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
By Vanessa Chambers, Austin Saggus, Grant Schuermann, Christen Sikora
Dirty Docks By: Getty Images
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.
One way to address myths and misunderstandings about China is to view films and discuss them with experts from a range of fields and backgrounds. In February 2015, Furman hosted the Chinese Environmental Film Festival to accomplish this goal. Students from Debunking the Myths of China, a First Year Seminar class, helped coordinate festival publicity, refreshments, and logistics. Faculty participating in the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) exploratory grant and LIASE Student Fellows also helped make the festival a success. Festival sponsors provided financial support and helped procure the films needed for the festival screenings. Read more about the festival
Students in the First Year Seminar class, Debunking the Myths of China, prepare the Chinese Environmental Film Festival banner.Participants in the Chinese Environmental Film Festival included (from left to right) Ruheng Duoji, Emily Yeh, Tami Blumenfield, Onci Archei, Jenny Chio, Antonia Giles, and Fuji Lozada.
CHINA. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 7 Apr 2014. http://quest.eb.com/images/138_1108590
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.
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.”
Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest, “A Man Stands Over A Pile Of Used White P”, accessed 7 Apr 2014, http://quest.eb.com/images/115_2759933
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.
Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest, “Air Pollution Over Shanghai, China”, accessed 7 Apr 2014, http://quest.eb.com/images/132_1231890
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.
Works Cited:
Riviera, Gloria S. “Pollution in China: The Business of Bad Air.” World Affairs Journal, May-June 2013. Web. 09 Apr. 2014.
Attracted by cheap labor and lax regulations, many companies from all over the world have outsourced the production of their products to massive Chinese factories. The benefits of inexpensive production costs do come with a steep price, however. According to a CBS News article citing the World Bank in 2007, 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world were in China (Lagorio 2007).
Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest, “Air Pollution”, accessed 9 Apr 2014, http://quest.eb.com/images/132_1235077
More recently, in January of 2014, an article in theNew York Times illustrated how widespread pollution in China directly impacts the rest of the world. Based on a study led by nine scholars, published in the prominent scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,the studyfound that strong global winds called westerlies act as catalysts to intercontinental pollution. The westerly transport black carbon and other pollutants across the Pacific and deposit this toxic matter into Californian valleys and other areas of the Western US. Black carbon poses an especially high risk as it remains in the air even after rainfall. Cities such as Los Angeles suffer at least one extra day a year in which smog levels exceed federal ozone limits as a direct result of Chinese factory pollution (Wong 2014). Although the impact of Chinese pollution on American cities is small compared with America’s domestic pollution, when paired together it compounds the toxicity of the air we breathe each day. American cities are not alone in this, as many European and Asian countries are also impacted by the massive amounts of toxic air pumped out in China on a daily basis.
A woman overlooks the polluted Yangtze River. Courtesy: Getty Images
