generalspeaking

Battling Pollution Chinese-Style

China's great frog-leaf forward on its inevitable march to world supremacy in exportation of manufactured goods produced more cheaply than anywhere else, in its haste to reach its target of an ever-increasing GDP to satisfy the employment needs of a steadily-emerging cadre of young people in a country nudging an upward trajectory surpassing its current 1.3-billion  population has left it a sink-hole of garbage and polluted environment.

China's huge cities each representing a gigantic metropolis with tens of millions of residents, and its innumerable manufacturers of all manner of goods and consumables, from chemicals to pharmaceuticals, toys to tinned foodstuffs strain the generosity of the land, the water and the air to absorb the constant outpouring of pollutants emerging from the most common source of energy production - coal fired plants.

Wangfujing Road

Those giant brick chimneys spewing out their carbon in particulate clouds of dangerous effluent cloud and veil the cities in which they sit. The emergence of greater numbers of vehicles as China's auto industry ramps up, only adds to the environmental degradation. Deadly smog, dangerous to the lungs of children, the elderly and the health-impaired is so thick at times the sun cannot penetrate and municipalities are forced to call for temporary factory shut-downs.

  

Plants producing chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paints, rubber, plastics, refining metals all produce effluent which is allowed to trickle into the very same waterways that people are dependent upon for their potable water for household use.  The environmental degradation affects crops as well, with heavy metals making their way into the agrarian countryside, corrupting and contaminating the very food that people rely upon for health and nutrition.

Little wonder that the Chinese are so fed up. One Chinese businessman enraged with the state of a filthy river has offered an environmental official $32,000 as an award for swimming in the polluted waterway. He posted photographs of a garbage-filled river in his hometown of Rui'an. He offered his cash prize if the local environmental protection chief would agree to swim in the river. And another offer emerged by another Chinese.

This was a $48,000 cash prize to the environmental protection chief in the nearby county of Cangnan if the official swam in polluted rivers there. A rubber shoe factory has been dumping waste water into the river. Not so awful? The area has an exceptionally high cancer rate. Neither environment minister agreed to that recreational swimming offer but one agreed his bureau would take 'some measures' - primarily, it seems working with residents to clean up trash.

"We will also step up efforts in controlling industrial pollution sources", said the official. But the public, he also said, should shoulder responsibility in protecting the environment. They are the ones who are suffering, they are not the ones who pollute the environment. Can Chinese citizens trust an official who claims after the fact that efforts to control industrial pollution sources will be sorted out, but dependence on the public is primary?

Nothing must be permitted to halt the manufacturing-and-export juggernaut.

Labels: China, Corruption, Environment, Health, Human Relations

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, February 21, 2013