have no idea that the sky can be a deep azure blue in the day and twinkle with a billion stars at night.
It’s not just a blotted sky, however, that the Chinese people have to worry about when it comes to the ill effects of air pollution. According to a seminal World Bank study, such pollution kills a staggering 700,000 Chinese souls annually.191 That’s roughly the equivalent of choking out the entire population of the city of San Francisco, the states of Wyoming or Delaware, the Canadian province of New Brunswick, or even the entire nation of Bahrain every single year.
Now parse this: In quintessential Orwellian fashion, when the World Bank’s study first came out, Beijing’s censors demanded this 700,000 corpse statistic be suppressed in the printed edition of the final report; these Communist Party hacks didn’t claim it was untrue, simply that the grim findings might lead to social unrest. Indeed—and wouldn’t it be about time?
And here’s another mind-numbing statistic that isn’t exactly a state secret either. The world’s most populous nation features over 100 cities with over one million people; and virtually every one of these teeming masses of humanity is shrouded in a toxic haze of sulfur dioxide and lung-piercing particulates. Moreover, of the 20 largest cities in the world with the absolutely worst air pollution—Mexico City and Jakarta come achingly to mind—fully 16 of these gas mask-optional metropolises are in China.
Just why is the air in China so filthy? Simply because China relies on coal for 75% of its energy needs—with little serious effort to manage its coal use cleanly. Indeed, throughout China, coal is transported, burned, and disposed of with little pollution control technology and with even less regard for its impact on human or animal life. (One of us has even personally witnessed sites where ton upon ton of coal has slid into the Yangtze River from pathetically constructed cliff-side storage bins—which are then patched up with an equal lack of concern.)
It’s not just that coal is China’s choice for electricity generation. In many rural Chinese households, raw coal is still burned for cooking and heating—with little or no ventilation. And it is because of coal’s ubiquity in the Chinese economy that it accounts for 90% of China’s sulfur dioxide emissions—the principal ingredient of smog. High coal dependence is also the reason why China’s air is heavily laden with particularly lethal particulate matter, which can deeply penetrate—and often lacerate—lung tissue.
As to why any of us should care if the citizens of China want to choke themselves to death, remember this: For every 100 tons of sulfur dioxide or particulate matter or deadly mercury the Dragon’s factories belch into Chinese skies, thousands of pounds of these pollutants eventually reach vulnerable eyes, lungs, throats, and nervous systems in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and, eventually, North America. It’s not for nothing that you can wake up in Carson, California or Seattle, Washington and exclaim, “I hate the smell of China in the morning.”
Water, Water Everywhere and Nary a Drop to Drink
America’s three great rivers—the192 Colorado, Mississippi, and Ohio—are so filthy that it is dangerous to swim or eat fish caught in them. Parts of the Ohio River in Pittsburgh are so thick, dark, and soupy it looks like one could walk across it.
—FactsandDetails.com
You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club to know this quotation is phony. But once you replace “America” with “China,” substitute the “Yangtze, Pearl, and Yellow” rivers for the “Colorado, Mississippi, and Ohio,” and swap “Guangzhou” for “Pittsburgh,” the environmental picture painted by the website FactsandDetails.com is all too real.
Nor do you have to be a member of the National Rifle Association to know that if the rivers and waterways in America were even a tenth as filthy as those in China, the good old U.S. of A. would literally be up in arms. In China, however, there is precious little being done to protect the most precious of its resources—water.
Frankly, we find this aspect of China’s lack of environmental stewardship to be the most astonishing. With 20% of the planet’s population, China has only 7% of the world’s fresh water; and vast portions of the country—including over 100 cities—suffer from chronic drought. Despite such water scarcity, China’s business and government brain trust has allowed 70% of all Chinese rivers, lakes, and streams and 90% of all Chinese groundwater to become severely polluted. Moreover, in industrial bastions like Shanxi, much of the river water is even too toxic to touch. Jeffrey Hayes offers this brief snapshot of a real movie playing out in rivers and lakes all across China:
Waters that used to teem with fish193 and welcome swimmers now have film and foam at the top and give off bad smells. Canals are often covered with layers of floating trash, with the deposits particularly thick on the banks. Most of it is plastic containers in a variety of sun-bleached colors.
Such damage is being done by a relentless torrent of billions of tons of largely untreated industrial waste, chemical fertilizers, and raw animal and human sewage that spew from everything from chemical factories, drug manufacturers, and fertilizer producers to tanneries, paper mills, and pig farms. Because of this relentless barrage of untreated wastes, a billion Chinese citizens must drink polluted water on a daily basis while at least 700 million of these chosen many must endure their potable water “seasoned” with human or animal wastes.
Meanwhile, the Liao River, which is the biggest river in southern Manchuria, is a monument to the maxim that the faster China grows, the further it gets behind in environmental protection. For even though the river’s banks feature new water treatment facilities, these facilities have been utterly overwhelmed by ever-increasing pollution levels.
As to why so much pollution winds up in Chinese waters, here’s just one typical “fly by night” scenario offered up by one of the “T-shirt kings” of Guangdong Province—Fuan Textiles. As chronicled by the Washington Post, Fuan’s factory was shut down for illegally dumping194 20,000 tons of waste that literally dyed the local river red. However, after unemployment rose, local government apparatchiks quietly encouraged Fuan to simply change its name and move to a new location.
In fact, China’s horrific water pollution has added a whole new term to the lexicon of environmental disasters—the so-called “cancer village.” Along the Huai River alone, there are more than 100 such cancer villages; and these beleaguered peasant backwaters feature esophageal, stomach, and intestinal cancer rates every bit as high as the death rates faced by American doughboys storming the beaches of Normandy.
And think about this: As recently as Mao’s time, the Chinese people were very closely connected to the water. Today, however, even a reincarnated Chairman Mao—who loved to swim across the Yangtze—wouldn’t be caught dead in it. In this same tawdry vein, despite easy access to many mountain rivers, the residents of cities like Chengdu and Chongqing don’t consider recreational fishing to be an option outside of man-made pools inside “fishing parks.” Meanwhile millions of citizens in Shanghai live right on the coast and at the mouth of a great river, but almost nobody dares to bathe or swim in the deadly waters surrounding the city.
To view this environmental shame from an American perspective, consider the plight of Lake Tai. This Chinese equivalent of America’s beautiful Lake Placid in the Adirondacks is the third largest lake in China, is home to more than 90 islands, and is famous for its beautiful limestone formations. Today, however, a beleaguered Lake Tai is becoming even better known for its propensity to turn bright green from algae blooms that deplete the lake’s oxygen, kill fish, and render the lake’s water totally unsuitable for drinking.
And what’s an endangered Chinese natural resource like Lake Tai without an environmental activist who has been tortured for trying to protect it? To his credit, Wu Lihong did hold out for five days before the police finally beat a “confession” out of him and sent him off to the Chinese slammer—which in China is truly a slammer.
China’s Invisible Scourge—Soil Toxicity
China’s arable land, which feeds 22% of the world’s population,195 is facing grim pollution and degradation, warns Zhou Xiansheng, director of the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)... The decline in soil quality has become one of the most worrisome byproducts of China’s breakneck economic growth. Heavy metals are accumulating in the soil, hardening the soil surface and reducing its fertility, and residues from chemical fertilizers and pesticides are showing up in farm products, poisoning both people and livestock. Currently, about 10 million hectares of cropland—10% of the country’s total cropland area—has been contaminated.
—Worldwatch Institute
China Environmental Times rightly calls soil contamination the “invisible pollution”196 because, unlike water and air pollution, it is not very visible to the naked eye. And today, in any given part of China, it truly is “pick your soil poison.”
For example, in the electronics manufacturing hub of the Pearl River Delta, the biggest problem is with heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and nickel. However, in the breadbasket of Northern China, it’s more like a flood of pesticides while China’s prime vegetable growing areas are inundated with carcinogenic nitrates from over-fertilization. Meanwhile, in fruit fields and orchards across China, intensive use of “a copper sulfate compound used in insecticides and germicides197 has led to widespread contamination of fruit that can cause chronic poisoning.” And despite an official nationwide ban on DDT, its continued regular use and long-term impacts are apparent in the insect-free and bird-free world of Western China’s farmland.
What’s so myopic about so much of this pollution is that it is the malignant outgrowth of an insane “more is better” philosophy embraced by millions of Chinese peasant farmers. Whether it is fertilizer or pesticides for crops or antibiotics for livestock (or lead in our toys and paint), there is no deft chemical touch in China but rather a “pour it on” and “paint it on” mentality that is about as safe as plutonium flakes in potato chips.
Just consider China’s over-fertilization epidemic: Chinese farmers use more than 30 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer each year and routinely apply double or triple what crops require. According to soil expert Fusuo Zhang of the China Agricultural University,198 this surfeit of fertilizer has caused soil pH to plummet, and the resulting soil acidification is cutting crop production by as much as 30 to 50% in some areas.
A similar Rabelaisian appetite for pesticides—together with often improper use—has led to the contamination of over 5% of China’s soil while, all told, China’s loss of arable land to all toxins adds up to fully 10%. To be clear here, that’s over 25 million acres down the toxic tubes; and it is the equivalent of wiping out over 80% of the farmland in Iowa.
This is hardly the end of the story, however. There is also the matter of China’s willingness—indeed, its extreme eagerness—to be the dumping ground for one of the most toxic modern concoctions ever created—so-called “e-waste.”
Such e-waste is the stuff of dead computers, obsolete cell phones, and other electronic gadgets; and it’s a veritable heavy metal concert like no other. As ScienceDaily tells it: “Up to 50-million tons of e-waste is generated worldwide199 each year—enough to fill a line of garbage collection trucks stretching halfway around the world;” and of course it’s China backing up its garbage trucks to collect fully 70% of that e-waste.
This is not just West dumps East. It also the fifteenth century meeting the twenty-first century. In this squalid e-waste world, Chinese peasants squat over small charcoal grills to melt lead solder from circuit boards and use only small portable fans to ward off the toxic fumes as they pick bare-handed through the computer chips and capacitors and diodes that will be resold to electrical appliance factories.
It’s an ultra-primitive recycling process amidst all the paraphernalia of modern life. And it yields China’s factory floor yet another competitive edge over countries like Brazil or Mexico or France or America that are willing to treat their citizens like human beings rather than as human sacrifices to the godless goal of cheap production.
This is all so disgusting on its face, and all the more so because the toxic dust that results from the recycling process travels for miles into the Chinese countryside. Indeed, in and around e-waste reprocessing ghettos like Guiyu in Guangdong Province, the levels of copper, lead, nickel, and various other toxic heavy metals are 100, 200, and 300 times higher than safety levels.
So what, then, is the grand total cost of all of China’s various sources of soil contamination—from chemicals, fertilizers, and pesticides to e-waste? According to China’s own scientists, the price tag comes in the form of over 10 million tons200 of grain lost annually—a number equal to about one-sixth of the U.S. wheat harvest, half the total corn production of Mexico, and almost all of the annual rice production of Japan. So to put this price tag in another way we will all come to painfully understand at the checkout line of our local grocery store, that’s over 10 million more tons of grain that China will have to raid from the food supplies of other countries every year because of its lack of environmental stewardship.
The Emperor of Global Warming
The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat201 to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice—humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.
—Friends of the Earth
At this point, we think you get the very clear pollution picture—and how China’s utter disregard for its natural resources affects us all. Yet there is still one more environmental issue we need to put on the planetary table. This is the very weighty matter of the prodigious contributions of China’s factory floor to climate change.
Before we delve into this issue, we know that there are many Americans who do not believe climate change is real, much less a legitimate danger. To those of you in this camp, we merely want to say this:
The costs of failing to prevent climate change if it is indeed real are likely to be far higher than any costs we might incur to prevent climate change if it turns out to be a hoax. Viewed from this perspective, action on climate change would seem to represent a prudent insurance policy against a phenomenon we do not yet know anywhere near enough about.
So within the context of these observations, we further note that as early as 2006—years before any experts thought it would happen—China absolutely sprinted past the United States to claim the mantle of biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Moreover, over the next several decades, if gone unchecked, China’s coal-fired-driven growth, working in tandem with a projected swarm of hundreds of millions of new cars on Chinese roads, will lead to an exponential increase in greenhouse gases that will absolutely dwarf that of all other nations combined—including the United States.
Of course, the China apologists will argue that China has a “right” to pollute the world in proportion to its massive population. But that begs the question of exactly who is responsible for China being severely overpopulated in the first place? China certainly can’t pin that one on anyone else.
The biggest irony of all of this is that China actually stands to be one of the biggest victims of climate change. To understand why, it’s helpful to know that the mighty waters that flow through China’s two greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—largely originate in the snow pack and glaciers of the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau. These glaciers are already melting at the rate of about 7% a year, and if Planet Earth does indeed continue to heat up, these glaciers will melt far faster. That, in turn, means China will first face several decades of epic flooding—followed by chronic droughts and famines as its two biggest rivers run all but dry.
Meanwhile, as the polar ice caps continue to melt and sea levels rise, coastal cities like Shanghai and Tianjin will face submersion. That this is a very distinct possibility is validated by this dire warning from the Red Cross’s Dr. Peter Walker: “[W]ithin 80 years, 30 million people202 in China are going to be under sea. We know it is going to happen, so we must look at ways of how to protect the area.”
Well, China, how about starting to protect yourself and your neighbor India and the rest of us—rather than blaming the rest of the world for the problem and demanding that America and Europe pay for any solution?
Why China is Killing Itself—and the Planet
An industrial city—though China doesn’t really have any other kind—Tianying203 accounts for over half of China’s lead production. Thanks to poor technology and worse regulation, much of that toxic metal ends up in Tianying’s soil and water, and then in the bloodstream of its children.”
—Time
To close this chapter, we must answer what should by now be one glaringly obvious question: Why is China’s totalitarian government—which should be able to control anything it wants within its borders—allowing China to become the dumping ground of the world?
Answering this question is of utmost importance—not the least of which to Chinese citizens. For it is certainly true that China’s battering of Mother Nature will ultimately cause far more suffering than anything the Chinese people endured during the 1930s horrific Rape of Nanking by Japanese imperial forces or over the course of the British Empire’s ruthless “opium wars” during the nineteenth century. Indeed, these “foreign humiliations” which the Chinese Communist Party are so fond of reminding the world of, while brutal and far reaching at the time, now seem second order small when it comes to the environmental humiliation the Chinese Communist Party is now inflicting on its own people.
So why exactly is this Grand Tragedy of the Commons happening? Surely, part of the fault must lie squarely in the board rooms of foreign companies like BASF, DuPont, GE, Intel, and Volkswagen that strategically export their pollution to China. Besides having fallen in love with all of the various illegal subsidies the Chinese government uses to encourage offshoring, the corporate executives of these foreign companies much prefer the fast and loose rules of China’s “Environmental Predation Agency” to America’s Environmental Protection Agency, Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, or the European Environment Agency.
Ultimately, however, the blame for China’s “Death to a Big Planet” must lie with the Chinese Communist Party itself for not just accepting its environmental humiliation—but also for engineering and financing it. In fact, the unprecedented willingness of an “any color but Green” China to allow the wholesale trashing of its air, water, and soil ecosystems boils down to three simple factors working in deadly interaction with an almost perfect lack of future vision.
One factor is embodied in the unwritten Communist Party principle that says “pollute and grow now and protect later.” From this myopic perspective, it’s better to trade off another piece of the Chinese environment to steal a few million more jobs from the West—and thereby keep the political peace within China—than it is to pay the freight for environmental protection.
A second related problem is that with so many of the enterprises in China owned by the state, the fox is not only guarding the environmental henhouse; it is running the entire chicken and egg business. In fact, China’s state-run enterprises are among the very worst offenders when it comes to the wholesale dumping and spewing of pollutants into the waters and onto the land of China.
Still a third source of China’s utter disregard for its environment is the Confucian idea that man’s role is to conquer nature rather than to live in symbiosis with it. One of the most tragic illustrations of this fantastic Chinese delusion dates back to days of Mao Zedong and the great leap backward during the 1960s. This was the time of Mao’s infamous “Kill a Sparrow” campaign—concocted by the Chinese dictator to rid the countryside of rats, mice, mosquitoes, and public pest #1, the lowly sparrow.
This felony dumb crime against nature was straight out of a Chinese revolutionary opera as Chairman Mao mobilized millions of peasants to sing and shout and bang on pans to scare the sparrows from the fields. Mao’s goal was to prevent the sparrows from feasting on the seeds of the planted crops—but what the Chairman didn’t count on was that as much seed as sparrows might eat, they devour even more insects.
So it was that once China suppressed its sparrow population, China’s prime agricultural lands were overrun by hordes of hungry locusts. While the resulting starvation literally killed tens of millions of Chinese, the real long-term tragedy is that the Communist Party hasn’t learned a wit about the wisdom of environmental stewardship.
Death By China Death By China - Peter Navarro & Greg Autry Death By China