Chinese regime suppresses green protests
Saturday, 14 July 2007.
Clean-up programme ”going backwards” says top official – pollution kills hundreds of thousands every year
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info
”China’s environment is close to breaking point and the situation is endangering people’s lives,” exclaimed Pan Yue, vice-minister at the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).
”Pursuit of short-term goals is leading to ever increasing pollution despite various measures,” Pan was quoted saying in China Daily (4 July). These remarks were made as China officially edged past the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide – the main ’greenhouse’ gas responsible for global warming. China’s economy produced 8 percent more carbon dioxide than the US in 2006, according to a report last month from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Pan’s comments coincided with yet another dangerous spill involving chemical waste that forced authorities to cut off drinking water for 200,000 residents in Shuyang county, Jiangsu province. A factory had been dumping hazardous levels of ammonia and other chemicals into a river, forcing the suspension of water supplies, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
More than 70 percent of China’s waterways and 90 percent of its underground water are contaminated by pollution, according to government reports. 26 percent of this water is ”dangerous even to bathe in” according to SEPA. The Chinese regime has promised to cut emissions of major pollutants by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010, but the problem has worsened this year despite such noisy promises.
”Now areas that had improved are suffering renewed pollution,” according to Pan. Another SEPA spokesman, Zhou Shengxien, revealed that a recent survey had found 75 percent of water purification plants on major rivers and reservoirs were not working. The report showed that 44 percent of 500 companies investigated were breaking environmental laws.
The crisis in Shuyang county last week follows an even bigger mains cut-off in the city of Wuxi, population 2.3m, in the same province in May. Jiangsu is one of the fastest growing and wealthiest provinces in China. Its ’communist’ party secretary, Li Yuanchao, is widely tipped as a possible successor to Hu Jintao as China’s president. Li’s calamitous environmental record in Jiangsu does not bode well for China’s deepening environmental crisis should these predictions prove correct.
Misunderstandings?
China’s ruling ’communist’ party desperately wants to reassure the public it has a plan to deal with the wholesale destruction of waterways, farmland and the atmosphere as a result of runaway industrialisation. The Chinese economy is growing at around 12 percent – the fastest clip since 1995. But this growth is driven by a mad chase after profits with complete disregard for the long-term cost in terms of human and natural resources.
The latest warnings from Pan Yue and SEPA underline the growing frustration of an agency at the forefront of the ’clean-up’ campaign that carries very little weight in practise. ”Past SEPA controls on development appear to have been widely ignored,” the Financial Times (5 July) noted. An incident last week illustrates this. A copper company in the city of Tongling, Anhui province, refused entrance to SEPA inspectors.
”If even SEPA, exercising the authority of central government, cannot gain access, then how could environmental protection departments under the local government ever get in?” Pan was quoted saying in the Financial Times (6 July). The company claimed the incident was a ”misunderstanding” as a result of security guards not recognising the SEPA inspectors’ credentials!
Meanwhile the central government in Beijing is becoming increasingly alarmed by the spread of environmental protests. Anti-pollution protests and disputes increased by 30 percent in 2005 to more than 50 000, according to official statistics. SEPA received 1,814 citizen petitions in the first five months of this year demanding an improved environment – an 8 percent rise on the same period of 2006, according to Xinhua. This year in early June, 20,000 took to the streets of Xiamen in one of the largest urban-based protests for years, forcing the city government to delay plans for a high-polluting petrochemical factory.
Hundreds of farmers near Mount Emei in Sichuan province blocked a highway last week, starting their action on Tuesday 10 July, to protest against an aluminum company responsible for a gas leak that contaminated grapes and other crops, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported. Five protesters were arrested and ten injured when police broke up the protest.
The ruling party wants to clean up the environment, because of the political instability the issue is generating but also because of the massive drain it represents on economic resources – a recent World Bank study estimates the health costs of air and water pollution to amount to about 4.3 percent of China’s GDP. By adding the non-health impacts of pollution, which are estimated to be about 1.5 percent of GDP, the total cost of air and water pollution is about 5.8 percent of GDP, according to the report compiled in cooperation with the Beijing government. This represents a staggering 511 billion dollars based on the IMF’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) calculations of China’s GDP in 2006 (of 8.8 trillion dollars).
Fear of mass protests
But despite its increasing fear over the effects of this destruction and waste, the regime is determined to block increasing mass pressure, which it rightly sees as a potential threat to its own rule. Following the protests in Xiamen, mobilised with the help of the internet and mobile phone messages, the city government has introduced new draconian internet regulations in an attempt to flush out or silence the ’instigators’ of mass protests. Even Pan Yue, the SEPA spokesman, has attempted to block publication of the World Bank’s latest report, The Cost of Pollution in China, fearing it could trigger ”social unrest”.
SEPA and other ministries want to suppress around a third of the report, according to reports in the Financial Times (3 July), in particular a detailed ”map” of pollution hotspots that Beijing fears will incite local communities to take to the streets. The worst-hit area of China, according to the report, is the northern coal-belt around Shanxi province, the centre of another recent scandal involving slavery and human trafficking. The World Bank report revises upwards the number of Chinese who meet a premature death each year as a result of airborne pollution, from 400,000 to 700,000. Waterborne pollutants cause an additional 60,000 premature deaths a year.
”Traditional administrative methods cannot resolve the accumulated environmental problems,” Pan said in a statement on SEPA’s website. This is self-evident, but what officials like Pan Yue mean by this is that ’market forces’ must be given even greater rein for example by charging higher ’global market’ prices for fuel and raw materials, and speeding up deregulation and market mechanisms over state-owned utilities. The evidence from countries where such methods have been adopted - the United States for example – is hardly encouraging.
The one force that turn the tide on China’s terrifying ecological descent is the very force the regime is trying its utmost to suppress – mass action by workers, youth and farmers to close down the polluters and save their communities while there is still time. New attempts at censorship and repression, however, will not succeed. The political awakening exemplified by mass protests in Xiamen, Huaxi and Dongzhou is an unstoppable process. In the coming peirod such movements will converge, develop stronger organisational ties and lay the foundations for fighting workers’ organisations and trade unions as an answer to the disastrous rule of capitalists and bureaucrats.
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info
”China’s environment is close to breaking point and the situation is endangering people’s lives,” exclaimed Pan Yue, vice-minister at the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).
”Pursuit of short-term goals is leading to ever increasing pollution despite various measures,” Pan was quoted saying in China Daily (4 July). These remarks were made as China officially edged past the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide – the main ’greenhouse’ gas responsible for global warming. China’s economy produced 8 percent more carbon dioxide than the US in 2006, according to a report last month from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Pan’s comments coincided with yet another dangerous spill involving chemical waste that forced authorities to cut off drinking water for 200,000 residents in Shuyang county, Jiangsu province. A factory had been dumping hazardous levels of ammonia and other chemicals into a river, forcing the suspension of water supplies, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
More than 70 percent of China’s waterways and 90 percent of its underground water are contaminated by pollution, according to government reports. 26 percent of this water is ”dangerous even to bathe in” according to SEPA. The Chinese regime has promised to cut emissions of major pollutants by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010, but the problem has worsened this year despite such noisy promises.
”Now areas that had improved are suffering renewed pollution,” according to Pan. Another SEPA spokesman, Zhou Shengxien, revealed that a recent survey had found 75 percent of water purification plants on major rivers and reservoirs were not working. The report showed that 44 percent of 500 companies investigated were breaking environmental laws.
The crisis in Shuyang county last week follows an even bigger mains cut-off in the city of Wuxi, population 2.3m, in the same province in May. Jiangsu is one of the fastest growing and wealthiest provinces in China. Its ’communist’ party secretary, Li Yuanchao, is widely tipped as a possible successor to Hu Jintao as China’s president. Li’s calamitous environmental record in Jiangsu does not bode well for China’s deepening environmental crisis should these predictions prove correct.
Misunderstandings?
China’s ruling ’communist’ party desperately wants to reassure the public it has a plan to deal with the wholesale destruction of waterways, farmland and the atmosphere as a result of runaway industrialisation. The Chinese economy is growing at around 12 percent – the fastest clip since 1995. But this growth is driven by a mad chase after profits with complete disregard for the long-term cost in terms of human and natural resources.
The latest warnings from Pan Yue and SEPA underline the growing frustration of an agency at the forefront of the ’clean-up’ campaign that carries very little weight in practise. ”Past SEPA controls on development appear to have been widely ignored,” the Financial Times (5 July) noted. An incident last week illustrates this. A copper company in the city of Tongling, Anhui province, refused entrance to SEPA inspectors.
”If even SEPA, exercising the authority of central government, cannot gain access, then how could environmental protection departments under the local government ever get in?” Pan was quoted saying in the Financial Times (6 July). The company claimed the incident was a ”misunderstanding” as a result of security guards not recognising the SEPA inspectors’ credentials!
Meanwhile the central government in Beijing is becoming increasingly alarmed by the spread of environmental protests. Anti-pollution protests and disputes increased by 30 percent in 2005 to more than 50 000, according to official statistics. SEPA received 1,814 citizen petitions in the first five months of this year demanding an improved environment – an 8 percent rise on the same period of 2006, according to Xinhua. This year in early June, 20,000 took to the streets of Xiamen in one of the largest urban-based protests for years, forcing the city government to delay plans for a high-polluting petrochemical factory.
Hundreds of farmers near Mount Emei in Sichuan province blocked a highway last week, starting their action on Tuesday 10 July, to protest against an aluminum company responsible for a gas leak that contaminated grapes and other crops, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported. Five protesters were arrested and ten injured when police broke up the protest.
The ruling party wants to clean up the environment, because of the political instability the issue is generating but also because of the massive drain it represents on economic resources – a recent World Bank study estimates the health costs of air and water pollution to amount to about 4.3 percent of China’s GDP. By adding the non-health impacts of pollution, which are estimated to be about 1.5 percent of GDP, the total cost of air and water pollution is about 5.8 percent of GDP, according to the report compiled in cooperation with the Beijing government. This represents a staggering 511 billion dollars based on the IMF’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) calculations of China’s GDP in 2006 (of 8.8 trillion dollars).
Fear of mass protests
But despite its increasing fear over the effects of this destruction and waste, the regime is determined to block increasing mass pressure, which it rightly sees as a potential threat to its own rule. Following the protests in Xiamen, mobilised with the help of the internet and mobile phone messages, the city government has introduced new draconian internet regulations in an attempt to flush out or silence the ’instigators’ of mass protests. Even Pan Yue, the SEPA spokesman, has attempted to block publication of the World Bank’s latest report, The Cost of Pollution in China, fearing it could trigger ”social unrest”.
SEPA and other ministries want to suppress around a third of the report, according to reports in the Financial Times (3 July), in particular a detailed ”map” of pollution hotspots that Beijing fears will incite local communities to take to the streets. The worst-hit area of China, according to the report, is the northern coal-belt around Shanxi province, the centre of another recent scandal involving slavery and human trafficking. The World Bank report revises upwards the number of Chinese who meet a premature death each year as a result of airborne pollution, from 400,000 to 700,000. Waterborne pollutants cause an additional 60,000 premature deaths a year.
”Traditional administrative methods cannot resolve the accumulated environmental problems,” Pan said in a statement on SEPA’s website. This is self-evident, but what officials like Pan Yue mean by this is that ’market forces’ must be given even greater rein for example by charging higher ’global market’ prices for fuel and raw materials, and speeding up deregulation and market mechanisms over state-owned utilities. The evidence from countries where such methods have been adopted - the United States for example – is hardly encouraging.
The one force that turn the tide on China’s terrifying ecological descent is the very force the regime is trying its utmost to suppress – mass action by workers, youth and farmers to close down the polluters and save their communities while there is still time. New attempts at censorship and repression, however, will not succeed. The political awakening exemplified by mass protests in Xiamen, Huaxi and Dongzhou is an unstoppable process. In the coming peirod such movements will converge, develop stronger organisational ties and lay the foundations for fighting workers’ organisations and trade unions as an answer to the disastrous rule of capitalists and bureaucrats.
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