Council on Foreign Relations, "CFR Backgrounders: China's Environmental Crisis," April 25, 2014

Introduction

A History of Pollution

While China's economic boom has greatly accelerated the devastation of its land and resources, the roots of its environmental problem stretch back centuries. Dynastic leaders consolidating territory and developing China's economy exploited the country's natural resources in ways that contributed to famines and natural disasters, writes CFR's Elizabeth Economy in The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future. Moreover, China's Confucian roots helped spur policies that often promoted man's use of nature, hindering the development of a conservation ethos. "China's current environmental situation is the result not only of policy choices made today but also of attitudes, approaches, and institutions that have evolved over centuries," Economy writes.

It wasn't until the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment that China began to develop its environmental institutions. It dispatched a delegation to the conference in Stockholm, but by then the country's environment was already in dire straits that were further exacerbated by economic reforms of the late 1970s. Spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, these reforms boosted China's industrial output at an average annual rate of more than 11.4 percent.

The legacy of decentralization characterized by Deng's reforms remains at the heart of China's environmental struggles today. The reforms diffused authority to the provinces, creating a proliferation of township and village enterprises (TVEs) to encourage development in rural industries. In 1997, TVEs generated almost a third of the national GDP. But local governments were difficult to monitor and therefore seldom upheld environmental standards. Today, environmental policies remain difficult to enforce at a local level, where officials often retain economic incentives to ignore them.

China's modernization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created a booming middle class. In some ways, the country's trajectory of industrialization is not unlike those of other modernizing nations, such as Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. But experts point to the nation's staggering size and pace of its growth, noting that its environmental effect on the world is far greater than that of any other single country. "It's on a scale and speed the world has never known," says Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

How Bad Is It?

China's energy consumption has ballooned, spiking 130 percent from 2000 to 2010. In January 2013, Beijing experienced a prolonged bout of smog so severe that citizens dubbed it "airpocalypse"; the concentration of hazardous particles was forty times the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Later that year, pollution in the northern city of Harbin shrank visibility to less than 50 meters. China Daily reported that December was the worst month in 2013 for air quality, with more than 80 percent of the seventy-four cities with air-monitoring devices failing to meet national standards for at least half the month. Based on a 2012 Asian Development Bank report, less than 1 percent of China's 500 largest cities meet the WHO's air quality standards.

Coal has been the main culprit in the degradation of air quality. China is the world's largest coal producer and accounts for almost half of global consumption. Coal is also the source of as much as 90 percent of the country's sulfur dioxide emissions and half of its particulate emissions. Mostly burned in the north, it provides around 70 percent of China's energy needs. However, emissions levels from coal plants alone in 2011 potentially contributed to a quarter of a million premature deaths that year, according to a Greenpeace analysis. Another troubling trend compounding air problems has been the country's staggering pace of urbanization, with the government planning to move 70 to 75 percent of China's population to cities between 2000 and 2030. China is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, having overtaken the United States in 2007.

Yet experts cite water depletion and pollution as the country's biggest environmental hazards. Overuse, contamination, and waste have produced severe shortages; approximately two-thirds of China's roughly 660 cities don't have enough water despite the fact that China controls the river water supply of thirteen neighboring countries and has dammed every major river on the Tibetan plateau. The impact is particularly felt in rural areas, where some 300 to 500 million people lack access to piped water. Industry along China's major water sources has also polluted the supply heavily; in 2005, a plant explosion leaked around one hundred tons of toxic chemicals into the Songhua river.

The pace of contamination has garnered increased media attention: in March 2013, Shanghai came under scrutiny when roughly 16,000 dead pigs were discovered floating through the Huangpu River. Lack of waste removal and proper processing has exacerbated the problem; almost 90 percent of underground water in cities and 70 percent of China's rivers and lakes are now polluted. Combined with negligent farming practices, the water crisis has turned China's arable land into desert, which today claims around 27.5 percent of China's total land mass. Some 400 million Chinese lives are affected by desertification, according to the government, and the World Bank estimates that the overall cost of water scarcity associated with pollution is around 147 billion RMB, or roughly 1 percent of GDP.

Cost of Environmental Damage

Environmental depredations pose a serious threat to China's economic growth, costing the country roughly 9 percent (PDF) of its gross national income, according to most recent figures from the World Bank. China's Ministry of Environmental Protection calculates its own "green GDP" number, estimating the cost of pollution at around 1.5 trillion RMB, or roughly 3.5 percent of GDP, according to its 2010 figures. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, the ministry has only been releasing such figures since 2006, and intermittently.

Data on the public-health toll of China's pollution paint a devastating picture. According to a Global Burden of Disease study, air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010. In late 2013, an eight-year-old girl in Jiangsu province became China's youngest lung cancer patient; doctors attribute her illness to air pollution. Epidemiological studies conducted since the 1980s in northern China suggest that urban air in China causes significant health complications, including respiratory, cardiovascular, and cerebrovascular diseases. The pollution has also been linked to the proliferation of acute and chronic diseases; estimates suggest that around 11 percent of digestive system cancers in China may stem from unsafe drinking water. Human cases of the avian flu (H7N9 virus), which broke out in China in March 2013 and has claimed more than forty lives, were caused by exposure to infected poultry and contaminated environments.

China's neighbors, including Japan and South Korea, have also expressed concern over acid rain and smog affecting their native populations. In May 2013, government officials of the three countries added air pollution and climate change to a list of diplomatic issues for the region to solve. Moreover, a recent study reported that emissions from China's export industries are worsening air pollution as far as the western United States.

The damage has also affected China's economic prospects as it continues to pursue resources and pump investment into other countries. Its close economic partners, particularly in the developing world, face costly environmental burdens attached with doing business with China, note CFR's Economy and Michael Levi in their book on China's quest for resources, By All Means Necessary.

Citizen Outrage

What's Being Done?