荒诞者共和

Wenran Jiang
The China Brief Volume 7, Issue 16
Jamestown Foundation
2007-08-08

“Green GDP” has been the new catchphrase in the Chinese media and political discourse in the past few years. China’s State Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) jointly released China’s first Green GDP report in 2006, which measures the country’s GDP performance against the cost of resources and the impact on the environment. It concludes that a limited calculation of pollution alone cost 3.05 percent of China’s GDP in 2004 [1]. The widely reported new method of assessing China’s growth, however, will be relegated to simply an exciting start; Beijing recently announced that the much-anticipated Green GDP report for 2005, completed last year, would now be shelved indefinitely.

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Edward Russell
Asia Times
August 10, 2007

BEIJING - August 7 dawned a typical, hazy Beijing morning. The last headlights of night were reflecting off the light-grayish gloom that held the city, obscuring buildings and short-shifting the horizon to 100 meters at best. One year out and Beijing's promise of a "green Olympics" is looking hazy at best.

Last month, the official state news agency Xinhua announced a plan by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) to remove "about 1 million vehicles between August 7 and 20". Both the US Embassy and the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau (BEPB) confirmed plans for a temporary car ban this month as a "test-run" for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

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Ling Li
Worldwatch Institute
July 31, 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.

The release of a landmark 2005 Green National Accounting study that calculates the environmental costs of China’s rapid economic development has been “postponed indefinitely,” according to Wang Jinnan, the head of the study group. Wang told China Youth Daily last Monday that disagreement between the two government departments that authored the report—China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)—over what to include and how to release this information was a major reason for the report’s delay. He noted that several participating local governments had also expressed reluctance in publicizing the data.

The goal of Green National Accounting, also known as Green Gross Domestic Product (Green GDP) accounting, is to measure the “true cost” of economic growth by deducting the costs of natural resources depletion and environmental degradation from traditional GDP calculations. But economists in China and elsewhere have faced a variety of methodological challenges in developing this approach, which has made the concept more attractive in theory than in practice.

Starting in 2004, SEPA and NBS launched a series of pilot projects in green GDP accounting in some 10 provinces and municipalities across China—at a time when no country in the world was using such an accounting system. According to the first official report, released last September, China’s economic losses from environmental pollution in 2004 totaled some 511.8 billion yuan (US$67.7 billion), or roughly 3.1 percent of GDP. But this represented only part of the true cost of environmental damage, the authors noted, due to limitations of technologies and data. A complete green GDP accounting system requires calculating costs of resource depletion and ecological damage that cannot typically be monetized, they said.

Earlier this month, NBS head Xie Fuzhan announced that the so-called “green GDP accounting system” in fact does not exist because there is no international standard available for the measurement. Xie also stressed that the Chinese government will continue with efforts to develop the accounting system. Wang, the study’s leader, however, believes that despite the deficiencies of the existing system, the reported results still provide a useful indication of China’s current environmental situation. He says the report’s publication would help local officials better understand the “hidden” costs of environmental degradation behind the nation’s rapid economic growth.

Jianqiang Liu
Worldwatch Institute
June 19, 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.

China’s worsening environmental crisis is catalyzing a growing environmental movement in which the public is resisting special interest groups and opposing the government’s environmentally “unfriendly” behaviors. More significantly, this movement represents a push toward greater democracy in the country, with the public fighting for its civil rights through protecting the environment.

Although citizens, NGOs, and journalists suffering from China’s deteriorating environment did not set out to turn their environmental efforts into a democracy movement, they have found more democratic space in the “green” realm. They are able to write articles, hold open forums, launch grassroots groups, and educate the public, influencing the behaviors of both the government and special interests. Rather than ideology, they have paid more attention to protecting individual environmental rights—breathing fresh air, drinking clean water, protecting the homeland, and conserving nature. Citizens also have more political space in the environmental arena because the government is undertaking parallel efforts to improve the environment.

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Carin Zissis
Council on Foreign Relations
February 9, 2007

Introduction
What has China’s economic boom done to the environment?
What are some of China’s major environmental challenges?
How has the Chinese public responded to the environmental threat?
What has China done to improve the situation?
Is China’s national environmental agency an effective watchdog?
Which government agencies monitor the environment at the local level?
What is the role of local non-governmental organizations?
What role does the international community play in China’s environmental policy?
What is the U.S. position on China’s environmental troubles?
What impact has the 2008 Olympics had on China’s environmental policy?

Introduction

The familiar story of China's economic boom keeps headline writers busy with gross domestic product (GDP) growth hitting 10.7 percent last year. Its booming economy, however, has brought a concurrent environmental crisis. Sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities are in China. Beijing's pledge to host a “Green Olympics” in the summer of 2008 signals the country's willingness to address its environmental problems. But with less than two years until the summer games, the country does not look likely to meet its environmental goals.
What has China’s economic boom done to the environment?

China's economy has grown tenfold since 1978, and the focus on development over the environment has led to widespread environmental degradation. “China has gone through an industrialization in the past twenty years that many developing countries needed one hundred years to complete,” says Pan Yue, the deputy director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), in a report for Germany's Der Spiegel. But Elizabeth C. Economy, a CFR senior fellow and expert on China's environment, says the argument that China is experiencing the same growing pains as any other industrialized nation “fundamentally mischaracterizes” the issue. The "scale and scope of pollution far outpaces what occurred in the United States and Europe” during their industrial revolutions, she says. Moreover, China's environmental woes have hurt its economy. The damage to the ecosystem costs China about 9 percent of its GDP, according to the United Nations Development Program.

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