Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

All but ten of the fifty-three waterways that flow into the Bohai Sea are rated “heavily contaminated.” Together they release 2.8 billion tons of polluted water into the Bohai annually, leading to a buildup of heavy metal in the mud 2,000 times higher than the national safety standard (Yingling Liu, “China’s Coastal Pollution Necessitates Rethinking Government Role,” Worldwatch Institute, November 8, 2007).

38. The clearest illustration of this was the lead-contamination scandal of 2009. Thousands of children were poisoned by the steady buildup of heavy metals from factories in Shaanxi and Hunan. It arose because the government monitored data only on the daily proportions of emissions; it was not measuring the accumulated total of lead in the soil.

39. “DDT-laced Seafood from China May Pose a Threat to Humans,” Under-watertimes.com News Service, May 17, 2007, citing a study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry .

40. The 32 million tons of farmed fish produced in China in 2005 was equal to roughly a third of the world’s oceanic fish catch.

41. This theory is credited to biogeochemist Graham Logan of the University of New South Wales: Graham A. Logan, J. M. Hayes, Glenn B. Hieshima, and Roger E. Summons, “Terminal Proterozoic Reorganization of Biogeochemical Cycles,” Nature, July 6, 2002.

42. This theory is put forward by paleontologist Ronald Martin of the University of Delaware: “Secular Increase in Nutrient Levels through the Phanerozoic; Implications for Productivity, Biomass, and Diversity of the Marine Biosphere,” Palaios 11 (1996): 209–19.

43. Frederik Leliaert, Zhang Xiaowen, et al., “Identity of the Qingdao Algal Bloom,” Phycological Research 57 (2009): 147–51.

44. Ibid.

45. Algaculture is already under way in several countries, including China. One use is to absorb carbon sequestered from coal-gasification plants. In Japan, a very similar technique is used to harvest nori seaweed.

46. Jonathan Watts, “A Hunger Eating Up the World,” Guardian Weekly, January 20, 2006.

47. Climate change will have a devastating effect on agricultural production in China. If no measures are taken, the overall productivity of Chinese farming industry may decline 5 to 10 percent by 2030. By the second half of the twenty-first century, the production of major crops in China’s wheat, rice, and corn could see a maximum reduction of 37 percent (Lin Erda et al., “Investigating the Impacts of Climate Change on Chinese Agriculture, China-UK Collaborative Project,” www.dfid.gov.uk, 2008).

1. Official translation.

2. Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution —and How It Can Renew America (Allen Lane, 2008). Friedman advocates the adoption of China’s authoritarian powers as a temporary measure for “one day.” In parentheses, he steps back by saying “(not two).”

3. Thomas Friedman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 9, 2009.

4. Heilongjiang recorded the lowest temperature in Chinese history of minus 52.3°C on February 13, 1969, at Mohe.

5. Heilongjiang was the front line for 1.25 million of them (Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature [Cambridge University Press, 2001]).

6. The crisis with the Soviet Union abated when Mao met U.S. president Richard Nixon and gained the support of the world’s most powerful military.

7. In 1995, Ma won over the newly formed Environmental Protection Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. Senior politicians were impressed by his argument that wetlands are a cost-effective form of flood control, while swamps have a kidneylike function in cleansing polluted waterways and processing toxic waste. The agriculture ministry objected. They opposed any brake on the conversion of land for food production. But Ma was in the ascendant and so, it seemed, was the conservation movement (Joanne R. Bauer [ed.], Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood, and Contested Environments [M. E. Sharpe, 2006], p. 66).

8. This was of international importance as China has the biggest wetlands in Asia. Including marshes, swamps, lagoons, deltas, lakes, rivers, and coastal areas, they cover approximately 25 million hectares, or about 2.5 percent of its territory. See www.ramsar.org.

9. The Sanjiang wetland reserve in Fuyuan was established in 1993, approved as a provincial reserve the next year and a national-level reserve in 2000. In 1999, Heilongjiang was applauded worldwide for taking the lead in wetland protection when it announced the first ban on the development of swamps and watersheds (Cynthia W. Cann, Michael C. Cann, and Gao Shangquan, “China’s Road to Sustainable Development: An Overview,” in Kristen Day [ed.], China’s Environment and the Challenge of Sustainable Development [M. E. Sharpe, 2005], pp. 3–35).

10. In 1996, the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan conducted the first environmental impact assessment of a natural resource exploitation project in China on the Sanjiang Plain with support from the Wild Bird Society of Japan and the International Crane Foundation (Michael Pickles, “Implementing Ecologically Sustainable Development in China: The Example of Heilongjiang Province,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, April 1, 2002, p. 2).

11. Troops lent military boats, telescopes, offices, and observation stations to nature reserve staff. In return, the conservationists taught soldiers to identify the flora and fauna of the region. The July 18, 2000, issue of the People’s Liberation Army Daily carried the headline “Every Soldier Is a Soldier for Environment Protection” (Bauer, Forging Environmentalism, p. 65). Bauer also quotes a military official as saying, “The Russian side is full of forests and their observation stations are hidden in the big trees. Our side has few trees and our observation stations and military moves are exposed.”

12. The initial blitzkrieg came in 2005, when the State Environmental Protection Agency, as it was then called, blacklisted thirty projects worth 119.7 billion yuan, then suspended all development approval in four of the worst pollution hotspots: Tangshan in Hebei, Luliang in Shanxi, Liupanshui in Guizhou, and Laiwu in Shandong.

13. See chs. 5, 10, 11, 15, and 16. Pan Yue was advocating the creation of an eco-civilization long before President Hu. Pan was greatly helped by his family’s revolutionary credentials. His father, Pan Tian, is an engineer general in the People’s Liberation Army and his father-in-law is Liu Huaqing, former commander of the navy. Pan has a journalistic background and worked in the Economic Restructuring Office (Andrew Mertha, China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change [Cornell University, 2008], p. 50). He worked inside the government and the Communist Party to ensure that candidates for promotion were judged at least partly on their environmental records, launched an experiment to assess “green GDP,” pressed for environmental impact assessments for new projects, and initiated a new credit evaluation system with the Bank of China that requires financial institutions to include ecological regulation compliance as a factor when assessing requests for loans. Outside the one-party system, he opened up the space for NGOs, advocated greater public participation in environmental policy-making, and encouraged the media to act as watchdog.

14. Yang Dongping, the president of Friends of Nature, called the upgrade a major turning point in China’s environmental protection (Yang Dongping, “The Turning Point in China’s Environmental Protection Movement,” Bio-diversity Matters, spring 2008).