Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

1. Alexandra Harney, The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (Penguin, 2008), p. 17.

2. From 24.5 billion yuan in 1980 to 3.5 trillion yuan in 2008.

3. According to Rupert Hoogewerf, compiler of the Hurun Report list of China’s richest men and women.

4. Although it was not an illegal trade, since opium use was permitted in Britain. A more eloquent criticism was made in Parliament by the Opposition leader William Gladstone, who described Britain’s actions in the subsequent “Opium War” as “unjust and iniquitous … to protect an infamous contraband traffic” (House of Commons Debates [Hansard], vol. 53, April 8, 1840, col. 818).

5. Jiang Gaoming, “China Must Say No to Imported Waste,” China Dialogue, February 8, 2007.

6. The world’s largest container ship, the Emma Maersk, had recently delivered 170,000 tons of trash to Lianjiao in south China’s Guangdong Province.

7. Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), bk. I, Ch. 8. Like Malthus, Smith judged China without ever seeing it.

8. A report from the Waste Resources Action Programme of the UK suggested that the advantage of recycling over landfilling was so great that it made environmental sense to ship waste halfway around the world for recycling, 1,300–1,600 kilograms of CO 2being saved for each ton of recycled waste (John Vidal, “Sending Waste to China Saves Carbon Emissions,” Guardian, August 19, 2008).

9. Alan W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (Vintage, 1965), p. 63.

10. Between 1999 and 2009, annual exports of waste paper from Britain, mainly to India, China, and Indonesia, have risen from 470,000 to 4.7 million tons and plastic bottles from under 40,000 tons to half a million (Vidal, “Sending Waste to China Saves Carbon Emissions”).

11. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal came into force in 1992.

12. Jiang, “China Must Say No to Imported Waste.”

13. According to Eddy Zheng of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, approximately 70 percent of e-waste generated worldwide is processed in China. The biggest center for this operation is Guiyu, where, he says, human exposure to toxins is very intensive (talk given to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, August 24, 2009).

14. Scott Pelley, “‘60 Minutes’ Crew Attacked in China While Reporting on E-Waste,” Huffington Post (Internet newspaper), November 6, 2008. My own party comprised my assistant, Sami Sillanpää of the Helsingin Sanomat, and Clifford Coonan of the Irish Times .

15. Arlene Blum of the Green Science Policy Institute has conducted extensive research on the health problems related to fire retardants in the U.S. With regulations tightening in other countries, she fears the industry is moving to China (interview with author).

16. In the U.S, 130,000 computers are discarded every day and 100 million cellphones annually, according to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, quoted in “Following the Trail of Toxic E-Waste,” CBS 60 Minutes, November 9, 2008. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans produce 2.63 million tons of e-waste each year.

17. In 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office condemned the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to identify where 80 percent of U.S. electronic waste is headed.

18. Zheng, talk given to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, August 24, 2009.

19. Press conference, August 2009.

20. I first heard this apposite expression from Nick Young while he was head of China Development Brief.

21. So much so that even other factories in Guangdong are worried. When I visited a legitimate production line for the Robosapien toy, I was surprised to find every member of staff being searched on their way out of the gates. “Why?” I asked a manager. “Because otherwise someone will smuggle out a model and then a factory in Shantou will be producing rip-off copies within days.”

22. Hong Kong’s per capita GDP in 2006 was $42,123; Guangxi’s was less than $2,000 ( National Statistical Yearbook 2007 [China National Bureau of Statistics, 2007]).

23. Nearly 5,000 officials at the county level or above were punished for corruption in one year, state media reported (Mark Magnier, “Corruption Taints Every Facet of Life in China,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2008). Nationwide, corruption accounts for an estimated 3 to 15 percent of a $7 trillion economy, and party membership can be an invitation to solicit bribes or cut illegal land deals.

24. This is also where a former colleague, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, saw a local activist, Lu Banglie, so savagely beaten by thugs that he reported him dead. I went to look for Lu’s body and was relieved to find him shaken but very much alive.

25. Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me, “The big demand for wildlife started in the nineties. It existed before but not on a big scale. I think that is related to the economy. People are getting rich and exploring rare dishes. Guangdong is the biggest problem but all of the southern area of Guanxi and Yunnan, it is getting more common.”

26. Author’s interview with Traffic representative.

27. Jonathan Watts, “‘Noah’s Ark’ of 5,000 Rare Animals Found Floating off the Coast of China,” Guardian, May 26, 2007.

28. One raid on a restaurant in Guanghzou in 2008 turned up 118 pangolins, 60 kilograms of snakes, and 400 kilograms of toads.

29. Jonathan Watts, “Concubine Culture Brings Trouble for China’s Bosses,” Guardian, September 8, 2007.

30. Other factors, of course, include cheap labor and a good infrastructure. The average hourly salary in Guangdong for manufacturing workers in 2002 was 57 cents, about 3 percent of the U.S. level, according to Alexandra Harney in The China Price . She estimates that this is less than handloom operators in Britain were paid during the Industrial Revolution (p. 9).

31. Quoted in Zhou Jigang, “The Rich Consume and the Poor Suffer the Pollution,” China Dialogue, October 27, 2006.

32. This single province accounts for a third of China’s exports (Harney, The China Price, p. 15). The National Development and Reform Commission estimates that between 15 and 25 percent of all the country’s global warming emissions result from manufacturing exports. According to Oslo’s Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, a third of all Chinese emissions are linked to exports, with 9 percent from manufacture of exports to the U.S., and 6 percent from goods for Europe (Jonathan Watts, “Consuming Nations Should Pay for Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Not Manufacturing Countries, Says China,” Guardian, March 17, 2009). If such emissions were factored into consuming nations’ carbon accounts, the reductions claimed in Europe in recent years would be overturned. The British government’s impressive 18 percent cut in carbon emissions since 1990 would be revealed as a 20 percent increase.

33. By one estimate, Chinese manufacturers are paid only a quarter of the final retail sale (Harney, The China Price, p. 15).

34. The power generated for industry here is particularly dirty because coal mined in the south contains high levels of sulfur.

35. Data from 2005 (Tang Hao, “Cleaning China’s Polluted Pearl,” China Dialogue, June 28, 2007).

36. Cheung Chi-fai, “Hong Kong Smog Third Worst Since 1968,” South China Morning Post, January 17, 2008.