A project of the Furman University First Year Seminar taught by Dr. Tami Blumenfield
//Hannah Tyson, Darcy Waskiewicz, Stephen Reynolds
Introduction and Health Concerns
Imagine walking outside and choking on the air you breath. Think of a world where you have to put a mask on your children to protect their lungs. Seeing the sun is a rare occurrence for you due to smog and pollution. This is not an imaginary world, this is China.
//By Caroline Wolcott, Lena Dufresne, Anna Walters, and Graham Robbins
Contaminated baby formula, water contaminated by sewage, and unsafe swimming conditions are frightening realities in China. These issues span over numerous aspects of everyday life including people’s eating habits, health, and lifestyle. A large percentage of this contamination can be attributed to many years of uncontrolled industrial pollution, seeing as though industry is a large majority of the Chinese economy.
A woman overlooks the polluted Yangtze River. Courtesy: Getty Images
Continue reading “Water Pollution: It Affects More Than Just Your Tea”
//By Vanessa Chambers, Austin Saggus, Grant Schuermann, Christen Sikora
Has the Chinese Government stopped or slowed down progress for environmental activism in China? Is China trying to stop or dilute this sort of activism? Is China polluting environmental activism? The answers may surprise you. Pollution in China is a serious issue and needs to be dealt with as this issue continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Continue reading “Is China Polluting Environmental Activism?”
//By Thomas Stubbs, Connor Courtney, Christian Frabitore, Simone Alimonti, and Kate Stevens
Like the rest of China’s economy, the tourism industry is growing at an almost unimaginable rate. Travel was highly restricted for Chinese citizens until the mid-1980s, but since then it has become a form of leisure affordable for an ever-increasing number of people. For example, when Hong Kong was finally made open to mainland Chinese in 1997, soon they made up 75% of the island’s tourist population. Until the mid-2000s most Chinese tourists still traveled in big tour groups to keep their trips affordable, but since then independent tourism has become much more commonplace (Chan and Zakkour). Since more people have money and a desire to travel there has been a growth in tourism in the rural villages of China, as seen in one of our Chinese Environmental Film Festival Films, Peasant Family Happiness. The pumping of new economic life into these traditional agricultural villages would seem to be a positive occurrence. However, the conversion of an agricultural community into a tourist mecca comes with certain consequences. Continue reading “Chinese Village Tourism”
//By Caroline Gunter and Plicca Watt
You are probably assuming the only type of pollution is environmental, well the Chinese Government says otherwise. One particular type of pollution in China is spiritual pollution. In the early 1980’s the Communist Party led a campaign against what they coined “spiritual pollution”. In reality, the campaign was a way to keep the western cultural and economic influences out of China. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign started at the conclusion of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Political leader and activist Deng Xiaoping gave a speech criticizing the academic circles for focusing too heavily on humanization, calling it un-marxist. In 1984 the New York Times describes the campaign saying the exemptions include “fashionable clothing, youthful aspirations for a better life, science and technology, religious belief, Western musical, art and literary classics and economic prosperity, including commerce with the West.” The Party’s main idea was by terming any western influence vaguely as spiritual pollution they could portray to the people to stay away from just about anything. The propaganda ministry removed any of it from the countryside, hereby excluding a huge portion of Chinese population. This campaign ended within three months of its beginning. It is clear that the Chinese Government did not see labeling foreign ideals as spiritual pollution as a wise or successful choice.
Work Cited:
“Spiritual Pollution Thirty Years On” by Geremie R Barmé in Australian Centre on China in the World on 17 November 2013.
http://www.thechinastory.org/2013/11/spiritual-pollution-thirty-years-on/
“China Is Said To End a Campaign To Stop ‘Spiritual Pollution’” by Christopher S. Wren in The New York Times on 24 January 1984.
“The Rise and Fall of the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution in the People’s Republic of China” by Shu-Shin Wang in Asian Affairs in 1986.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30172073
//By Plicca Watt
In the Eastern coastal Chinese city of Hangzhou shrewd entrepreneurs are turning the city’s trash into valuable, clean energy. The Hangzhou Environmental Group (HEG) has transformed the city’s decades- old landfill into a methane gas powered energy plant and even attracts tourists to the plant site with environmental video games, hikes in the eco- park, and so called “trash tours.”
When garbage decomposes, a toxic methane gas is released which warms the earth twenty times faster than carbon dioxide. The HEG’s power plant traps and transforms the harmful gas into clean energy. Not only is this a profitable way to produce energy, but this system also helps curb pollution and better the environment in China. Part of the reason why China has experienced problems with pollution in recent years is due to the exorbitant economic growth. With a growing middle class, more Chinese people the economic ability to purchase consumer goods which in turn means more garbage is produced that will end up in the Chinese landfills. Even the Chinese government have shown concern for the nation’s environmental and pollution issues. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao states, “Environmental pollution has become a major problem in China’s current development and it has not been addressed well.”
It is encouraging to see that the Chinese have emerged with ingenious solutions, such as the Hangzhou Environmental Group’s landfill to energy plant, that facilitate not only economic growth, but also environmental health.
Works Cited:
Liu, Coco. “Turning Trash to Gold in China.” Scientific American Global RSS. N.p., 1 June 2011. Web. 7 Apr. 2014. <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/turning-trash-to-gold-in-china/>.
“Premier Wen Jiabao Meets Press.”Premier Wen Jiabao Meets Press. Consulate of the People’s Republic of China, n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2014. <http://toronto.china-consulate.org/eng/topics/lianghui/t240621.ht
//By Tommy Hauver, Michael Tan and Claire Mathon
Before the Cultural Revolution, long hours during the day were not uncommon for villagers. Part of the long workdays was the long walk to the farming plot. Since some villages were based next to maintain sides, they would use hill plots to do the majority of their farming, it would take up to 2-3 hour just to the farming plots. Another reason for their hard work was due to the thin topsoil that would lie on these hill plots. Because of the thin topsoil, the arable lands become fewer and fewer, which leads to problems with their food. Since the land that could be farmed on was few, it became tough for some villages to support all of the citizens. This caused those villages to boil the rice in watery gruel to make it last longer for every meal. Another aspect of the villagers’ lives that was impacted was their diet. Due to the fact that meat was mostly eaten on special occasions, dried fish, pickles, and beans made up the starch side of their diet. Finally, vegetables were a rare food to be eaten in certain villages, because of the belief that vegetables needed to be cooked in oil, and few peanuts were grown. (Anita Chan, Chen Village, pgs 14-15) 
Continue reading “Urbanization: Farming and Food in Villages Before Cultural Revolution”
//By Tommy Hauver, Claire Mathon and Michael Tan
Before the Cultural Revolution, some of these Chinese villages might have seemed picturesque form a distance. With few villages remotely near by, even the market area being miles away, villages seemed quaint, especially the ones that were pressed up against the mountainside, with a stream that might run near by. Although, at a closer range, it might not be as picturesque as one may think. With “roads”, if they can even be called roads, are made completely of dirt, so when it rains the roads are slippery and flooded. Then there are the houses. Only using brick for small sections of their foundation, the people in the villages, ranging around one thousand citizens for some villages, built the houses mostly of plastered mud. Because of the little brick for foundation, and being made mostly out of the plastered mud, the houses turned out to be very steep-peaked and narrow. This resulted in the houses breaking down, as well as reeking of rotting plants and meats that were kept in the houses with the families. (Anita Chan, Chen Village, pg 13)
See also:
Village Farming and Food Before Cultural Revolution
Urbanization: Chinese Cultural Revolution
Urbanization of Chinese Villages After Cultural Revolution
Continue reading “Urbanization: Layout of Villages Before the Cultural Revolution”
//By Graham Dabbs and Caroline Gunter
Some people hold a stereotype that China is a dirty and polluted country. I decided to investigate this and find out about Chinese air pollution. The first thing you have to understand about air pollution is how it is measured. Pollution levels are measured using the air quality index or AQI. This takes into consideration particulate size as well as concentration in the air. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s the reading outside of Beijing Embassy was seven hundred and fifty five. To put this into perspective a reading about three hundred and one is considered an extremely hazardous emergency situation. This means the particles in the air are large enough to “travel down into the lungs and bloodstream and potentially cause severe damage in the organs” (World Affairs Journal). This air pollution also has a cultural impact. According to online chinese retailer (taobao.com) the word “mask” was searched 5,300% more than usual. There was also an increase in the air purifiers business. This indicates not only that the Chinese people were aware of the problem, but also interested in fixing the issue. But the real question is what action is the Chinese government taking to bring awareness to and correct the problem? “in 2012, in response to growing public pressure, Beijing started to regularly monitor and publish its own AQI readings for air around the country. Now there are more than eighty monitoring systems in place in China’s major cities and this year, for the first time, officials issued emergency warnings and allowed pollution to be covered on state-run television.” (World Affairs Journal). As you can see, the air pollution in China is at a dangerous levels, but with the growing environmental movement people are becoming aware and working for a change.
//By M. Baker
When the selection of the city of Beijing as the host city for the 2008 Olympics was announced on July 13, 2001, it sparked a wave of excitement across China and marked a new period of change for the city. This period of change before the 2008 Olympics transformed the city in many ways, but perhaps the biggest changes for the city came in the form of a transformed skyline and new infrastructure.
Prior to the selection of Beijing as an Olympic host city, the physical landscape of Beijing was similar to many other cities across China. Buildings were either old holdovers from dynasties past or distinctly utilitarian high-rises built in the communist era when waste and extravagance was severely frowned upon. These communist-era buildings were often bland and made of brick or stone or other cheap materials.
For the Beijing Olympics, government officials strove to present Beijing as a truly international city. In order to fulfill this goal, Chinese government officials embarked on a huge campaign to change the landscape of Beijing in several ways. First, they set about improving the overall infrastructure of the city: hundreds of miles of subway lines were added, the airport was expanded and updated, and new facilities for the Olympics were built, including the Water Cube and the famous Bird’s Nest Stadium.
Next, the Chinese government decided to preserve—at least artificially—some distinctly Chinese structures from the pre-communist era as a tribute the China’s past. This move was vastly different from the previous actions of the government in the communist era, who tended to emphasize progress over cultural history—see the Cultural Revolution.
Finally, new development and architectural innovation was strongly encouraged as China attempted to turn Beijing into a truly international city akin to New York, London, or Paris. Buildings were made to impress and show “face” for China: the new National Theatre, the Bird’s Nest Stadium, the Water Cube, and the CCTV building are all examples of this new age of Chinese architecture that came about because of the preparations for the 2008 Olympics.
Overall, Beijing was radically transformed physically for the Olympics. These changes have had a lasting impact on Beijing, particularly because of the new infrastructure and new skyline filled with modern, architecturally distinct buildings. However, some argue that the changes made for the Olympics have not done much for the city. In an article for The New York Times, Michael Wines details how the flagship stadiums built for the Olympics stand mostly empty four years later: “By most accounts, the vendors hawking trinkets outside the stadium outnumber the foreigners who go there to gawk.”
On the other hand, most residents of Beijing had positive feelings for the changes brought about because of the Olympics: even Grandma Gao, a woman who had previously lived in a hutong village within Beijing and was forcibly relocated to make room for the new National Stadium, reported that her life had “changed for the better”.
The changes brought about by the Olympics have drastically transformed Beijing, even years after the Olympics. While the urgency for such change has slowed, today Beijing continues to change its landscape in its continuing quest to present the best “face” to the world.
See Also:
Before and After the Beijing Olympics: Economic Change
Before and After the Beijing Olympics: Political Change
Sources:
Beijing: Changed by the Olympics, Film. Directed by Duffy Wang (Oakland, CA: D3 Productions, 2008).
Curtis Ashton, “Beijing’s Museums in the Context of the 2008 Olympics,” in Cultural Heritage: Politics in China, eds. Tami Blumenfield and Helaine Silverman, 187-203. (New York: Springer, 2013).
Wines, Michael, “After Summer Olympics, Empty Shells in Beijing,” The New York Times, February 6, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/weekinreview/07wines.html (accessed March 3, 2014).