荒诞者共和

Philip Bowring
Asia Sentinel
10 August 2007

Wall Street's dissembling greed threatens us all.

lies Sack Henry Paulson. Liquidate Goldman Sachs. Call Alan Greenspan to account. End Moody’s rating franchise. Arrest a few dozen salesmen of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Those should be the correct responses to the chaos roiling western financial markets and beginning to have a knock-on effect on an otherwise soundly placed East Asia.

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Asia Sentinel
19 August 2007

China’s coal-mining accidents have their roots in greed and corruption.

The United States has been grimly transfixed since August 6 by the deaths of six coal miners killed in the state of Utah and the subsequent death of three more miners who tried to rescue them. Hour-by-hour reports have been issued on national television networks, and opposition has been building in the US Congress to the entire coal industry.

But while that drama plays itself out in the US, China, with far too many local officials with financial stakes in coal mines, has long outstripped the rest of the world for underground deaths. By one estimate, 13 miners die every day in China. Officials put the deaths at 4,726 in 2006, although the Beijing Times earlier this year estimated that more than 7,000 miners were killed the same year in mine explosions, cave-ins, and flooding, compared to 43 who died in the United States during the same year. So far, officially, 1,792 miners have died in 1,066 mishaps in the first half of 2007.

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Monica Liau
Worldwatch Institute
August 9, 2007

China Watch is a joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI) and is supported by the blue moon fund.

Chinese authorities say global warming is to blame for the extreme weather conditions that have afflicted the country this year, Reuters reports. Summer floods have killed more than 700 people across 24 provinces and displaced an estimated 5 million more. In other provinces, drought has left more than 8 million people short of water. Because China has both limited water resources and a large population living in reclaimed flood zones, droughts and flooding are annual problems. But experts say sustained weather events like those experienced this year are abnormal and likely to worsen in the coming years.

“One of the reasons for the weather extremes this year has been unusual atmospheric circulation brought about by global warming,” said Song Lianchun, head of the China Meteorological Administration’s Department of Forecasting Services and Disaster Mitigation.

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Wang Jiaquan
Worldwatch Institute
July 26, 2007

China Watch is a joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI) and is supported by the blue moon fund.

For years, eastern China’s Jiangsu province has proudly led the rest of the country in economic production. With a population of 74 million, the province’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) leapfrogged from US$1,000 in 1996 to US$3,038 in 2005, making it the first province to exceed the US$3,000 mark, five years ahead of schedule. With merely 1 percent of China’s total land area, Jiangsu claims 15 percent of the country’s overall industrial output and 10 percent of its GDP.

But the country’s leading economic powerhouse is now forced to face its own environmental woes following a sudden outbreak of algae in Taihu Lakein southern Jiangsu. The algae bloom cut off the tap water supply to more than 2 million people in Wuxi City in late May.

In early July, a top provincial official called on the industrially booming region to sacrifice its GDP growth in order to balance the “green” deficit it owes to China’s third largest freshwater lake. After a series of intensive, high-profile efforts by the central government to address the lake’s pollution, Jiangsu Provincial Communist Party Secretary Li Yuanchao urged local officials to spare no efforts in cleaning up the water body, even at the cost of economic growth.

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Elizabeth C. Economy
Council on Foreign Relations
January 27, 2003

Testimony before the Congressional Executive Commission on China
Roundtable on the Environment

China's spectacular economic growth-averaging 8% or more annually over the past two decades-has produced an impressive increase in the standard of living for hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. At the same time, this economic development has had severe ramifications for the natural environment. There has been a dramatic increase in the demand for natural resources of all kinds, including water, land and energy. Forest resources have been depleted, triggering a range of devastating secondary impacts such as desertification, flooding and species loss. Moreover, poorly regulated industrial and household emissions and waste have caused levels of water and air pollution to skyrocket. China's development and environment practices have also made the country one of the world's leading contributors to regional and global environmental problems, including acid rain, ozone depletion, global climate change, and biodiversity loss.

Environmental degradation and pollution in China also pose challenges well beyond those to the natural environment. The ramifications for the social and economic welfare of the Chinese people are substantial. Public health problems, mass migration, forced resettlement, and social unrest are all the consequence of a failure to integrate environmental considerations into development efforts effectively.

This does not mean that the Chinese leadership is ignoring the challenge of environmental protection. Both as result of domestic pressures and international ones[1], China's leaders have become increasingly cognizant of the need to improve the country's environment. The State Environmental Protection Administration and other relevant agencies have tried to do as much as they can, establishing an extensive legal framework and bureaucratic infrastructure to address environmental concerns. However, China's environmental bureaucracy is generally weak, and funding and personnel levels remain well below the level necessary merely to keep the situation from deteriorating further. Without greater support from Beijing, the regulatory and enforcement regimes also remain insufficient to support implementation of the best policies or technological fixes.

Much of the burden for environmental protection, therefore, has come to rest outside of Beijing and the central government apparatus. Responsibility has been decentralized to the local level, with some wealthier regions under proactive mayors moving aggressively to tackle their own environmental needs, while other cities and towns lag far behind. The government has also encouraged public participation in environmental protection, opening the door to non-governmental organizations and the media, who have become an important force for change in some sectors of environmental protection. The international community-through bilateral assistance, non-governmental organizations, international governmental organizations, and most recently, multinationals-has also been a powerful force in shaping China's environmental practices.

Still, much remains to be done. The particular mix of environmental challenges and weak policy responses means that the Chinese people cannot yet claim several basic rights: the right to breathe clean air, to access clean water, to participate in the decision-making process on industrial development or public works projects that affect their livelihood, and to secure justice when these rights are violated.

Without greater attention and commitment from the center, China's environment is likely to continue to deteriorate throughout much of the country, causing further social and economic distress domestically and levying even greater costs on the environmental future of the rest of the world.

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