RICH, PARCHED, AND SICK

To Western sensibilities, China is a nation of contradictions. The streets of glittering Shanghai or Hong Kong, lined with modern skyscrapers and luxury shops, attest to the unprecedented transformation overtaking the country in recent decades. Industrial cities such as Wuxi, with its hundreds of factories lining Lake Tai, are the engines of this progress: they make the toys, phones, t-shirts, cars, and computers whose profits have lifted nearly 500 million people out of poverty over the last thirty years. Yet, nestled tight against the wealth and hope are the terrifying consequences of these changes.
For problems, look no further than Wuxi itself, where 95% of industrial waste and sewage runs, untreated, into Lake Tai, causing outbreaks of algae that in 2006 that forced the citizens to go without tap water for months. The Northern city of Shijiazhuang, (population two million) is rapidly running out of available drinking water: municipal wells have already drained an estimated two-thirds of the city’s groundwater, even as parched villages outside the city often depend for weeks at a time on tanker trucks that deliver fresh water. Ironically, in 2005 massive flooding in the southern province of Guangdong killed more than 500 people over the course of two weeks. Acid rain sears 30% of China’s landscape, and dust storms whirl off the North China Plain to blanket coastal cities (Beijing alone suffered eleven such storms in 2000), while grain production on the Plain fell by 50 million tons between 1998 and 2004 (a figure larger than the total grain harvest of Canada).
In many ways, nature has dealt China a bad hand—with over 22% of the world’s population, it has just 8% of its water. Further, the geographic distribution of water is decidedly lopsided: 81% of the water resides in the south, which has just over 50% of the population. This accounts for the absurdities of half the population of the verge of death-by-thirst, and the other half drowning in floods.
However, geography alone could not manufacture a crisis on this scale. Rather, in its scramble to modernize, China has embraced unsustainable industrial and agricultural practices, trading short-term growth for long-term viability. The practice of monoculture, and the overuse of pesticides have created a new Dust Bowl out of the North Plain, where the depletion of 40% of the soil has led to those falling harvests and dust storms. Further, China’s industries, given very little oversight by local governments, produce so much waste that half the rivers running through China’s urban centers have been deemed unfit even for irrigation, and emit more sulfur dioxide (a principal cause of acid rain) than in any other nation.
Over the past decade or so, Chinese officials have steadily warmed to the need for change. Indeed, in a nation where 320 million people lack adequate drinking water, and unsustainable economic practices (and the health problems arising from them) cause an estimated loss of 15.1 billion dollars per year, it must have taken doublethink on a grand scale to prevent any action heretofore. Impressed with the need for change, the government has attacked the problem from several directions, all of them beset with serious problems. Two examples will suffice: construction just recently commenced on the South-North Water Diversion (SNWD), a series of parallel aqueducts that will siphon water from the wet south, and send it thousands of miles to the thirsty north. Aside from costing nearly $60 billion, and having no hope of completion before 2050, 25 years after most of the north will have run out of water, the SNWD faces the real prospect of having no water worth drinking to funnel, if factories cannot contain their pollution. A second method adopted by the Communist party has been noisy and grandiose national legislation on the subject of environmental reform, most of which is simply ignored at the local level, where politicians often own or collude the industrial sector. China faces some serious barriers to change: the government must find ways to end the corruption of its local officials, as well as interest the corporations themselves in changing their practices, perhaps through market-based incentives such as tax credits or quota systems, which are common in the West.
Western critics of China’s environmental degradation must remember that, historically, such is the fate of any developing nation: at one time, both the U.S. and Britain suffered similar circumstances. Before Western activists, politicians, or corporations can point fingers, they must consider how their resources—the wealth of the richest nation on Earth—could be brought to bear on the problem, whether through investment in infrastructure, the construction of environmentally-friendly factories, or even direct, humanitarian intervention in current crisis areas.