Posted on 03/10/2005 6:12:52 AM PST by loreldan
"The world has been dazzled in recent years by the economic strides being made by China. But it has come at a huge cost to the country's environment. Pollution is a huge and costly problem. Pan Yue of the ministry of the environment says these problems will soon overwhelm the country and will create millions of 'environmental refugees'."
(Excerpt) Read more at service.spiegel.de ...
It's true that when the Berlin Wall fell incredible pollution was found behind the Iron Curtain. Centralized Communist Economies have a long record of such things, far worse than anything in the industrialized west.
But I seriously doubt that it would bring down the economy of China. It might just slow it down a bit. If the economy fails it will be for other reasons, such as trade imbalances or sclerotic centralized control.
I agree with you, but this is interesting coming from a Chinese official. I think the Chinese economy is a bubble that will eventually burst.
Much of what he says has been said by others that study China's economy and politics..
I have read similar predictions concerning China's eminent financial collapse..
He will probably be dead soon..
Executed by the Chinese government..
Yeah. I hope not; it's not often you hear even soft criticism from inside their government.
I have not been to China and don't know what the real situation is but there IS a sustainable level and and unsustainable level of population. Man's technology has not yet repealed the laws of nature. Now and then someone likes to point out that the current world population could double and still be housed in West Texas or something like that as if the only issue were having room enough to stand but it is not really that simple. At some point the world population will go into decline, for whatever reason I cannot foresee, but it will happen.
I have been to Shenzen and Dongguan which are just inland from Hong Kong. There are factories from one side of the horizon to the other. Shenzen a city of 1 million people was a farmers field 20 years ago. Quite a shock to see all this activity.
Almost all developing nations are facing a similar crisis. The problem in China is the rate of growth and sheer scale of activity. If you think Love Canal was bad, check out the Suzhou Creek in Shanghai.
Interesting article but I don't understand this statement. Anyone know what it means?
Said collapse is much more likely to come about from the catastrophe of EnvironMentalism protagonists, rather than from the environment, it'self!!!
I can just see it now... Another "cultural revolution" with idiots running around their country with "little green books," instead of Mao's "little red books," killing people with automobiles (especially SUV's), rather than people with glasses!!!
Oh! And welcome to FR, CA_Green, I'm sure you're finding it much easier to be Green with our fantastic new GANG-GREEN Governator, right?
I'm guessing, but I thought he meant that Chinese products are sold a lot cheaper than Japanese. More materials are used for less return.
"From each, according to his ability..."
The 'environment' has a much needed ability to 'socitiy'... no surprise there.
It means they are highly inefficient in resource utilization and rely on low wages to be competitive.
Nah... China is basically going through its industrial revolution. Its not like a stock market bubble that we had in the 90s.
Basically they are 'catching up' with the rest of the world after being isolationist for so long. They are just starting to build their car factories, and assembly lines, and power stations.
Thats why pollution is so bad. They are balls-out industrializing and its only after you get a bit 'fat and happy' (like the US) that you can 'afford' to go back and clean up emissions and all that.
Their 'economy' will STEAM ahead, under free markets the people would be 'better off' and pay would rise, which would eventually reduce the main engine of the chinese economy (untapped market and MASSIVE 'cheap' workforce) and slow the economy down.
At that point they would have 'caught up'.
Of course the communist gov't of china is to rigid to adapt to the market as fluently as the US can, so we will always maintain the advantage on emerging technologies and economic trends regardless of labor force.
Intersting ABSURD SideNote: China is EXEMPT from the KYOTO protocall (one of the key reasons the US refuses to sign)
I've been saying it till I'm blue in the face, the Chinese economy is a house of cards that could tumble at any time. And when it does, it won't be pretty.
Polution isn't really a costly problem until you decide to do something about it. Yeah it probably shortens people's lives, but in China that's a good problem to have.
It's the sclerotic centralized control that will hurt them most. The peoblem, environmentally, in China is that while they have advanced environmental protection laws (mostly copied whole cloth from US EPA regulations) there is little or no political will to enforce those laws. Every major enterprise is also a state owned entity, so that any environmental infraction is handles as a political matter instead of a technical matter. The net effect is that these laws are not enforced.
In China, water quality data is considered a state secret. In the US, it's a matter of public record. These problems won't get fixed until the population at large knows the truth, which they are ignorant of now.
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