China's Pollution Revolution
The Centre for Economics and Business Research in its latest World Economic League Table has reported that Asian countries were on the upward swing while European countries, traditionally occupying the high rung of business economies are occupying a downward swing. And while the U.S. economy ,despite its problems, is the largest world economy, it is now closely followed by China.China also happens to be the largest carrier of American debt in its holding of U.S. Treasury securities, to the value of $1.16-trillion dollars. And despite the global economic downturn, and a slight falling off of export from China, the country is still accelerating its production and export of goods throughout the world thanks to cheap labour and the state of the yuan.
China's burgeoning prosperity has cost the globe production diversification; countries that once held a fair market share of production and export, able to maintain smokestack employment to fuel their economies have surrendered production to China. While unemployment has grown elsewhere in the world, it has provided China with the opportunity to offer employment to more of its people.
Greater numbers of Chinese than ever before are now gainfully employed, and there is a rising tide of middle class Chinese, able to visit as tourists other parts of the world to see how their counterparts elsewhere live. This has introduced the Chinese to the realization that other people live more environmentally normal lives than do the Chinese.
Where industrialization for China has meant smokestacks chugging out black smoke, particulate matter everywhere, dimming the atmosphere. And where foul chemicals pollute waterways creating potable water shortages, and lifestyle and environmental-induced diseases have become rampant. Beijing, like other Chinese metropoli suffers from constant heavy smog days where the sun is hidden for days on end behind choking, lung-strangling pollution.
Levels of particulate matter clouding the atmosphere occur in amounts that would shut down cities elsewhere on the Globe for fear of the health impacts on people and animals. The smog reaches levels that surpass a worse-case scenario, and are then recorded as "beyond index", or as some wags ruefully describe it, "crazy bad".
Despite which, the official Chinese government air quality measurements are bruited about as being "good", even "excellent", occurring at least 80% of the time. Nor is the dismal environmental fallout of having become the world's production centre the only problem that Chinese face. Lead and other heavy minerals in paint - also exported as lead in children's toys.
Melamine-tainted milk, that makes children ill, and can and does kill some; cooking oil from unsavoury sources, including industrial and sewage-derived; and markets brimming with fresh vegetables drenched in pesticides. Quality control is less than dismal; profit is king and must be achieved at any cost.
Mainland China now faces the fact that 600,000 people last year alone contracted lung cancer which has risen by 60% in the past decade. The cause quite, quite explicable. The cost of the steadily rising quality of economic life for people comes at the inexorable cost of their failing health prospects.
Labels: China, Economy, Environment, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, December 27, 2011
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