When a Billion Chinese Jump (17 page)

Such is the passion for the exotic in Guangdong that local markets had accidentally become biochemical laboratories. Viruses were mixed and remixed as cages filled with civet cats, wild boar, snakes, frogs, and rare birds were stacked close together in enclosed, humid areas. SARS—and quite possibly bird flu—were thought to have originated here.

Guangdong is also where new modes of behavior are tried out. As in California, what happens here today often spreads to the rest of the country tomorrow. This is the home of sexual pioneer Li Li, a philosophy graduate and bedroom activist, who—using her better-known pseudonym Muzimei—became China’s most celebrated sex blogger and the first to podcast her lovemaking. It is also a hub of the world’s adult toy business, of which China controls 70 percent. In Shenzhen, I visited a sex-toy factory, where bored production-line workers were sticking fake pubic hair on rubber vaginas, testing the circuits on unfeasibly large vibrators, sticking studs on sadomasochist outfits, and waiting for the end of a shift spent monotonously making cheap thrills.

Prostitution is a less legal but far bigger part of the sex business. In Shenzhen, it reaches an industrial scale in streets filled with pink-lit windows displaying the charms of young “masseuses” and “hairdressers,” each
marked with a number like an item on a restaurant menu. In Guangzhou, I interviewed a karaoke hostess who rented out her womb to a childless Hong Kong couple while making money on the side through prostitution and blackmail. In Shenzhen, I got in touch with Azhen, a twenty-four-year-old
ernai
or second wife, who lived in a flat paid for by a sugar daddy. Hers was a common story. Housing estates near the border were heavily populated with mistresses of rich men in Hong Kong. “No woman wants to demean herself, but there is no social safety net,” Azhen told us.
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The same might be said of China’s place in the global economy. Foreign money and weak domestic regulation have turned Guangdong into a place where overseas companies can illicitly ejaculate emissions and pollution and indulge in energy-intensive behavior while pretending to be clean at home. This is where the developed world dodges its own rules. Rubbish is not the only environmental problem outsourced to China. Carbon is also being dumped as international manufacturers shift production of dirty, energy-intensive goods to Guangdong and beyond.
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Far away and out of sight of independent courts and a free media, governments and international corporations use China to sidestep the Kyoto Protocol and other international treaties on environmental and labor standards.

Pan Yue, the deputy minister for environmental protection, noted the hypocrisy of wealthier nations: “Developed countries account for 15 percent of the world’s population, yet use over 85 percent of its resources. They raise their own environmental standards and transfer resource-intensive and polluting industries to developing nations; they establish a series of green barriers and bear as little environmental responsibility as is possible.”
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Guangdong is where many of these dubious environmental accounts are hidden. Just as in the Qing dynasty, when corrupt local officials put British opium dealers above their own people, the province is now selling itself as a haven for carbon cheats and waste-regulation dodgers. This is a major reason why China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: between 15 and 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide output is attributable to the production of exports.
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Local people do not receive a fair share of the benefit. Half of the factories are partly or wholly owned by foreign investors, and Chinese partners, when present, are on a far from equal footing.
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Yet, they are the ones paying the environmental price. Guangdong has one of the worst acid-rain problems in China.
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The Pearl River, which flows through Guangzhou,
was classified as too contaminated for human contact for most of its length for ten years until 2008.
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In that year, there were more smoggy days here than at any time since the start of the People’s Republic in 1949.
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The haze often spread to Hong Kong and other neighboring regions.

But Guangdong is trying to escape its reputation as the global economy’s toilet bowl. The provincial government has moved dirty factories farther inland and nurtured domestic high-tech industries in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Among the most impressive is Build Your Dreams, a battery-and-electric vehicle manufacturer that became the first company in the world to mass-produce a plug-in hybrid car in 2009. Guangzhou’s attempts to turn green are also evident on the skyline, where the seventy-one-story solar-and-wind-powered Pearl River Tower stands proud as the world’s most energy-efficient superskyscraper. Its low-emission, environmentally friendly credentials are, however, compromised by the identity of its owner: China National Tobacco.

The city has committed billions of yuan to cleaning up the water and air. To demonstrate the improvement, the Guangzhou mayor, Zhang Guangning, led thousands of people in a swim across the Pearl River in 2006, the first such event in thirty years. But the crossing was only possible thanks to a series of temporary fixes, including the shutdown of factories and the flushing of dams in the days leading up to the swim. Even with these emergency measures, participants complained the water was bitter, oily, and smelly.

The problem is that Guangdong—like China, like developing nations through history—prefers to deal with the environmental symptoms rather than the economic causes. Instead of closing down or cleaning up dirty factories, it just relocates them farther inland. Instead of cutting waste-water emissions, it builds more treatment plants.

Efforts to improve the environment also face a new challenge from the rapid increase in domestic waste as China’s populace grows richer and millions more consumers join the resource-hungry, throwaway lifestyle of the developed world. The average person in China discards a third less rubbish than their counterparts in Europe and almost one half less than those in the United States.
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But they are catching up fast. The amount of domestic refuse more than doubled in the decade after 1998.
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Yet there are few specialized facilities for dealing with hazardous waste, which means toxins continue to contaminate groundwater and soil resources.

The old problem of foreign dumping persists because Guangdong’s governance is weak, and developed nations remain as hypocritical as ever. After a series of embarrassing British media reports in the mid-2000s about the trade in recycled waste, the Chinese government was shamed into shutting down districts like Nanhai, which had been a major plastic and metal recycling center. It also prohibited imports of foreign waste. But, as usual in this province where gaping holes could be found in even the most draconian legislation, the businesses found a way around the regulations. They simply moved on and ignored them.

The concrete was still wet when I arrived at Shijing Village, a refugee camp for rubbish recyclers who had been forced to relocate after the government clampdown. The scrap-dealing community had recently set up their new base in the middle of the countryside in an attempt to avoid prying eyes. Many of the sheds were only half-completed, but the task of buying, selling, and sorting rubbish was already in full swing. The operation was remarkably specialized. One area was dedicated to green and red hotel welcome mats and elevator carpets marked, as was popular in China, with the different days of the week. Another stack of rubbish consisted entirely of the bases of revolving chairs. In other areas, sorters made separate piles of broken black buckets, discarded lids of shampoo bottles, and shoes of every shape and size.

I was thrilled. The junk was a journalistic treasure. I could recycle it for a story proving that the ban on waste imports had been evaded yet again, and that the cleanup of the recycling industry was merely a cosmetic exercise that pushed the problem from the suburbs into the countryside. It had taken a long time and a lot of luck to find. Earlier in the day, we visited Nanhai, but the former recycling hub was eerily deserted. The streets were swept clean and the small sheds shuttered up. The only sign of what the area had been was a foul stream and a handful of dispirited locals for whom the UK media’s reports and the government’s sudden concern about the environment were a financial disaster.

“It’s a terrible blow because we only started this business last year. We get no compensation. All we can do is wait and hope the government allows us to restart business,” said one old man, Ding Chunming, who used to process plastic bottles and bags. Others were less patient and optimistic.
There were rumors that less law-abiding recyclers had moved to a new location. My assistant, my photographer, and I got nowhere in asking the authorities where that might be. We wasted so many hours searching that I considered giving up and going home.

But by then our taxi driver had entered so completely into the spirit of the hunt that he took the initiative. In the next town he stopped at the first car-scrap dealer on the roadside and, without any prompting, made up a completely fictitious story about us being foreign businessmen looking for a place to sell overseas rubbish. Within minutes, he had directions for Shijing. I sat in the car, a passive conspirator in the deception but its main beneficiary.

For most of the two-hour drive to Shijing we argued over the journalistic ethics of this pretense. “You’ll never get any real news in Guangdong if you come clean that you are a journalist,” the cameraman—a veteran in the region—told me. I initially claimed the moral high ground, asserting that journalists should speak as well as write the truth. But I realized my words were hypocritical. I was benefiting from the falsehood, so I should either abandon the project or take part in the deception. I chose the latter, justifying this to myself as a small wrong to expose a bigger one.

Minutes later I was lying myself, posing on the phone as a British plastic-waste dealer and hearing from a potential business partner in Guangdong that we could evade the ban on foreign rubbish by bringing it in through Hong Kong. He offered me $100 a ton.
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By the time we reached Shijing, I had jettisoned my qualms and entered fully into my new fake role.

Most of the rubbish recyclers were unconvinced by my act and treated me with understandable suspicion. There was no hostility but considerable concern about the presence of a foreigner in a place that no overseas businessman was likely to visit. The people we met were at the bottom of the social ladder. They had been moved on once because media coverage about “dirty China” embarrassed their government. Seeing us, they feared the same thing would happen again. A local businesswoman, who gave her name only as Ms. Liang, guessed immediately that I was a journalist and begged me not to write a critical story. “We have only just got here from Nanhai,” she told me. “I have never dealt with foreign waste. I can’t do it now and I won’t do it in the future.”

But another, more credulous, man told me he was willing to strike a
deal if the price was right. He did not realize he might be incriminating himself to a journalist. My ability to deceive had improved.

I left with a miniscoop and a major feeling of guilt.
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The Guangdong recyclers were clearing up the world’s mess, yet they were treated as if they created it. Pushed ever farther out of sight along with the rubbish, they helped to maintain the illusion of environmental improvement in developed Western nations and rich cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. In reality, there was no cleanup, just a widening of the distance between consumption and its consequences. This was the opposite of responsible self-governance, but Guangdong—despite its lawless history—was not primarily to blame. Sniffing around the province’s waste dumps, I had found a stinking pile of hypocrisy. The stench followed me all the way home.

Jiangsu and Zhejiang

Local governments have more revenues, the per capita income is a lot higher and many farmers have turned themselves into workers or even entrepreneurs, but what was once paradise on Earth has been degraded into dumping grounds of industrial waste.

—Yang Jike, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Standing Committee
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The road to riches is paved with empire-building ambitions in early twenty-first-century China. Dirt tracks widen to eight-lane superhighways. Isolated villages swell into globalized cities. And Gross Domestic Product—that triumph of human quantity over natural quality—expands outward in a widening ripple of concrete, steel, and smoke. The heretics of the age warn that expansion is hitting an environmental limit. The idols find new ways to break industrial ground. In Jiangsu, the wealthiest province in China,
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I traced the environmental tracks of some of those economic pioneers.

My journey began, unexpectedly, in a stretch limousine that had been sent from Huaxi Village to pick me up. It was an incongruous sight among the taxis lined up outside the airport, and I wondered briefly if I was being secretly filmed for a send-up video as the driver opened the door into the spacious leather-upholstered interior.

I could not help grinning. My host, an official with the Huaxi propaganda department, frowned. Not wanting to offend, I tried to explain.

“I’m sorry, I’ve never been in a car like this before and I didn’t expect one here. In my mind, stretch limos are for Hollywood idols and business tycoons. Yet here we are on the way to a model communist village. This is lavish hospitality. Thank you!”

Deputy Secretary Sun Haiyan smiled politely. He then addressed my misconceptions: It should not come as a surprise, he said, to find a limousine in Jiangsu Province. China was no longer poor and we were not going to just any model community; we were on the way to Huaxi, the “Number One Village” in the wealthiest province of the fastest-growing nation of the early twenty-first century.