Eye on China: Local corruption, global pollution

There have been many doomsayers about China. Gordon Chang started the trend five years ago with his book, The Coming Collapse of China. Englishman Joe Studwell followed up with his China Dreams. The arguments of both books, based on economics and business, were proved wrong.

As is often the cruel fate of forecasters, exactly the opposite happened just after they had pronounced it. After 2001, China's growth really took off and recorded its highest level of a decade in 2005.

The debate essentially revolves around whether China has found its own route to prosperity - or whether China's atypical economic model will result in systemic failure. It was the latter conclusion which was adopted by Chang and Studwell.

But for the last year or so, analysts have flip-flopped: China has become less different - in fact almost dull. Authors and researchers say we should stop getting in a flap about China and just regard the continent as another rapidly-growing country like Japan, Taiwan or South Korea 20 years ago.

Yet is it? Evidence is increasingly coming from a new angle - the environmental one - that China really is a rather frightening, unpredictable and powerful force on the international scene.

Forget about a Chinese recession but take a look at what growth at the rate and scale of China's growth is doing to the environment. We all know that change is accelerating, thanks to all the familiar arguments about globalisation, the internet and information technology - but China is just so damn large.

The country burned up two billion tonnes of coal last year - and that could rise to eight billion tonnes in the next five years (that is, double, and double again).

Pollution is, of course, an unhelpfully simple word to describe the manifold effects of economic modernisation.

Take a look at the latest environmental white paper from the Chinese Government and it lists dozens of hot spots: water shortage (aquifers running out of water in northern China); water pollution by paper mills, tanning factories and chemical plants; inadequately treated drinking water; rubbish (such as plastic bags blowing across the Gobi desert in their thousands); energy-related air pollution from coal and diesel and cars and power stations; environmental damage caused by deforestation (itself caused by lower levels of water); and dam building.

You also have the carbon dioxide problem, given off by China's burning of fossil fuels, and which could accelerate the greenhouse effect.

Yet many scientists and engineers I have spoken to are optimistic these problems can be solved. China is so wasteful and there are relatively simple ways for cutting emissions: Raising energy prices and introducing new technologies for burning fuels more cleanly.

But the political and cultural problems are far more intractable. Chinese officials are a ruthless, ambitious class. They have been promised promotion based on economic growth and they don't want this now-familiar ladder to social mobility being ruined by the bleatings of cancerous peasants and tree huggers.

A senior environmentalist divulged to me last week in Beijing that at a huge chemical spill six months ago, the local government forbade sick residents to go for a medical checkup. Up to 200,000 people were affected with heavy metal poisoning.

When I asked where President Hu and Premier Wen stood on this matter, my source shrugged his shoulders. "These people are wavering. They are in the middle of conflicting forces and they must try to forge a consensus," he answered.

What's clear is that the many admiring comments about the power of the Beijing political elite to ram through change are wrong.

Major changes are frequently thwarted at local level - easily done in a country as vast as China. There are too many bureaucratic levels through which orders have to be filtered. This translates as so many opportunities for bribery.

Promotion is not the only reason officials want to continue with development. Just as important is the fact that economic development makes officials wealthy. Like any proper blood-sucking bureaucracy, they have perfected the fine balance of encouraging as much economic activity as possible while milking as much of it for themselves as possible.

Pollution control is an ideal corner to be cut. Why? Because in poorly regulated societies, the cost of pollution is easily pushed away from the polluter to others, through contaminating air and drinking water.

Making the bureaucracy serve the country - as opposed to vice-versa - is a political problem which China has never solved.

For me, the practical political problems thrown up by China's unreformed governing structure are far more disturbing than the country's economics.

* Eye on China is a journalist based in Beijing.