Paying the price for China's growth


By Tim Luard
BBC, China

The sheer scale of China's economic transformation is matched only by the size of the new challenges and dangers it has created.

None is bigger than the threat to the environment.

Feeding a fifth of the world's people on 7% of its arable land was never easy - and that land is now shrinking at a rate of 1m hectares a year.

Economic growth has transformed China

"If you travel out of town you don't find any countryside at all anymore," complains one resident of Shanghai. "Just more cities".

The endless grey factories and tower blocks of China's development zones are soaking up the biggest rural migration in human history.

The plan is to move as many as 400 million people to the cities in the next 25 years, people who will need new roads, housing and other infrastructure on a truly massive scale.

Such is China's economic frenzy that a country which was once almost self-sufficient now imports not only grain but also huge quantities of other resources. It is the world's largest consumer of copper, aluminium and cement and the second biggest importer of oil.

While this appetite sparks fears about the long-term effects on the world's raw materials, China's own natural resources - its air, land and water - are already suffering badly.

China has already become the world's second biggest generator of carbon dioxide emissions and could overtake the US as the biggest source of greenhouse gases in three decades.

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Already relying on coal for 75% of the country's energy needs, the government has responded to a series of power blackouts by building new, mainly coal-fired power plants, raising the prospect of ever more coal dust and acid rain.

Beijing is trying to reduce air pollution by urging residents to switch their heating to natural gas. But the huge rise in the number of cars on city streets does not help.

Car ownership has been doubling every few years. If per capita ownership were to reach US levels, China would have to find room for 600m cars - more than exist today in the entire world.

Turned to dust

Fly west from the capital and you get a bird's-eye view of perhaps the most serious threat of all.

Dusty beds of dried-up rivers run through endless grey hills and deserts below.

'Destroying is easy,' Dai Qing says

More than half China's citizens face serious problems of water shortage or contamination.

"When I was young, water was everywhere," said Dai Qing, a prominent writer.

"The edges of Beijing were rich with lotus-ponds and rice fields. But now it's totally disappeared. The nearest water is more than 100m below ground. Yet people still want houses with swimming pools, like in the US," she said.

Dai Qing led an unprecedented campaign against the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river. Now in its last phase of construction, the dam is set to be the world's largest hydroelectric project, generating power for China's expanding cities, and protests among critics.

There have already been many problems with sedimentation and flooding, she said. "But China's top leaders have prevented any mention of these in the media - even on the internet where they have their own police."

Upstream from the Three Gorges, the city of Chongqing hopes to benefit from the dam because big ships will be able to reach it from the coast.

But with China home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world - according to the World Bank - and Chongqing prominent amongst them, the great river is sometimes scarcely visible through the smog.

The city also faces serious sanitation problems, because its sewage and waste water goes straight into the river - a situation that is only now being addressed.

"In the dry season when the flow is less, the waste doesn't dilute as fast, so it becomes a health problem," said John Aspinall, who is helping supervise construction of a sewage treatment plant.

Human cost

China's economic reforms have benefited hundreds of millions of people, giving them a better diet and better standard of life.

But while attention focuses on the damage done to China's natural resources as a cost of those reforms, the harm done to its most vulnerable people should not be overlooked.

Tackling the problems will take generations

Michael Ma, an environmental business consultant, has found Chinese workers packed into dark, smoky factories in scenes he describes as reminiscent of 18th century Europe.

"Some multinationals are as guilty as local companies of taking advantage of loose environmental and labour controls", he said.

"They find loopholes so they can make quick money. And if there's any problem - they just move deeper into the countryside."

Despite the scale of the challenges China now faces, all is not gloom.

There seems to be a new public awareness building of the dangers of destroying the resources on which China's long term health and prosperity depend.

Pressure from small grassroots groups has also achieved some limited success, raising hopes that the environment could be an issue that encourages the government to become more generally accountable.

Beijing has announced a series of tree-planting and other campaigns, although the State Environmental Protection Administration refused repeated requests for an interview to discuss them.

There are now proposals to make it more expensive for companies to pollute than not to pollute - and to make environmental issues a factor when local officials' promotion prospects are assessed.

But undoing the damage caused by breakneck growth will need more than that.

"Destroying is easy", Dai Qing said, "protecting and treating are difficult".
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China's poor being left behind


By Tim Luard
BBC, Chongqing

Chairman Mao's successors decreed that "getting rich is glorious". But despite all the talk of economic growth and success stories, for most ordinary Chinese it is still just a dream.

In Zhongshan, a 1,000-year-old village deep in China's under-developed west, up to 90% of the 700 inhabitants survive on government handouts, according to local official Zhou Jiling.

Many are looking after grandchildren whose parents have moved to cities far away on the coast to find work.

Rural China has benefited far less from reforms
Some of these migrants visit their home villages for annual holidays, others once every few years and some not at all.

Half an hour's walk away, up a steep winding path through the fields, 72-year-old Wang Yinqing lives in a single room with a packed mud floor.

She has been here since 1949, the year Mao led his peasant army to victory.

"Things got better then," she said. "He gave us solid houses. Before that they were built of bamboo."

Today she has electricity for the bare light bulb hanging from the rafters, but no refrigerator, television or telephone. For a toilet, she goes outside with the chickens.

Her daughters grew up hungry, she said, but they now earn just enough for their food and clothing, and sometimes send a little bit home.

She herself has never even seen the nearest city, Chongqing, even though it is just 100km (60 miles) away.

While she said China's reforms were "a good thing", they have largely passed her by, as they have many other people in China's countryside.

Poor getting poorer

Rural areas did well under the first phase of China's economic reforms. But since then agriculture has been neglected. The abandonment of free public health and other welfare systems and the decision to let some parts of the country get rich before others have all contributed to a huge and still growing wealth gap.

China's poverty makes talk of superpower status premature
To talk of superpowers seems almost absurd when you head into the hills and remember that China still ranks just 94th in the United Nations Human Development Index.

Many people are getting richer. But last year the number of people living in extreme poverty (defined as those with annual incomes of less than $77) actually rose, to just over 3% of the population - although admittedly this is the first officially recorded increase in 25 years of economic reforms.

Similarly, road-building and other big infrastructure programmes look impressive from a distance. But when you see some rural roads close-up, you come across an awful lot of cracks and pot-holes.

Contracts for both building and mending the roads tend to be in the hands of local officials who have close links to construction companies - one of many reasons why China's unique combination of communism and capitalism does not always leave everyone with a fair chance.

Migrants are flooding Chongqing for work and better living standards
"Concepts we borrow from the West don't always fit in when applied to Chinese reality," said Cao Haili, a journalist working for Caijing magazine, noted for its exposes of the darker side of China's economic reforms.

Corruption has multiplied with the massive investment and decentralisation that have been integral parts of the reforms.

The lack of transparency, accountability and rule of law become more apparent the further one goes from the centre of power.

Crime, local protectionism and regional competition - not to mention the simmering separatist movements on China's fringes - all add to a sense of fragmentation.

It is a trend that could bring about the Communist Party's downfall, as its leaders are the first to admit.

But they are in a quandary. They have had some success in controlling the breakneck speed of growth, averting - at least for now - rampant inflation and a crash in the banking system.

Unemployed

But slower growth will mean not enough new jobs for the 10m workers a year entering the urban employment market - not to mention the 14m still laid off from state-owned enterprises, the 95m migrants seeking work and an estimated 150m surplus labourers in the countryside.

Protests by laid-off workers take place daily, even at a time when the economy is doing well.

Chongqing is one place where jobseekers keep arriving and the boom shows no sign of slowing. With state banks being told to limit lending, private investment has taken over and annual growth is still as high as 12%.

"No one can say Chinese are poor," said one local businessman as he ushered a group of glamorous girls into his private room at a karaoke club, "when we can put down four million renminbi ($500,000) in cash for a new villa".

He did not mention that the farmers being moved off their land to make way for the villa would have had to work for more than 2,000 years to pay such a sum themselves.

The new leadership in Beijing says it is now doing more to tame the raw excesses of Chinese-style capitalism, and address the concerns of the marginalised.

It now talks about not only economic growth but also "quality of life".

According to Liu Haiming, a Beijing-based artist, Chinese people have become "shaky" in their excitement about money. They no longer relate to each other or care about the common good.

"All they think about are material things. They have misunderstood what being a developed country really means."

But in cities like Shanghai, migrant workers keep on coming, eager for their big chance.

Li Xiaobo works 10 hours a day in a marble processing factory, with no days off - in addition to a part-time job.

He shares a 10 square metre room with three co-workers.

He and his fellow migrants face discrimination over everything from getting a mortgage to finding a girlfriend.

He believes 98% of the migrants are unhappy with their conditions. But for him, it is still better than being back home in Hunan Province.

Seeing all the city's fine shops is "like a dream", he said.

I've found some disturbing information from Everything You Know Is Wrong - The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies. It regards China's stance as becoming THE next world superpower (How long did you think the United States would enjoy it's Post-World War, Post-Cold War superpower status?) I HIGHLY suggest anyone who wants a real knowledge of the world around them to buy this book.

Here are some excerpts from Will this Be the Chinese Century?
By Howard Bllom and Diane Starr Petryk-Bloom

"...The Chinese have put big bcuks into what Jane's Information Group, the world's top gatherer of military hardware data, calls "leapfrog" military technologies. The Chinese have long had a large nuclear arsenal mounted on some of the world's most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and packaged in the sophisticated MIRVed warheads (MIRV stands for multiple indepenedtly-targeted reentry vechile" - a device that allows one rocket to carry a cluster of nuclear bombs, each aimed at a different city). But the Chinese count on this nuclear arsenal as a deterent - a way of keeping the US's forces at bay..."

"...By skimming the water and using violent end maneuvers that throw off defenses, Sunburn Missiles have the capacity to put the US military totally out of business in the Western Pacific..."

"...In the early 1990s, 70 percent of foreign direct investment in the Asian nations went to the Southeast Asian tigers and only 30 percent went to China. By 2001, the tigers had been declawed and defanged by their Chinese neighbor, which now swallowed 70 percent of foreign investment funds...One reason - the Chinese are graduacting more students with information technology training in than any other low-cost nation in sight..."

"...China steals the technology of outsiders, then becomes the outside firms' most ferocious competitor..."

"...Leading American families - from the Forbes to the Delanos - made millions smuggling illicit drugs into the Chinese market..."

You can find the book that this came from here

Geez, in 30 years they'll be as bad as us. We better put a stop to this!

Everything You Know Is Wrong is a great read. It's Authored by Russ Kick, he operates http://www.thememoryhole.org/ and is responsible for many FOIA requests. Book of Lists is another interesting read, not nearly as educational as the above stated but more entertaining.

I wish more people would here in the USA understood what China is planning to do. They have become one of the strongest financial countries in the world with great help from us. I don't think that China will ever get to have the power of the USA but I will tell you that when they have a solid chance of taking over Taiwan that will be a no brainer. There only problem is that the USA will nver give China the power to take over Taiwan. Imagine if China took over Taiwan. Look at a map.. Scary.

In my opinion if China was ever going to go to war it would be with Japan. There still pist off what Japan did to there woman and children years ago.

The Death of a Culture:

China's dying ethnic villages


By Louisa Lim
BBC, Guizhou

Far from the glitz and glamour of China's booming cities, Guizhou province is home to many of the country's ethnic minorities.

Inside a dirty wooden shack deep in the green hills of Guizhou, a young man puffs into his bamboo pipes. His baby daughter sleeps beside him, naked and filthy.

Yang Cangkun is trying to save his culture

For 25-year-old Yang Cangkun, this is the music of his people, the Miao, whose culture is different from that of the Han Chinese who make up 92% of China's population.

He wishes he could earn money by teaching local children about their culture. But like most people here, he has to leave the village to make a living.

At the root of the villagers' problems is a massive hydro-electric project, which saw their land flooded beneath a reservoir.

The fact the government built the dam without paying any compensation is still the root of great bitterness here.

"The government did this to us," said Yang Cangkun.

At this year's courtship festival, the girls are alone

"We're quite backward here. No one from here has ever gone to work in the government at the provincial level. When our land got flooded, no relief funds were given to us. So we are extremely sad about it," he said.

Politically and geographically the Miao feel marginalised, living in these beautiful but isolated mountain areas.

But government officials do not agree.

Yang Kairao, from the education department, who made the one-hour boat trip across the reservoir then hiked up the hillside to the village, said relations between the Miao and the government could not be closer.

"Ethnic minority groups like the Miao work under the leadership of the Communist Party and the government. And the relationship is extremely close. It's like the relationship between fish and water," he said.

Everyone in this village is Miao - part of the same ethnic group as the Hmong in Thailand. They are called the side comb Miao because women coil their hair around the head, fixing it with a comb at a rakish angle.

Their traditional clothes burst with rainbows of colour - stiff black skirts with pleated ribbons and jackets aflame with reds and pinks.

But young people do not wear them much any more - it just does not make economic sense, teacher Yang Mei said.

"We don't wear the old Miao clothes because we have to work and it takes too much effort and wastes too much money. A regular set of Miao clothes costs 200 Yuan ($25). We can use that money to buy two or three sets of Han clothes," she said.

Yang Mei met her husband at a match-making festival, known as Huapo Jie. It is a chance for young people to meet their partners, as they dance together.

"I noticed my husband," she said, "because he looked gorgeous with a long floating belt around his waist."

Village exodus

This year the villagers dressed up in their traditional clothes for the festival as usual, but there was no dancing or festivities.

With all the young men away working, village life has ground to a halt.

Most of the people who attended were young girls, and they were not happy.

"There are too few people here," one said. "I'm really disappointed. I just wanted to have fun but there's no dancing because everyone's gone."

For those who have stayed behind, life is cruel.

Yang Dingmen sobbed as she showed us how little food there was in her storeroom.

She has had to send her 18-year-old daughter out to make money. Her 80-year-old father-in-law is dying because the family cannot buy him medicine.

Her husband, Yang Chuanxin, still mouths the right slogans - but he knows reality does not measure up.

"It was good in the time of Chairman Mao and it's good now. After our fields were flooded, we didn't have any land any more, so we can't make a living," he said.

Yang Dingmei's father-in-law is dying

The fate of this small village speaks volumes about how minority groups are treated in China.

They are marginalised in a system dependent on political patronage, and their interests are often overlooked in the name of the greater good.

In today's cut-throat world, just surviving is the main battle. And to do that, many adults have to leave their villages.

In the process, they are being assimilated into the majority Han population, while the traditions that mark them out are withering away.

Back in the bare house, even the family's one comfort - the traditional pipes - are broken.

Mr Yang tries to play anyway.

"I don't know how to fix it," he said, "and there's no one left here who understands these things".