When a Billion Chinese Jump (59 page)

6.
The world’s largest container ship, the
Emma Maersk,
had recently delivered 170,000 tons of trash to Lianjiao in south China’s Guangdong Province.

7.
Adam Smith,
An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), bk. I,
Ch. 8
. Like Malthus, Smith judged China without ever seeing it.

8.
A report from the Waste Resources Action Programme of the UK suggested that the advantage of recycling over landfilling was so great that it made environmental sense to ship waste halfway around the world for recycling, 1,300–1,600 kilograms of CO
₂
being saved for each ton of recycled waste (John Vidal, “Sending Waste to China Saves Carbon Emissions,”
Guardian,
August 19, 2008).

9.
Alan W. Watts,
The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
(Vintage, 1965), p. 63.

10.
Between 1999 and 2009, annual exports of waste paper from Britain, mainly to India, China, and Indonesia, have risen from 470,000 to 4.7 million tons and plastic bottles from under 40,000 tons to half a million (Vidal, “Sending Waste to China Saves Carbon Emissions”).

11.
The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal came into force in 1992.

12.
Jiang, “China Must Say No to Imported Waste.”

13.
According to Eddy Zheng of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, approximately 70 percent of e-waste generated worldwide is processed in China. The biggest center for this operation is Guiyu, where, he says, human exposure to toxins is very intensive (talk given to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, August 24, 2009).

14.
Scott Pelley, “‘60 Minutes’ Crew Attacked in China While Reporting on E-Waste,”
Huffington Post
(Internet newspaper), November 6, 2008. My own party comprised my assistant, Sami Sillanpää of the
Helsingin Sanomat,
and Clifford Coonan of the
Irish Times
.

15.
Arlene Blum of the Green Science Policy Institute has conducted extensive research on the health problems related to fire retardants in the U.S. With regulations tightening in other countries, she fears the industry is moving to China (interview with author).

16.
In the U.S, 130,000 computers are discarded every day and 100 million cellphones annually, according to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, quoted in “Following the Trail of Toxic E-Waste,” CBS
60 Minutes,
November
9, 2008. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans produce 2.63 million tons of e-waste each year.

17.
In 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office condemned the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to identify where 80 percent of U.S. electronic waste is headed.

18.
Zheng, talk given to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, August 24, 2009.

19.
Press conference, August 2009.

20.
I first heard this apposite expression from Nick Young while he was head of China Development Brief.

21.
So much so that even other factories in Guangdong are worried. When I visited a legitimate production line for the Robosapien toy, I was surprised to find every member of staff being searched on their way out of the gates. “Why?” I asked a manager. “Because otherwise someone will smuggle out a model and then a factory in Shantou will be producing rip-off copies within days.”

22.
Hong Kong’s per capita GDP in 2006 was $42,123; Guangxi’s was less than $2,000 (
National Statistical Yearbook 2007
[China National Bureau of Statistics, 2007]).

23.
Nearly 5,000 officials at the county level or above were punished for corruption in one year, state media reported (Mark Magnier, “Corruption Taints Every Facet of Life in China,”
Los Angeles Times,
December 28, 2008). Nationwide, corruption accounts for an estimated 3 to 15 percent of a $7 trillion economy, and party membership can be an invitation to solicit bribes or cut illegal land deals.

24.
This is also where a former colleague, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, saw a local activist, Lu Banglie, so savagely beaten by thugs that he reported him dead. I went to look for Lu’s body and was relieved to find him shaken but very much alive.

25.
Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me, “The big demand for wildlife started in the nineties. It existed before but not on a big scale. I think that is related to the economy. People are getting rich and exploring rare dishes. Guangdong is the biggest problem but all of the southern area of Guanxi and Yunnan, it is getting more common.”

26.
Author’s interview with Traffic representative.

27.
Jonathan Watts, “‘Noah’s Ark’ of 5,000 Rare Animals Found Floating off the Coast of China,”
Guardian,
May 26, 2007.

28.
One raid on a restaurant in Guanghzou in 2008 turned up 118 pangolins, 60 kilograms of snakes, and 400 kilograms of toads.

29.
Jonathan Watts, “Concubine Culture Brings Trouble for China’s Bosses,”
Guardian,
September 8, 2007.

30.
Other factors, of course, include cheap labor and a good infrastructure. The average hourly salary in Guangdong for manufacturing workers in 2002 was 57 cents, about 3 percent of the U.S. level, according to Alexandra Harney in
The China Price
. She estimates that this is less than handloom operators in Britain were paid during the Industrial Revolution (p. 9).

31.
Quoted in Zhou Jigang, “The Rich Consume and the Poor Suffer the Pollution,”
China Dialogue,
October 27, 2006.

32.
This single province accounts for a third of China’s exports (Harney,
The China Price,
p. 15). The National Development and Reform Commission estimates that between 15 and 25 percent of all the country’s global warming emissions result from manufacturing exports. According to Oslo’s Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, a third of all Chinese emissions are linked to exports, with 9 percent from manufacture of exports to the U.S., and 6 percent from goods for Europe (Jonathan Watts, “Consuming Nations Should Pay for Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Not Manufacturing Countries, Says China,”
Guardian,
March 17, 2009). If such emissions were factored into consuming nations’ carbon accounts, the reductions claimed in Europe in recent years would be overturned. The British government’s impressive 18 percent cut in carbon emissions since 1990 would be revealed as a 20 percent increase.

33.
By one estimate, Chinese manufacturers are paid only a quarter of the final retail sale (Harney,
The China Price,
p. 15).

34.
The power generated for industry here is particularly dirty because coal mined in the south contains high levels of sulfur.

35.
Data from 2005 (Tang Hao, “Cleaning China’s Polluted Pearl,”
China Dialogue,
June 28, 2007).

36.
Cheung Chi-fai, “Hong Kong Smog Third Worst Since 1968,”
South China Morning Post,
January 17, 2008.

37.
The average American discards 23.4 kilograms of plastic packaging a year. In Japan and Europe the figures are 20.1 and 15 kilograms, respectively, while in China it is a mere 13 kilograms. Developed countries recognized the threats that plastics pose long ago, and responded by using new materials and developing recycling (Jiang, “China Must Say No to Imported Waste”).

38.
Ministry of environmental protection website figures released in 2008.

39.
Prices have more than halved since the start of the economic crisis in autumn 2008 (
Nanfang Metropolitan Daily,
October 21, 2008).

40.
Jonathan Watts and Jess Cartner-Morley, “Waste Land,”
Guardian,
March 31, 2007.

1.
Speech to an international conference on sustainable sanitation in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, in 2007 (Shi Jiangtao, “Experts Blame Pollution on Runaway Greed,”
South China Morning Post,
August 28, 2007).

2.
Depending on how and when wealth is calculated. This accolade has also been claimed at times by Guangdong and Shanghai.

3.
Now nominally retired, Wu has passed leadership of the village to his son, but he is still revered as a founding father and exercises influence much like Deng Xiaoping—who dominated Chinese politics long after he resigned all formal titles apart from that of Honorary Chairman of the China Bridge Association.

4.
He Jianming,
Jingcai Wu Renbao
(Shandong Wenyi Publishing House, 2007).

5.
But the biographies are careful not to position Wu too clearly as a pioneer capitalist. Among his leftist achievements, they cite the setting up of a free village canteen in the early 1970s. Its success was proclaimed when thirty-eight of the fifty-eight women residents put on weight—a sign, if nothing else, of how cosmetic values have changed in China.

6.
Town and village enterprises (TVEs) were a driving force in the first two decades after the economic reforms of 1978 as local governments and collectives took advantage of the opening to foreign trade and capital. From 1978 to 1996, TVE employment rose from 28 million to 135 million (Barry Naughton,
The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth
[MIT Press, 2007]).

7.
James Kynge covers this in detail in
China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006). See also Bill Emmott, “What China Can Learn from Japan on Cleaning Up the Environment,”
McKinsey Quarterly,
September 2008.

8.
Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler, “China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories,”
New York Times,
December 21, 2007.

9.
A central aim of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 was to make China one of the world’s major steel-producing nations.

10.
International Energy Agency figures cited in Kahn and Landler, “China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories.”

11.
With 2,400 employees, a turnover of 7 billion yuan (around $1 billion), and an annual output of 1.3 million tons per year.

12.
Together, they covered an area more than twelve times greater than the Traf-ford Centre in the UK.

13.
The city estimates that 5,000 foreign merchants have established permanent bases in the city. Each year, another 200,000 visit for short-term sprees.

14.
China Commodities City Group.

15.
China’s exports have doubled in less than five years. The “miracle” Japanese economy of the 1970s managed the feat in seven years; Germany took ten years in the 1960s; it took Britain twelve years after 1838, culminating in the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park—the proudest moment in its industrial history—to do the same (Will Hutton, “Welcome to the Great Mall of China,”
Observer,
May 13, 2004). However, dependence on overseas markets makes the economy extremely vulnerable to a downturn. At the time of the economic crash of 2008, the economist Michael Pettis estimated that China was five times more dependent on foreign markets to create domestic jobs than the United States was at the time of the Great Crash in 1929.

16.
One example is the use of toxic fire-retardant chemicals exposed by UC Berkeley chemist Arlene Blum: “I learned China is putting fire retardant chemicals into all furniture imported into the U.S. and Canada. PentaBDE and other chemical fire retardants considered too toxic to be used in the U.S. are being added at high levels. Scrap foam containing these toxic chemicals is also imported into the U.S. for use in carpet cushion” (Arlene Blum, personal correspondence).

17.
Fisherman say whitebait catches have fallen to a fifth of their peak. In 2007, the lake was so fetid that 5 million people in Wuxi and neighboring regions had to use bottled water for drinking and bathing. Local media reported that 6 billion tons of wastewater were discharged into the lake each year and 70 percent of the nearby rivers were heavily polluted.

18.
Between 2001 and 2006, the number of babies born with heart defects, cleft lips, and hydrocephalus rose by 50 percent, a fifth of which were attributed to pollution (Stephen Chen, “Birth Defects Caused by Environmental Pollution: First Large-Scale Study Exposes Poisoning Risks,”
South China Morning Post,
January 9, 2009).

19.
Citizens of conscience who have greater influence than China’s chronically overlooked rural residents have no means to escape. He Hongshi, party secretary of Touzen Village of Jiangsu Province, is currently serving two years in prison for leading villagers in their complaints against chemical parks.
An article in the
Nanfang Daily
recounted two cases of such abuse. Villagers from Duigou Village in Jiangsu Province’s Guannan County decided to have their river water tested because of noticeable pollution. The results showed that the water was undrinkable for both people and animals. Residents demanded compensation of 40,000 yuan ($5,700) from the chemical plants in the local industrial park. In response, the administrative committee, a government branch, sued them on charges of blackmail.