When a Billion Chinese Jump (16 page)

Rather than cut down on consumption, which would hurt economic growth, governments encouraged citizens to recycle, which appeared to be a clean, efficient alternative to burning and landfilling. But all too often this meant sending the waste overseas, particularly to China.
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The rubbish was not supposed to be dumped. That was prohibited by EU and U.S. law, but shipments of nonhazardous waste were permitted for recycling.
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This loophole allowed rich nations to deceive themselves that they were cleaning up, even though little or no effort was made to ensure the shipped waste was dealt with properly at the other end. In effect, much of it was swept under a Guangdong carpet.

Not surprisingly, the dubious ethics involved prompted comparisons with the opium trade.
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But the Guangdong authorities were as indifferent to illegal waste as their Cantonese forebears were to illicit drugs. Perhaps the province’s geography has shaped its destiny. Lying close to foreign borders and far from the center of state power in Beijing, the control-dodging character of the region is encapsulated in the expression
shangao huangdiyuan,
“the mountains are high and the emperor far away.” This far south, the authority of the state is stretched to its limits. A locally based UK diplomat once told me she proposed a collaboration with the Guangdong officials based on new energy efficiency laws that had just been passed by the state. The response: “We don’t think those laws apply to us.”

Weak governance and dire pollution go hand in hand. China’s political system is neither dictatorship nor democracy. For the environment, it contains the worst elements of both. At the top, the state lacks the authority to impose pollution regulations and wildlife conservation laws, while at the bottom citizens lack the democratic tools of a free press, independent courts, and elections to defend their land, air, and water. The gap in between is filled by local governments, township enterprises, migrant workers, and foreign corporations, many of which are focused on economic growth at the expense of all else. The result is neither red nor green; it is black or gray. Money is concentrated in this bulging middle belt, which is also the main source of corruption and pollution. With such weak regulation and political accountability, rubbish can be sent to Guangdong in the name of nonhazardous recycling, but the end result is often toxic rubbish dumps that damage the health of local people.

Guiyu is the world’s computer graveyard.
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To get there, I drove through giant manufacturing towns I had never heard of, including Chendian, which billboard after billboard of giant seminaked women declared to be the global center of bra production. Farther along the road, the skies darkened and rain began tapping on the taxi roof. I passed a funeral procession. The mourners wore transparent plastic macs over their traditional white
funeral garb as they walked through the drizzle. Soon after, I reached the town where motherboards went to die, where hard drives were softened up, and memory cards were erased beyond the reach of any Control Z. The streets were stacked with green circuit boards, computer casings, and reams of cables, leads, and wires. Locals sat among mounds of brightly colored plastic, hand-sorting the waste by shade and type.

Stopping and talking to locals was risky. The dirty conditions and low wages made e-waste a sensitive topic. Several journalists had previously been detained here. At least one team had been attacked.
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I asked the driver to park on a side road, where my Western face and the taxi’s out-of-town number plate would attract less attention. I wandered over to a makeshift outdoor workshop where a bare-chested old man was sorting through huge earthenware pots of tiny plastic pellets under a net awning. The colors were separated in tubs of chemical compounds: green pellets sank, purple floated to the surface. It was a smelly, time-consuming process for which the man earned about 40 yuan per day. He said he had been processing waste from around the world for twenty years, but his garrulity ended as a crowd gathered. The old man asked me to leave: “No journalists. I already get into trouble from time to time with the tax authorities.”

It was a similar story in dozens of small warehouses nearby. In one, a child was helping to strip circuit boards. In another, a woman removed whatever white plastic she could find from a pile of computers and printers for 20 yuan (about $3.00) per day. Next door, two Sichuanese women earned 36 yuan for a thirteen-hour shift, picking apart motherboards. “We know it might be toxic, but what can we do? It’s a job,” one of them told us. “We’re not scared.”

They should have been. Studies have revealed that the amount of lead in the blood of children in Guiyu is 50 percent higher than limits set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which could result in retarded mental development. Workers are also exposed to cadmium, chromium, polyvinyl chlorides, brominated flame retardants, and mercury—a toxic cocktail that can cause brain damage, cancer, or kidney failure.
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Many of these chemicals leak from the hundreds of millions of computers, mobile phones, and other devices discarded overseas.
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Efforts to make manufacturers share responsibility with retailers, consumers, and governments for the lifespan of their products have had only partial success.
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American companies often falsely claim to be recycling domestically
while actually shipping e-waste to China and elsewhere, using shell companies in Hong Kong and Singapore. Interpol has identified waste smuggling as a thriving business for crime organizations worldwide. Eddy Zheng, who studied the e-garbage problem at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, believes the rapid increase of e-waste coming into China might be out of control: “The government does not have resources to stop this. Many foreign companies take advantage of this to illegally import e-waste into China.”
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He is scathingly sarcastic about foreign efforts to restrict the trade. “The U.S. is too generous in its contribution to China’s environmental contamination,” he said.
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On the road out of Guiyu I saw a banner proclaiming, “Protecting the Environment Is Enriching Life.” As was often the case in China, the ideal of the propaganda was the opposite of reality on the streets. It was aspirational. The country’s political system was well described as “government by slogan.”
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Recycling could be less of a hazard with better governance, but Guangdong’s economic success has been achieved with speed and energy, not caution and regulation. That is part of its attraction to foreign capital. Since 1979, when the port of Shenzhen was chosen as one of the pioneer economic development zones, Guangdong has been at the forefront of China’s spectacular transformation. It was here that former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping launched his famous southern tour in 1992, when he urged the nation to follow Guangdong’s example. Reform, he said, should not “proceed slowly like women with bound feet, but blaze a trail and press forward boldly.”

The province has thrived on the shifting ideological border between old-style mainland communism and the capitalism of neighboring Hong Kong, its main conduit for trade and investment. Ethics have been contorted by the province’s itinerant, border culture. As well as building one of the most spectacular and dynamic economies in the modern world, Guangdong has pioneered a model of corrupt, land-grabbing, labor-abusing, environment-degrading development. For a journalist, it is a gold mine.

How manufacturing costs were kept low is one of the province’s dirtiest secrets. Manufacturers are often contractually obliged not to reveal which companies they make products for because the value of brands could be destroyed if consumers are informed about factory conditions. Weak governance helps companies cover up, but the people of Guangdong
knew better than anyone the real worth of luxury-brand bags and footwear because they make many of the components.

Due to weak governance, the province has become a counterfeiting center as well as a manufacturing hub, sometimes turning out the knockoffs very close to the original. The city of Shantou on the northeast coast is notorious for copying products made in foreign-invested factories.
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The cultural fakery also applies to art. At Dafen, 3,000 counterfeit painters produce Rembrandts, Picassos, and Dalís at the rate of fifty masterpieces per day. You can haggle down a copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
to a mere 50 yuan.

Income disparities are more glaring here than most places in China. On one side is Hong Kong, which has the tenth-richest population on the planet. On the other is Guangxi, one of the poorest provinces in China with an average income twenty times lower.
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Lodged between these extremes, Guangdong is a hotbed of tension and crime. Corruption is rampant.
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“Black society” gangs, such as the Triads, are traditionally strong in this region, partly because of Canton’s tribal culture but also because of the proximity of the gambling dens of Macau and the opportunities of underworld business in Hong Kong. Many local governments and businesses employ thugs. One night in Shenzhen, a row over an inflated bar bill ended up with two friends and me being chased by a gang of more than a dozen heavies. They surrounded our taxi, smashed my glasses, and badly beat up one of my friends with sticks and belts. It could easily have been much worse.

Far more violent tensions were found at the shifting boundary between urban and rural Guangdong. Pressure often exploded to the surface, particularly when farmland was requisitioned for expanding cities and industrial estates. Like many correspondents, I had spent much of my time in China interviewing dispossessed farmers in Guangdong, which was on the front line of the land disputes. Governance, the law, and farmers’ interests were sacrificed in the name of economic expediency so land could be secured for more factories, showrooms, and dump sites. The illegality of the authorities’ actions was evident in their attempts to cover up what they were doing. In Xiangyang, I was detained by police, who admitted they had intercepted my phone calls to local protesters. In Taishi, two rural activists were put under house arrest to prevent them from speaking to me.
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To avoid getting another in trouble, I had to dash through an emergency exit and hide in a restaurant toilet for thirty minutes to avoid detection.

In Sanshan, residents were so desperate to appeal to the outside world about the confiscation of their land that they took the risk of sneaking out of their villages at midnight, being interviewed through the early hours, and then returning just before dawn. Some passed on messages and pictures through intermediaries. Others agreed to meet in parks where they could check whether any of us were being followed. Other interviews could only be conducted by phone—frequently switching prepaid SIM cards because the police might be listening in. This, in what was supposedly the most modern and open province in China.

Guangdong had other dirty secrets. It was a hub for the illegal trade in endangered species. Stallholders, restaurants, and chemists competed to offer the most unusual wildlife dishes and medicines from the traditional pharmacopoeia described in the previous chapter. Markets teemed with more exotic creatures than many zoos. The stalls sold snakes, scorpions, salamanders, and dozens of species of birds and turtles, some of which were endangered. Rare animals were once partially protected by their price. In the past, only the rich could afford such delicacies. But with the rise in wealth, many were being mass-consumed into extinction.
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I had a soft spot for the pangolin, a cute scaly anteater that was much in demand for its tasty meat and because its scales were thought to regulate menstruation and to help mothers lactate. The creature had once been common in Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guangxi but was now extremely rare in China. To meet the growing demand, hunters moved to neighboring Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos; then, when the pangolin populations of these nations were decimated, they pushed ever farther south down through Thailand and the Malay peninsula to Indonesia. The last healthy populations in the remote jungles of Java were also coming under threat.
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The smuggling of these beasts was highlighted in May 2006, when a rickety wooden vessel lost engine power off Qingzhou Island off the coast of Guangdong. After the coast guard boarded the abandoned boat, they discovered 5,000 of the world’s rarest animals, many so dehydrated from the tropical sun that they were close to death. Crushed inside 200 cages on this 25-meter craft were 31 pangolins, 44 leatherback turtles, 2,720 monitor lizards, and 1,130 Brazilian turtles. They also found twenty-one bear paws wrapped in newspaper.
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The cargo would probably never have been discovered if it were not for the engine failure, and many more are undoubtedly smuggled in undetected.

Weak governance was at the core of the problem. Police investigations into illegal wildlife consumption were stepped up, but they made limited progress.
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In 2006, a waitress at one Guangdong restaurant did not think twice before confirming to my assistant, who was posing as a customer, that pangolin was indeed on the menu. Three years later, after countless other supposed crackdowns, we found another restaurant offering pangolin at 1,000 yuan (about $143) per kilogram. “You need to pay in advance and then we will find one for you,” said an employee. “We can cook it in a hot pot or braise it in soy sauce.”

As illegal restaurants and markets were closed down, others opened up elsewhere or were pushed underground. At 4 a.m., in a dark suburb of Taiping, about an hour’s drive from downtown Guangzhou, I found exotic-animal traders covertly doing business out of sight of the authorities and conservationists. The three long rows of sheds they occupied resembled a cramped and dirty zoo filled with wire cages: long and tall for the herons, flat and low for the civet cats. Ostriches had room to move their necks but not their bodies. Local conservationists told me there were similar markets throughout southern China.