Maybe in hindsight we should’ve been peeking over the emerald horizon where those factories began to decamp. Rather than titillating ourselves with clunky cell phones and a White House intern’s stained blue dress, perhaps we should’ve battened down the hatches against industrial capitulation that Clinton and the free trade crowd hastened in their bull rush to crack China open. For whatever reason, though, few outside the Washington/academic wonkosphere seemed to have noticed that China of the nineties resembled nothing of the arthritic, old Far East reciting Mao’s Little Red Book to anyone who cared. Ditching austerity, it was whooshing at the speed of one of its bullet trains in its evolution from manufacturing pipsqueak to leader of the pack.
You know that sensitive, overweight kid so introverted that bullies he easily could’ve gotten into a headlock drove him indoors to wallow? Well, that was China, international punching-bag of the last two centuries, before it marshaled its girth to carve for itself what it’d missed out on so far: a fat piece of the world economy. Nothing illustrated its early victories like gross national product that more than tripled over the decade, from 357 billion dollars in 1990 to 1.2 trillion dollars in 2000. Outsiders’ big money—ones with lots of zeroes—deserve some of the credit. Nearly a century after the Boxer Rebellion had shunted British and US firms from Asia, direct foreign investment to China by 1997 had almost reached half a trillion dollars.
The Clinton administration, hell-bent for a policy reset there, bankrolled a portion of those outlays with taxpayer’s dollars in hopes of accessing markets inside the world’s most populous nation while exerting more sway over its government. Monies not earmarked from the American treasury cascaded through the World Bank and other global financial institutions that Washington steered. The billions didn’t wend through the typical rabbit holes of foreign aid, where dictators’ cronies and in-laws suddenly got rich. They subsidized nuts-and-bolts public works—roads, ports, highways, and such—essential in animating China’s export business. In effect, the West was lubricating the chute for Asian manufacturing, one that in a few years would undercut countless made-in-America brands, be it snowboards or semiconductors.
Of course, few were that vulgar about the pattern set to emerge. Most experts chiming in saw it as unfolding globalization, where streamlining the path from Chinese production lines to American checkout lines would showcase the exquisiteness of a tariff-free paradigm uniting former Cold Warriors. Deng championed the association. But he was a realist. When in the early eighties he famously quipped, “To get rich is glorious,” he might’ve prefaced his remark by explaining what it required. In his nation’s instance, there was no way to fabricate merchandise at the impatient clip world markets demanded if the raw materials and finished products couldn’t be as efficiently transported as, say, a UPS distribution center. From harbors to super-roads, China was swapping sun hats for construction helmets. America’s credit card helped with the tab.
China wasted not a second, either, pouncing on its opportunity to become wonderfully profitable. At the opening of the decade of tech stocks and grunge rock, it registered a slight trade deficit of ten billion dollars with America. In a turnaround that startled many economists, it enjoyed a net eighty-four billion dollar surplus with its former nemesis by the dawn of the new millennium. US imports of Chinese wares registered more than 300 billion dollars—about the size of the defense budget under Reagan—by the juncture Clinton completed his economic handiwork in 2000.
Interestingly, Chinese imports were less than half that when his wife, Hillary, sat on Walmart’s board of directors before he ran for president in 1992. Nobody said the Clinton-Walmart connection was fishy, just as no one could dispute that Walmart was turning the land of Mao into a manufacturing archipelago of plants, distribution centers, and contractors whose sprawl was almost extra-planetary.
◘
Bleakly, confirmation of Asia’s renaissance was also visible beyond hectic ports dominated by giant, praying mantis-looking cranes. Over many crowded spots, skies were surrendering their cerulean gleam to smokestacks panting fumes from galaxies of new factories, along with the first wave of privately owned automobiles. The artificial haze was not only an optical obstruction. It was forensically detectable in the lower troposphere, or the space between the ground and 1,500 feet up where smog generally confines itself, in a preview of coming envelopment. Some major cities where residents were getting their first taste of the nation’s embryonic consumer economy were being swathed in rising nitrogen oxide seeping from power plants and vehicles. In municipalities exceeding 2 million people, the gas violated limits in four-fifths of them. To thrive, in a sense, was to cough.
Number-crunching health experts might’ve sputtered themselves in 1995 after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a divining analysis that should’ve given would-be globalists a collective flop sweat. Lost production from Chinese left ill by particulate-matter and ozone pollution above background levels had popped fivefold (to 112 billion dollars) from 1975 to 1995, as Asia’s infrastructure binge and proto-reforms advanced. Seemingly, it only took the sidelining of certain people exposed to certain airborne contaminants that hadn’t existed a decade or two ago to begin tearing at society. MIT had sniffed something big. Another report from the era, this one from the World Bank in 1997, stressed that if China merely complied with its own relatively slack rules, 178,000 unnecessary air pollution deaths could be averted yearly.
Of all the threats, the public health tsunami whipping around coal was the most chilling. Before most had heard of the Internet, researchers in Tianjin south of Beijing were discovering that Chinese living near power plants and companies fashioning steel, dyes, chemicals, and locomotives fueled by the nugget lived in a pulmonary gun-scope. They were four-and-a-half times more likely to contract bronchitis, asthma, allergies, and other illnesses than those in less industrial enclaves. Scarier results were plumbed in Nanning in southern China near Vietnam during a 1991-2002 study deciphering lung cancer rates. Residents close to factories there in some cases faced double the odds of getting the disease than their urban neighbors. Children’s health was its own pathogen rain. Experts tracking 6,000 youths aged thirteen to fourteen residing near plants in rural, southeastern China were twice as likely of developing allergies or asthma than peers not near those generators. Rates of the chronic, often deadly disease—the top cause of childhood hospitalization—jumped over the last two decades. Epidemiologically speaking, coal burning was China’s elephant in the room.
While no one pumped the economic brakes to contemplate what these multiple studies were foretelling, China’s national leaders during the nineties weren’t completely sitting on their hands, either. They did the obvious and the unexpected. They strengthened air quality regulations countrywide. They then prodded some heavy industry out of the capital. In another novelty, they even enlisted the national media they customarily gagged to expose tens of thousands of the country’s highest polluting factories. The unusual coverage was nicknamed the Green Hurricane. It’d only gust for a few years before the 30,000 or so government censors manning the Great Firewall of China busied themselves tamping down environmental turmoil.
Beijing city authorities got their own fingernails grimy charting pollution about then. Every day, technicians sampled averages of three smog-related compounds: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and miniscule specks of carbon-family discharges less than ten micrometers in diameter, technically known as “particulate matter” (or PM-10 for short). What the Chinese regarded as a good day under their emerging Blue Sky program, American regulators would’ve contested as an unhealthy one by applying sterner EPA limits. Naturally, that assumed they could perform side-by-side comparisons. Yet that was impossible since Chinese officials squelched the data they were collecting by sequestering it in-house. Releasing the numbers, they later admitted, might’ve elicited public scorn, questions about their stewardship, and inflamed what they dreaded most—social unrest that could topple them from power one day by disagreeable means.
Beijing city hall also thought small, vent-small, focused on the thousands of smoky residential heating systems, where coal was tossed into home and apartment building furnaces to combust at high temperatures. Exhaust from this antiquated warming method for years puffed from rooftop chimneys barely above street level. Plumes would drape neighborhoods on freezing, windless nights, casting a grey pall in the early morning through which bundled-up children walked to school and people scurried to work.
Overseas, meanwhile, West Coast researchers were circling a different sort of weather disturbance. The swirl that captured their attention on satellites was often milky-white, predisposed to springtime appearances, and capable of traversing the Pacific Ocean on a parabolic, eastward trajectory over Alaska in four to ten days. China’s fierce dust storms were twirling up into the atmosphere and across the ocean snaking ribbons of grit, each drift weighing tens of millions of pounds, much of it dappled with industrial particles. Because the concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, and arsenic were low, they were yet to enflame environmental concern, only mild consternation among scientists intuiting a flattening planet before the term became talking-head chic.
There were no stunners here—not about coal, not about Trans-Pacific drift—under the Faustian bargain contoured by Deng and perpetuated by Jiang and his likeminded successors. China would rejigger the calculus of great nations by shape-shifting into an export-manufacturing colossus dedicated to Western store shelves. This model was its chance to vault out of its excruciating past, to erase those centuries hostage to foreign occupation and shuffling backwardness. Bottom-barrel wages, slack red tape, pliant locales, and sheer size conferred to it transcendent advantages that Mexico, Taiwan, and other non-Western factory bastions could never sustain. As the world’s friendliest landing pad for outsourced production, air quality would have to take it on the chin, at least for now. Under this creed, rules that had been tightened in 1996 were loosened in 2000 to accommodate boundless, new capacity for China’s two-pronged drive to industrialize and modernize.
In November 2001, the ruling elite of the People’s Republic got the signatures they so craved as the rubble was being bulldozed away in Manhattan and Washington, DC following the Al Qaeda attacks. Grinding, sometimes-rancorous negotiations about China’s future had its oddly quiet denouement in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. Troops and guards adorned in purple camouflage and white robes tightened into a security perimeter against supposed terrorist threats for the membership induction. The admission ceremony granting China the trading rights of any capitalist nation was over in an affable blink. WTO Director General Michael Moore hugged Chinese Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng, said a few words, and it was official. Who could’ve predicted what would be more earth shattering: the ascension of Islamic radicalism or 1.3 billion Chinese capitalists?
The year 2001 couldn’t have gone more swimmingly as China’s year of legitimization. In July, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that the capital of 20 million people had trounced cosmopolitan Toronto, Paris, and Istanbul in the vote to host the 2008 Summer Games. Only a wizened clairvoyant could’ve predicted the labor required to invert the city’s smog-tableau into green exemplar once the economic afterburners were lit, or how the soupy air would soon be blamed for killing Chinese in droves from exposure to microscopic bits unloosed by the country’s double-digit GDP. Even a fortune-teller might not have believed the atmosphere could be so sadistic.
Was this really what Clinton’s White House meant trumpeting new “economic rules of the road” of shared technology that fostered an environmentally healthful future for all? An era where brackish skies no longer clouded? Over a few years, that quixotic idea lost its moral currency, its voices supplanted by a deal-making philosophy that the faster Asia’s industrialization occurred, the better it would be for both sides. So instead of avoided, inefficient, fume-prone technologies entrenched themselves in the factories and gear works of a China the West helped reimagine. Those early warning health studies by MIT and the World Bank—studies that might’ve been Gore’s ammunition to lobby for treaty provisions to contain the filthy smokestacks that he dreaded would proliferate—just didn’t seem to mortify anyone else in power as much as the vice president.
◘
Combine capitalistic toe dipping of the eighties with broad economic trends and trade pacts adopted in the nineties, and the society legendary for its herbal medicines and reliance on nature by the early-2000s was under chemical bombardment hard to exaggerate. Some of the experts’ admonitions during the WTO debate about emissions dumping from North America to the Far East on the luggage rack of the free trade bandwagon were looking downright soothsaying. From cities where housing complexes rose weekly to towns with the crudest of services, tens of millions of tons of sophisticated compounds circled over peoples’ heads, infiltrated their food, contaminated their water, glommed to their homes, and stunted their crops. The sources were as many as their ill effects—coal fed into humongous plant furnaces casting brilliant red sparks and cavalcades of big rig trucks thundering every which direction. Cement scooped up from enormous, sandy pits and liquids extracted from drums that spruced up electronics’ screens and forged plastics slotted their own waste legacies. For the most part, they’d all materialized within a generation.
On the air pollution front, the Chinese saw four chemicals drench their skies. Nitrogen oxides are brownish-orange gases that escape from automobiles, refineries, power plants, heavy industry, and other origins. When it reacts in bright sunlight with hydrocarbons—vapors from gasoline, diesel fuel, solvents, paints, and such—nitrogen oxides convert into ground-level ozone that disperses as microscopic bits able to invade the lungs. People, understandably, conflate two types of ozone, partly from cultural misperceptions that have blurred their meaning. The upper-atmospheric variety protects Earth from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays. Its invisible, lower-level cousin is what’s hell on the lungs. Ozone inflames the respiratory tract, making it taxing to breathe. It can aggravate bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma as well, raising the chance of respiratory infection while making you antsy for shelter.
Not to be forgotten in China’s chemical lineup are sulfur dioxide and directly emitted fine particles. Sulfur dioxide, the primary ingredient in acid rain that the Eastern US, Canada, and Europe wrangled over in the seventies, is a respiratory irritant especially noxious for asthmatics, children, and the elderly. Through the atmosphere, it transforms into sulfate particles that can evade respiratory defenses. Machines burn coal or oil laced with sulfur plume it, which is why the nastiest concentrations of sulfur dioxide usually linger around power plants, boilers, and similar operations. Fine particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in size, or about thirty times smaller than the width of a human hair, may be the most insidious compound of them all. Its infinitesimal mass is like a diplomatic passport that allows it to bypass different membranes, where it can penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream to wreak biological havoc. Versatile in its capacity for damage, PM-2.5 impairs lung function and worsens asthma. Scientists have associated it with cancer, heart attacks, irregular heartbeats, and premature death in people with existing cardiovascular ailments and other woes. Motor vehicle exhaust, power plant emissions, steel mills, and construction sites spew most of it. Also, because it’s so light, PM-2.5 can be lifted astonishing distances by local winds and the jet streams alike. Most nations consider it the best, single barometer for air pollution out there.
A gallery of heavy metals and industrial compounds absolved from smog formation constitute a whole hazard category unto their own in contemporary China. Among them are dioxin—one of the most poisonous compounds known to man—mercury, lead, paraxylene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, fluoride, ammonia, black and organic carbon, chromium-6, cadmium, arsenic, and other materials with skull-and-bones health implications. Not only are some carcinogenic, they can also compromise immune, nervous, and reproductive systems, weaken the heart and blood production and inhibit childhood development. Smelters, power plants, steel plants, and recycling graveyards for castoff electronics are fingered most for discharging them into Asia’s clotted skies.
Now for all the meteorology you need to know; Chinese smog is frequently its most tortuous when high-pressure weather systems whirling in from Siberia clamp over its territory, generally in winter and early spring. Contained in these weather systems from the north is a layer of cool air that sinks toward the earth, pressing the contaminants down like a lid on a cauldron, sometimes for days. If the conditions stagnate overhead, winds die off and don’t blow the filth away with much urgency.
◘
Eleven years after the WTO accepted them, China’s membership papers could’ve doubled as coronation parchment. Using 2012 as a baseline, the once-forgotten Middle Kingdom—now the Kraken of carbon dioxide, acid rain, and nitrogen oxide discharges—was still on its tear. Asthmatic and all, Asia’s tiger boasted a 5.8 trillion dollar economy that emplaced it as the globe’s second largest, behind only the US and ahead of sometimes-archenemy Japan. Being number one in big categories landed it there, and the People’s Republic was the preeminent overall manufacturer, with exports swelling geometrically since 1979. Nobody fabricated more steel, chemicals, solar panels, and wind farms than its workers. In size-matter metrics by country, China maintained the longest sea-bridge and high-speed train, the second busiest airport, and the penultimate number of billionaires. Its freshly built infrastructure made Westerners salivate. More automobiles are purchased there than any place else as part of a bubbling 1.7 trillion dollar consumer market that can’t snap up enough kitchen appliances, cell phones, and Swiss watches. A market, incidentally, just beginning to be whetted by fattened incomes, if not a hankering to live more American.
Demographers predict that come 2030, nearly two-thirds of its population will be city-dwellers. Multinationals Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Colgate-Palmolive, along with the major US automakers, have sunk billions there. Besting them all is Walmart, which operates some 350 stores employing 100,000 people. Shanghai alone has constructed the equivalent of 334 Empire State buildings since 1998. “You can’t be an elevator company and not be in China,” explained the CEO of United Technologies, which produces Otis Elevators. In central Chengdu, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and other upscale European brand-makers field stores on the avenue giving way to a statue of their former dear leader, Mao. Direct foreign investment that stood at 430 million dollars annually in 1982 had whooshed to 92.4 billion dollars by the year of the Beijing Games. By 2013, to no ones surprise, China’s annual four trillion dollars in trade knocked the US off its perch as king of the import-export hill.
In spite of these blazing advancements, the country that also owns trillions in US treasury bonds remains terrifically impoverished. China ranked midpoint of the World Bank’s 181-country index of wealth per citizen. At 13,700 dollars, the average Chinese earned about a third of the typical American. While hundreds of millions of Chinese are no longer destitute, two hundred million remain so. The ruling body reflects this duality as a classic police state able to jail or execute just about anyone it pleases while maintaining a cult of self-enrichment, where hordes of Community Party members stuff their pockets with ill-gotten gains and perks denied commoners.
Air pollution had never migrated over such a paradoxical concoction—sunny, gullible Los Angeles included. Neither did it dilly-dally. By the time the world hyperventilated about the Y2K bug frying computers, China’s airshed, rivers, and lakes downstream of factories were shading into preepidemic gray. Premier Zhu Rongji, a straight-shooting pragmatist, brashly predicted how air pollution tramples health, unconcerned about what his colleagues thought about his forthrightness. On the eve of the twenty-first century, he offered this fatalistic comment on smog that epidemiologists later corroborated: “If I worked in Beijing, I would shorten my life at least five years.”