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Remember 1936...
This week in Beijing the bulldozers in a matter of minutes,
demolished a whole residential area where peasants ( laobaixin ) from all over
China, came to stay and petition to the Central Government their grievances.
This is an ancient tradition now officially terminated, buried under the rubble
of official brutal oppression. Helpless men, women and children simply removed,
erased from the scene, left abandoned on the streets with nothing, no rights,
no justice, nowhere to go in order to make space for another shopping centre
for the ruling class. In the UK, Lindsay Hillson from Channel 4 News covered
the story. Another public demonstration of the human rights policies made in
China.
This week alone,18 000 blogs were closed down by the cyber police, powered
and supported by Yahoo, Microsoft, and Oracle among others.( Reuters)
This week the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party will meet in Beijing
to sanction the present Regime policies. On the top of the agenda, is the continuation
of the so-called kaifang, open door policy, that primarily unleashed a corruption
wave on all walks of society. Moreover, it gave way to the uncontrolled mass
manufacture of a number of cheap commodities, produced by the largest slave
- labour camps ever seen by humankind. It also made China the number one producer
of carbon dioxide in the planet among a number of on going environmental catastrophes
of epic proportions. The meeting will reaffirm the continued support to regimes
like Sudan/Darfur and Burma that has fuelled the insatiable appetite for commercial
partners.
A staggering number of accomplishments to be celebrated by the world community
in Beijing , during the 2008 Olympic Games.
Olympic Shame, Oil 120 x 100 cms, the AAF Autumn Collection London, 18.10.07
Those who do not learn from the past history are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana - Quote from a monument outside Dachao - Munich, Germany engraved
in memory of the Nazi victims.
Missing Her Colours
To anyone interested in the Environment and China related issues these articles are a must read.
Please follow the link below , to the New York Times Series ...
Where are my red flowers?
Where are my yellow rivers?
Where are my blue skies?
Where are my green mountains?
Where are my singing birds in the morning?
Where are my noisy crickets in the early evenings?
The Island of Heaven 120x100cms Oil,Wang Chun
No longer, can I see or hear them,
There is a void in my soul a pain in my heart
A sense of vulnerability, of a life without a chart
Perhaps they were sold, traded as another product Made in China
Now shipped afar.
How can we live without our colours?
How can we live without our sounds?
Is this the price we the Chinese People had to pay?
To live in this greyness state without our Shinning Sun,
Now covered by a dark polluted cloud crafted by the few
That blinds the hearts and minds of the many.
Seeing my beloved China, muted, colourless is too painful
Submerged by a sea of steel, concrete and glass.
A dried canvas, covered by commercial logos
from companies without a heart…
The Island of Solitude , Oil by Wang Chun
Where are our colours?
Perhaps sold by people who betrayed the people
To foreigners that cannot see our colours
Incapable of seeing beyond the colour of money
Who do not care for the colour of our heart
Where are our colours?
The Red China, painted by the sacrifice,
blood and ideals of the yellow people
with their brave Red Hearts.
Where is She?
The missing China of my heart.
The Island of Man, 120x100cms Oil by Wang Chun
LOST PARADISE
For Chinese version click here
Three changes in our Republic China history. First is the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The first 28 years, from 1921-1949, the new democratic revolution, at cost of 28,000,000 peoples blood, I call it Paradise Dream. the second 28 years, from 1949-1977, I call it Paradise Build. Chinese communist party lead Chinese people built a miracle which no times, no country during human history can be compare with. The third 28 years, from 1978-2006, I call it Paradise Lost. Chinese people have paid huge price, lost public ownership, and relating to it, free medical care, free education, welfare housing…superiority of socialism and modern society basic security…0.4% people control 70% fortune, the level of fortune concentration surpass any capitalist country in the world…this will threat the quality of communist party, and socialism republic country…
Written by , Zhang Hongliang
Massive Corruption of China Sell Out on key industries by foreign capital.
For Chinese version click here
We should make clear about one question first, what’s the criterion for
innovation’s failure or success. Using the grossing GDP or our people’s
benefits’ gain or lose. If the later, Chinese innovation is fail.
Including Russia and all former Soviet Union, the innovation of state owned
property didn’t deprive common people’s welfare and security, although
the system of socialism have been overthrown, but they still keep the system
of free education, free medical care, free housing, such as the superiority
of socialism... but at the same time, Chinese common people lost all of welfare
and security, every year, nearly 5,000,000 people died at home because they
can’t afford it. ( 8,000,000 died every year, 60% died at home), the
cost for university has grown 20 times in ten years … Chinese innovation
is totally a resource devastation…
At first, the elites of innovation cheat us, say, we don’t make a “fair
at the beginning”, we will make a “fair in the end”, what
is the “fair in the end”? it is just to put the property of state-owned
and collectively-owned enterprises to minority, let a few people become rich
first, then drive all people to common prosperity. But after the property of
state-owned and collectively-owned enterprises have convert to minority’s
hands, they work out a “Property Law” at once, using the form of
law to lock their “fair” property which rob our national property.
The property innovation in 90s is just an innovation of “state to private”,
it is not really terrible, still has chance to be corrected, but now this innovation
has become a sort of “China to Foreign”, this is really no way.
To day, in Chinese 28 industries, foreign capital has controlled 21, but recently,
our commerce department said this is just the primary stage for foreign capital
to buy China, should let foreign capital continue to do more and more acquisitions,
and they say there are $ 700,000,000,000 acquisition capital in the world every
year, our China only have $ 5,000,000,000 during 2006 … the terrible
problem is just on this point, foreign capital only use $ 5,000,000,000 to
control our 21 industries, what does it mean? It proves the fortune our Chinese
people work so hard to create for so many years, has sold to foreign capital
in a very low price. Not only they don’t fell any sorry, but also become
the reason they continue to sell, I doubt this commerce department is P.R.C.
commerce department.
Eco - Catastrophe on Global Scale
MADE IN CHINA
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
China’s industrial growth depends on coal, plentiful but polluting, from
mines like this one in Shenmu, Shaanxi Province, behind a village store.
BEIJING, Aug. 25 — No country in history has emerged as a major industrial
power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades
and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
Jut just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power
have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all
precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic
and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term
burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling
Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic
juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause
of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed
for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack
access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of
the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by
the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a
meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries
can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the
sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local
pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of
the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting
a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more
than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry
and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal,
the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
“ It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement
is also our biggest burden,” says Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading
environmental researchers. “There is pressure for change, but many people
refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon.”
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide
and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as
acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution
over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical
Research.
More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial
revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global
warming.
Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world’s
leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International
Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of
this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had
already passed that level.
For the Communist Party, the political calculus is daunting. Reining in economic
growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country’s authoritarian
system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public,
provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political
change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests
and threaten the party’s rule.
But pollution poses its own threat. Officials blame fetid air and water for
thousands of episodes of social unrest. Health care costs have climbed sharply.
Severe water shortages could turn more farmland into desert. And the unconstrained
expansion of energy-intensive industries creates greater dependence on imported
oil and dirty coal, meaning that environmental problems get harder and more
expensive to address the longer they are unresolved.
China’s leaders recognize that they must change course. They are vowing
to overhaul the growth-first philosophy of the Deng Xiaoping era and embrace
a new model that allows for steady growth while protecting the environment.
In his equivalent of a State of the Union address this year, Prime Minister
Wen Jiabao made 48 references to “environment,” “pollution” or “environmental
protection.”
The government has numerical targets for reducing emissions and conserving
energy. Export subsidies for polluting industries have been phased out. Different
campaigns have been started to close illegal coal mines and shutter some heavily
polluting factories. Major initiatives are under way to develop clean energy
sources like solar and wind power. And environmental regulation in Beijing,
Shanghai and other leading cities has been tightened ahead of the 2008 Olympics.
Yet most of the government’s targets for energy efficiency, as well as
improving air and water quality, have gone unmet. And there are ample signs
that the leadership is either unwilling or unable to make fundamental changes.
Land, water, electricity, oil and bank loans remain relatively inexpensive,
even for heavy polluters. Beijing has declined to use the kind of tax policies
and market-oriented incentives for conservation that have worked well in Japan
and many European countries.
Provincial officials, who enjoy substantial autonomy, often ignore environmental
edicts, helping to reopen mines or factories closed by central authorities.
Over all, enforcement is often tinged with corruption. This spring, officials
in Yunnan Province in southern China beautified Laoshou Mountain, which had
been used as a quarry, by spraying green paint over acres of rock.
President Hu Jintao’s most ambitious attempt to change the culture of
fast-growth collapsed this year. The project, known as “Green G.D.P.,” was
an effort to create an environmental yardstick for evaluating the performance
of every official in China. It recalculated gross domestic product, or G.D.P.,
to reflect the cost of pollution.
But the early results were so sobering — in some provinces the pollution-adjusted
growth rates were reduced almost to zero — that the project was banished
to China’s ivory tower this spring and stripped of official influence.
Chinese leaders argue that the outside world is a partner in degrading the
country’s environment. Chinese manufacturers that dump waste into rivers
or pump smoke into the sky make the cheap products that fill stores in the
United States and Europe. Often, these manufacturers subcontract for foreign
companies — or are owned by them. In fact, foreign investment continues
to rise as multinational corporations build more factories in China. Beijing
also insists that it will accept no mandatory limits on its carbon dioxide
emissions, which would almost certainly reduce its industrial growth. It argues
that rich countries caused global warming and should find a way to solve it
without impinging on China’s development.
Indeed, Britain, the United States and Japan polluted their way to prosperity
and worried about environmental damage only after their economies matured and
their urban middle classes demanded blue skies and safe drinking water.
But China is more like a teenage smoker with emphysema. The costs of pollution
have mounted well before it is ready to curtail economic development. But the
price of business as usual — including the predicted effects of global
warming on China itself — strikes many of its own experts and some senior
officials as intolerably high.
“ Typically, industrial countries deal with green problems when they are
rich,” said Ren Yong, a climate expert at the Center for Environment and
Economy in Beijing. “We have to deal with them while we are still poor.
There is no model for us to follow.”
In the face of past challenges, the Communist Party has usually responded with
sweeping edicts from Beijing. Some environmentalists say they hope the top
leadership has now made pollution control such a high priority that lower level
officials will have no choice but to go along, just as Deng Xiaoping once forced
China’s sluggish bureaucracy to fixate on growth.
But the environment may end up posing a different political challenge. A command-and-control
political culture accustomed to issuing thundering directives is now under
pressure, even from people in the ruling party, to submit to oversight from
the public, for which pollution has become a daily — and increasingly
deadly — reality.
Perpetual Haze
During the three decades since Deng set China on a course toward market-style
growth, rapid industrialization and urbanization have lifted hundreds of millions
of Chinese out of poverty and made the country the world’s largest producer
of consumer goods. But there is little question that growth came at the expense
of the country’s air, land and water, much of it already degraded by
decades of Stalinist economic planning that emphasized the development of heavy
industries in urban areas.
For air quality, a major culprit is coal, on which China relies for about two-thirds
of its energy needs. It has abundant supplies of coal and already burns more
of it than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. But even many of its
newest coal-fired power plants and industrial furnaces operate inefficiently
and use pollution controls considered inadequate in the West.
Expanding car ownership, heavy traffic and low-grade gasoline have made autos
the leading source of air pollution in major Chinese cities. Only 1 percent
of China’s urban population of 560 million now breathes air considered
safe by the European Union, according to a World Bank study of Chinese pollution
published this year. One major pollutant contributing to China’s bad
air is particulate matter, which includes concentrations of fine dust, soot
and aerosol particles less than 10 microns in diameter (known as PM 10).
The level of such particulates is measured in micrograms per cubic meter of
air. The European Union stipulates that any reading above 40 micrograms is
unsafe. The United States allows 50. In 2006, Beijing’s average PM 10
level was 141, according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Only
Cairo, among world capitals, had worse air quality as measured by particulates,
according to the World Bank.
Emissions of sulfur dioxide from coal and fuel oil, which can cause respiratory
and cardiovascular diseases as well as acid rain, are increasing even faster
than China’s economic growth. In 2005, China became the leading source
of sulfur dioxide pollution globally, the State Environmental Protection Administration,
or SEPA, reported last year.
Other major air pollutants, including ozone, an important component of smog,
and smaller particulate matter, called PM 2.5, emitted when gasoline is burned,
are not widely monitored in China. Medical experts in China and in the West
have argued that PM 2.5 causes more chronic diseases of the lung and heart
than the more widely watched PM 10.
Perhaps an even more acute challenge is water. China has only one-fifth as
much water per capita as the United States. But while southern China is relatively
wet, the north, home to about half of China’s population, is an immense,
parched region that now threatens to become the world’s biggest desert.
Farmers in the north once used shovels to dig their wells. Now, many aquifers
have been so depleted that some wells in Beijing and Hebei must extend more
than half a mile before they reach fresh water. Industry and agriculture use
nearly all of the flow of the Yellow River, before it reaches the Bohai Sea.
In response, Chinese leaders have undertaken one of the most ambitious engineering
projects in world history, a $60 billion network of canals, rivers and lakes
to transport water from the flood-prone Yangtze River to the silt-choked Yellow
River. But that effort, if successful, will still leave the north chronically
thirsty.
This scarcity has not yet created a culture of conservation. Water remains
inexpensive by global standards, and Chinese industry uses 4 to 10 times more
water per unit of production than the average in industrialized nations, according
to the World Bank.
In many parts of China, factories and farms dump waste into surface water with
few repercussions. China’s environmental monitors say that one-third
of all river water, and vast sections of China’s great lakes, the Tai,
Chao and Dianchi, have water rated Grade V, the most degraded level, rendering
it unfit for industrial or agricultural use.
Grim Statistics
The toll this pollution has taken on human health remains a delicate topic
in China. The leadership has banned publication of data on the subject for
fear of inciting social unrest, said scholars involved in the research. But
the results of some research provide alarming evidence that the environment
has become one of the biggest causes of death.
An internal, unpublicized report by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning
in 2003 estimated that 300,000 people die each year from ambient air pollution,
mostly of heart disease and lung cancer. An additional 110,000 deaths could
be attributed to indoor air pollution caused by poorly ventilated coal and
wood stoves or toxic fumes from shoddy construction materials, said a person
involved in that study.
Another report, prepared in 2005 by Chinese environmental experts, estimated
that annual premature deaths attributable to outdoor air pollution were likely
to reach 380,000 in 2010 and 550,000 in 2020.
•
This spring, a World Bank study done with SEPA, the national environmental
agency, concluded that outdoor air pollution was already causing 350,000 to
400,000 premature deaths a year. Indoor pollution contributed to the deaths
of an additional 300,000 people, while 60,000 died from diarrhea, bladder and
stomach cancer and other diseases that can be caused by water-borne pollution.
China’s environmental agency insisted that the health statistics be removed
from the published version of the report, citing the possible impact on “social
stability,” World Bank officials said.
But other international organizations with access to Chinese data have published
similar results. For example, the World Health Organization found that China
suffered more deaths from water-related pollutants and fewer from bad air,
but agreed with the World Bank that the total death toll had reached 750,000
a year. In comparison, 4,700 people died last year in China’s notoriously
unsafe mines, and 89,000 people were killed in road accidents, the highest
number of automobile-related deaths in the world. The Ministry of Health estimates
that cigarette smoking takes a million Chinese lives each year.
Studies of Chinese environmental health mostly use statistical models developed
in the United States and Europe and apply them to China, which has done little
long-term research on the matter domestically. The results are more like plausible
suppositions than conclusive findings.
But Chinese experts say that, if anything, the Western models probably understate
the problems.
“ China’s pollution is worse, the density of its population is greater
and people do not protect themselves as well,” said Jin Yinlong, the director
general of the Institute for Environmental Health and Related Product Safety
in Beijing. “So the studies are not definitive. My assumption is that they
will turn out to be conservative.”
Growth Run Amok
As gloomy as China’s pollution picture looks today, it is set to get
significantly worse, because China has come to rely mainly on energy-intensive
heavy industry and urbanization to fuel economic growth. In 2000, a team of
economists and energy specialists at the Development Research Center, part
of the State Council, set out to gauge how much energy China would need over
the ensuing 20 years to achieve the leadership’s goal of quadrupling
the size of the economy.
They based their projections on China’s experience during the first 20
years of economic reform, from 1980 to 2000. In that period, China relied mainly
on light industry and small-scale private enterprise to spur growth. It made
big improvements in energy efficiency even as the economy expanded rapidly.
Gross domestic product quadrupled, while energy use only doubled.
The team projected that such efficiency gains would probably continue. But
the experts also offered what they called a worst-case situation in which the
most energy-hungry parts of the economy grew faster and efficiency gains fell
short.
That worst-case situation now looks wildly optimistic. Last year, China burned
the energy equivalent of 2.7 billion tons of coal, three-quarters of what the
experts had said would be the maximum required in 2020. To put it another way,
China now seems likely to need as much energy in 2010 as it thought it would
need in 2020 under the most pessimistic assumptions.
“ No one really knew what was driving the economy, which is why the predictions
were so wrong,” said Yang Fuqiang, a former Chinese energy planner who
is now the chief China representative of the Energy Foundation, an American group
that supports energy-related research. “What I fear is that the trend is
now basically irreversible.”
The ravenous appetite for fossil fuels traces partly to an economic stimulus
program in 1997. The leadership, worried that China’s economy would fall
into a steep recession as its East Asian neighbors had, provided generous state
financing and tax incentives to support industrialization on a grand scale.
It worked well, possibly too well. In 1996, China and the United States each
accounted for 13 percent of global steel production. By 2005, the United States
share had dropped to 8 percent, while China’s share had risen to 35 percent,
according to a study by Daniel H. Rosen and Trevor Houser of China Strategic
Advisory, a group that analyzes the Chinese economy.
Similarly, China now makes half of the world’s cement and flat glass,
and about a third of its aluminum. In 2006, China overtook Japan as the second-largest
producer of cars and trucks after the United States.
Its energy needs are compounded because even some of its newest heavy industry
plants do not operate as efficiently, or control pollution as effectively,
as factories in other parts of the world, a recent World Bank report said.
Chinese steel makers, on average, use one-fifth more energy per ton than the
international average. Cement manufacturers need 45 percent more power, and
ethylene producers need 70 percent more than producers elsewhere, the World
Bank says.
China’s aluminum industry alone consumes as much energy as the country’s
commercial sector — all the hotels, restaurants, banks and shopping malls
combined, Mr. Rosen and Mr. Houser reported.
Moreover, the boom is not limited to heavy industry. Each year for the past
few years, China has built about 7.5 billion square feet of commercial and
residential space, more than the combined floor space of all the malls and
strip malls in the United States, according to data collected by the United
States Energy Information Administration.
Chinese buildings rarely have thermal insulation. They require, on average,
twice as much energy to heat and cool as those in similar climates in the United
States and Europe, according to the World Bank. A vast majority of new buildings — 95
percent, the bank says — do not meet China’s own codes for energy
efficiency.
All these new buildings require China to build power plants, which it has been
doing prodigiously. In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity
to its power grid, about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last
year, it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France.
That increase has come almost entirely from small- and medium-size coal-fired
power plants that were built quickly and inexpensively. Only a few of them
use modern, combined-cycle turbines, which increase efficiency, said Noureddine
Berrah, an energy expert at the World Bank. He said Beijing had so far declined
to use the most advanced type of combined-cycle turbines despite having completed
a successful pilot project nearly a decade ago.
While over the long term, combined-cycle plants save money and reduce pollution,
Mr. Berrah said, they cost more and take longer to build. For that reason,
he said, central and provincial government officials prefer older technology.
“ China is making decisions today that will affect its energy use for the
next 30 or 40 years,” he said. “Unfortunately, in some parts of the
government the thinking is much more shortsighted.”
The Politics of Pollution
Since Hu Jintao became the Communist Party chief in 2002 and Wen Jiabao became
prime minister the next spring, China’s leadership has struck consistent
themes. The economy must grow at a more sustainable, less bubbly pace. Environmental
abuse has reached intolerable levels. Officials who ignore these principles
will be called to account.
Five years later, it seems clear that these senior leaders are either too timid
to enforce their orders, or the fast-growth political culture they preside
over is too entrenched to heed them.
In the second quarter of this year, the economy expanded at a neck-snapping
pace of 11.9 percent, its fastest in a decade. State-driven investment projects,
state-backed heavy industry and a thriving export sector led the way. China
burned 18 percent more coal than it did the year before.
China’s authoritarian system has repeatedly proved its ability to suppress
political threats to Communist Party rule. But its failure to realize its avowed
goals of balancing economic growth and environmental protection is a sign that
the country’s environmental problems are at least partly systemic, many
experts and some government officials say. China cannot go green, in other
words, without political change.
In their efforts to free China of its socialist shackles in the 1980s and early
90s, Deng and his supporters gave lower-level officials the leeway, and the
obligation, to increase economic growth.
Local party bosses gained broad powers over state bank lending, taxes, regulation
and land use. In return, the party leadership graded them, first and foremost,
on how much they expanded the economy in their domains.
To judge by its original goals — stimulating the economy, creating jobs
and keeping the Communist Party in power — the system Deng put in place
has few equals. But his approach eroded Beijing’s ability to fine-tune
the economy. Today, a culture of collusion between government and business
has made all but the most pro-growth government policies hard to enforce.
“ The main reason behind the continued deterioration of the environment
is a mistaken view of what counts as political achievement,” said Pan Yue,
the deputy minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration. “The
crazy expansion of high-polluting, high-energy industries has spawned special
interests. Protected by local governments, some businesses treat the natural
resources that belong to all the people as their own private property.”
Mr. Hu has tried to change the system. In an internal address in 2004, he endorsed “comprehensive
environmental and economic accounting” — otherwise known as “Green
G.D.P.” He said the “pioneering endeavor” would produce a
new performance test for government and party officials that better reflected
the leadership’s environmental priorities.
The Green G.D.P. team sought to calculate the yearly damage to the environment
and human health in each province. Their first report, released last year,
estimated that pollution in 2004 cost just over 3 percent of the gross domestic
product, meaning that the pollution-adjusted growth rate that year would drop
to about 7 percent from 10 percent. Officials said at the time that their formula
used low estimates of environmental damage to health and did not assess the
impact on China’s ecology. They would produce a more decisive formula,
they said, the next year.
That did not happen. Mr. Hu’s plan died amid intense squabbling, people
involved in the effort said. The Green G.D.P. group’s second report,
originally scheduled for release in March, never materialized.
The official explanation was that the science behind the green index was immature.
Wang Jinnan, the leading academic researcher on the Green G.D.P. team, said
provincial leaders killed the project. “Officials do not like to be lined
up and told how they are not meeting the leadership’s goals,” he
said. “They found it difficult to accept this.”
Conflicting Pressures
Despite the demise of Green G.D.P., party leaders insist that they intend to
restrain runaway energy use and emissions. The government last year mandated
that the country use 20 percent less energy to achieve the same level of economic
activity in 2010 compared with 2005. It also required that total emissions
of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants decline by 10 percent in the
same period.
The program is a domestic imperative. But it has also become China’s
main response to growing international pressure to combat global warming. Chinese
leaders reject mandatory emissions caps, and they say the energy efficiency
plan will slow growth in carbon dioxide emissions.
Even with the heavy pressure, though, the efficiency goals have been hard to
achieve. In the first full year since the targets were set, emissions increased.
Energy use for every dollar of economic output fell but by much less than the
4 percent interim goal.
In a public relations sense, the party’s commitment to conservation seems
steadfast. Mr. Hu shunned his usual coat and tie at a meeting of the Central
Committee this summer. State news media said the temperature in the Great Hall
of the People was set at a balmy 79 degrees Fahrenheit to save energy, and
officials have encouraged others to set thermostats at the same level.
By other measures, though, the leadership has moved slowly to address environmental
and energy concerns.
The government rarely uses market-oriented incentives to reduce pollution.
Officials have rejected proposals to introduce surcharges on electricity and
coal to reflect the true cost to the environment. The state still controls
the price of fuel oil, including gasoline, subsidizing the cost of driving.
Energy and environmental officials have little influence in the bureaucracy.
The environmental agency still has only about 200 full-time employees, compared
with 18,000 at the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.
China has no Energy Ministry. The Energy Bureau of the National Development
and Reform Commission, the country’s central planning agency, has 100
full-time staff members. The Energy Department of the United States has 110,000
employees.
China does have an army of amateur regulators. Environmentalists expose pollution
and press local government officials to enforce environmental laws. But private
individuals and nongovernment organizations cannot cross the line between advocacy
and political agitation without risking arrest.
At least two leading environmental organizers have been prosecuted in recent
weeks, and several others have received sharp warnings to tone down their criticism
of local officials. One reason the authorities have cited: the need for social
stability before the 2008 Olympics, once viewed as an opportunity for China
to improve the environment.
Year 3 : The MZ Micro Library, work in progress...
See you again, soon ...
"ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE"
