Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

37. The average American discards 23.4 kilograms of plastic packaging a year. In Japan and Europe the figures are 20.1 and 15 kilograms, respectively, while in China it is a mere 13 kilograms. Developed countries recognized the threats that plastics pose long ago, and responded by using new materials and developing recycling (Jiang, “China Must Say No to Imported Waste”).

38. Ministry of environmental protection website figures released in 2008.

39. Prices have more than halved since the start of the economic crisis in autumn 2008 ( Nanfang Metropolitan Daily, October 21, 2008).

40. Jonathan Watts and Jess Cartner-Morley, “Waste Land,” Guardian, March 31, 2007.

1. Speech to an international conference on sustainable sanitation in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, in 2007 (Shi Jiangtao, “Experts Blame Pollution on Runaway Greed,” South China Morning Post, August 28, 2007).

2. Depending on how and when wealth is calculated. This accolade has also been claimed at times by Guangdong and Shanghai.

3. Now nominally retired, Wu has passed leadership of the village to his son, but he is still revered as a founding father and exercises influence much like Deng Xiaoping—who dominated Chinese politics long after he resigned all formal titles apart from that of Honorary Chairman of the China Bridge Association.

4. He Jianming, Jingcai Wu Renbao (Shandong Wenyi Publishing House, 2007).

5. But the biographies are careful not to position Wu too clearly as a pioneer capitalist. Among his leftist achievements, they cite the setting up of a free village canteen in the early 1970s. Its success was proclaimed when thirty-eight of the fifty-eight women residents put on weight—a sign, if nothing else, of how cosmetic values have changed in China.

6. Town and village enterprises (TVEs) were a driving force in the first two decades after the economic reforms of 1978 as local governments and collectives took advantage of the opening to foreign trade and capital. From 1978 to 1996, TVE employment rose from 28 million to 135 million (Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth [MIT Press, 2007]).

7. James Kynge covers this in detail in China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). See also Bill Emmott, “What China Can Learn from Japan on Cleaning Up the Environment,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2008.

8. Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler, “China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories,” New York Times, December 21, 2007.

9. A central aim of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 was to make China one of the world’s major steel-producing nations.

10. International Energy Agency figures cited in Kahn and Landler, “China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories.”

11. With 2,400 employees, a turnover of 7 billion yuan (around $1 billion), and an annual output of 1.3 million tons per year.

12. Together, they covered an area more than twelve times greater than the Traf-ford Centre in the UK.

13. The city estimates that 5,000 foreign merchants have established permanent bases in the city. Each year, another 200,000 visit for short-term sprees.

14. China Commodities City Group.

15. China’s exports have doubled in less than five years. The “miracle” Japanese economy of the 1970s managed the feat in seven years; Germany took ten years in the 1960s; it took Britain twelve years after 1838, culminating in the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park—the proudest moment in its industrial history—to do the same (Will Hutton, “Welcome to the Great Mall of China,” Observer, May 13, 2004). However, dependence on overseas markets makes the economy extremely vulnerable to a downturn. At the time of the economic crash of 2008, the economist Michael Pettis estimated that China was five times more dependent on foreign markets to create domestic jobs than the United States was at the time of the Great Crash in 1929.

16. One example is the use of toxic fire-retardant chemicals exposed by UC Berkeley chemist Arlene Blum: “I learned China is putting fire retardant chemicals into all furniture imported into the U.S. and Canada. PentaBDE and other chemical fire retardants considered too toxic to be used in the U.S. are being added at high levels. Scrap foam containing these toxic chemicals is also imported into the U.S. for use in carpet cushion” (Arlene Blum, personal correspondence).

17. Fisherman say whitebait catches have fallen to a fifth of their peak. In 2007, the lake was so fetid that 5 million people in Wuxi and neighboring regions had to use bottled water for drinking and bathing. Local media reported that 6 billion tons of wastewater were discharged into the lake each year and 70 percent of the nearby rivers were heavily polluted.

18. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of babies born with heart defects, cleft lips, and hydrocephalus rose by 50 percent, a fifth of which were attributed to pollution (Stephen Chen, “Birth Defects Caused by Environmental Pollution: First Large-Scale Study Exposes Poisoning Risks,” South China Morning Post, January 9, 2009).

19. Citizens of conscience who have greater influence than China’s chronically overlooked rural residents have no means to escape. He Hongshi, party secretary of Touzen Village of Jiangsu Province, is currently serving two years in prison for leading villagers in their complaints against chemical parks. An article in the Nanfang Daily recounted two cases of such abuse. Villagers from Duigou Village in Jiangsu Province’s Guannan County decided to have their river water tested because of noticeable pollution. The results showed that the water was undrinkable for both people and animals. Residents demanded compensation of 40,000 yuan ($5,700) from the chemical plants in the local industrial park. In response, the administrative committee, a government branch, sued them on charges of blackmail.

20. Ma Tianjie, “Environmental Mass Incidents in Rural China,” China Environment 10 (2008/9), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In the most violent reported case, police killed at least three villagers in Dongzhou, Guangdong Province, while quelling a riot over a planned power plant. Two years later, in 2007, thousands took to the streets in Xiamen, Fujian Province, to successfully block plans for a petrochemical plant. In recent years, the government has stopped releasing data on the number of mass incidents.

21. Jonathan Watts, “China Blames Growing Social Unrest on Anger over Pollution,” Guardian, July 6, 2007.

22. As Elizabeth Economy notes: “The price of water is rising in some cities, such as Beijing, but in many others it remains as low as 20 per cent of the replacement cost. That ensures that factories and municipalities have little reason to invest in wastewater treatment or other water-conservation efforts. Fines for polluting are so low that factory managers often prefer to pay them rather than adopt costlier pollution-control technologies. One manager of a coal-fired power plant explained to a Chinese reporter in 2005 that he was ignoring a recent edict mandating that all new power plants use desulphurisation equipment because the technology cost as much as would 15 years’ worth of fines” (“The Great Leap Backward?” Foreign Affairs 86, 5 [September/October 2007]).

23. Huaxi Chemical Industrial Park. Though it shares the same name as the “Number One Village in China,” they are unconnected.

24. Sami Sillanpää ( Helsingin Sanomat ), Didi Kirsten Tatlow ( South China Morning Post ), and Clifford Coonan ( Irish Times ).