China’s Pollution and the Threat to Domestic and Regional Stability

By Nathan Nankivell, Japan Focus, January 3, 2006–

China’s economic boom has an environmental dark side. While China’s economy continues to grow at a rate of more than 8% annually, as it has for more than two decades, the country’s environment and the Chinese people are paying a steep price. China now boasts five of the ten most polluted cities in the world; 70% of the water that flows through China’s urban areas is unfit for drinking or fishing; and severely degraded land or desert, which now claims 1⁄4 of China’s land, is advancing at a rate of 1300 sq. miles per year.

As Nathan Nankivell points out, the environmental crisis poses a challenge for China’s leaders on their own developmental terms. The environment is biting back into economic growth: regions from Qinghai to Shenzhen, for example, face significant costs to industrial production from lack of water; countrywide, these economic losses totaled $28 billion in 2003 and the challenge is only increasing. Overall costs to China’s economy from environmental pollution and degradation are estimated at 8-12% of GDP annually. Environment-related public health is a second significant problem. Chinese officials have acknowledged, for example, that 300 million people drink contaminated water on a daily basis, and of these, 190 million drink water that is so contaminated that it is making them sick.

Finally, the failure of the government to redress its environment-related economic and public health problems has produced widespread social discontent. Environmental protests are a serious source of localized social instability that in numerous, widely-reported cases over the past year alone, have turned violent.

For the rest of the world, how China responds to its environmental crisis has enormous implications. Nankivell outlines some potential future scenarios that suggest just how serious a threat China’s environmental practices might be to global security. Already, throughout Asia and beyond, China’s contribution to transborder air and water pollution provokes significant concern.

Russia’s harsh criticism of China’s handling of the recent transborder water pollution disaster that poisoned the water for the twelve million residents of Harbin and many others suggests the potential for international conflict.

Globally, China is one of the world’s leading contributors to climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss, and it is now in the early stages of following the United States and other rich nations in a race toward mass automobile ownership whose implications for air pollution and global warning are profound. (to be cont’d…)

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