China must come clean about its poisonous environment
Even in a China that is more capitalist than ever, the instinctive official response to bad news is to suppress it with all the force available to the nominally communist state. Beijing needs to accept that in 2007 this kind of reaction is as futile and dangerous as it was in 2003, when the authorities kept secret the spread of the deadly Sars virus. It is futile because the truth will out and dangerous because secrecy delays the necessary remedial action.
So it is with the bowdlerising of a World Bank report on pollution in China. As the Financial Times has reported, the original research found that more than 750,000 Chinese die prematurely each year, mainly from air pollution.
The State Environment Protection Agency and the health ministry told the World Bank to cut this from the published report because it was, in the words of an adviser involved in the study, “too sensitive and could cause social unrest”. Chinese officials were probably worried by the detailed breakdown of the worst places to live in China, which showed the most toxic cities clustered in the north-western coal belt.
Residents of polluted cities do not need the World Bank to tell them the air is filthy. They breathe the stuff every day. But Chinese officials are right to be nervous. Environmental protests – rural and urban – have proliferated in recent years as Chinese citizens become better educated and more forceful in defence of their rights. In Xiamen, angry residents have stalled plans to build a petrochemical plant seen as a source of lethal pollution.
However, the correct response to the sort of grim news contained in the World Bank report is not to suppress the truth but to tackle the underlying problem. Reducing emissions from coal-fired power stations, for example, is neither as expensive nor as difficult as businesses and the provincial governments with which they collude often pretend.
Moreover, China can tie the essentially domestic crisis of urban air pollution into solving the international problem of climate change. Spewing out local air pollutants and carbon, the main global warming gas, often go hand in hand. The same holds for modernising plants to avoid either type of emissions. Many foreign companies are eager to fund these clean-up projects in exchange for carbon credits valued at home. In the meantime, these could help China solve its local air pollution problem.
All of the above can only happen if Chinese leaders overcome their fear of the facts and start telling the truth. They may find it easier than they think and it would certainly produce better results.
