Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

25. Accounts differed. The Dongyang government said about 1,000 police and local officials had been attacked by a mob, resulting in thirty-six injuries and no deaths. Residents claimed 3,000 police stormed the village, leaving several people—including police—killed, dozens wounded, and thirty police buses destroyed.

26. These slogans are included in a detailed report on the incident in the Phoenix Weekly magazine, translated by Roland Soong on his ESWN blog. http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050601_1.htm.

27. In December 2007, the government forced six enterprises to publish an apology in the Hangzhou Daily . “We have been found discharging excessive pollution recently. This is because we had not paid enough attention to environmental protection nor fully obeyed the law and regulations, and the pollution treatment facilities were not operating properly.” The firms—two paper mills, two electroplating factories, and two printing and dyeing plants—promised to suspend production until they had invested more on waste treatment. “We sincerely apologize to all the people in Hangzhou and are willing to accept criticism and advice.”

28. Qian Yanfeng, “Toxic Water Scare Leaves a Sour Taste,” China Daily, February 25, 2009.

29. The director of the environmental bureau, Dai Beijun, quoted in Xinhua, “Six Enterprises Apologize for Pollution,” December 28, 2007.

30. Ch. 15 covers these initiatives in more detail.

31. “The first Chinese province to calculate ‘green GDP’—economic production less environmental costs—has concluded it [the economy] barely grew during the country’s expansion over the past two decades” ( Financial Times, August 19, 2004). When asked to explain why the scheme had been aborted, one official observed: “The ‘green GDP’ really makes the provinces and cities look bad” (“‘Green GDP’ Mired in Red Tape,” China Digital Times, March 30, 2007).

32. Ma Jun, “After ‘Green GDP,’ What Next?” China Dialogue, August 8, 2007.

33. As Emmott writes: “Far from being unprecedented, the broad shape and nature of the country’s growth from the 1980s onward has been pretty similar to the pattern shown in earlier decades by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other East Asian success stories” (Emmott, “What China Can Learn from Japan on Cleaning Up the Environment”). This assumption follows the Kuznet’s curve hypothesis, which suggests that pollution and inequality increase during the early stages of a country’s development and then start to decline. Though Emmott did not say so, the same could also be said of the UK or the U.S.A.

34. Cost of Pollution in China: Economic Estimates of Physical Damages, report by the World Bank and China’s Environmental Protection Agency, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Water Resources, 2007.

35. Economy, “The Great Leap Backward?” cites water pollution costs of $35.8 billion one year, air pollution costs of $27.5 billion another, and on and on with weather disasters ($26.5 billion), acid rain ($13.3 billion), desertification ($6 billion), or crop damage from soil pollution ($2.5 billion).

36. The annual bonus was usually about 80,000 yuan ($11,400), and 95 percent of their dividends—worth about 200,000 yuan ($29,000).

1. Speaking at the Nature Conservancy conference ConEx in Vancouver, 2008.

2. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “City Dwellers Set to Surpass Rural Inhabitants in 2008,” DESA News 12, 2 (February 2008).

3. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, described this as one of the defining trends of our era. “Revolution of new technology and China’s urbanizing process are expected to be the two big events that will affect human-kind in the twenty-first century,” he noted at a symposium in China in 1999.

4. By administrative fiat. Chongqing had previously been part of Sichuan Province. But it was made into a municipality in 1997 as part of preparations for the Three Gorges Dam, noted in Ch. 3.

5. City residents in Chongqing have seen their incomes rise 66 percent in the past five years to just over 10,000 yuan ($1,400) per year, almost three times that of their country cousins.

6. China’s urban population increased by only 8.3 percent between 1949 and 1979, 20 percentage points lower than the average for developing nations. This was partly due to the politburo’s belief that urbanization was responsible for the famines of 1960 and 1961. However, a bigger factor in that tragedy was the Great Leap Forward, during which farmers were ordered to tear down trees for steel production, slaughter birds that killed pests, and use deep-plowing techniques that ruined soil quality.

7. With 1.6 trillion yuan ($229 billion) spent since 1999, mainly on roads, bridges, dams, and pipelines, this policy is sometimes compared with the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild postwar Europe.

8. As one observer noted, Chongqing’s urban population was expanding eight times quicker than that of late-nineteenth-century Chicago, then considered the world’s fastest-growing city (James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America [Houghton Mifflin, 2006]).

9. Deng Xiangzheng, Huang Jikun, Scott Rozelle, and Emi Uchida, “Cultivated Land Conversion and Potential Agricultural Productivity in China,” China Academy of Sciences, July 2005.

10. Over this period some cultivated land was added: 24.2 percent of it by reclaiming woodland, 66 percent from grasslands, and 1.9 percent from bodies of water. But this was all obtained at the expense of natural ecosystems. Over the previous forty years, land reclamation has led to the loss of 11,900 square kilometers of coastal shallows, with industry taking more than 10,000 square kilometers of coastal wetlands. Half of China’s coastal shallows are now completely destroyed. Despite this, the trend of overall loss of cultivated land has not been reversed (Jiang Gaoming, “The Terrible Cost of China’s Growth,” China Dialogue, January 12, 2007). Chapter 15 considers this phenomenon in more detail.

11. According to a study by the U.S.-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The planet’s most spectacular edifices are now rising up in the East rather than the West. In 2008, six of the world’s ten tallest new buildings were completed in China, including the 492-meter Shanghai World Financial Center, which is only slightly shorter than the world’s highest man-made structure, Taipei 101 in Taiwan. Both will soon be dwarfed by the 632-meter Shanghai Tower and the 600-meter China 117 Tower in Tianjin.

12. Energy use of New York City is 70 percent of U.S. average because using public transport and heating residential blocks rather than individual homes are more efficient (interview with Joel Cohen).

13. China’s urban population has grown in cities of all sizes. However, townships of between 5,000 and 10,000 people are witnessing the fastest growth. Demographic trends in China indicate that (1) the urban population of about 430 million in 2001 will reach 850 million by 2015, and (2) the number of cities with over 100,000 people will increase from 630 in 2001 to over 1,000 by 2015 (World Bank on Urban Environment, web.worldbank.org).

14. “Urbanization Will Be Halted in Tibet, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Qinghai,” South China Morning Post, January 4, 2008.

15. Interview with Joel Cohen.

16. Only 10 percent of which is arable.

17. Thomas Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

18. Where population pressures are exacting a toll on the environment, according to mainland media. It would also be stopped in nature reserves and areas that are the origins of major rivers and sources of sandstorms. The favorable areas to live, accounting for about 10 percent of China’s landmass, would hold more than 30 percent of the population. Fertile agricultural plains in northeastern, central, and southern China, and flourishing urban clusters centered on megacities such as Shenyang, Beijing, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Changsha, Qingdao, Nanning, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou would start preparing for an enormous increase in residents (“Urbanization Will Be Halted in Tibet, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Qinghai”).