Heavy smog at the financial district of Pudong, in Shanghai, China, December 11, 2015. (Credit: Reuters/Aly Song)
Polite society continues to let ecological destruction wrought by unfettered capitalism be somebody else’s problem
What’s missing from the way that our financial press reports about China’s economic slowdown is that it fails to take into account the role of the mainland’s people and the environment in how this crisis came to be. For too long this story has been told exclusively with quarter over quarter economic performance statistics by the myopic business press, which ignores entirely the deeper ecological crisis and intense social upheaval that has been underway in China for years.
There are serious and profound consequences from China’s over-the-top drive to be the world’s factory, and global investors’ greed to extract as much as they could in the way of a double-digit rate of return in the process. The truth is, our investor class did not care, and still doesn’t care, how China makes its numbers as long as it makes them.
The real-world consequence won’t make it on Bloomberg’s 24-7 watch your money-a-thon. Those talking heads have a working presumption that there is absolutely no connection between the markets’ insatiable hunt for the next billion-dollar killing and how it might impact the planet’s natural systems. That’s for the Weather Channel.
Polite society continues to let the ecological destruction wrought by unfettered capitalism be somebody else’s problem, or more precisely, on the second set of books to which we relegate such “externalities.”
After all, wasn’t that the whole rationalization for outsourcing to begin with? Leave it to the Chinese to sweat out the manufacturing details, and the global investor class from the golf course gets to figure out what to do with the profits they extract. But now, with so much of their water polluted and their air so contaminated China’s people and its ecology have been stressed to the breaking point.
“I think in the West there is confusion in part on how this is reported,” says Barbara Finamore, senior attorney and Asia director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There is more than one reason for the slowdown. Part of it is they can’t rely on heavy manufacturing anymore. So much of the reporting makes the assumption that there is an unlimited carrying capacity for the natural resources base but there are limits.”
“There is an intentionality to what the Chinese government is doing now, which is not reported,” says Finamore. “In 2015, China’s coal consumption dropped. This is remarkable in that China has begun to decouple its continued economic growth from having to increase its coal consumption.
“In 2015 China surpassed Germany as No. 1 in the world in terms of solar panel installation. Their investment in renewable energy is bigger than the European Union and the United States combined,” says NRDC’s Finamore.
Nothing like real-time delivery.
China’s air pollution kills 4,000 people a day, close to 17 percent of the country’s annual mortality. Even though it is roughly a fifth of the world’s population, the Max Planck Institute reports China accounts for almost half of the 3.3 million deaths annually caused by air pollution. According to the “State of the Planet” 2014 analysis published by the Columbia University’s Earth Institute, less than 1 percent of China’s 500 largest cities meet World Health Organization’s air quality standards.
Of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, 16 are in China.
Contaminated air is only part of it. The United Nations World Water Report issued last year reported the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources had determined that in 118 of the country’s cities tested, 97 percent of the sub-surface groundwater was contaminated, and in 64 percent of the places surveyed the drinking water source was seriously contaminated.
The trade journal Water and Wastewater International reports that out of 668 cities, 400 face a major water deficit, with their average daily capita access levels to one of life’s essential ingredients at what the U.N. defines as “extreme scarcity.” So far 90 percent of the water produced by China’s dozens of desalination plants has gone to thermal/nuclear, steel, metal and industrial park production.
China is feeding 20 percent of the world’s population with just 7 percent of the farmland, of which 20 percent is contaminated. As far back as 2001, international experts warned that the aquifer that supports the North China’s Plain, which produces half of China’s wheat and a third of its corn crop, was dropping to the point where it could not be replenished. Tens of thousands of irrigation wells in the region dried up as farmers had to drill deeper and deeper to get the water they needed.
Here in the West, we don’t get the magnitude of what’s going on because our corporate media doesn’t want us making the broader connections to just what a ruination the last few decades of global free trade has wrought on the planet.