When reading the article below bear in mind the findings of the PEW
Global Attitudes Survery published on 27th June 2007:
“Rising alarm about environmental problems registers across the board.
Thirty-seven per cent of Americans name the issue as the top global
threat, up 14% in five years. *In China, another big polluter, 70%
agree*. In Britain, the figure is 46%.”
(source: Guardian 28th June 2007)
Covering up bad news seems like a short-term existential necessity for
the Chinese authorities.
China must come clean about its poisonous environment
FT Published: July 3 2007 22:23 | Last updated: July 3 2007 22:23
Even in a China that is more capitalist than ever, the instinctive
official response to bad news is to suppress it with all the force
available to the nominally communist state. Beijing needs to accept that
in 2007 this kind of reaction is as futile and dangerous as it was in
2003, when the authorities kept secret the spread of the deadly Sars
virus. It is futile because the truth will out and dangerous because
secrecy delays the necessary remedial action.
So it is with the bowdlerising of a World Bank report on pollution in
China. As the Financial Times has reported, the original research found
that more than *750,000 Chinese die prematurely each year*
,
mainly from air pollution.
The State Environment Protection Agency and the health ministry told the
World Bank to cut this from the published report because it was, in the
words of an adviser involved in the study, too sensitive and could
cause social unrest. Chinese officials were probably worried by the
detailed breakdown of the worst places to live in China, which showed
the most toxic cities clustered in the north-western coal belt.
Residents of polluted cities do not need the World Bank to tell them the
air is filthy. They breathe the stuff every day. But Chinese officials
are right to be nervous. Environmental protests rural and urban have
proliferated in recent years as Chinese citizens become better educated
and more forceful in defence of their rights. In Xiamen, angry residents
have stalled plans to build a petrochemical plant seen as a source of
lethal pollution.
However, the correct response to the sort of grim news contained in the
World Bank report is not to suppress the truth but to tackle the
underlying problem. Reducing emissions from coal-fired power stations,
for example, is neither as expensive nor as difficult as businesses and
the provincial governments with which they collude often pretend.
Moreover, China can tie the essentially domestic crisis of urban air
pollution into solving the international problem of climate change.
Spewing out local air pollutants and carbon, the main global warming
gas, often go hand in hand. The same holds for modernising plants to
avoid either type of emissions. Many foreign companies are eager to fund
these clean-up projects in exchange for carbon credits valued at home.
In the meantime, these could help China solve its local air pollution
problem.
All of the above can only happen if Chinese leaders overcome their fear
of the facts and start telling the truth. They may find it easier than
they think and it would certainly produce better results.
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