Green knights, on your horses

Earlier this year I listed the long row of urgent priorities by the central government. I found the list impressive and actually none of the subjects could be missed there. Without addressing each of them, China would develop a massive problem. Since then, with the product quality scandals and a few more, the list has only grown. At that time, I was also wondering which of those priorities would survive the year-end. Some things move faster than expected.
Politics in China is governed by negotiations between the central and many, many other governments. Much of the real power is in the hands of local power brokers and state-owned companies and only by getting their consent, the central government can realize some of its priorities. The question is therefore: what urgent priorities will drop off the list?
I have been discussing the subject with a range of fellow China-watchers and there is a consensus that the environment has dropped out. Some actually say, it has never been on it, but for a while at least investments in environmental projects went up. Local authorities do not mind those, since they benefit from every investment.
A few times over the past months, the government departments in charge of the environment had to take severe political hits. One report by the World Health Organization on the number of environmental reports in China and one developed with the World Bank on the Green GDP, a pet-project of Hu Jintao, where killed. They still had some effect because they of course leaked out, but it gave a clear signal that the environment as an issue should back-off.
Some of my friends dismissed those reports anyway as meaningless propaganda tools. That might be true, but when even meaningless propaganda kits gets killed, there is something rotten.
What those reports could and should have done is creating a climate for real measures, like a stiff increase of energy prices, so the usage of energy could slow down and that could force even the economy at large to cool down, something the central government has not yet been able to do. But when anything goes against the interest of the local power brokers, it is a slowdown of the economy. Those in charge are making money on the booming economy now and do not want to share that with a next generation of leaders.
Of course, China is never going to remove the environment as an issue from its political agenda. And of course, next year Beijing needs to have some breathable air for at least a few weeks in August as the Olympics take place. In the official propaganda, the environment will remain an issue, but not one with a high priority.
Knowing this, what can be done?

First, the environmental struggle has seen severe setbacks and the prospects do not look good. But not all is lost yet and the green knights should get on their horses and get their act together.
Second, companies involved in environmental projects should get their things implemented as soon as possible. Funding that is available should be used as much as possible, because a drop on the political agenda will be followed by a drop in funding
For the record, of course I hope this gloomy analysis is wrong.

Second report on environmental damage killed

At the beginning of this month China's environmental authorities got critiziced after they forced the World Bank to tone down a report, estimating the annually 750,000 Chinese would die prematurely from environmental damage. Now, according to the Los Angeles Times, an annual report on the environmental damage for the GDP, due in September, was killed.
Last year the so-called "Green GDP" said environmental damage had cost China US$ 67.7 billion or 3 percent of its GDP over 2005.

Chinese and Western experts, however, said Monday that authorities might have acted for reasons not readily apparent to casual observers. They said the reluctance to publicize the country's environmental woes might have had more to do with political relations between the central government and provincial leaders than with a fear of airing dirty laundry.

The now cancelled "Green GDP" report would also be a tool to put a price tag on the environmental damage per province, a problem for those provinces who are more focused on economic growth than on environmental protection.

Looking for job in China?

Poor labor conditions have caught the attention in China and it does not look it is going away very fast. Global Voices points at this report in Moobol.com on a illegal black cotton factory in Wuhan. A picture says more than words.

Update: Got some more words anyway. CSR Asia translated the store and you can find it here.

Contaminated imports from the US and Europe

also from Japan

Shanghai Scrap gets rightfully annoyed by all the news of bad Chinese products, while the world forgets the container-loads of contaminated garbage China receives from the US, Europe and Japan.

For almost five years I have covered the Chinese scrap trade, and in the course of visiting Chinese ports and scrap facilities, I have seen American scrap shipments contaminated with medical waste, household garbage, dead animals, sludge, mud, and other items not included on the shipping manifest. And these are just the shipments that DON’T contain e-waste. All of this occurs despite China’s strict laws on waste imports – many of which were implemented in reaction to American exports of hazardous materials to China.

China censors 750,000 environmental deaths

About 750,000 premature deaths caused by the environmental degradation have been eleminated from a World Bank report, writes the Financial Times (here in a pick-up from Howard French). The fear of "social unrest" was quoted as the reason to skip the information from the report.
The report has not been released officially, but a draft was available last year on the internet.

Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities is leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year. A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research.
Another 60,000-odd premature deaths were attributable to poor-quality water, largely in the countryside, from severe diarrhoea, and stomach, liver and bladder
cancers.

The China Opportunity - the WTO-column

Shanghai - "Are you positive or negative about the effects of China on the world?" I tried to look no too cynical when the leader of a European delegation formulated last week the questions he wanted me to answer. Shanghai and China are flooded by delegations full of curious business people, government officials, NGO's, eager to find out how China is going to change the world. Most of them seem genuinly lost when it comes to the more fundamental questions.

All to often those relative newcomers try to fit China's development in some easy to catch cliches, since making a real assessment of what is going on is darned difficult. I try not to let them get away with all too easy ways of framing the China story. My task is to confuse you, I tell them, rattle their all to simple assumptions about the dangers and opportunities in China, try to liberate them from the all to simple ideas they might have had about China.

By the time I meet them, most visiting delegates have already made one simple but rather essential observation. "This is a huge country." While everybody might know the figures, only when you are traveling here, face the huge distances, the internal differences, people start to realize that even Shanghai - with mostly a bigger population than the region they come from - cannot be described in cliches only.

It is a delicate balance: trying not to deny the huge problems China is facing, while at the same time also avoiding all too easy doomsday scenario's that sell very well in the media. China's voracious hunger for energy and raw materials. The water crisis in Wuxi, the dead fish in China's lakes, the growing number of stories about social unrest: it's sizzling economic growth does seem to come at a price that might be too high.

China as a country has been used to an almost permanent state of crisis management and has become pretty good in managing crises of all kinds of nature. That is not meant as a compliment, but might help to understand why despite an endless row of serious incidents, there might be a way to continue economic progress without turning the environment or global economic relations into a real disaster mode.

What strikes me in China is the high level of inefficiency in using energy, labor, raw materials, almost anything that is needed for fuel its economic growth. Getting more coal and oil in has been the most important strategy to deal with the growing need for energy. But there could be another way. The level of inefficiency is so high that even a marginally successful program to save energy could make a huge difference and allow years of economic growth without the need for more coal or oil.

I'm not familiar with the current figures, but a few years ago China needed eight times as much energy to generate one US dollar worth of products compared to the United States, for sure also not a country that has a clean record when it comes to energy saving.

Efficiency is going to be a key word in the years to come. That might go against the slight anarchistic nature of China and its citizens, but when there is no other way out, China's crisis manager will find that way.

Fons Tuinstra

Beijing is full

In Beijing now each 1.46 family has a car, reports China Car Times. The difference between the rush hours and the rest of the day have now mostly disappeared as traffic is hardly moving. More than three million cars are on the road and perhaps it has to look at the situation in Tokyo or New York were using that car is very hard.

The car manufacturers will be happy with that situation. They do not want you to use a car, but only to buy it. Then their job is over.

Death and destruction at Wuhan

Ever wondered how environmental destruction could look like? The China Environmental News has a few pictures of the tons of dead fish that have to be cleared in the region of Wuhan. Things really start to look nasty.

A battle won for the environment in Yunnan

the three parallel rivers

Josie Liu points at a pledge the Yunnan provincial government has made to protect the environment. There will be no dams and no mines in the region of the three parallal rivers, one of the World Natural Heritages sites, listed by UNESCO.

Mobile calls cause global warming

Houston, we have a problem

Chinese state media have of course been silent on the next environmental disaster China is causing for the world, but fortunately, the Dutch media are on top of it. While in China the number of mobile callers is rapidly nearing the half billion, a group of fifty scientists in Columbia have revealed that mobile phones contribute to global warming.

Not the batteries are the problem, but the billions of calls heat up the waves. Solutions have not been given, but we can better start raising pigeons again. Hold on, maybe we should first ask fifty scientists if raising pigeons is not bad for the world.

Fighting for China's clean air

Orville Schell

China-veteran Orville Schell pleads for action on the world's growing environmental problems in this essay in China Dialogue:

How should we proceed? By forming a coalition of respected scientists, business leaders and policy experts, calling a high-level emergency summit with their counterparts in China and then enlisting the US presidential candidates to pledge to make the coal/climate change issue a priority. The ultimate goal should be to undertake a US$25 billion collaborative effort, with the United States providing capital, technological know-how and entrepreneurial and managerial skills and China providing some resources of its own, research, critical leadership among developing countries, its low-cost manufacturing base and its prodigious market energy.

Lenovo tops Greenpeace' guide

Lenovo, China's largest manufacturer of PC's, head a Greenpeace listing on green policies, report ChinaCSR and China Tech News.

"Given the growing mountains of e-waste in China - both imported and domestically generated – it is heartening to see a Chinese company taking the lead, and assuming responsibility at least for its own branded waste," said Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace International Toxics Campaigner, "The challenge for the industry now is to see who will actually place greener products on the market."