Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Locals were so proud of their victory they offered guided tours of the battleground, marshaling visitors through a school car park full of smashed police buses and burned-out cars, streets full of broken bricks and discarded sticks. Some carried loudspeakers and bellowed chaotic instructions to try to keep the crowds moving along. In a supposedly authoritarian nation, the anarchy and defiance were astonishing.

“Aren’t these villagers brave? They are so tough it’s unbelievable,” my taxi driver said. “Everybody wants to come and see this place. We really admire them.” A fashionably dressed young woman who had come with friends from a nearby city agreed: “We came to take a look because many people have heard of the riot. This is really big news.”

The origins of the riot were hazy. 25Frustration had been simmering for some time. Locals accused corrupt officials of seizing land for the industrial park—built in 2002—without their consent. They blamed toxins from the chemical plant for ruined crops, malformed babies, and contamination of the local Huashui River. They petitioned the government and hung banners outside the chemical plants.

One read: “Give me back my earth, I want to live; give me back my earth, I want to be healthy; give me back my earth, I want my children and grandchildren; give me back my earth, I want to eat; give me back my earth, I want my environment.”

Another: “Poison gas gets released, the people are crying, the corrupt officials get rich, the people suffer all their lives.” It was signed, “The People of China.” 26

The village chief reportedly refused to hold a public meeting to hear these grievances. Attempts to petition the central government also proved fruitless. They had lost faith in the authorities. “The communists are even worse than the Japanese,” one man told me.

Amid the mood of triumph were concerns about a backlash. One old woman ushered me inside her home to see a collection of trophies from the battle. “I am scared,” she said, as she revealed two dented riot police helmets, several empty gas canisters, a policeman’s jacket, and several truncheons and machetes. “This is getting bigger and bigger.”

In the center of a crowd of locals beside a wrecked bus, one middle-aged woman won a cheer of approval by calling for the government to make the first move toward reconciliation. “It’s up to them to start talking,” she said. “I don’t know what we would do if the police came back again, but our demand is to make the factory move out of the village. We will not compromise on that.” The bravado was to be short-lived. After the authorities regained control, nine alleged ringleaders were given prison sentences of between one and five years, according to their lawyer Li Heping. Few details of the incident and the arrests were ever published in the Chinese media.

The industrial expansion went on. But the pollution, inefficiency, and instability indicated that something had to change or China would accelerate into an ecological wall. At a state level, the response was Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Outlook on Development,” which officials told me could be translated more simply as “sustainable development.” Among the regions, Zhejiang and Jiangsu went further than most to put this ideal into practice. Like Western nations before them, the provinces had become rich through dirty industries and now they wanted to clean up. Zhejiang’s capital, Hangzhou, reinvented itself as a service-industry, information technology, and tourist hub—a transformation that was symbolized by beautifying the lakeside scenery and improving water quality. Jiangsu became a leader in the field of solar energy, centered around Suntech, the world’s biggest manufacturer of photovoltaic panels.

Local TV stations, newspapers, and web portals increasingly turned their attention to environmental problems. Some offending companies were named and shamed. A few even apologized. 27Zhejiang announced tighter controls on pharmaceutical, chemical, cement, and other toxic industries. Jiangsu introduced China’s first emissions trading system and promised to close more than 2,000 small chemical plants that failed to meet environmental standards. What was most striking—though unremarked upon by the government or local media—was that the authorities had clearly known for years that these firms had been violating the rules and destroying the environment. There was also no mention of similar punishments for midsized and big polluters, which generated more income and exercised greater political clout.

Often, these “cleanup” measures turned out to be a different means of expansion. As with the recycling businesses of Guangdong, many dirty industries simply moved into the hinterlands. Others found new tricks to dump their waste through concealed pipes or by discharging at night. A year and a half after the supposed crackdown on polluters in Jiangsu, the city of Yancheng had to shut off water for a million people after carbolic acid—including the carcinogens hydroxybenzene and phenol—was found in the city’s water supply. 28Even in Zhejiang, which has gone further than most to improve the situation, officials caution that there would be no qualitative change in the environment until 2020. 29

The situation was similar at a national level. The government’s noble aspiration to move the economy onto a sustainable track was belied by industry’s ever-increasing consumption of land and resources. Beijing’s mandarins experimented with strategies to ease energy intensity and reduce pollution. 30They tweaked caps on power and water prices to more accurately reflect the costs of maintaining supplies and quality. They also attempted to make energy-intensive industries, such as steel and cement, pay extra for power, but these efforts were often compromised or ignored. Local authorities did not want to hurt the competitiveness of businesses paying taxes and, more often than not, bribes.

Efforts to make polluters pay or to account for environmental costs faltered because of weak governance. This was evident in the central government’s failed attempt to introduce a “green GDP.” As the name suggested, this policy aimed to factor long-term environmental costs into calculations of economic growth. It was a hugely ambitious plan that could have set a precedent worldwide. Trials were conducted in several provinces. But three years later, when local officials realized this would almost negate growth in their accounts, they torpedoed the scheme. 31

The central government could have overruled them if it had been united on the policy. But it was complex to implement, and politburo members had their own reasons for wanting to scrap the plan. With no electoral mandate, the Communist Party depends on economic growth for legitimacy. If “green” accounting sliced several points off GDP growth, the party’s authority would suddenly look very shaky. Going green too rapidly was a political risk. Instead the leadership incorporated some of the “green GDP” goals into other areas, such as promotion assessment for cadres, but economic calculations were left untouched. China would remain addicted to growth. In the words of the environmentalist Ma Jun: “The plight of the ‘green GDP’ project reflects the current conflict between the environment and the economy.” 32

To an extent, these were growing pains. Optimists argued that China was following a well-trodden path of development that would eventually take it out of the industrial mire. A former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, predicted that China’s environmental problem would prove no more insurmountable than those overcome by Japan and South Korea. Like them, he wrote, China would be able to afford a cleanup once it grew richer. 33At that point, a time-proven market solution would kick in: first, a newly created middle class would refuse to tolerate the old dirty industries; second, newly generated wealth would fund a cleanup; third, companies would move up the manufacturing value chain by developing cleaner hightech and service-sector businesses; and finally, higher-polluting industries would be sent out of the cities, or—even better—out of the province.