Good overview of the environmental problems China is facing.
The Green Leap Forward
Environmentalism is China’s fastest-growing citizen movement. Beijing isn’t cracking down on these new activists—it’s empowering them.
By Christina Larson
China is on its way to becoming not only the world’s largest economy, but also its largest polluter. Of the world’s twenty most polluted cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country’s cities have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next fifteen years, China’s shortage of clean water will create 30 million “environmental refugees.”
China’s pollution problems, moreover, are no longer solely its own. Winds that whip up over the Gobi Desert sweep dark clouds of mercury, soot, and carbon monoxide to South Korea and Japan; as much as 40 percent of the air pollution in these countries can be traced to China. The toxic plumes travel further afield, now detected by scientists in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. On bad days, a quarter of Los Angeles’s smog originates in China. Later this year, China is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases; within twenty-five years, its annual contribution to global warming could triple.
One of the most polluted cities in China is Lanzhou, the capital of western Gansu Province, situated at the point where the Silk Road crosses the Yellow River. Historically a remote trading outpost, Lanzhou was transformed in the 1950s and ’60s in keeping with Mao Zedong’s vision for China’s future prosperity: “The machines are rumbling, and smoke is rising from factories.” Adopting the adage of the time—“Pollute now, clean up later”—Lanzhou became northwest China’s primary hub for oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Today, the city stretches long and narrow between the Gaolan and White Pagoda mountains, but on many days thick smog masks their peaks. Just by breathing the city air, Lanzhou’s 3 million residents inhale the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes a day. Ten percent of the Yellow River near Lanzhou is now sewage, and last year three industrial spills turned its waters an ominous red.
