China's anti-pollution efforts
stink By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - When toxic-chemical spills in
its rivers threaten the water supply in
neighboring countries, China's lax environmental
record becomes a serious regional issue.
However, when researchers in California
report that on a given day 25% of the pollution
littering the skies above Los Angeles has wafted
over from China, the country's battle to clean up
its degraded environment turns into a world war.
It's not just China's trade imbalance that is
commanding international attention these days; the
country is also increasingly known as the world's
greatest exporter of pollution.
The issue
has become so big that Chinese leaders are vowing
to do something about it. The government has
committed US$162 billion to cleaning up the
environment over the next five years.
Zhou
Shengxian, head of the State Environmental Protection
Agency, is in charge of
China's stepped-up anti-pollution drive, and he is
talking tough about making the country green
again. However, so far all Zhou's stern talk, not
to mention reams of accompanying SEPA regulations,
has not produced any results, leaving critics to
dismiss the agency as a paper tiger and
environmentalists to throw up their hands in
despair.
SEPA's most recent high-profile
move, announced this month, is to set up a
national network of 11 environmental monitors that
will, according to the official Xinhua News
Agency, report directly to SEPA and be free of
"local-government meddling". The announcement is
supposed to provide assurance that protection of
the environment will no longer give way to the
blind pursuit of profit among local officials
whose job performance, until now, has been judged
by the gross domestic product (GDP) in their
province or district.
It was precisely
this mentality that led to last November's
disastrous chemical spill into the Songhua River
in the northeastern province of Jilin and the subsequent
cover-up. After a blast at a petrochemical company
plant discharged 100 tonnes of benzene and other
toxic compounds into the river, officials were
forced to shut off the water supply to millions of
people downstream.
Local officials in
Jilin initially denied that any pollution had been
caused by the blast, and authorities in Harbin,
the capital city of 3.8 million people in
neighboring Heilongjiang province,
claimed they were shutting off the city's water
supply to repair faulty pipes when actually a
toxic slick 85 kilometers long was flowing through
their city on its way to a meeting with the Amur
River at the Russian border. Meanwhile, of course,
the Russian government and people were kept in the
dark. (The Chinese government later issued a
formal apology to Russia for the spill.)
Thanks to some intrepid local journalists,
the truth about the spill in Jilin eventually came
out, and the story has since come to exemplify not
just China's abject environmental record, but also
the rampant culture of corruption among local
officials, whose first reflex is to protect their
positions by covering up any environmental
accident.
Then-SEPA boss Xie Zhenhua took
the fall for the Jilin debacle, resigning his
post, and the more zealous Zhou took his place.
Since then, the environmental watchdog has taken a
much more assertive role in national life. The
more prominent public role assumed by Zhou has
helped raise environmental awareness, but it is
also true that the Jilin disaster served as a
wake-up call for the Chinese leadership in
general. It is fair to say that what happened in
Jilin could happen again in thousands of other
locations all over China, and the consequences
could be far worse.
Until the Jilin spill,
the central government had never bothered to count
the number of chemical plants along China's rivers
and coastline. When SEPA undertook a nationwide
survey, the agency found 21,000 plants in such
locations, more than 50% of them along the Yangtze
and Yellow rivers. Roughly 400 million people -
nearly a third of China's population - live along
the banks of the Yangtze, and an additional 100
million reside in the Yellow River basin.
"In this situation the consequences [of
another major chemical spill] could be
unthinkable," Zhou warned.
And he has gone
out of his way to signal that - after 27 years of
reckless economic growth - it is a new day for
environmental awareness in China. According to
SEPA's own estimates, there has been an
environmental accident every other day in the
country since the Jilin spill, and Zhou has
pledged to turn things around.
"Now we've
entered a stage where we'll try to use
environmental-protection measures to boost
economic growth," he said.
That will
include trying to break the single focus on profit
among local cadres.
"We'll take into
account the handling of environmental issues in
the evaluation of local officials," Zhou said.
"Those who fail to meet requirements will pay a
price for turning a blind eye to the law."
Tough talk - but will it clean up China's
rivers, 70% of which are polluted, and bring back
blue skies to what has become a vast land of gray?
After the Jilin fiasco and Zhou's appointment,
spills of toxic cadmium from smelting works into
rivers in central China's Hunan and the southern
province of Guangdong did not inspire
confidence.
Nor did the release this month
of a SEPA report confirming that China has
retained its title as the world's greatest emitter
of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain. This is
a position the country has held since 1995, and
the SEPA report showed that the problem is getting
worse, not better.
The agency reported
that sulfur-dioxide emissions reached a record
high last year of almost 25.5 million tonnes, a
rise of 27% since 2000, costing the country $62.7
billion in economic losses. With results such as
this, it is hard to see how China will meet
Premier Wen Jiabao's stated goal of cutting
pollution by 10% by 2010.
Most of the
increase in sulfur-dioxide discharges is caused by
coal-burning power plants working overtime to
support two decades of economic growth averaging
more than 9% a year. China is the world's largest
coal producer - and will continue to be so for the
foreseeable future.
Overall, SEPA
estimates pollution costs China $200 billion a
year, or 10% of its GDP. According to the World
Bank, 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities
are in China, where poisoned air leads to 400,000
premature deaths every year. With car ownership in
the country also soaring, experts say China will
overtake the United States in the next decade as
the world's greatest emitter of greenhouse gases,
which scientists link to global warming.
So SEPA has a lot of work to do. But is
making China green again a mission impossible?
Holding local officials more accountable for the
environment is a good start toward a cleaner
future. And new pilot emissions-trading schemes
such as the one announced recently between the Hong Kong and Guangdong
governments also show promise.
Under the
Hong Kong-Guangdong arrangement, power companies
on both sides of the border would buy, or be
granted, emissions quotas. Companies that do not
use their quotas could then sell what's left over
to other firms. The theory is that as the scheme
encourages companies to reduce their emissions,
available credits in the quota system will become
fewer and more expensive, forcing the heavier
polluters to pay more. However, in practice the
scheme will be voluntary, and the Hong Kong power
companies are not interested in joining. So what
might look great on paper will in the end probably
produce no real gain.
The Hong
Kong-Guangdong example illustrates the larger
point: despite the heightened rhetoric, China's
traditional centrally controlled, top-down
management regime makes it difficult to implement
an effective anti-pollution strategy.
The
11 monitoring stations that SEPA is setting up
across the nation will probably provide another
case study in how local economic interests trump
national environmental goals. SEPA already has
emissions-control agreements with the nation's six
largest power producers, which are responsible for
60% of the sulfur-dioxide emissions in the
country, and with the seven provinces where the
bulk of those emissions occur. The result: a new
world record last year for sulfur-dioxide
emissions.
What would truly make an impact
on China's efforts at environmental cleanup may be
too much to ask right now: freeing up local media
to report on the environmental damage that is
occurring in their areas, freeing up citizens to
protect their property rights through the legal
system, and making sure that system has the
integrity of the rule of law.
That said,
even under the best of circumstances, China will
not see blue skies again any time soon. Things may
actually get worse before they get better. And
that has become a source of worry even for people
as far away as California.
Kent
Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong
International School. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
(Copyright 2006
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