GDP growth or a livable environment - the view from the New People’s Weekly
The environmental cost of China’s very rapid industrialisation and urbanisation is increasingly evident. With the cost of pollution a daily reality in people’s lives, the trade off between economic growth and environmental protection is the subject of lively public debate.
This is a translation of an article on the subject in a middle-brow weekly magazine called Xinmin Zhoukan (New People’s Weekly). It doesn’t contain any startling policy revelations. But I find it interesting for the light it shines on the way China’s chattering classes think about environmental issues, and for the authors colourful vocabulary:
‘Do you want GDP growth or do you want to stay alive?
In a few years time, future generations are going to look back and judge us, just like we look back and judge the generation of the cultural revolution. They are going to think we were foolish beyond belief.
Rapid GDP growth has certainly brought added zest to our lives. But in many places, spiralling growth and spiralling pollution has left the land stinking like rotten meat, people wandering like refuges in a war zone.
It’s like in a dirty kitchen. The soup in the spoon might have the beautiful taste of chicken, ginseng or swallows, but everywhere else is all chicken entestines, ducks arses, fetid oil and other disgusting inedibles.
Chemical waste, nuclear waste, metal slag, but we labour on undaunted.
We are like the frog that stays in the slowly heated water till it boils to death.
In the past, China was the kind of place where if you saw something was wrong you would say it, and if someone needed help you would stretch out your hand. Now, China is the kind of place where if you see something wrong you stay silent, and it someone needs help you hide your hand in your sleeve.
If a neighbour needs help we don’t offer it. If we need help we can’t go to the man above because he’s probably the cause of the problem. We can only complain to the man at the top, and then we are contented with the slightest hint of compensation.
That’s the culture in which the rivers run with filth, the hills are barren, and the air is blurry with smog.
Why can’t we go to the courts to sort the problem out?
The justice system is twisted like a snake. Getting judgements on environmental issues is no easy matter. As everyone knows, the manufacturing companies that cause the pollution are often the pets of the local government and the pillars of the local economy. Can you really expect the courts to punish the pet and knock over the pillar?
Confronted with ‘GDP’, ‘law’ tends to run home like a snivelling school boy, nose driping with snot.’
Powerful stuff, and from what I can see New People’s Weekly is not a particularly radical publication. I don’t follow environmental issues closely but think this speaks pretty loudly for a growing awareness of the causes and consequences of environmental pollution, and the awareness that an attitudinal shift from Chinese people will be required to address the problem.
Original Chinese article here.
Great post. Very interesting.