The Rising Dragon’S Environmental Disaster
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Asia Sentinel - The Rising Dragon’s Environmental Disaster http://www.asiasentinel.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=vie... The Rising Dragon’s Environmental Disaster Written by Jasper Becker WEDNESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2006 This is a chapter reprinted by arrangement with the National Geographic Society from the book Dragon Rising: An Inside Look at China Today By Jasper Becker. Copyright 2006 Jasper Becker. Its nose-curling stench hits you even before you see the floating carpet of green algae and a dense matting of water hyacinth. Once a beauty spot praised by poets, Dianchi Lake, around Kunming, the capital of subtropical Yunnan province, shows the cost to China of its frantic growth. “There are fewer fish and they keep getting smaller. They don’t taste good either,” complains fisherman Zhong Gaoling. When he was growing up, he said, the waters were crystal clear and there were 57 types of fish and shrimp to catch. Now, half of the species have vanished altogether and just six are worth catching. “When I was young you could swim in it and see the stones at the bottom,” he said. Now the bottom has poisonous sediment of cadmium, arsenic and lead three feet thick, which can only be removed by dredging. Wherever you go in this beautiful landscape that borders Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, you find a heartbreaking legacy of environmental mismanagement and the prospect of worse damage to come. Kunming has spent over US$2 billion on efforts to clean up the lake but it is still too toxic to drink, and nowhere near meeting the country's minimum quality standards. The industrial hub of a poor province with 42 million people, Kunming has around 5,000 industrial plants pouring effluent into the lake. For years, the municipal government would order, time after time, the worst polluters to shut down. “They just pretend, I can hear them when they secretly open again, sometimes at night,” Mr. Zhong scoffed. Many factories are still using machinery dating from the 1950s to produce chemical fertilizers or to process tine and phosphorous. And until the first wastewater plant was built in 1990, Kunming pumped ninety percent of the city's waste water directly into the lake untreated. Around 254 million cubic meters of wastewater is discharged into Dianchi Lake every year. “Even after treatment you still can't drink this water,” admits Wu Yihui, who manages a second plant which was built in 1996. Liang Congjie, the founder of Friends of Nature, a rare Chinese NGO, recalls swimming in Dianchi Lake as a student in the 1950s and speaks bitterly about the failure to clean up it up. “It is awful, they just made a kind of show,” he said. Liang said the authorities even poured chemicals into the lake to kill the algae and then filter it before Kunming staged an international horticultural exposition in 1999. To manipulate scientific data on the lake’s effluent levels and to make them match claims of success, local officials would resort to tricks like moving a monitoring station from one end of the lake to the other, cleaner, end to get better readings. Dianchi was once one of Asia’s biggest freshwater lakes but over the past fifty years, it has shrunk to a third of its former size and silted up. “Our per-capita supply of water is just one ninth of the national average,” says Mrs. Lin Kuang, spokeswoman for Dianchi Lake Regulatory Commission. “Without the water we can't grow our economy.” In its search to find drinking water, Kunming has had to build reservoirs and dams on rivers ever further away. Since the 1980s, the city has relied on water channelled from the Songhua Dam reservoir in the mountains some 50 miles away. Now as the city prepares to expand, it simultaneously been forced to invest in an even bigger engineering project to divert water from other rivers like the Golden Sands River 120 miles to the north. 1 of 6 15/11/2011 11:29 AM Asia Sentinel - The Rising Dragon’s Environmental Disaster http://www.asiasentinel.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=vie... Major cities across the country are grappling with the same threats as Kunming and water is only one facet of a crisis which, if unchecked, could overwhelm the whole modernization project. Its origins can be traced to a mixture of inherited problems and new ones but in both cases the root causes are political. The environment poses one of the gravest threats to the political stability of the country because it lays bare for all to see the failure of the political system. The environmental protest movements and failures like the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant spurred the downfall of the Soviet system in the 1980s. It is remarkable that so far nothing similar has happened in China because the failures are as painfully evident here. Disputes over pollution are one of the chief reasons for the rapid growth of grass-roots protests in China. In Yunnan it all started in the early 1950s when the state sent logging companies to fell the forests and settle hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Virgin tropical forest still covered most of the mountains and plains. The great rivers -- the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, rise in the high Himalayan Plateau and flow in parallel through some magnificent steep gorges which had been so remote that Western explorers only saw them at the turn of the last century. One of them was the explorer Joseph Rock, whose travels in the 1930s, published in the National Geographic, made Yunnan’s flora and fauna internationally famous. As Rock revealed, Yunnan is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, with half the nation’s animal species and a quarter of its plants species. It was still largely untouched by the modern world in 1949. Rock traveled everywhere on foot and horse, and sometimes had to be carried by porters. More than anywhere in China, the blame for what has gone wrong cannot be laid anywhere but on the post-1949 government. In a short few decades Yunnan’s rivers and lakes including Dianchi have all silted up. Even the more recently built dams have begun suffer as the sediment accumulated in the reservoirs and industrial and agricultural effluents have poisoned the water in them. In this chapter my journey starts in Kunming at a meeting of environmental NGOs and end at the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a chasm through which the Golden Sands River hurtles beneath the snow-capped Jade Dragon Mountain. A dam may soon be built across the gorge and may soon block all of Yunnan’s great rivers, the last pristine rivers left in China. If the dams are not stopped, the rich diversity which Joseph Rock marveled at will be doomed. It is an easy call to make because one by one all of China’s great rivers have already been ruined. The dire state of the country's rivers is the most visible evidence of the ecological mismanagement which began during the Mao era and has continued in the market economy that followed. The Chinese Communists borrowed from Stalin the philosophy that “man must conquer nature” rather than live in harmony with it. Stalin’s economic policies required rapid electrification. This in turn depended on the construction of large-scale hydro- electric schemes and nuclear power stations which could demonstrate man’s technological mastery of one of the great forces of nature. Under Mao, China paid no attention at all to the principles of sustainable growth. In fact people actually felt proud of pollution because it was a sign of progress. The more chimneys belching out dirty smoke, the more successful and developed a place could claim to be. Mao had cultural and historical reasons to be even more eager to conquer China’s rivers. China’s civilization developed in river valleys and each dynasty depended on its ability to mobilize large numbers to prevent floods and irrigate fields to ensure its prosperity. Mao was especially eager to tame the Yellow River, whose frequent devastating floods gave it the name “China’s sorrow.” Soviet engineers arrived soon after 1950 and started planning the construction of 46 giant dams across the Yellow River. Before 1949, China had built just 40 small hydropower projects and only a handful of larger ones. At the same time Chinese students were sent to the Soviet Union to study hydro-electrical engineering. Among them was the future prime minister Li Peng, who began to harbor the ambition to erect a dam bigger even than any Stalin had built, a dam across the Yangtze at the Three Gorges. Nothing less would do to demonstrate China’s maturity as a great power. The Soviet experts with drew in 1959 in the midst of a great ideological dispute between Moscow and Beijing, before the first of these Yellow River dams could be completed. The Chinese decided to press on themselves regardless but the Sanmen Xia dam proved to be a disastrous mistake because, for one thing, the reservoir quickly silted up. Some 300,000 peasants were pushed off their land and many died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Later engineering efforts have not managed to make it a success and 40 years on locals have petitioned the government to dismantle the dam. Even so China continued during the Great Leap Forward with an ambitious dam-building program. Like latter-day Pharaohs, the Communist Party mobilized huge resources and manpower to build dams, big and small. They were built everywhere at a furious pace and often without any proper planning or tools, and sometimes in defiance of basic engineering principles.