China's progress comes at a cost
Now it must manage its environment
It would be hard to come up with a more telling image of China's current woes than the sight of its inhabitants scrabbling for fresh water. An explosion at a petrochemical factory last week released a vast slick of carcinogenic benzene, polluting water supplies across Harbin, capital of the Heilongjiang province, and triggering panic among its nine million citizens. Supermarkets were stripped of bottled water while families queued for hours before tankers for a potful of water.
Thus life goes on in China. On one hand, there is the country's extraordinary economic growth, titanic industrial expansion and pell-mell sprint towards capitalism which have lifted 400 million Chinese out of poverty in a generation. On the other , the county's pollution problems now seriously alarm scientists across the globe, while the various components of the country's infrastructure are either non-existent or pitifully stunted, including its health service, its roads and, in particular, its environmental protection. What happened in Harbin last week is now being repeated, in some form, every day in this vast, changing landscape. The consequences of unchecked economic growth have never looked so clear or so painful.
China originally promoted its great economic experiment in order to keep its people content and its communist leaders in power. But wealth has consequences, one of which is an expectation that life should have quality, something that is still conspicuously lacking in China. A smart new car is useless on unpassable roads; wealth no comfort in a land blighted by chemical spills, contaminated rivers and chronic pollution. China has endured privation for centuries. Now excess - in every form - has become a universal rule, a situation that cannot be sustained.
Premier Hu Jintao has pledged to make his country environmentally friendly and decreed the Olympic Games in Beijing must be ecologically sound. To do that, he must contemplate a notion long considered unthinkable in China: slower, more careful economic growth combined with proper, systematic support for health and environment services. At the same time, the West, which has invested heavily in China in recent years, has a duty to do so in more sustainable, responsible ways. The alternative is ecological mayhem that will have a profound, irreversible impact across the world.
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