Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Such is the passion for the exotic in Guangdong that local markets had accidentally become biochemical laboratories. Viruses were mixed and remixed as cages filled with civet cats, wild boar, snakes, frogs, and rare birds were stacked close together in enclosed, humid areas. SARS—and quite possibly bird flu—were thought to have originated here.

Guangdong is also where new modes of behavior are tried out. As in California, what happens here today often spreads to the rest of the country tomorrow. This is the home of sexual pioneer Li Li, a philosophy graduate and bedroom activist, who—using her better-known pseudonym Muzimei—became China’s most celebrated sex blogger and the first to podcast her lovemaking. It is also a hub of the world’s adult toy business, of which China controls 70 percent. In Shenzhen, I visited a sex-toy factory, where bored production-line workers were sticking fake pubic hair on rubber vaginas, testing the circuits on unfeasibly large vibrators, sticking studs on sadomasochist outfits, and waiting for the end of a shift spent monotonously making cheap thrills.

Prostitution is a less legal but far bigger part of the sex business. In Shenzhen, it reaches an industrial scale in streets filled with pink-lit windows displaying the charms of young “masseuses” and “hairdressers,” each marked with a number like an item on a restaurant menu. In Guangzhou, I interviewed a karaoke hostess who rented out her womb to a childless Hong Kong couple while making money on the side through prostitution and blackmail. In Shenzhen, I got in touch with Azhen, a twenty-four-year-old ernai or second wife, who lived in a flat paid for by a sugar daddy. Hers was a common story. Housing estates near the border were heavily populated with mistresses of rich men in Hong Kong. “No woman wants to demean herself, but there is no social safety net,” Azhen told us. 29

The same might be said of China’s place in the global economy. Foreign money and weak domestic regulation have turned Guangdong into a place where overseas companies can illicitly ejaculate emissions and pollution and indulge in energy-intensive behavior while pretending to be clean at home. This is where the developed world dodges its own rules. Rubbish is not the only environmental problem outsourced to China. Carbon is also being dumped as international manufacturers shift production of dirty, energy-intensive goods to Guangdong and beyond. 30Far away and out of sight of independent courts and a free media, governments and international corporations use China to sidestep the Kyoto Protocol and other international treaties on environmental and labor standards.

Pan Yue, the deputy minister for environmental protection, noted the hypocrisy of wealthier nations: “Developed countries account for 15 percent of the world’s population, yet use over 85 percent of its resources. They raise their own environmental standards and transfer resource-intensive and polluting industries to developing nations; they establish a series of green barriers and bear as little environmental responsibility as is possible.” 31

Guangdong is where many of these dubious environmental accounts are hidden. Just as in the Qing dynasty, when corrupt local officials put British opium dealers above their own people, the province is now selling itself as a haven for carbon cheats and waste-regulation dodgers. This is a major reason why China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: between 15 and 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide output is attributable to the production of exports. 32

Local people do not receive a fair share of the benefit. Half of the factories are partly or wholly owned by foreign investors, and Chinese partners, when present, are on a far from equal footing. 33Yet, they are the ones paying the environmental price. Guangdong has one of the worst acid-rain problems in China. 34The Pearl River, which flows through Guangzhou, was classified as too contaminated for human contact for most of its length for ten years until 2008. 35In that year, there were more smoggy days here than at any time since the start of the People’s Republic in 1949. 36The haze often spread to Hong Kong and other neighboring regions.

But Guangdong is trying to escape its reputation as the global economy’s toilet bowl. The provincial government has moved dirty factories farther inland and nurtured domestic high-tech industries in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Among the most impressive is Build Your Dreams, a battery-and-electric vehicle manufacturer that became the first company in the world to mass-produce a plug-in hybrid car in 2009. Guangzhou’s attempts to turn green are also evident on the skyline, where the seventy-one-story solar-and-wind-powered Pearl River Tower stands proud as the world’s most energy-efficient superskyscraper. Its low-emission, environmentally friendly credentials are, however, compromised by the identity of its owner: China National Tobacco.

The city has committed billions of yuan to cleaning up the water and air. To demonstrate the improvement, the Guangzhou mayor, Zhang Guangning, led thousands of people in a swim across the Pearl River in 2006, the first such event in thirty years. But the crossing was only possible thanks to a series of temporary fixes, including the shutdown of factories and the flushing of dams in the days leading up to the swim. Even with these emergency measures, participants complained the water was bitter, oily, and smelly.

The problem is that Guangdong—like China, like developing nations through history—prefers to deal with the environmental symptoms rather than the economic causes. Instead of closing down or cleaning up dirty factories, it just relocates them farther inland. Instead of cutting waste-water emissions, it builds more treatment plants.

Efforts to improve the environment also face a new challenge from the rapid increase in domestic waste as China’s populace grows richer and millions more consumers join the resource-hungry, throwaway lifestyle of the developed world. The average person in China discards a third less rubbish than their counterparts in Europe and almost one half less than those in the United States. 37But they are catching up fast. The amount of domestic refuse more than doubled in the decade after 1998. 38Yet there are few specialized facilities for dealing with hazardous waste, which means toxins continue to contaminate groundwater and soil resources.

The old problem of foreign dumping persists because Guangdong’s governance is weak, and developed nations remain as hypocritical as ever. After a series of embarrassing British media reports in the mid-2000s about the trade in recycled waste, the Chinese government was shamed into shutting down districts like Nanhai, which had been a major plastic and metal recycling center. It also prohibited imports of foreign waste. But, as usual in this province where gaping holes could be found in even the most draconian legislation, the businesses found a way around the regulations. They simply moved on and ignored them.

The concrete was still wet when I arrived at Shijing Village, a refugee camp for rubbish recyclers who had been forced to relocate after the government clampdown. The scrap-dealing community had recently set up their new base in the middle of the countryside in an attempt to avoid prying eyes. Many of the sheds were only half-completed, but the task of buying, selling, and sorting rubbish was already in full swing. The operation was remarkably specialized. One area was dedicated to green and red hotel welcome mats and elevator carpets marked, as was popular in China, with the different days of the week. Another stack of rubbish consisted entirely of the bases of revolving chairs. In other areas, sorters made separate piles of broken black buckets, discarded lids of shampoo bottles, and shoes of every shape and size.