Understanding China [3rd Edition] by John Bryan Starr

Author:John Bryan Starr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

There is yet another reason that rapid economic development almost always wins over environmental protection in China. In other countries, active and engaged grassroots movements have helped build public consciousness about environmental concerns. Despite heightened public concern, and the emergence of NGOs concerned with environmental issues, there is still no green movement in China. As we have seen, the state is hypersensitive about groups that might become nuclei for political opposition, and this has made forming a green movement virtually impossible.

News of many grassroots protests reaches the Western press practically every month. For example, in 1993 a township-owned chemical factory in remote Gansu Province was polluting a local stream so seriously that peasants wading in the stream to fish were getting blisters on their legs. When the factory operators and township authorities ignored the protests, the residents descended on the factory, drove its operators out, and shut it down. There are other examples like this one, and while numerous local environmental groups have sprung up in recent years, they are isolated from one another and show no signs yet of being able to form a national movement that will significantly affect the actions of local governments. Nor is Beijing, threatened as it is by any competition to the authority of the party-state, likely to permit the emergence of such a movement.

Chinese pollution has its effects on the rest of the world as well. At some point in 2008, China overtook the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, principal among the so-called greenhouse gases. Nonetheless, international pressure on China to do more with respect to the environment most often elicits a response heard elsewhere in the developing world. It is a response consistently voiced by Chinese delegations to international meetings on the environment since China attended its first such conference in 1973. Concern for the environment, this argument runs, is a pastime taken up late in life by wealthy nations, which themselves achieved economic development with little or no attention to its environmental consequences. Given this, why should poorer countries be held to new and higher standards in their economic development than the developed nations were in years past? If the West believes that developing nations should be held to these new high standards, then it should help pay for the very expensive process of meeting them. China has held to this position with some consistency over the last forty years.

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and in force since 2005, limits neither of the world’s two largest producers of greenhouse gas: the United States, because former President George W. Bush decided not to honor the limitations imposed by the protocol, and China, because the protocol imposed no limits on developing countries. Since then it would appear that forward-looking Chinese leaders have begun to realize that China’s pollution is hurting its economic development. As a result, they have become somewhat more open to the idea that the United States and China should work together in addressing the issue of global warming.

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