Dirty China

This is really Fallows' beat, but this New York Times article about China being really, really, really polluted sure is something. Manufactured Landscapes, a film I've recommended previously, is full of really eye-opening images.

This is, perhaps, the achilles heel of Chinese authoritarianism. The Soviet Union was full of just astounding things, like the incredible shrinking Aral Sea pictured above. China, by contrast, used to be too poor for anything truly awful to happen on the environmental front, but capitalism has set the table for nightmare scenarios. Democracies have, obviously, our share of environmental problems, but this really is one of those situations where it's the worst form of government except for all the others.

Public domain photo by Wikipedian Staeker

Comments

Progressives see this sort of thing, and then turn right around and ask for more power to be handed to the Federal Government. Whether it's the Justice Dept or the Health Dept, more power is simply going to handled badly when it's centralized.

Posted by James Robertson | August 27, 2007 9:04 AM

What China is practicing is certainly something extremely warped and diseased, not a true capitalist system at all. All of the 'entrepreneurs' are kept extremely controlled, under the Thumb of Mao as it is called.

Their federal government, yes a truly Communist state, has a very specific national goal: conquer the rest of the capitalist world by producing goods so cheaply (by slave labour) that over time, they will drive their competitors out of business. Then they hold trillions of dollars/euros,etc. (not there yet, but trying) in debt, then use it to squeeze the countries they feel are doing something to protect themselves.

Also, trust is an issue. I know personal friends who have done business with Chinese 'partners' and ended up losing their shirts, so to speak. One of them was a fashion designer with contacts in Brazil for production of unique blouses and, yes, shirts. Her chinese partner subverted the accounts she had brought to the business and they stopped dealing with her. She almost went under. I have two other such stories, but let it suffice to say you cannot trust the Chinese in business or politics.

Posted by falkoyn | August 27, 2007 9:10 AM

Hm. Obviously you were never in China in the good old days.

I first visited Shanghai in 1979, and it had the filthiest air I've ever had the privilege of masticating. In those days, nearly everyone used pressed coal dust blocks to cook with, and the lung cancer rate among housewives was considerable (I had a friend in one of the local hospitals who clued me in on that). The rain was literally muddy, and in many places the air was full of cotton waste from mills. We could tell which way the wind was blowing in the night by smelling our hung-out laundry in the morning.

The only thing that's changed is that the pollutant mix has shifted with prosperity (less basic sh*t, more exotic chemicals) and the problem has become more widespread. But China was always drop-dead polluted.

And where do you get idiots like that James Robertson? What an illiterate wanker. The countries that are handling pollution best, such as the Nordic states, all have strong centralized governments. The difference between them and China is a little thing called democracy. Remember?

Posted by sunsin | August 27, 2007 9:17 AM

sunsin is right. The key isn't centralization. The key is the presence of bottom-up feedback, which allows the concerns of individuals or groups of individuals to affect government policies. We've seen the same thing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where Communism produced much more pollution with respect to economic growth than in democracies.

Posted by Jim W | August 27, 2007 9:31 AM

"And where do you get idiots like that James Robertson? What an illiterate wanker. The countries that are handling pollution best, such as the Nordic states, all have strong centralized governments. The difference between them and China is a little thing called democracy. Remember?"

In that case, you must have perfect trust of all the things Bush has done over the last few years, right? He was elected Democratically, and yet I see no end of complaining about abuse of power - some of it warranted, some of it not (IMHO).

The point (which is apparently beyond susin) is this: handing power to a central government is not about how it will be handled by people you trust; rather, it's about how it will be handled by people you don't. The Nordic countries could easily acquire governments that progressives don't think highly of (the waves of Islamic immigrants there is generating a small, but growing nativist backlash).

If a nativist government took power in a Scandinavian country, with all the power that the left has cheerfully handed over, just how happy do you think you'll be? About as happy as thoughtful Republicans will be with some of the power granted to the current administration if a real nanny state progressive gets elected to the Presidency.

Posted by James Robertson | August 27, 2007 9:44 AM

China had some devastating environmental disasters under Mao.

In 1958, he ordered all the peasants to kill sparrows because sparrows eat seeds (along with insects). The peasants complied, virtually wiping out the sparrows in China. The next year, insect swarms devastated China's crops. Millions died of starvation.

They've had environmental problems in China for a while now.

Posted by pj | August 27, 2007 11:05 AM

I first saw China's horrifying pollution during one of those Michael Palin tourist-to-mildly-exotic-places shows several years ago. I can't remember the city, but it looked like the grimmest dystopian landscape you could imagine. Somber, air-less, cement and soot.

What is Man that Thou art mindful of him?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | August 27, 2007 11:07 AM

A large part of the death of the Aral Sea can be blamed not on the USSR but on the present Uzbek government under Islam Karimov. He's continued to promote cotton monoculture at the expense of the Aral Sea and everything else. Villages that were ports in 1980 are now a hundred miles away from the shore. There's a German documentary about this that I recommend, I wish I could remember its name.

Anyway, my point is that it doesn't need much to create a major environmental catastrophe. Something as simple as the Uzbeks contining to divert the Amu Darya into a lot of irrigation canals is enough.

Posted by CG | August 27, 2007 11:13 AM

China's pollution problems have gotten 100 times worse since 1978. Back then, as today, forget about Beijing and Shanghai. Those are the exceptions in every conceivable way in China. As late as the mid-70's China's rural areas were not filled with plastic and chemical garbage, as they are today. (I live in Hubei province 5 months of the year.) Most of China today is like Guatemala (or worse), despite the breathless reporting of journalists who visit Shanghai and Beijing for two weeks. ("They have malls!")

Posted by 88 | August 27, 2007 11:46 AM

Yeah, it's pretty hard to capture externalities without elections, and I'm far from a democracy fetishist.

Posted by Will Allen | August 27, 2007 12:25 PM

Isn't that the ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Did you find any photos of US WW2 era dive bombers parked in the desert?

Posted by Thunderlips | August 27, 2007 2:27 PM

What's up with writing a post titled "Dirty China" and using a photo from... the former Soviet Union? "Here's a picture of what environmental degradation looks like"? Lazy. Economically, it's difficult to think of two countries more different than modern China and the USSR.

Posted by mike | August 27, 2007 11:56 PM

it was so much better back when china accepted its lot as an impoverished nation. now it's like...

chinese people: that's a nice life with cars and heating and air conditioning in the summer and all that consumer choice which doesn't look like illusion and that cash currency that appears to equal power and joy. we want all that. yes, we do.

american people: no no! you're gonna wreck it for all of us, can't you see?! you're already wrecking it. and so quickly! no no! stop! i don't want that trinket for a dollar. i don't want it at all! stop! 50 cents did you say?

i always considered myself robust until i developed asthma as an adult during 2 years in central china in the mid-1990s.

i think environmentalism is an aesthetic. with efficiency the key, i don't see that it's incompatible with the capitalism aesthetic -- or even market economy policies meant to achieve true communism.

if we're the ones setting the trends, then let's get to it, kids!

Posted by ted | August 28, 2007 9:00 AM

it was so much better back when china accepted its lot as an impoverished nation. now it's like...

chinese people: that's a nice life with cars and heating and air conditioning in the summer and all that consumer choice which doesn't look like illusion and that cash currency that appears to equal power and joy. we want all that. yes, we do.

american people: no no! you're gonna wreck it for all of us, can't you see?! you're already wrecking it. and so quickly! no no! stop! i don't want that trinket for a dollar. i don't want it at all! stop! 50 cents did you say?

i always considered myself robust until i developed asthma as an adult during 2 years in central china in the mid-1990s.

i think environmentalism is an aesthetic. with efficiency the key, i don't see that it's incompatible with the capitalism aesthetic -- or even market economy policies meant to achieve true communism.

if we're the ones setting the trends, then let's get to it, kids!

Posted by ted | August 28, 2007 9:00 AM