A side effect of the rapid economic growth China has been enjoying over the last decade can be attributed to the rising levels of pollution and environmental damage on all aspects of human and animal habitation within the greater Sino-Asian area. This became evident especially in Beijing, its capital, as it was preparing for its candidacy as an Olympic host city for the 2008 Olympiad games. Seven years in the future, the city of Beijing is desperately trying to save face as they prepare to host what it promised to be the biggest sporting event the world is to see thus far.
The Problems
1. Political Issues
Having only recently been emancipated from the strict communist régime that controlled every aspect of the nation, the Chinese in recent years discovered that capitalism—the one thing that they were taught to resent by its former government—is not the evil corruptor of society as their government had preached it to be. Thus started the automobile boom in China, with every citizen trying to grab a piece of the good life pie, buying and owning a car seemed the ultimate symbol of financial enlightenment: the Chinese were finally starting to realize their own “American Dream” where they would finally have the financial freedom that was denied to them for so many years
What stood in the way of the Chinese however, was the devastating national financial gap between the haves and have-nots. China’s economic growth for the past half century had depended on their industry and the economic rationales and revenues of that had been distributed amongst the people accordingly to it. This is more easily understood if one compares the nation’s workforce to a factory. The work division in a factory is usually somewhat skewed with 95% of the employees working at the assembly line and 5% being those that manage the assembly line workers. In the same way, 95% of China’s industrial working force had been the under-paid, low-priority workers doing the “dirty job”, while the remainder grew fat and rich from managing (and manipulating) the hard workers. In the past year, Forbes magazine reported that China has the greatest number of millionaires and is home to six of Asia’s top ten richest people claim that 5% piece of the Chinese economical pie: which is not surprising for a country whose population boasts over a billion.
2. Social Ennui and Reluctance
Because of the aforementioned skew in economy, the Chinese were and are motivated even harder to rid themselves of their financial woes and achieve their rightful social status; given the opportunity, cars started selling like hot cakes and fuel emissions conjoined with carbon emissions, from the immense arsenal of factories the city of Beijing and its neighboring city Tianjin were producing, gave much more than what the eager citizens were bargaining for. It is reported that just in the last year, over 400,000 premature deaths were caused by air pollution in the city of Beijing, and over 70% of the country’s rivers have been rendered un-irrigable and unsafe for human consumption as a result of the acid rain that was produced by the pollution (The Guardian). An even more frightening aspect to these statistics lies within the public’s ennui and ignorance to the subject. The Beijing-ers, having been fed Mao’s doctrines over the past half century, still embrace the communal idea that everything belongs to the people which sanctions public littering, and general disregarding of common ethics as social norms. It is actually very common to see little children defecating or urinating on the sidewalks under the supervision of their parents; people standing in line that seems to spread to all four cardinal directions (as opposed to the usual single file line that runs from “North” to “South”); men rolling and folding their upper garments to unsightly levels, exposing parts of the body that would usually be kept under wraps; or waiters and waitresses not being inclined to provide service and will simply ignore their customers until they are yelled at to provide service. Although this may seem appalling and in a way uncivilized to the western world, these are merely the normal aspects of life people have developed in the post-communist era, where the government which once used to regulate almost every aspect of life has let go of its grasping claws and the people, who no longer have to respond to anyone, have taken on an overly egocentric life style where all actions are solely for the benefit of those taking it. Without the right institutions to handle marketization and its effects, China’s late-developing economy paved the way for a sharp conflict of individual interest and the public good as a result of the speed and implementation of marketization throughout the nation. Thus the 1990s have given birth to a new terrifying race of consumers: the rapidly growing Sino-Asian economical populous whom spend money in the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (or according to the Social Contract: “One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they”) while reasoning in the likes of Karl Marx.
3. Traffic and Air Pollution
Air, in most cases, can be seen as an ethereal physical element in the sense that it neither carries a tangible property, a distinctive smell, nor can be observed by the naked eye. Pollution has a tendency in reversing this ethereal property as it often colors the transparent, adds a stench to the odorless and so forth. So naturally, the two main causes of pollution in the city of Beijing are carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and green air emissions from industry. As of recent years, the city of Beijing was awarded the accolade of being the most heavily polluted city in the world, recording fatal amounts of nitrogen oxide levels within the atmosphere: breathing ten minutes of unfiltered “natural” in Beijing is more harmful in terms of the toxins than smoking a single unfiltered cigarette as the Beijing air reportedly contains 90mg of Sulfur Dioxide and 122mg of Nitrogen Dioxide per cubic meter (on a related note, China also boasts the largest smoking population in the world.) The cause of this astonishing feat that Beijing has levied upon itself (ironically on time for the Olympics) is credited to the increase of automobiles. Since 2002, the number of automated vehicles roaming the streets of Beijing (be they cars, buses, motorcycles, motor scooters, etc.) have increased by a whopping two and a half million units , fueled by the automobile boom that hit China in the last decade. The biggest factor that contributes to the automobile boom uniquely in the city of Beijing is the structure of the city. Beijing, like most metropolitan areas has a concentric layout, where each area of the city is marked by overlapping circles (or “rings” as they’re called in Beijing) that become bigger in size the further it moves away from the center. In the center of that circle (or the “1st Ring”) lies the Forbidden City, which has served as Beijing’s most notorious historical monument, and biggest obstacle to the development of the city. Synchronous with UNESCO’s dubbing of the former palace as a World Heritage Site in 1987, the 720,000 square meters of land it occupies has literally become “untouchable” and city expansion forced roads to revolve around the city center (on an interesting side note, the area occupied by the Forbidden City is so wide that there are two subway stations that occupy the western and eastern borders of the area respectively.) Consequently, as roads cannot intersect or enter this huge area of land, access from western vicinity of the city to the eastern requires for one to inconveniently drive around each ring and exit at the closest area away from the city center. This seriously cripples the flow of traffic in the city of Beijing, undermining the efficiency of public ground transportation. To compensate for this difficulty, some citizens have resorted to use of bicycle and underground transportation, but due to lack of funding and outdated technology employed by the transportation bureau of the city of Beijing, the subway in Beijing is often crowded beyond the point of movement, and tardy since it is taking in more passengers than it was originally intended for. Thus the odd combination of the automobile boom and inefficient mass transit systems, the citizens of Beijing are more likely encouraged to resort to using private transportation, which with its increase raises air pollution levels throughout the city. Carbon dioxide emission from automobiles, however, is not the sole factor of atmospheric pollution in Beijing, as the city is also a tragic victim to the seasonal phenomenon that raids its skies known as “Asian Dust” or “Yellow Sand”. This phenomenon is characterized by waves of sand particles that get caught in the atmosphere above the Gobi desert in Mongolia and travel down to East Asia through prevailing winds during late winter and spring. The passing of the sand-ridden winds usually leaves a yellow-ish sandy residue in the environment it affects, consisting of sand particles and air. In recent years this sand has mixed with toxic pollutants emitted from factories and gas emissions diffused in the air to form a yellow smog-like substance which reduces general visibility (which is ironic, if you generally take into account that air is transparent) and adds a charred flavor/fragrance to the air which now has been found to be one of the developing causes of asthma in the country.
4. Food Safety and Hygiene
The city of Beijing has experienced many questionable scares in the past year in regards to the safety and cleanliness of food. The most well-known issue even among the locals is the sale of fake or imitation food especially those sold by street vendors. Among the many conspicuous food items that have been sold on the streets for consumption such as manmade eggs, water-fed fish, and fake tofu, none have been more shocking than the news of cardboard-stuffed meat buns. Meat buns or baozi as they’re called, have enjoyed a great reputation as a timeless classic in the Chinese culinary world, with its first documented historical appearance dating back to the 3rd century. News that even the meat-filled was no longer safe for consumption sent Beijing-ers into a flurry of panic and concern at the time, as baozi was popular lunch menus for college students and company employees. Although the news was later dismissed as fraud, this opened the door for many more investigations regarding food hygiene around in the capital city which lead to recalls ranging from city-wide to international scales. One may vaguely remember the infamous toothpaste recall in July that had stalled free trade agreement talks between the United States and China, where FDA authorities had found traces of diethylene glycol, a substance harmful to the human body, was found among the contents. To the Chinese however, food poisoning is just another part of everyday life that many experience frequently, which is unsurprising given the sanitary conditions of the city. Common restaurants in Beijing barely wash the pots and pans that are used by the cooks throughout the day (one cook had even told me that he does not wash his wok at all because he believes that it adds more flavor to his dishes) and insect appendages are often served as unexpected hors d’oeuvres with the food; the tap water is barely treated and often times yields a white flake-like substance even when boiled; the city has no recycle program other the homeless who maraud the streets often seen picking out plastic and glass bottles that are usually exchanged for little money at the end of the day. I found that public concern about the general and personal hygiene is also alarmingly low, as a few of my Chinese colleagues pointed out to me that it is very unusual for someone to take daily showers.
Possible Solutions
A lot has been done and proposed by the government in the past few years to resolve these environmental issues: the Chinese government has worked closely with SINOPEC, China’s largest supplier of petroleum, to ban the use of leaded gasoline throughout the nation; restrictions of motorcycles have been set into place, prompting for the conversion of many diesel-based motorcycles to electric; the city government sanctioned the use of artificial rain to clear up sand residues in the atmosphere; tighter inspection laws have been set in place to safeguard the citizens and visitors from food poisoning and so forth. It is safe to say, however, that the problems raised in this paper are mostly products of unawareness or disinterest either of the people and should first be resolved through increased public awareness of the issues. The situation in China is comparable to that of post-war America when widespread use of pesticides rendered their image to that of “miraculous solutions” in agriculture and disease prevention. Until concerned researchers such as Rachel Carson actively engaged in spreading public awareness on the toxicity of the chemicals, the unsuspecting public regarded the now FDA-banned chemicals as a godsend, to the point that they showered their children with the products in belief that it would fend off harmful diseases. China is currently the fastest growing economy in the planet and has the most spoken language in the world; what China currently lacks is not government policies and regulations but the concern of the people about the environment and their surroundings. What the city of Beijing needs more than an efficient transportation system, cleaner air, or better public sanitary regulations, is increased awareness and concern for the environment: China needs its own Silent Spring.