China Faces American-Style Pollution
Problems
By
Jeanette Joy Fisher
One might have hoped that China would have learned some
lessons about pollution by watching America's expansion
problems over the decades, but China's explosive growth
has brought its industrial pollution problem to a level
that will require some drastic steps to fix.
On the positive side, Chinese officials
seem to be ready to take steps to reduce the country's
pollution problems before they get totally out of hand.
One of the most promising clean-up projects is being
undertaken on the Pearl River, which is China's
equivalent of the Mighty Mississippi. The Pearl's
headwaters are in the Tibetan foothills, where the river
begins its 1,375-mile journey to the South China Sea.
Nearly a third of all Chinese goods designed for foreign
export are manufactured along the Pearl, which means that
the river has suffered a heavy toll over the years.
However, the Chinese government has spent billions of
dollars to build new sewage treatment plants and to move
heavy industry out of the country's major cities. Although
there has been a marked improvement in the river's water
quality, there's still a long way to go before the Pearl
will conform to Western standards or those of other
prosperous Asian nations.
China's growth explosion has some environmentalists
predicting that the country may surpass America as the
world's largest producer of greenhouse gases within
the next two decades. This is in large part to the rise in
the standard of living of the average Chinese citizen, who
can now afford to buy an automobile for transportation. In
fact, Chinese consumers are buying nearly 24,000 new cars
every day.
The Chinese government has been inundated by concerns from
citizens about the quality of their drinking water
and their farmland as industrial growth and mining
continue to boom at an unprecedented rate. Government
officials realize all too well that they must try to
maintain some control over the explosive growth if they
hope to remain in power. The creation of an EPA-style
agency, called the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)
was meant to be a step in that direction, but it has so
far had a spotty success record at best, because its real
power is at the provincial level, and most Chinese
provinces are more concerned with improving the living
standard of their citizens than with environmental
protection.
The Pearl River project will give China an opportunity to
show the world their commitment to clean water, and water
quality has improved over the past five years, but there's
still a long way to go. For instance, a recent study found
high levels of toxic metals in the Pearl River
estuary, including shrimp that contained sixteen times the
recommended level of cadmium.
There are some other encouraging developments beginning to
take place, including a growing number of green groups
that are being formed on China's college campuses. It's
yet to be determined when and how China's waterways will
conform to worldwide quality standards, but it appears
some promising efforts are underway.
Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher
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