A pedestrian wearing a protective mask in Beijing, January 17, 2012. Decades of coal-powered industrialization combined with the government-promoted car craze have brought China the worst air pollution in the world.
Credit: Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times
This article seeks to explain why China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland and the proximate causes, including overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compounded the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with […]
This is a very long, extremely well written article. Having been to China twice [2011 & 2012], I can attest to much of what is written here, as I have seen this first hand. Cities built for 1 million souls, mostly empty but still maintained by a ghost squad of 30,000 seen from the train between Beijing and Lhasa Tibet.
My guide told me that there are no longer enough people in the countryside to handle the wild fires and bring in the harvests.
Simply stated, **as goes China so goes the world**. Pray for a breakdown soon.
Truly a frightening scenario for the Chinese people and the rest of the world. Western economies have become heavily dependent on cheap Chinese labor for manufacturing and a collapse of their economy would deeply affect us all.