Issues Decisive for China’s Rise or Fall by Yuwa Wei

Author:Yuwa Wei
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811336997
Publisher: Springer Singapore

6.1 Beyond the Issue of Environment: Environmental Degradation Poses a Threat to China’s National Security and Future Prosperity

Since the 1990s, academic findings have revealed that local or global environmental changes impact deeply on the prospects of human society, indicating that environmental change has become an issue of national security.5 It is perceived that local and global environmental changes pose new and, in some cases, unprecedented threats to human security .6 This insight has gained increasing political attention and public recognition.7

There is a growing awareness among academic and political communities that environmental degradation and scarcity of natural resource have been the main factors causing instability and conflict in the post-cold war world.8 Environmental degradation is the “deterioration of the natural environment through depletion of resources such as air, water and land; the destruction of ecosystems; habitat destruction; the extinction of wildlife; and pollution ”.9 In other words, environmental degradation refers to undesirable change of the natural environment or erosion of the quality of the natural environment caused by human activities. A direct consequence of environmental degradation is scarcity of natural resources, which in combination with related conditions such as population growth, urbanization, migration, and the spread of infectious diseases, may contribute significantly to global instability.10

In the case of China, the economic growth has achieved by overconsumption of energy and other natural resources, and at the expense of the environment, causing severe air pollution, acid rain, fisheries depletion, and degradation and depletion of river basins. Spreading desertification has significantly eroded China’s arable land. Deforestation has caused increasingly frequent extreme weather and floods. It is reported that pollution impacts on most of the urban air, surface water and offshore seawater, as well as ecological environment. Twenty-five out of the twenty-seven major lakes and the seven major rivers in China are polluted.11 A survey carried out in 2004 revealed that the water quality of the seven major rivers in China had reduced to a historical low, well below the drinkable standard.12 In addition, 57% of urban groundwater was also polluted.13 According to a report in 2006, about 700 million people drank contaminated water every day.14 Elizabeth C. Economy in one of her works investigating China’s ecological destruction depicted a gloomy picture of the Huai River, a major waterway in central China.15 With more than 38 billion gallons of polluted liquid being flushed into it, the Huai River turned black and became even unfit for industrial use and agricultural irrigation, rendering devastation to farmlands and fish farms in the basin. People lived in this vast area were plagued by pollution -borne diseases.16 In addition to this is that the air quality of many Chinese cities fails to meet international health standards. Smog spells experienced by China’s metropolises like Beijing are severe. The concentration of hazardous particles in the smog may reach a degree that is 40 times higher than the safety standard set up by the World Health Organization.17 According to a Greenpeace East Asia report, in the first three quarters of 2015, air quality

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