4 Environment
The veneration of nature is an ancient ingredient of China’s admirably long-lived civilization – but the presence of this attitude has not provided a sufficient counterweight to all those much less admirable forces of environmental destruction whose cumulative effects bequeathed modern China with extensively degraded landscapes. To these old problems were added insults committed in the name of a superior ideology during Mao’s years, as well as all the new environmental assaults that have taken place during the post-1980 era of economic modernization guided by a peculiar mixture of state (party) control and no-holds-barred private enterprise. And all of these developments have been unfolding against China’s complex geologic, geomorphologic and climatic conditions, which include a vulnerability to major earthquakes, extreme droughts and no less extreme monsoon downpours. I will outline some of these attitudes and constraints in the opening section of this chapter.
Any list of major manifestations of China’s environmental degradation that could be chosen for a more detailed appraisal should include widespread deforestation, recurrently intolerable air pollution, ubiquitous water contamination, excessive losses of arable land, and a drastic decline of biodiversity. Space limitations make it impossible to survey all of them, and when a more detailed examination must be limited to a single item, then I have no doubt that what the ancient Chinese called “the first of the five elements” – China’s water – is the most appropriate choice. Problems with water are far from being the only difficulties complicating China’s quest for modernization. As the consequences of environmental change were added to a longer, well-established list of other factors that might contribute to the political destabilization of a country, or even help trigger violent conflicts, China’s worsening ecosystemic degradation and spreading environmental pollution came to be seen as prime candidates for such unwelcome roles. I will assess the possibilities of such developments in the third section of this chapter, “China’s environment and security”.
The qualitative appraisal of environmental degradation that has been presented in many publications over the past two decades is not enough to assess the impact of these changes. Difficult as it may be, there is a need to establish the cost of China’s environmental change. I will present some fairly detailed estimates of its magnitude and impacts, based on a variety of Chinese evidence published during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Finally, the chapter closes with a recounting and an appraisal of what has been perhaps the most contentious Chinese approach to developing its economy: the pursuit of extraordinarily sized schemes, ranging from the new Great Green Wall of trees to the world’s largest hydro dam. I will review the history and perils of these choices in “Megaprojects and China’s environment”.
Attitudes and constraints: constancy and change
Human transformation of the Earth’s environment is obviously the most remarkable, and perhaps the most disturbing, sign of the accelerating evolution of our species. Natural ecosystems are replaced by human constructs, releases of greenhouse gases are now changing even the long-term composition of the atmosphere, and biodiversity is in decline everywhere. The consequences of human actions reached a surprisingly large scale long before the advent of high civilizations with their intensifying agricultures and expanding cities. For example, Alroy’s (2001) ecologically realistic simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in North America demonstrates that even low population growth rate and low hunting intensity would have made the anthropogenic extinction of large herbivores, including woolly mammoths, inevitable, and his model correctly predicts the terminal fate of thirty-two out of forty-one megafaunal Ice Age species.
And as soon as we reach the historical period, that is the time of about 5,000 years ago, we cannot find any better examples of human impacts on the environment than those provided by China’s long quest to accommodate its growing population. The manifestations of these impacts, some of them of remarkable antiquity, range from sweeping deforestation to bold hydroengineering projects (irrigation systems, navigable canals), and from painstaking terracing of sloping land to many technical inventions and innovations (including the humble wheelbarrow and ingenious percussion drills), whose deployment made it much easier to harness resources and to transform natural environments into new landscapes whose physical features were so obviously dominated by human design. At the same time, these powerful forces of transformation and subjugation coexisted with feelings of awe and admiration of nature, and with the advocacy of nature’s supremacy.
Perhaps most notably, Laozi’s Dao de jing, the cornerstone of the Taoist belief, advocates taking no action contrary to nature as the best way to have everything properly regulated: weiwuwei, zewubuzhi. Or, to express the same sentiment in the words of the book’s very next segment, in Raymond Blakney’s (1955: 117) translation,
Doing spoils it, grabbing misses it;
So the Wise Man refrains from doing
And doesn’t spoil anything.
But this view was never shared by more than a tiny, and reclusive, minority lost in the sea of generations bent on refashioning everything natural around them.
Inevitably, these transforming patterns that marked the country’s long history remained recognizable in its post-1949 developments, as many new designs, and delusions, began to guide China’s treatment of its (by that time considerably degraded) environment. I sketched these old and new attitudes in the four paragraphs with which I closed the opening chapter of The Bad Earth, and in half a dozen paragraphs with which I closed the book. Although twenty years have passed since these lines were published, their sentiment and their verdict stand. Perhaps the only, and not unimportant difference, is that the Party’s heavy hand, albeit still very much in evidence, is now felt less intrusively in a number of ways. Unfortunately, this change, so welcomed by hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese as it eases their lives, has not been necessarily good news for the environment: new destructive forces of blind consumerism have filled the void left by the old destructive forces of the retreating rigid ideology.
At the same time, it must be realized that China’s environment would present extraordinary challenges even to a state organized on the most rational principles and pursuing the best-laid plans. Modern history does not lack for great examples debunking the myth of a simplistic geographic determinism – but, at the same time, it would be naive to dismiss many constraints imposed by specific climate regimes, by a country’s endowment with arable and forested land, with water and mineral, particularly energy, resources and, obviously, by the size and growth rates of its population. That is why, before taking a closer look at some specific challenges, I will outline these constraints in a “crowded stage” analogy.
Environmental attitudes: constancy and change
A reverence for nature runs unmistakably through the long span of Chinese history (Smil 1984). The poet, always ready to pour full goblets of wine and “drink three hundred cups in a round”, found the mountains his most faithful companion; emperors, between wars and court intrigues, painted finches in bamboo groves and ascended sacred mountains; Buddhist monks sought their dhyana “midst fir and beech”; craftsmen located their buildings to “harmonize with the local currents of the cosmic breath”; painters were put through the rigors of mastering smooth, natural, tapering bamboo leaves and plum branches; and who wouldn’t admire the symphony of plants, rocks, and water in countless gardens?
Attitudes, poetry, paintings, habits, common sayings, and regulations abound with images of nature and a view of man as a part of a greater order of things. Old trees are prized for their antiquity and dignity: ancient pines, frost-defying plum blossoms, elegant bamboo. Flowers are loved and admired: magnolias, lotus, chrysanthemums, peonies. There are birds of exquisite plumage – mountain pheasants, finches, ducks, magpies; animals ordinary – horses and oxen – and extraordinary – dragons and unicorns. There is a universe of peaks and clouds, snow and wind, waterfalls and ponds, reeds and shores, hills and dense forests. The titles of old paintings envelop the mind in the magnificence of nature and induce reverence: Light Snow on the Mountain Pass; Brocaded Sea of Peach-Blossom Waves; Summer Retreat in the Eastern Grove; Ode on the Red Cliff; Listening to the Sounds of Spring Under Bamboo; Peaks Emerging from Spring Clouds.
To stop here, however, as many an uncritical admirer might, would be telling only the more appealing part of the story. There has also been a clearly discernible current of destruction and subjugation: the burning of forests just to drive away dangerous animals; massive, total, and truly ruthless deforestation to create new fields, to get fuel and charcoal, and to obtain timber for fabulous palaces and ordinary houses, wood for cremation of the dead, and (to no small effect) for making ink from the soot of burned pines (one of history’s many ironies: glorious accounts of civilization underwritten by the destruction of its natural foundations); the erection of sprawling rectilinear cities (fires would rage for days to consume the vast areas of wooden buildings) eliminating any trace of nature, save for some artificial gardens.
This traditional discrepancy between the environmental ideal and reality could not cease on that October day in 1949 when Mao Zedong spoke from the Tian’anmen to proclaim the founding of a new China. The environmental record of this new China thus carries clear parallels with the past as well as, inevitably, marks of the ruling ideology and advancing modernization. To describe it unequivocally is impossible: what a mixture of some excellent intentions and notable achievements with much casual neglect, astonishing irresponsibility, and staggering and outright destruction! If a simplifying verdict were still sought, I would summarize the record, without being alarmist, as genuinely disquieting.
In general, the attitudes of people who have just emerged from long years of privation to the threshold of life promising a bit more freedom and little more prosperity are not conducive to conservation, savings, and the eschewing of immediate consumption; just the opposite is likely to be true, putting further accelerated pressure on the environment. Indeed, here is a perfect illustration of a key ecological concept well known as the tragedy of the commons, or killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
And as always, in a country where to pass a qualifying examination for the imperial civil service was the dream of millions for millennia, there are complex and uncoordinated bureaucracies always good at promulgating new laws and regulations and holding grand conferences (disguised banqueting, mostly) but much less adept at getting things done. Nor are the provincial interests unimportant, or the considerations of the still heavily militarized economy.
And finally, there is the pervasive state ideology, that political worship, that unpredictable ever-twisting party line that one day makes a capitalist criminal out of a man planting a handful of trees in his backyard while rewarding a county secretary who orders the massive destruction of trees, lakes, garlic patches, and pond ducks – only to turn around the next day and instruct that self-same secretary that he should gain the enthusiasm of the masses for backyard garlic growing, tree planting, and duck feeding; the party line that encourages a “hundred flowers to bloom” so that the “poisonous weeds” of intellectual independence, courage, and honesty can be more easily identified; the party line that has turned everything into politics and left only the single arbiter to determine merit.
Only a naive mind could not be overwhelmed by this state of affairs. The best outlook is for some gradual localized improvements, and for the prevention of further major degradation in key sectors and areas. That, I maintain, would be a grand success. On the implications of the failure to do so I will not speculate: that they are grim is all too clear and, unfortunately, this outcome is at least as likely as the other.
To believe otherwise would be to perpetuate the fatuous naivety of Western admirers of the Central Kingdom in Communist clothes, at a time when some responsible Chinese are themselves all too acutely aware that many of the developmental policies of the past three decades have led to unprecedented destruction and degradation of the country’s environment, and that this poses a real threat to the nation’s physical well-being, and hence to its social stability. And all of these informed Chinese who have exposed the country’s environmental debacle are also aware of, but don’t write about, another critical issue – the cloud of political uncertainty that hangs over the future.
In a recent paper, the Policy Research Office of the Ministry of Forestry (1980: 31) concluded starkly but forthrightly: “If we do not take firm and decisive action now…the dire consequences are unimaginable”. Such is the state of the Chinese environment as viewed by knowledgeable Chinese, and it provokes an unorthodox conclusion: it is not the large population per se, nor the relative poverty of the nation, nor its notorious modern political instability, but rather its staggering mistreatment of the environment that may well be the most fundamental check on China’s reach toward prosperity, a hindrance also the most intractable and difficult to deal with.
The record of the past two decades would seem to indicate that my concerns were misplaced, as nothing seems to be able to slow down the country’s remarkable economic expansion. But this would be an unacceptably hasty judgment. China has been undoubtedly successful in dealing with some of its daunting environmental challenges and, as a result, many important indicators have either shown encouraging improvements or at least no signs of further deterioration. Perhaps the most welcome example is that, although many of the new plantings are in thinly spaced, fast-growing species, the country’s total area covered by trees (159Mha in 1999) is now about 30 per cent larger than it was at the very beginning of Deng’s reforms a quarter-century ago (NBS 2001). And the most obvious improvement benefiting the largest number of people has been the decline in urban concentrations of fly ash and sulfur dioxide, as many cities have been aggressively substituting clean-burning natural gas for ash- and sulfur-laden coal.
At the same time, many indicators of environmental quality have been getting worse, and a significant share of economic advances has been bought with further impoverishment of China’s already strained resource base: water tables on the North China Plain have been sinking ever faster, longer stretches of many rivers have been converted to open waste conduits, the biodiversity of the extraordinarily species-rich southern ecosystems is disappearing. China’s many natural constraints do not make a better management of these challenges impossible, but they surely make it much more difficult. Countries in less constraining circumstances have the benefit of larger gaps between the immovable natural supply and rising demand; in China the two aggregates are already uncomfortably close in some instances, and will get inevitably closer in the future. Being aware of these realities, which are surveyed briefly in the following subsection, is not a reason for despair, but merely an essential antidote to the hubris of omnipotent technical fixes.
China’s environment: a disquieting analogy
Analogies concentrate our thoughts, and thus trouble our minds. Imagine China as a crowded stage, and Westerners as fascinated spectators. Some onlookers can be seen running across the proscenium, and paying rather large sums for the packaged experience. A few outsiders can be seen well inside the podium, lingering a bit, asking questions, even leaving behind some brand-new props before descending back to the auditorium where they interpret some details of a largely incomprehensible script either to those spectators with a craving for exotica or to some ambitious impresarios present in the audience who think that they could provide a better direction to the whole confusing piece.
Even though some of these outsiders get to play bit parts or get invited to temporarily direct some marginal scenes, none of them truly partakes in the existential happenings on stage. Not only do these walk-on participants read from a different script, but their real interests are either in the decor, make-up, phrasing and the gestures of the actors, or in getting the local production managers to buy as many new and expensive props as possible. They do not really understand how hard life is for most of the actors, and most of them do not want to discover the extent to which the boards and pillars hidden by newly colorful facades are rotten. But what is it we all are watching? The longevity of the stage, its strange adornments and its extraordinary crowding have always cast their spells on the spectators – but to assume that the play can go on as an endless series of repertory reruns is to delude ourselves.
A tragedy, then? The relentless progression toward a feared outcome would seem to make it so. Shortly after 1949, when Westerners lost their access to the stage for about two decades, and could observe the unfolding drama only from a distance, it packed in about 550 million people. That number had doubled by 1989, and demographic imperatives make it virtually certain that, after passing the 1.3 billion mark in 2003, at least another 200 million will be added before the population peaks during the fourth decade of the twenty-first century (UNO 2002) (see Figure 4.1). Is not the stage getting ever closer to collapsing? Even from afar, many of its boards look shaky. But this is not a classical tragedy. There will be no sudden resolution with a plaintive chorus in the background, no cataclysmic collapse. The simple reality is that some parts of that large stage have caved in already: farming has had to be abandoned on deeply eroded slopelands, on cropland claimed by deserts, and in areas where the water table has sunk below the acceptable cost of pumping. People have had to move elsewhere, adding to the crowding. Other boards are so worn-out that treading on them is exceedingly risky – but where else can the actors go? That question becomes even more acute as millions have been already displaced, and more will follow, by the construction of reservoirs, canals and transportation links. Only a privileged or lucky few can leave the stage, most must stay and move around as best as they can.
But are not parts of the stage much brighter than a generation ago, do not many actors look more prosperous? True, but this is only a superficial decor, and beneath its dazzle the boards are rotting faster than ever, and too many shabby figures can be seen in the background. And the stage gets shakier not only because the crowding increases, but precisely because the actors’ lots are getting better. But there will be no classical crisis in this peculiar tragedy, no turning point of the drama – and hence no liberating catharsis. Greater crowding, spreading decay and intensifying pollution will keep on combining into more prominent scenes of degradation, hardship and pain. This process has been unfolding for a long time: the numbers of the suffering actors are already counted in many millions, and they are bound to increase. Can the spectators remain unaffected?
Figure 4.1 Past and future growth of China’s population, 1950–2050
Source: Past totals from various issues of China Statistical Yearbook; the three variants of long-range forecast from UNO (2002).
La longue durée
Some forms of environmental degradation are noticeable almost instantly, but the consequences of other changes can be fully appreciated only when using very long-term perspectives. As so many events in human history, they are perfect examples of what Fernand Braudel (1972) classed in his la longue durée category: complex processes unfolding gradually over very long periods of time, changing reality almost imperceptibly in their early stages and only later at a worrisome pace, and finally resulting in a profoundly different world. The appropriate model is a protracted, multifocal, multicausal decline, rather than acute and generalized collapse brought about by a single decisive factor: China’s environmental realities fit this model in every respect.
Impressive improvements of human existence have been paid for by worldwide environmental degradation. The concurrent increase of population and individual well-being does not represent, as Julian Simon (1996) would have us to believe, the triumph of human intellect and organization over the raw forces of nature. The very phrasing betrays a profound ignorance of the biophysical fundamentals of civilizational progress. In order to be more than an ephemeral phenomenon, the process cannot be a contest of forces. Human ingenuity can succeed over a very long run only when it preserves irreplaceable environmental services – from the stratospheric ozone layer shielding the Earth from UV radiation, to the soil bacteria driving the nitrogen cycle – which make life possible. The biosphere’s finite resources, and even more so its life-sustaining services, cannot be taxed indefinitely beyond their self-renewing limits (Smil 2002b).
This means that long-term civilizational development is incompatible with what modern economists love to call a “healthy growth”, a 3, 4 or 5 per cent annual addition to the gross economic product. To act on this understanding in a civilization whose modus operandi, if not its very raison d’être, is the fastest possible economic growth, will require an unprecedented transformation of human affairs. Western nations, owing to their combination of very slow population growth, high affluence and technical prowess, have, if they choose to use it, an excellent chance to effect this grand transition during the next two generations. The margins for maneuver are wide: conservation and innovation have the potential of cutting our resource needs by half without lowering our quality of life; adopting more modest – but still fairly affluent – lifestyles could cut resource use even further. In contrast, China’s expanding population and its huge developmental needs will put enormous additional claims on all kinds of natural resources. Even when undertaken with unprecedented care, such an expansion will further degrade the country’s environment.
Contrasting realities
Only four key parameters need to be quantified in order to appreciate the country’s precarious position and to understand the reasons for its prospective decline: the population, and its food, water and energy consumption. During the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the affluent Western nations will add only about 25 million people to their current total of less than 700 million. China will add – using the medium variant of the latest UN forecast (UNO 2002) – nearly 200 million to its 2000 total of about 1,275 million. Western nations, with some 12 per cent of the global population in the year 2000, had nearly a quarter of the world’s farmland, or an average of about 0.5ha/person. But this is really an irrelevant figure, because about three quarters of our staple grain harvests are fed to animals in order to provide diets high in animal foodstuffs. The West could easily give up the cultivation of a large share of its farmland merely by moderating its high intakes of meat and dairy products.
In contrast, China, with 21 per cent of the world’s population in the year 2000, had only nine per cent of the world’s farmland, or just a little over 0.1ha/capita, an equivalent of one third of the Mexican rate and one seventh of the US rate. The only two poor populous countries with less farmland per capita are Egypt and Bangladesh: Egypt, where two out of three loaves of bread are baked from imported US flour; Bangladesh, whose continuing existence as a nation is so patently questionable. Moreover, nearly 300 million Chinese live in provinces where the per capita availability of arable land is already lower than in Bangladesh. And although China’s average food supply is now, as demonstrated in some detail in the previous chapter, above the typical need, regional disparities perpetuate the relatively large-scale extent of malnutrition. In order to erase the deficits for at least 80 million people who still do not have enough food to meet FAO’s primary nutritional objective of a healthy and vigorous life, and to produce adequate food for its additional 200 million people, China will have to expand its food output by at least 20 per cent during the next two generations.
China’s annually renewable water resources represent less than 7 per cent of the global total, and, moreover, they are disproportionately concentrated in the South, and are scarce north of the Changjiang, the area containing about two fifths of China’s population and producing a commensurate share of the grain harvest. Even if it were possible to use every drop of the northern stream runoff, per capita water supply would be less than a quarter of America’s actual per capita water consumption. Actual per capita northern supply for all uses – agriculture, industry, services and households – amounts to little more than the Americans use just to flush their toilets and wash their clothes, dishes and cars.
The combination of prolonged drought spells and heavy water demand has repeatedly dried out the Huanghe, northern China’s principal river, before it reached the sea. This happened for the first time in recorded history in 1972, and starting in 1985 the river dried up in some sections every year until 2000 (People’s Daily 2000a). In 1997 the river did not reach Bohai Bay for a record 226 days, and the dry bed extended for more than 700km from the river’s mouth (Liu 1998). In 2000 and 2001 the river kept flowing even during the dry season (November to late June), in spite of the fact that a severe drought reduced the volume to just 16.4Gm3 along the river’s middle course, the second lowest rate on record (People’s Daily 2001). Yet the necessity of feeding an additional (approximate) 8 million people every year, to satisfy the rising urban demand and to secure water for growing industries, means that the North’s already much overused resources will be under even more pressure during the next two decades.
Western nations also consume over 40 per cent of the world’s fuels and primary electricity. This is more than three times their share of the global population, giving them an annual average of more than four tonnes of crude oil per capita. Again, we could give up a large share of this so often wasteful use – SUVs, extravagantly sized overheated and overcooled houses, long-distance flights to gambling casinos, and the amassing of material possessions far beyond anybody’s conceivable need – without compromising the real quality of life (i.e. good health care, longevity, access to education, a clean environment). Obviously, our reduced energy use would dramatically lower the pressure on the global environment.
In contrast, in the year 2000 China’s consumption of primary commercial energy amounted to about 9 per cent of the global total, again much less than the country’s population share. And less than 15 per cent of the low per capita rate, equivalent to about half a tonne of crude oil a year, is used by households, compared to about 40 per cent in the West. I have shown in great detail that a purposeful society can guarantee the combination of decent physical well-being, good nutrition and fair education opportunities only when per capita energy consumption reaches about one tonne of oil equivalent a year (Smil 2003). In order to join the ranks of developed nations, China’s per capita energy consumption would have to be at least twice the current mean. But real national modernization is impossible without near-universal literacy and greater access to higher education. Nations with literacy in excess of 90 per cent and with at least 20 per cent of young people enrolled at post-secondary institutions use at least 1.5t of oil equivalent per capita, three times China’s current mean.
Looking ahead
China’s development during the next two generations will thus require massive increases of food and energy output merely to maintain the existing per capita rates, and unprecedented increments if the country is to approach incipient affluence. Consequently, even if the requisite inputs of resources – be it fertilizer and irrigation water or timber and coal – were used with greatly improved efficiencies, there would be a net increase in their total extraction and hence in environmental degradation and in the generation of pollutants. Feeding nearly 200 million additional people by the year 2025 will require an incremental food supply roughly equivalent to the total current food consumption of Brazil – yet the food production will have to come from a smaller area of farmland. The combination of a larger population and land claims resulting from environmental degradation (erosion, desertification, salinization), and urban, industrial and transportation construction, may reduce the per capita availability of farmland to just 0.08ha/person by the year 2025.
The only way to produce substantially higher harvests from a declining area of deteriorating land, is further intensification of China’s already highly intensive crop farming. Yet the country is already relatively more dependent on fossil fuels to grow its food than the USA. This is because it uses on the average four times as much nitrogenous fertilizer per hectare (whose synthesis needs natural gas, coal and electricity), and irrigates a third of its fields (three fifths with pumps). But the crop response to high applications of nitrogen has been declining, while their leaching contaminates waters, and more frequent multicropping and sharply lower recycling of organic wastes contribute to a steady decline of soil quality. As already explained in Chapter 2, a very large share of crop residues is burned by fuel-short rural households rather than being composted and returned to fields. Urban wastes, increasingly polluted with chemicals and heavy metals, are unfit for recycling. And unsustainable rates of erosion (in excess of 15t/ha annually) prevail over at least a third of China’s fields.
These natural constraints can be partially negated by bioengineering advances. Genetically modified crops may accelerate the growth of average yields and hence be able to support higher population densities. But more productive crop varieties could not eliminate further farmland losses, halt the erosion and degradation of arable soils, or actually reduce the rates of fossil-fuel-dependent inputs. Indeed, all of these problems have been exacerbated as China’s successful adoption of high-yielding rices and wheats has boosted the country’s food supply since the 1970s. And only the eventual development and diffusion of nitrogen-fixing grain crops could eliminate further increases in China’s dependence on synthetic nitrogen. Such a breakthrough is no nearer to field applications today than it was a generation ago.
Given the absence of readily deployable alternatives, and the need for greatly increased energy use, the dominance of coal in China’s energy consumption will continue. Although the fuel’s share will gradually decline, as will particulate emissions from large sources equipped with better controls, numerous small sources (now burning more than half of all China’s coal) will remain largely uncontrolled, as will nearly all sulfur dioxide emissions, a principal cause of dismal air quality and high respiratory morbidity in China’s cities. Accelerated development of hydrogeneration would reduce the environmental effects of coal combustion – but it would magnify other problems which have accompanied the development of China’s water power, above all extensive flooding of high-yielding farmland, mass population resettlements, and rapid reservoir silting caused by deforestation and slopeland cultivation.
To believe that alternative energy sources will cover a large share of China’s fuel and electricity needs within the next 10–20 years is to ignore the gradual and costly realities of energy transitions (Smil 2003). Recall that after two decades of vigorous and expensive technical innovation the West has increased the efficiency of its energy converters – but its reliance on fossil fuels has remained remarkably stable. A major international complication will be introduced by China’s rising share of carbon dioxide generation. The late 1990s reduction of these emissions was an exceptional departure from a long-term trend of rising contributions. Even if China does not surpass the US level during the coming generation, it will be a close second, and as such it will have a critical, but very likely also a contentious, role in any effort to stabilize and reduce the global generation of greenhouse gases. Moreover, emissions of methane from paddy fields and nitrous oxide from intensified fertilization will also rise.
The combination of demographic imperatives and rapid economic growth means that China’s already much degraded environment will suffer even more during the next generation. The best outlook for the next generation is that the rate of this environmental decay can be slowed down. Such an achievement would be an essential precondition for first stabilizing, and eventually reversing, the degradative trends, so that China’s great stage survives in a tolerable state. And yet, with all of these worrisome trends in mind, there is no preordained progression here, no automatic reason for advocating what most people think of as the classic Malthusian outcome.
That is because human futures, while not infinitely alterable, are amazingly malleable. Malthus (1803: 543–544) himself reflected on this reality in the second, and so inexplicably neglected and unquoted, edition of his famous book when he concluded that
On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society.…And although we cannot expect that the virtue and happiness of mankind will keep pace with the brilliant career of physical discovery; yet, if we are not wanting to ourselves, we may confidently indulge the hope that, to no unimportant extent, they will be influenced by its progress and will partake in its success.
The first of the five elements: China’s water
There are, naturally, other specific segments of China’s changing environment deserving of closer examination – but water makes the most compelling choice, both because of its deep historical links to the rise of Chinese civilization, and because of its critical role in the far-from-accomplished modernization of the country’s society. The combination of irreplaceable demand for at least the minimum volume of this resource, of its widespread, and in some regions worsening, shortages, and its indispensability for securing more affluent lives for the still growing as well as rapidly urbanizing population, make water management both the most urgent and the most enduring environmental challenge for China’s leadership.
Fortunately, concerns about the strained and diminishing northern supply have brighter counterweights, not just in the southern water surplus but in large water conservation opportunities everywhere: China is not only the world’s most water-stressed largest economy, it is also the most water-wasting one. Fortunately, there are clear signs of this understanding: easing the current crisis will require not only new supplies, namely inevitable long-distance water transfers, but also the maximum practicable reduction of existing waste. An encouraging shift has already taken place during the 1990s: in 1990 the total volume of waste water discharged by China’s industries was nearly 25Gm3; by 1999 this rate was reduced to about 20Gm2 (NBS 2001). Given the huge intervening increase in China’s industrial output, this means that average water intensity (m3/yuan of production) fell by at least 60 per cent. But first let us take a more systematic look at China’s water resources and uses (Smil 1984, 1993).
Water: resources, uses, waste
Art mirrors, succinctly and admirably, the human perception of the environment. When European painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries looked at a landscape, various elements would prevail: light from the high clouds in Jacob van Ruisdael, majestic trees in John Constable, shimmering colors in Claude Monet. In contrast, Chinese painters have always seen their landscapes as shan shui – mountain-water – the term containing all the tension and harmony of yang and yin, evoking whole sets of analogies, lending to landscape painting “a worshipful attitude, making it a ritual act of reverence in praise of the harmony of Heaven and Earth” (Sze 1959). Water, the first of the ancient five elements, the Black Tortoise of the Five Regions of the Heavens, has thus always had a pivotal place in the Chinese culture – and in everyday Chinese life (Smil 1979d). One does not have to agree with Karl Wittfogel’s (1957) historical thesis about the emergence and institutionalization of hydraulic despotism in China, to appreciate the close relationship between water and the country’s civilization, a link both beneficial and destructive, and a link very much enduring.
Vagaries of precipitation, drought and flood still determine the size of harvests; the arid north still has to endure month after rainless month, while typhoons may be smashing southern dikes. And new dimensions have been added with rapidly progressing industrializaton and urbanization and with expanded irrigation and chemicalization of agriculture: much higher uses of water in general, frequently straining the available resources and leading to shortages of even drinking water; drastically increased extraction of ground waters followed by sinking water tables and surface subsidence; and widespread water pollution of all major rivers, lakes and coastlines. All of these problems are often related to those critical Chinese environmental constraints – the relatively small volume and irregular distribution of the country’s water flows.
Yin–yang of waters
When drinking water think of the spring.
Chinese proverb
The real springs for most of China’s waters are thousands of kilometers away from the country’s shores, in the Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines and in the equatorial Indian Ocean, where the two mighty cyclonic flows drenching China with seasonal monsoon rains originate every spring (Smil 1993). The dominance of these flows in the precipitation regime of the country imparts the inescapable yin–yang quality to China’s water supply. The simile extends not only to the contrast between negatives and positives – destructive floods and droughts have molded the course of Chinese civilization as much as the extensive irrigation and reliance on water transport – but also to the abrupt shifts between the two entities. The sharply divided curvilinear shapes symbolizing egg yolk and white in the yin–yang diagram have recurrent parallels in sudden transitions between lack and surfeit of water.
The spatial distribution of China’s precipitation also shows a relatively abrupt decline of annual and seasonal totals along the southeast/northwest gradient. The 500mm isohyet – running from central Heilongjiang in the Northeast to the Sino-Bhutanese border in the Southwest, and roughly coinciding with the direction of several major mountain chains – may be seen as a convenient approximate divide between the dry northern and western interior and the wetter coastal East and inland South (Figure 4.2). Strong seasonality of precipitation, high probability of prolonged droughts, perils of recurrent fluctuations between droughts and floods, and large spatial disparities in the distribution of annual and seasonal moisture, are the keys to appreciating China’s water supply: looking at long-term averages and nationwide totals is highly misleading.
Source: Based on Domrös and Peng (1988: 140).
Because all of the densely inhabited area of China is within the domain of the East Asian monsoon, which brings moisture between May and October, it has distinct summer precipitation maxima, strong and early (May and June) in the South, strong and later (July and August) on the North China Plain, and somewhat weaker at the same time in the North. Summer rains bring at least 70 per cent of annual moisture in regions north of Beijing, and 60 per cent on the North China Plain (Figure 4.3). The two wettest months contribute 50–60 per cent of annual moisture, compared to just 25 per cent in Guangzhou. Frequently, much of this rain comes in spectacular downpours. All of China’s recorded short-term precipitation maxima come from the North, including the one-hour record of 267mm from Shanxi, and the incredible one-week rain of 2,051mm, amounting to more than three times the mean annual precipitation in the area, between 2 and 8 August 1963 in Hebei (Domrös and Peng 1988).
Source: Based on Domrös and Peng (1988: 169).
Throughout history, China’s precipitation records also reveal relatively long and pronounced periods of either abundant or scarce precipitation. Thirty-year running means for Beijing for the years 1724–1980 show annual maxima around 750mm and minima down to about 450mm, a 40 per cent variability. Calculations of dryness/wetness indices for Eastern China between 1470 and 1977 show a long dry spell up to 1691, followed by a wet period until 1890, and a new predominantly dry regime during the twentieth century (Zhang 1988), while a similar study for the North indicates that the region has been relatively dry since 1680 (Zhang and Lin 1985).
Of the 6Tt of precipitation falling on China during an average year (the mean precipitation is 630mm) about 45 per cent, or 2.7Tt, ends up as stream runoff. About 40 per cent of this flow, or 1.1Tt, is potentially usable, and the actual annual withdrawals for agricultural, industrial and household uses during the late 1980s amounted to just over 500Gt, or less than half of the available potential (Smil 1984). Recent actual per capita use has thus been less than 500t/year, a withdrawal equal to less than a quarter of the US value, about 20 per cent below the Indian level, but roughly equal to some European (e.g. Swedish and Polish) rates (WRI 1988).
But China’s rate is boosted by the relative southern abundance: the northern values are only a fraction of the national mean. All of China north of the Changjiang, occupying 60 per cent of the country’s area, has only 20 per cent of its water resources. A more sensible comparison is to leave out the vast and arid Xinjiang and Qinghai and limit the contrast just to the densely inhabited North: while the region, covering about one third of China’s territory, has about two fifths of China’s population, grows the same share of staple grains and accounts for nearly 45 per cent of all industrial output, it receives only about one quarter of the country’s total precipitation, and its high summer evapotranspiration means that it has access to less than one tenth of stream runoff.
In the basin of the Huanghe, the region’s principal river, less than 1,500m3 of water runoff is available for each hectare of cultivated land, and no more than about 600m3/person; comparable rates in the Changjiang basin are, respectively, about 6,000m3/ha and 2,800m3/person. The Huanghe had its flows drastically reduced during the dry 1980s. In 1981 the river’s flow into the Bohai was 48.5Gt, almost exactly its long-term average; by 1986 the runoff dropped to 26.1Gt, and in 1987 it was just below 20Gt, only two fifths of the mean (ZXS 1988a). The river’s normally very low early summer flow had repeatedly ceased altogether downstream from Jinan for as long as thirty-seven days, causing reduction of crop yields, disruption of industrial production and enormous difficulties for oil extraction at Shengli, China’s second-largest oilfield, near the river’s estuary.
This necessitates a high degree of reliance on underground water reserves, but here, too, the northern provinces are disadvantaged. Aggregate underground water resources are now put at 870Gt, of which about 70 per cent is south of the Changjiang. Perhaps as much as 230Gt (an equivalent of less than 9 per cent of stream runoff) can be used annually, but the recent withdrawals are close to 60Gt, with the North accounting for three quarters of the total. As in any semi-arid and arid setting, most of North China’s water is used in agriculture, but the growing difficulties with urban supplies became a more acute concern during the 1980s. The situation was particularly tight in the capital Beijing, whose minimum annual industrial and household needs reached 800Mt by the late 1970s, and then kept on increasing by about 7 per cent a year during the 1980s. This would bring the 1990 need to about 1.6Gt, but the city’s eight waterworks supplied by large reservoirs could deliver no more than 700Mt (Dong 1990).
Urban consumption is far surpassed by the municipality’s vegetable and grain fields, which use about 3Gt, so Beijing and its environs need about 4.6Gt a year. But the recurrent droughts of the 1980s cut the supply capability of the city’s two large reservoirs – Miyun and Guanting, which were also serving Tianjin – to as little as 500Mt, or to less than one tenth of their design capacity of over 6Gt. In August 1981 the State Council decided to stop supplying Tianjin (which needs at least 600Mt a year) with water from these two reservoirs, an order necessitating a huge long-distance diversion of water from the Huanghe. Yet this sacrifice made little difference to the capital, whose surface water supply of between 4.22 and 4.49Gt (of which about 3Gt is practically recoverable) during normal precipitation years fell to just 2.5–3.2Gt during the years of prolonged droughts, causing excessive withdrawals from Miyun and Guanting, the complete disappearance of scores of smaller storages, and the intensifying depletion of underground reserves.
Chinese estimates put the maximum annual supply of Beijing’s ground water at 2.5Gt. In the 1950s the water table was in places just five meters below the surface, but today the city’s more than 40,000 wells draw water from depths of around 50m. During the 1980s the annual drop during the driest years surpassed two meters, and the surface subsidence extended over more than 1,000km2. During the early 1990s, annual water shortages during dry years will fluctuate between 600 and 900Mt, and the deficit is forecast to be at least 1.3Gt by the year 2000 (ZXS 1988b). Except for the new Zhangfang reservoir on the Juma He (on the municipality’s southwestern border with Hebei) which will supply up to 800Mt a year, there are no nearby exploitable sources of water. Not surprisingly, Beijing’s worsening water shortages have become a matter of anxious scientific and public debate, which has even included a questioning of the city’s future viability as capital of China (Xinhua 1988).
Beijing and Tianjin are no exceptions: a look at China’s northern urban water supplies reveals a repetitive pattern of progressing inadequacy of local or nearby rivers or reservoirs to satisfy the rising demand (aggravated by recurrent droughts), overuse of underground reserves (resulting in sinking water tables, higher pumping costs and extensive surface subsidence), and repeated recourse to long-distance water transfers (often involving the construction of conduits longer than 100km). In 1985, 188 Chinese cities were short of more than 10Mt of water a day, and in forty of these – including Beijing, Tianjin, Taiyuan and Xi’an – these shortages were serious enough to limit economic development. By 1988, frequent news reports claimed that more than half of China’s 200 large cities had difficulties with water supply, that the shortages were serious in about fifty of them, and that the average daily deficit had risen to about 12Mt. By 1990 this deficit reached 15Mt, and some of the estimates for the year 2000 went as high as 88Mt (Wang 1985).
Urban water shortages tend to attract a disproportionate share of attention, but, as in any other populous Asian country, China’s water use is heavily dominated by irrigation requirements, creating a number of extensive environmental impacts. Among the populous (more than 50 million) countries, only Egypt (where all farmed land is watered), and Pakistan and Japan (each with about 75 per cent watered land), surpass China in their relative dependence on irrigation (Nickum 1990). But this high dependence – according to the official statistics about 46 per cent of all arable land in the late 1980s – is of recent origin. In 1950 the share of China’s irrigated farmland was no more than 16 per cent (16Mha); by 1965 this share doubled, mainly thanks to extension of surface irrigation in the rice-growing parts of the country during the 1950s. The second period of expansion came during the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a massive drilling of tubewells on the North China Plain: the total figure peaked at 45.5Mha in 1976 (Figure 4.4). (After a period of decline and stagnation, the irrigated area continued to increase steadily during the 1990s, surpassing 53Mha by the century’s end.)
The subsequent decline, amounting to about 3 per cent of the peak area by 1988, has been interpreted as a worrisome sign of weakening crop production capacity caused by declining state investment and by baogan-induced neglect of irrigation facilities. But Nickum (1990) argues persuasively that the aggregate figures obscure more than they reveal about China’s complex and diverse state of irrigation. The basis of China’s accounting, the effectively irrigated area, is defined as level land with water resources and irrigation facilities capable of providing an adequate volume of water for crops under normal conditions. During a rainy year, such a plot of land may need no irrigation, while during a prolonged drought it may receive far from adequate moisture. Nor does the aggregate figure tell us about the number of yearly irrigations and their effectiveness.
Figure 4.4 The expansion of China’s irrigated land, 1950–1990
Source: Plotted from data in China Statistical Yearbook.
What matters is the sustainability of irrigation, and its economic effectiveness. Current Chinese practices do not reflect the scarcity value of irrigation water; this leads, on the one hand, to the continuation of unsustainable and wasteful irrigation, which would be greatly curtailed with the introduction of realistic water fees; and on the other hand, to the absence of irrigation in growing crops that bring unrealistically low returns. Nowhere are these problems more apparent than on the North China Plain. This 300,000km2 in the watersheds of the lower Huanghe, Huaihe and Haihe is a rather recent newcomer to extensive irrigation, but one whose crop yields are now critically dependent on it (O’Mara 1988). The region’s almost nonexistent slope (1:10,000), the rivers’ unreliable summer flow, and the enormous sediment load carried by the Huanghe and deposited in shallow canals, militated against any expansion of surface gravity irrigation: in 1949 less than 10 per cent of farmland in Hebei, Henan and Shandong was irrigated.
The fundamental change started only in the 1960s with the introduction of the first shallow tubewells. Their drilling peaked between 1971 and 1974, spurred by the increasing availability of fuel from the Daqing oilfield. By the late 1980s the plain had more than 2 million tubewells irrigating over 11Mha of farmland, with slightly more than three quarters relying only on the underground water and the rest irrigated in conjunction with surface water. In the early 1980s the total pumping volume fluctuated between 25 and 35Gm3 a year, and about 10Gm3 of the Huanghe was being diverted annually for irrigation in Henan and Shandong. River water irrigated about 17Mha, groundwater about 8Mha. Pumping helped keep down the formerly rather high water table, limiting the spread of salinization and reducing its former extent in Hebei and Shandong by about one quarter between 1960 and 1980.
But it also caused considerable local overexploitation of aquifers during prolonged droughts. Hebei province has been most affected by overpumping, with thirty-one separate depression cones formed over an area of some 1,200km2, or roughly a fifth of the province’s alluvium (Hebei Provincial Service 1986). The scarcity of irrigation water on the plain is best illustrated by the average annual distribution of water per hectare: in 1985 the national mean was about 9,400m3/ha; the most intensively cropped southern areas received more than 30,000m3/ha – but Shandong’s and Henan’s irrigated land averaged less than 4,300m3/ha (Nickum 1990). However, the growing water claims of the plain’s large cities and industrial areas will tend to lower even these modest irrigation rates.
Surface irrigation on the North China Plain has another troublesome environmental effect. Diversion of the Huanghe’s water, amounting to more than a quarter of the total flow during dry years, reduces the silt transport to the Bohai: up to a quarter of the high sediment load, that is about 400Mt, is now deposited each year on the river’s bed in Henan and Shandong. Surface irrigation on the plain thus aggravates the principal long-term threat for its habitation – the inexorable elevation of the riverbed above the surrounding countryside.
There is an important qualitative dimension to China’s irrigation prospects: irrigation waters in all of China’s intensively cultivated periurban areas, as well as in regions with large numbers of rural and town manufactures, have been increasingly contaminated by industrial waste, in addition to carrying higher concentrations of leached fertilizers and insecticides. The official nationwide total for 1990 waste water discharges was 36.7Gt – the equivalent of the Huanghe’s total flow in a moderately dry year – of which less than 20 per cent were treated. Late-1980s estimates of the annual economic loss attributable to water pollution were at least 30 billion yuan.
Compared to the huge volumes of water used in irrigation, household water supplies for the rural population are almost negligible, but the extension of an adequate and safe water supply to most of China’s population remains a distant goal. Running water is now available to just over 80 per cent of all urban residents in 300 large cities, and in less than a third of small cities and towns. By the end of 1990 about a quarter of the rural population had access to tap water, although only a fraction of this population had the water actually piped into their homes (Xinhua 1989). Even during years of normal precipitation, at least 50 million people in China’s rural areas have to live with the extreme scarcity of even drinking water, necessitating long trips to the nearest water source and minuscule per capita availabilities. The droughts of the 1980s worsened this situation: even in the capital, about 90,000 people had difficulty in getting water in 1986.
Chinese planners have been favoring increasingly more voluminous water transfers as the most expedient solution to urban and regional supply shortages: much capital and labor was invested in these schemes during the 1980s. The first major long-distance diversions expressly undertaken to ease critical urban water shortages were the temporary transfers of the Huanghe’s water to Tianjin in 1972, 1973 and 1975, when up to 50m3/s was diverted from the river via Henan’s Shengli Canal, Weihe and the Grand Canal, for a total length of 850km. In the winter of 1981–1982 this diversion was repeated, with the addition of two more links between the Huanghe and the Grand Canal, necessitating extensive emergency dredging of these conduits and the relocation of some villages (Zhang 1982).
Of the total diversion of 701Mm3 Tianjin actually received 451Mm3. The need for these costly emergency projects ended only with the construction of a permanent 233km-long diversion from Panjiakou reservoir on the Luanhe in Hebei. Luanhe waters were also diverted to Tangshan (a large mining city in Hebei destroyed by the 1976 earthquake) and to Qinhuangdao (the country’s largest coal port on the Bohai in northern Hebei). Other notable diversions include water for Dalian (China’s third largest port in Liaoning at the tip of Liaodong peninsula) from the Biliuhe, for Qingdao (Shandong’s largest port city on the Yellow Sea) from the Huanghe, and for Xi’an (China’s ancient capital in Shaanxi) from the Heihe. But all of these diversions will be greatly surpassed, in length as well as in diverted volume, by the transfer of the Changjiang’s water through the Grand Canal to northern Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and Tianjin.
During most years, water shortages and drought will be the country’s most extensive environmental stress, affecting commonly one tenth of the densely inhabited territory: since 1970, areas disastrously affected by drought fluctuated between 1 and 18 million hectares a year (see Figure 3.2). But the obverse threat is still far from negligible: after a period of relatively limited flooding during the 1970s, the 1980s saw between 4 and 9 million hectares affected by floods (Figure 3.2). During that decade the average area disastrously affected by floods rose to about 5.5Mha/year, an almost 2.5-fold increase compared to the 1970s – and the risks of catastrophic flooding have been growing almost everywhere.
About one tenth of China’s territory, inhabited by nearly two thirds of the population and producing roughly 70 per cent of all agricultural and industrial output, is below the flood level of major rivers. Throughout history, China’s maximum floods have brought enormous water surges (Cheng 1989). The Huanghe at Sanmenxia had a flow of 36,000m3/s in 1843, nearly twenty-five times its average; and the Changjiang, the world’s third most voluminous river, carried 110,000m3/s as it entered the plains of Hubei in 1870, about four times its enormous normal flow. In spite of the absence of flooding for nearly half a century, potentially the most dangerous situation is along the lower course of the Huanghe in Henan and Shandong. Improvement of dikes, construction of the two large flood-retarding basins in Henan and Shandong (storing about 5Gm3 of water), and progressively lower runoffs have appeared to lower the risk of catastrophic natural flooding. But there has been no extensive dredging along the river’s lower course, between Zhengzhou in Henan and the estuary, where it remains confined between about 1,400km of dikes which are at least 3–5m, and up to 11–15m, above the surrounding countryside, protecting roughly 250,000km2 of the North China Plain.
The highest reported elevations are 20m above the surrounding plain near Xinxiang in Henan, 13m near Kaifeng and 5m near Jinan; estimates of the annual rise range between 3 and 10cm a year (Mei and Dregne 2001).
With higher erosion on the Loess Plateau, the river’s silt load has increased from about 1.3Gt in the early 1950s to 1.6Gt in the early 1980s, the annual riverbed build-up has amounted to about 400Mt, and the average riverbed rise has been 1m per decade. The latest Chinese estimates are that a breach south of Jinan (in the most vulnerable area) would flood up to 33,000km2, affecting 18 million people and cutting all north/south railways and highways (Xinhua 1987). Counterintuitively, the recent period of northern drought has also contributed to a higher risk of flood damage, as dry riverbeds in many northern cities and villages were used for planting crops, dumping garbage, and even building houses. Unlike the Huanghe basin, parts of the Changjiang valley experienced several major floods during the 1980s. The principal reason for extensive flooding has been the increasing silting. In the late 1970s it was estimated that serious erosion affected about 20 per cent of the Changjiang basin (Wang and Zhou 1981); a decade later the share was put at 560,000km2, or just over 30 per cent (Chang 1987). Between 2.2 and 2.4Gt of silt is carried every year through the river’s gorges, raising the riverbeds and lake levels in Hubei and Hunan. Four fifths of all lakes in the famed area of thousand lakes in eastern Hubei disappeared owing to the combination of excessive silting and conversion to farmland, reducing the natural flood-storage capacity of this key rice-growing region. Dongtinghu, formerly China’s largest freshwater lake in northern Hunan, has fallen to second place beyond Poyanghu: of the annual influx of 160Mm3 of silt, only a quarter is discharged, and the bottom of the lake is rising by an average of 2.5cm a year (Chang 1987).
The lake’s water level during the rainy season is approaching the height of the catastrophic flood of 1954, and exceeding the danger level in sixty-eight different places. Elevation and strengthening of dikes cannot be an effective permanent solution. Moreover, most dikes and spill-over basins along the Changjiang are now able to withstand floods of only a 10–20-year frequency: a repeat of the 1954 flood, assessed by Chinese water-management experts as one of 40-year probability, could lead to the displacement of up to 7 million people, and to unprecedented economic losses (Lampton 1986). And, as always in China’s long history, the fear of southern floods continues to be accompanied by concerns about northern water deficits (Smil 2000b).
North China’s water shortages
Once again, severe drought is covering a large part of China’s north-central heartland, and once again the environmental catastrophists are predicting a massive drop in industrial production, and harvest failures, with global repercussions. Indeed, the overall annual economic loss to industry and agriculture attributable to water shortages has been surpassing $2.4 billion per year. For two thirds of China’s 600 largest cities, shortages are a recurrent problem. Is this the beginning of an inevitable environmental crisis? Or is it a matter of natural scarcity made much worse by economic mismanagement?
In absolute terms China is not short of water. It ranks sixth in the world in total water resources. But the country’s large population reduces its per capita water resources to just a quarter of the global mean. A highly uneven distribution of precipitation makes China’s northern provinces, which lie beyond the zone of vigorous monsoon rains, exceptionally water-poor. Although the region normally receives just enough precipitation to get b y, like the prairies of the United States and Canada, dry years come frequently. In fact, large swathes of the region may not see any rain or snow for many months or even for more than a year.
Below-average rainfalls for the period between 1978 and 1986 were followed by a fairly good precipitation, but drought returned in 1997, and this year (2002) it is nearly as bad as at any time during the past generation. Beijing’s reservoirs now contain less water than at any time since the early 1980s, when the city had some 3 million fewer people and only a small fraction of its current number of water-gobbling skyscrapers, hotels and restaurants. In early June, Beijing introduced “strict and obligatory” water quotas for industries, restaurants, hotels and universities, and residential and irrigation water was rationed on an experimental basis.
Reservoirs cannot fully compensate for such shortfalls, particularly at a time when China’s rapid urbanization multiplies per capita water demand: moving from village to city doubles or triples personal water consumption. Overuse of underground water, accompanied by serious ground subsidence, is thus the norm in all northern cities. Beijing’s water table, for example, has dropped by more than nine meters since the early 1980s; as a result, city ground levels are sinking by 1–2cm every year. Even higher subsidence rates are common in parts of the North China Plain, where pumps draw water from increasingly deeper wells for crop irrigation.
Yet even by the mid-1980s many Beijing residents were billed a flat fee (per household) for their water, paying less than 10 per cent of the actual cost of delivered water. That was until April 1996, when the State Council approved increased water prices in Beijing. However, better pricing alone cannot be the solution for complex environmental problems, although in this case it is obviously an essential ingredient of any effective action. More realistic water pricing would certainly prompt greater reuse of inevitably more expensive, treated waste water, while reducing China’s appalling water pollution.
Furthermore, water for irrigation, which accounts for about 80 per cent of northern China’s use and nearly 50 per cent even in the Beijing municipality, is still largely given away. Prices for irrigation water are rarely more than one US cent per ton, typically no more than 5–10 per cent of the delivered cost. But cheap irrigation water provides no incentives for making its use more efficient. At the March 1997 Forum Engelberg in Switzerland, Song Jian, chairman of China’s State Science and Technology Commission, claimed China’s agricultural water-use efficiency averaged a mere 10 per cent. The appropriate choice of crops (as well as grain-fed animals) would also help alleviate water-use problems.
None of these proposed changes and adjustments will come easily or inexpensively. Yet all of them are effective; they have been proven to work elsewhere in similar conditions. They can therefore make the difference between recurrent crises and adequate water supplies. It’s not fundamentally a matter of economic and technical resources: China has enough of both, but to solve the north-central heartland’s water crisis, there must be a determined commitment to allocate them to the challenge.
Searching for solutions
Nihil novum sub sole: certainly not as far as China’s grand-scale patterns of water supply are concerned. Parts of the country are repeatedly submerged by flooding waters, while in other provinces peasants drill ever-deeper wells to reach receding aquifers. As I write this, in August 2002, the rising waters of the Dongtinghu, China’s second largest lake, are once again spilling onto surrounding rice fields and into the villages and towns of the lakeside lowland that house more than 10 million people. At the same time, many places on the North China Plain have recently recorded the most rapid decline of water tables in their history. The Ministry of Land and Resources reported that in the year 2000 the average level of Hebei’s deep aquifer receded by 2.91m, and that a super-funnel of decreased water tables has formed over some 40,000km2 by the coalescence of water funnels underneath Beijing, Tianjin, northern Henan and western Shandong (Ma 2001).
Most of the new figures are merely more worrisome versions of the older ones. Official statistics indicate that China’s water consumption rose from about 100Gm3 in 1949 to 557Gm3 in 1997, and forecasts see the need for 664Gm3 by 2030 and 750Gm3 by 2050, bringing the annual requirement uncomfortably close to the total available volume of perhaps as little as 800Gm3 (and no more than 950Gm3) (China Daily 2002). About 27Mha of farmland now experiences drought each year, the annual deficit of irrigation water has reached 30Gm3, while the water shortage in urban areas amounts to about 6Gm3. Looking well ahead, Chinese experts voice concerns about the third and fourth decades of the twenty-first century, when the highest forecast totals of China’s population (in excess of 1.6 billion people) could bring down the nationwide average of per capita availability of water to just marginally above 1,700m3, the volume that is generally recognized as the mark for water shortages on a national scale.
But a closer look also shows a few encouraging signs. As high as the recently claimed water shortage is, the aggregate of 36Gm3 in the year 2000 is considerably smaller than the forecast made just a decade ago. Although the rate is still below the delivered costs, Beijing saw two more water price rises in 1999, to 1.3 yuan/m3 for domestic, and 1.6 yuan/m3 for industrial use – but as the true cost of water in north Chinese cities averages 5 yuan/t, even with that rise the Beijingers get their water at nearly 75 per cent below cost! The central government is definitely paying more attention to the northern water shortages, with the Minister of Water Resources promising to put the conservation and protection of water resources high on the state’s investment agenda. The State Environment Protection Administration has been working on large-scale projects to reduce river pollution.
But there is now a fairly broad consensus, although certainly no unanimity, among China’s water experts that demand-side management alone – conservation measures (water-saving faucets, showers and toilets), waste water treatment, higher prices and outright limits on water use – will not be sufficient to secure enough water for the provinces north of the Huanghe.
The only viable, albeit still controversial, means of expanding the supply is the long-distance transfer of water. The idea of South/North water transfer (nan shui bei diao) goes back to the 1950s (Greer 1979; Biswas et al. 1983; Smil 1993; Liu 1998). Possible routes for the transfer were identified and preliminarily surveyed in 1959, and the project was revived in 1978 as a part of the ten-year plan of economic modernization (Figure 4.5). A surprisingly strong public challenge based on environmental considerations, a new force in China’s policy-making, and the old problem of the enormous cost of such a project, led to a temporizing decision.
Instead of approving the full-scale project transferring 30Gm3 of water along the eastern route, from Jiangsu via Anhui and Shandong, the State Council chose a greatly scaled-down version to move only about 2Gm3 and even then not all the way, but only to the Donping Hu in Shandong, just south of the Huanghe. The principal economic argument against the full-scale version of the eastern route that takes the advantage of the Grand Canal has been the necessity of raising the water by a total of 40m along the way, a feat necessitating at least 1GW of pumping capacity, as well as major widening and dredging of the ancient, and now also heavily polluted, canal.
Detailed studies of the middle route resumed in 1990, and this alternative came to be seen by many experts as both economically and environmentally more acceptable. Water would be taken from an enlarged Danjiangkou reservoir on the Han River in northern Hubei (Figure 4.6). Its capacity would be boosted by 11.6Gm3 to 29.1Gm3 by raising the dam from the present 157m to 171.6m (Liu 1998; Xinhua 2002). The middle route’s main advantage is that no pumping would be required, as the water would be carried by gravity in a canal snaking along the southern and western edges of, respectively, the Funiu and Taihang Mountains all the way to
Beijing’s Yuyuantan Lake; a spur from Xushui in Hebei would carry water across the Haihe Plain to Tianjin. Moreover, water delivered by the middle route would be much cleaner than the flow traveling through the Grand Canal (Figure 4.5). The main disadvantage is the necessity of displacing large numbers of people. These would total about 50,000 along the canal’s route, but 200,000 people would have their houses and fields flooded because of the raised Danjiangkou dam, whose original construction has already displaced some 380,000 people (Liu 1992).
A surprising decision taken in November 2001 calls for both the first and second phases of the eastern route (from the lower Changjiang to Shandong, and then to Tianjin), and the first phase of the middle route from Hanjiang to Beijing and Tianjin – carrying initially 9.5Gm3, and 13–14Gm3 by the year 2030 – to be completed by 2010. The total cost of these two segments, shared 60:40 by central government and local authorities, will be more than 180 billion yuan (or US$22 billion when converted at the official exchange rate), and Beijing may receive the first deliveries of 1.2Gm3 of Changjiang water as early as 2007. Laudably, the project also includes more than 40 billion yuan to be invested concurrently into improved irrigation and widespread adoption of water-saving equipment in northern households and industries. Moreover, clear water passages and about 100 new sewage plants are planned to sharply reduce water pollution in the Grand Canal, which is now heavily contaminated in parts.
Water-saving measures should reduce the consumption in the areas that are to receive the diverted water by 4.1Gm3 a year. This would be equal to about one tenth of the eventually anticipated annual transfer of 38–48Gm3 (with the middle route carrying about 15Gm3), making it clearly the world’s most voluminous diversion of water. China’s largest previous water transfer was the gravity-driven 286km-long diversion of the Luanhe to the Beijing and Tianjin areas: completed in 1984, the project has an annual capacity of 19.5Gm3, while the pumped diversions from the Huanghe to Qingdao and from the Dong River to Shenzhen and Hong Kong have capacities of, respectively, 6.85 and 6.2Gm3 (Liu 1998). The only Western water diversions that compare in their scope with the South/North transfer – the nearly 1,100km of canals and pipelines of California’s State Water Project, taking water from the northern part of the state, and the diversion of the lower Colorado river to California, Arizona and New Mexico – have the capacity to move, respectively, 5.2Gm3 and 9.3Gm3 every year (CDWR 2002; Gelt 1997).
Inevitably, there are many technical and environmental concerns with a project of such unprecedented magnitude. These range from the basic questions of supply adequacy to some engineering challenges. Perhaps the most important consideration in the first category is the highly variable rainfall in the basin of the Han River, which results in recurrent low water levels in Danjiangkou reservoir. What will happen if there is an unusually long spell of low precipitation surpassing the dry periods of 1965–1966 and 1991–1995? This problem should be solved by building a connection between the Danjiangkou and Sanxia reservoirs, a relatively short link of about 150km to the Du River, the Han River’s southern tributary, but one requiring considerable pumping to cross Daba Shan.
How to cross the Huanghe – just north of the Dongping Lake with the eastern route, and near Zhengzhou in Henan with the middle route – may be the most challenging engineering problem. Siphoning under the river’s bed is the favored solution, but it will require some controls of silt deposition. Another major uncertainty is the fate of the aqueduct crossing the flood-prone Henanese plain: will the Sanmenxia and Xiaolangdi dams be able to moderate a catastrophic flood traveling down the Huanghe and threatening the new aqueduct?
China’s environment and security: simple myths and complex realities
Growing concerns about China’s long-term water supply have also become one of the most prominent examples used by a newly influential school of thought that sees a clear and direct connection between the state of the country’s environment and its broadly defined security. Most of the proponents of this view appear to be unaware that their thinking has roots in the classical geographic determinism of the late nineteenth century, and, as I will explain in the following section, its relatively rapid public acceptance owes a great deal to its fortuitous timing as a successor to, and clearly a partial substitute for, the fortunately lessened concerns about the risks of a thermonuclear conflict between two global superpowers.
During the early 1990s I was asked to prepare several China-based contributions to this interesting research genre (Smil 1992a, 1992b, 1995b). But the fact that I diligently searched out some important links between China’s deteriorating environment and its long-term security did not mean, to the disappointment of some of my catastrophically-minded colleagues, that I subscribed to a simplistic deterministic notion that saw, to caricature it by hyperbole, an inevitable regime change behind every eroding slopeland. All those new securitarians who were inclined to argue along these lines would not approve of the following analysis (Smil 1997b) – but I feel that it remains a fair appraisal of a concern that does not have to turn inevitably into a catastrophe whose impacts would go far beyond China’s extensive borders.
The Chinese language abounds in sayings and proverbs so succinct that they vex even the best translators. They are often so illuminating that they provide perfect encapsulations of countless realities. When asked to contribute again to the currently fashionable literature on environment and security,1 I found myself once more a reluctant participant in a quest whose main thrust can be most appropriately described by the ancient saying xin yuan yi ma. The four characters stand for heart, gibbon, idea and horse. It means you have an idea in mind, but the essence of your thoughts is really somewhere else.
So it is, I feel, with the recent spate of studies on environment and security. After the sudden demise of the superpower confrontation deprived political scientists of their ultimate security concern, apocalyptic nuclear war, they made a nimble readjustment. With no small help from Robert Kaplan, whose none-too-subtle visions of the future world became required reading for Washington bureaucrats, they discovered a worry perhaps almost as impressive.2 While environmental degradation does not happen in a blinding flash, it does share two important characteristics with nuclear exchange. First, its spatial reach could be truly global; and second, its social and economic effects could be highly devastating. The precipitous loss of a large share of stratospheric ozone would endanger all higher living organisms that have evolved in the biosphere protected from UVB radiation by the oxygenated atmosphere. Rapid climate change with a substantial rise of average temperatures could have effects ranging from new precipitation patterns to northward diffusion of malaria. These are, of course, the best-known, and potentially very worrisome, examples of environmental transformations.
In thinking about the new horse of environmental degradation, it is really the old gibbon’s heart of national security that many of the new securitarians want to preserve. They alter, dilute, and extend the meaning of security beyond any classical recognition, but they never give up on its original idea, which embodies conflict and violence. This is because that idea carries them to the heart of existential anguish and mortal peril, fears without which their message would not merit such an anxious hearing by politicians, the military, or the mass media. The new securitarians must be aware that the challenges posed by environmental degradation are not manageable by a well-established national security apparatus geared to preventing and fighting violent conflicts. Yet they wish to have that apparatus to embrace their ideas. They promise not just diffuse, incremental deterioration, but potentially violent conflicts whose “management” should become a matter for the highest levels of national policy-making.
Inevitably, policies guided by the fear of environmental catastrophe would affect the armed forces and intelligence-gathering organizations called on to fight this new global threat. These institutions, no matter what their real belief may be, have nimbly recognized the political value of these new fears – and hence the potential for funding.3 Many new securitarians have gone much further and redefined security in a totally all-encompassing manner. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) now maintains that security is concerned “with how people live and breathe”.4 With such a definition, one would expect security studies to be preoccupied with absolutely everything, from nutrition and unemployment to pollution and drug trafficking. The UNDP actually lists all these variables. It seems that the only ingredients it excludes is clinical depression, a feeling that makes millions of people very insecure indeed!5 A very politically incorrect question arises: why should anyone take this methodological farce seriously?
Of course, there is an obvious answer. Individual scholars, granting agencies, policy-makers and politicians all need to see suitably frightening concerns on their horizons; worries that provide a rich substrate for papers, meetings, consultations, commissions and strategic initiatives; and actions that make their participants full of the most satisfying feeling that they are helping to save the world. Consequently, environmental security has become a veritable growth industry, bringing together such unlikely confrères as Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysts and Greenpeace activists. In spite of their considerable differences, they share many unmistakable commonalties, as illustrated in recent alerts on environmental security.
Most of these studies display the simplistic bent common to recent converts to great causes. Many natural scientists must be amused, if not appalled, by the often crass environmental determinism of the securitarians (eroding slopelands = environmental refugees = overcrowded cities = political instability = violence; or water scarcity = civil or interstate war). Any thoughtful historian, and especially those fascinated by the complex relationships between civilizations and their environment, must be astonished by the utter neglect of long-term historical perspectives. The two most obvious weaknesses are, first, an apparent ignorance of the history of environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation in affluent nations; and second, a lack of appreciation of the quintessential role played by scarcity and crises in stimulating technical and social innovation.6
Even the most eager promoters of these new perils find it difficult to make connections between the environment and national security. Moreover, some of the political scientists who refused to board the new security train have been waging a war of ideas, almost to the point of denying any links at all between the two supervariables. Exaggeration, hesitation, meandering, tedious definitional debates and recriminations have been an inevitable result of this state of affairs.7 As a natural scientist, albeit one keenly interested in the socio-economic implications of environmental change, I will not attempt to add to the suspect canon of theoretical generalizations regarding the peculiar relationship between the environment and security. Unique combinations of environmental settings, economic (mis)fortunes, cultural expectations and social cohesion make any such generalizations highly suspect. Instead, my goal is to examine critically current Chinese realities, as well as the most likely short-term trends, in order to identify any links between China’s environment and its security.
What security?
Ullman’s expanded definition centers on the presence, over a relatively brief span of time, of drastic military or non-military security threats to the quality of life. In so doing, it captures both individual and policy-making concerns and significantly narrows the range of practical policy choices.8 But even when working within this broad framework, one must make a distinction between truly drastic new threats and serious, but recurring, old patterns which are better publicized. Appraising the available policy options requires distinguishing what appears alarming, but is in fact ephemeral, from what is truly worrisome and long-lasting. The dynamic nature of both technical and socio-economic fixes continually expands and alters the realm of these choices.
With nearly 1.25 billion people by the end of 1996, China is the world’s most populous nation. It possesses nuclear weapons, borders more than a dozen other countries, carries a burden of historical myths, and is prone to radical upheavals. Its security obviously matters. The state of China’s environment matters not just to the Chinese but to its neighbors as well. Ecosystems which have been much abused for millennia must now endure an extraordinarily large and rapid quest for modernization.9 While the concept still finds only a very few supporters among economists, economies are nothing but complex subsystems of the biosphere. Hence, any degradation of a nation’s environment inevitably weakens its long-term capacity for sustaining individual well-being and high levels of total output.10 Given China’s size, any major failure on the road to modernization would have wide-ranging international repercussions.
Although these matters are exceedingly difficult to quantify, my detailed and fairly comprehensive economic estimates suggest that environmental degradation costs China about 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product every year, a conclusion echoed by a recently published, independent Chinese study.11 Does this indisputably serious burden affect China’s security? If so, in what way? Were it to grow further, could it be restricted to merely a marginal aggravation, barely consequential in comparison with the traditionally present forces of disintegration, raging from the centrifugal tendencies of distant provinces to recurrent outbursts of violence, and from touchy nationalism to vicious infighting within the gerontocratic elite? Or could it become China’s major contribution to a world disintegrating into Kaplanesque anarchy? These questions are best answered by a closer look at the most important components of environmental change in China.
Environmental pollution
Maintaining that the only effect of more intense environmental pollution over a much greater area is to degrade the quality of life, the new securitarians ignore the process of industrialization and urbanization as a whole. Furthermore, they do so without a proper historical perspective. Deteriorating quality of air, water and soils; increasing background noise; foodstuffs contaminated by long-lasting residues of wastes and synthetic chemicals; and exposure to aesthetic blight have accompanied economic modernization around the world. They are all in abundant, and often revolting, evidence throughout China. However, when viewed in historical perspective, these degradations could be seen as merely regrettable, and often surprisingly temporary by-products of changes that have allowed impressive declines in infant mortality, a steady increase in life expectancy, larger disposable incomes and greater social mobility. China has quickly developed some of the world’s worst environmental quality indicators, but it has also experienced unusually impressive improvements in major quality-of-life indicators – a benefit also enjoyed by other late modernizers, notably South Korea and Taiwan. These two major differences – the speed of environmental degradation and the rate of improvement in certain quality-of-life indicators – have been dictated by the extraordinarily rapid pace of the recent modernization effort.
China is now the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, an inherently dirty fuel requiring efficient combustion and advanced emission controls to prevent high levels of air pollution. Even the most efficient form of coal combustion produces a great deal of particulate matter as well as sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and it is a leading source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas. Particulate controls using electrostatic precipitators are relatively cheap and highly effective, but desulfurization is expensive and nitrogen oxide removal even more so. Most of China’s coal is burned without any controls in tens of millions of small coal stoves and in small and mid-sized boilers providing heat, steam and hot water for millions of small enterprises, offices and public facilities. Coal is also by far the most important fuel for generating China’s electricity, but only the largest power plants commissioned during the past decade have satisfactory particulate emission controls, and there is no commercial desulfurization of flue gases.
Not surprisingly, this brings recurrently heavy episodes of classic (London-type) smog to most Chinese cities, and it creates semi-permanent hardship in all northern urban areas during winter. In addition, the recent rapid multiplication of passenger cars and trucks has been responsible for no less objectionable and no less recurrent episodes of heavy photochemical (Los Angeles-type) smog. China’s cities and the surrounding countryside are thus blanketed by very high levels of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and ozone, with concentrations of some of these pollutants being commonly of an order of magnitude above the recommended hygienic means. China’s SO2 air quality limit is 60 micrograms per cubic meter (mg/m3) an annual mean, while actual average concentrations in Beijing range from 80 mg/m3, in the cleanest suburbs, to 160mg/m3. In the worst polluted northern cities they commonly surpass 300mg/m3.12 The inevitable consequences of this combination include a higher incidence of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and premature mortality among the most sensitive individuals.
The news on water pollution is no better. Even according to official – and very likely too optimistic – statistics, less than half of all waste water is treated, mostly in the simplest way, before it is returned to streams, lakes and ponds. More importantly, during the early 1990s, only about a quarter of all treated industrial waste water conformed to acceptable standards after discharge. Chinese environmental journals abound with reports of high waterborne concentrations of heavy metals, phenols and waste oils. Stream monitoring shows rising levels of dissolved nitrates.
These trends are nothing unexpected, as they replicate those the Western world experienced during the earlier – and not so distant – stages of its industrialization. For example, until their substantial reduction, beginning in the late 1970s, US per capita SO2 emissions were more than ten times as high as the recent Chinese mean. In fact, the absolute level of Chinese SO2 emissions is still no higher than US totals were during the 1980s. Furthermore, even though total North American and European SO2 emissions have declined appreciably since the late 1970s, Central European rates are still considerably higher than those in China, both in terms of per capita and per square kilometer (km2). Atmospheric concentrations of particulate matter and SO2 were commonly as high in London during the early 1950s as they have been in Beijing during the 1990s. During London’s infamous episode of heavy smog pollution in early December 1952, average levels of SO2 stayed above 1,000mg/m3 for four consecutive days: together with extremely high levels of particulates, they were responsible for some 4,000 premature deaths.13
Moreover, some environmental degradations remain more intense in the West than in China. For example, the average annual concentration of nitrates, originating from synthetic fertilizers, manures and nitrogen oxides from combustion, has recently been between 15 and 20 milligrams per liter in the lower basin of Germany’s Rhine River, roughly twice as high as in the lower Huanghe, and four times as high as in the Yangzi River as it flows through Jiangsu province.14 At the same time, an important and rarely appreciated difference is that, little as China spends on environmental protection, these outlays are relatively higher than those of Western nations, or of Japan, at a comparable stage in their economic development. Government spending on environmental protection in these countries did not begin to make a difference until after their average per capita gross domestic products (GDP) passed US$5,000, nearly three times as high as the Chinese mean today.15
Perhaps the most encouraging indicator of China’s environmental progress, of which securitarians of the catastrophic bent appear to be quite unaware, has been a rapid decline of the country’s energy-to-GDP intensity. This measure is a powerful marker of two critical trends. Lower energy-to-GDP ratios indicate greater economic efficiency, and also suggest that the economy is putting a relatively lesser burden on the environment. A long-term decline in this indicator has been pronounced in both North America and in Western Europe, but Chinese improvements are occurring at an even faster rate (for details see the last section of Chapter 2). In addition, the average intensity of water use by industry has also declined, reducing the output of waste water. Both of these trends should continue during the coming years, since China’s energy and material intensity efficiencies remain far below their potential.
While industrial efficiencies have improved remarkably, major gains are yet to be made at the household level. Hardly any Chinese apartments are built with wall or ceiling insulation or double-glazed windows, and even fewer have individual temperature controls. Fiberglass and thermostats in millions of newly built apartments would bring energy savings and environmental benefits for decades to come.
The state of China’s environment has become a focus for both international aid efforts and for extensive transfer of advanced pollution prevention and clean manufacturing techniques. The United States, Japan and the European Union are all eagerly proffering their considerable advisory and technical capacities to deal with China’s energy and environmental challenges. Japanese involvement has been by far the most notable. Japan’s New Energy Development Organization is introducing better coal cleaning, more efficient combustion, and simplified flue gas desulfurization.16
Inevitably, the rapid pace of China’s modernization will bring higher investment in environmental protection. The official target is to double the rate of current investment in environmental protection by the year 2000. At present, it is still short of 1 per cent of GDP. Among the most encouraging specific plans for the near future is the project aimed at cleaning up three heavily polluted rivers in the densely populated eastern coastal region (Huai He, Hai He and Liaohe), and three major lakes (Tai Hu, Chao Hu and Dianchi).
What has been gained by the recent environment-degrading dash toward modernization is surely impressive. Quality-of-life gains have been quite substantial, both in terms of improvement rates and absolute levels achieved. The country’s infant mortality is now well below 30/1,000, comparable to Argentina. Life expectancy is now very close to seventy-one years, slightly ahead of Russia. Average per capita GDP, expressed in terms of purchasing power parity, was close to US$2,000 in 1995, comparable to Japan in the mid-1950s and to many countries in pre-World War II Europe. And per capita food availability rose to within less than 5 per cent of Japan and is now equivalent to about 112 per cent of the rate needed to satisfy nutritional needs compatible with a healthy and active life. Judged by these principal quality-of-life indicators, China should no longer be bundled with the low-income developing countries.17
Clearly, these are not indicators of a country on the brink of a catastrophic collapse. While incomes will continue to rise fairly rapidly, other indicators may rise only slowly or level off. Major changes will take place among environmental indicators. For example, overall life expectancy will increase, but the causes of death will reflect a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases and malignancies, as opposed to infectious disease. Consequently, I would argue that China’s environmental pollution, while undoubtedly objectionable and certainly harmful to millions of individuals, will not lower the overall quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. Many of its worst excesses will almost certainly be reduced. While its impacts will still be widespread, they are likely to be compensated for by other gains, at least in the judgment of the average citizen if not in the feelings of Western visitors working with ahistorical assumptions and unrealistic expectations.
Perhaps the most helpful way to think about the road ahead is to realize that, in terms of income, China will be traversing ground covered by most of today’s affluent countries between 1930 and 1970; in terms of pollution control, the country’s experience will more likely resemble the rich world’s achievements between 1955 and 1975 (albeit with strikingly different ratios of resources/population when compared not just to North America but also to most European countries). Consequently, I do not foresee circumstances in which mounting environmental pollution would threaten the country’s (broadly conceived) security interests to such an extent that either an appreciable decline in the quality of life or increase in civil violence might occur. The historical lessons are clear. As a society’s standard of living increases, environmental pollution is a major stimulus to higher efficiency of energy and material conversions, and, through stricter regulations, eventually to an improved quality of life. There is no reason why China should not replicate this experience.
Ecosystemic degradation
The problems encompassed within this broad definition of ecosystemic degradation are too intractable to rectify via straightforward technical solutions. Reducing and eliminating ecosystemic degradation requires constant and skilled resource management, ranging from appropriate agronomic techniques to ongoing planting, and nurturing of trees. As with environmental pollution, China’s record in this area is clearly worrisome on a number of fronts. Not all aspects of ecosystemic degradation are amenable to monetization. Most notably, we have no satisfactory means of valuing biodiversity, the key outcome of evolution and the guarantor of biospheric viability. As it happens, China’s pre-modern biodiversity was exceptionally high.
Excessive erosion now affects about one third of the country’s soils. Even when using official criteria, forest coverage remains below 15 per cent. Cumulative losses of arable land during the past forty years have been larger than all of Germany’s farmland, and the annual loss rate of around half a million hectares is still unacceptably high. Conversion of wetlands to crop fields has severely damaged one of the major stores of biodiversity and reduced water storage capacity. The deforested and overgrazed regions of northern China are threatened by desertification. Conservative estimates show that these degradations already cost China the equivalent of at least 5 per cent of GDP annually, and none of these trends can be radically reversed in a matter of years. But, as with the pollution effects, these developments have their obverse in encouraging changes. Perhaps most notably, the quality of afforestation efforts has improved significantly. Survival rates are now well over 50 per cent, compared to approximately 10 per cent a generation ago. Since the mid-1980s, the government has been limiting the allowable cut in state forests, and turning to substantial imports of wood. Recently, China has been spending about a billion dollars per year to import logs, pulp and paper from North and South America, Europe and Russia.
Although China is still losing its mature trees, the total forest area has been stabilized, and it may have actually grown a bit during the past few years – the first reversal in modern Chinese history. According to figures issued by the Ministry of Forestry, China’s forested areas rose from a low of 115.28 million hectares in 1981 to 124.65Mha by 1988, and reached 128.63Mha by 1992. The annual increment in new timber was 366 million m3, and annual consumption was 327 million m3, yielding an annual surplus averaging 39 million m3 of timber during the period 1989–1991, the first such gain in many generations. In December 1993 it was announced that total annual growth had surpassed 400 million m3, while consumption had declined further to 320 million m3. If true, this would mean a fundamental reversal in a single decade, with the 1989–1993 annual surplus being equal to exactly one quarter of all tree felling.18 Even when heavily discounted, there is little doubt that the precipitous decline of China’s forests has stopped, and perhaps even been slightly reversed.
New surveys show that the country has actually at least 30 per cent, and perhaps as much as 45 per cent, more arable land than is listed in official statistics, and tougher new regulations are being put in place to limit losses of the most valuable farmland. For more on China’s farmland, see the last section of Chapter 3.
Besides the scare over “Who will feed China?”, the other event related to the environment that has attracted a great deal of recent attention has been the record floods during the summer of 1996. Not surprisingly, the flooding in China is already interpreted as the beginning of a worsening trend directly attributable to ecosystemic degradation. This does not appear to be very likely. Saying this is not to claim that excessive rainfalls, or other unpreventable natural extremes, cannot be aggravated by human actions. In China’s case, there is no doubt that misguided environmental policies have contributed to the severity of catastrophic flooding by encouraging deforestation and the destruction of lakes and wetlands. Deforestation opens the slopes for direct impact by raindrops which, together with accelerated runoff, strips away most of the protective layer, reduces the water-storage capacity of the watershed, and increases soil erosion. The difference can be dramatic. While a forested terrain in central China will lose no more than a few tonnes of topsoil per hectare annually, a clear-cut slopeland will lose more than 30, or even 50, tonnes per hectare annually, and in north China’s highly erodible Loess Plateau, the rate may easily surpass 100 tonnes per hectare per year.
The destruction of wetlands has affected the central part of the Yangzi valley in the province of Hubei, the area formerly known as the land of thousand lakes, particularly hard. I still remember my astonishment when, some twenty years ago, I compared the first cloud-free satellite images of Hubei with the US and Japanese maps prepared during the early 1940s. While the maps showed a score of medium- and large-sized lakes and numerous smaller water surfaces, LANDSAT images in the 1970s revealed that the lake area had been reduced by half. After the beginning of de-Maoization, official sources revealed that of nearly 1,100 lakes larger than 1,000 mu (approximately 66.6 hectares) fewer than 400 remained by 1978. The province’s lake water surface had fallen by 75 per cent! Needless to say, such a drastic loss of water storage must be reflected in more intensive flooding.
Given ever-higher population densities and the rapidly rising economic product, the damage caused by an identical volume of water in the mid-1990s must be at least two to three times as high as it would have been in the mid-1970s, and a high multiple of the mid-1950s level. However, given China’s vastly increased level of economic activity, such damage may be a smaller fraction of annual GDP than in the past, and the overall effects may be surprisingly limited. For example, in 1995 natural disasters affected crops on about 4.5 million hectares, roughly 5 per cent of the officially claimed farmland, and reduced output to as little as one fifth of normal yields. Yet China still proceeded to produce a record harvest of cereals.
Moreover, careful chronicling of areas affected by floods shows no obvious trend. Although there was an increase in the total area affected between 1970 and 1986, annual totals were substantially lower than during the worst flooding of the 1950s and 1960s. The obverse situation to China’s recurrent flooding – the commonly cited warnings about water shortages so severe that they could cripple urban life of drought-prone northern provinces, where some two fifths of China’s population live and an equal share of industrial capacity is located – offers a perfect example of the ignoring of economic realities, both by Chinese and Western environmental doomsayers. I will illustrate this by comparing Beijing’s pre-1996 water prices with those of the city where I live.
Winnipeg, a city of some 700,000 people with no heavy industrial production, gets its water from Lake of the Woods, one of the large glacial lakes left behind by the last Ice Age. This water requires hardly any cleaning, and no pumping is needed as the water flows to the city by gravity. Yet with sewerage rates included, we are charged about US$1.30/m3. Until the State Council approved increased prices in April 1996, the inhabitants of Beijing – a city of 11 million people where half of all water comes from expensive underground pumping and where Stalinist planners located many water-guzzling, heavy industrial enterprises – were paying 0.3 yuan/m3, that is a mere $0.035/m3 at the official exchange rate, and only around $0.15/m3 when using a liberal purchasing parity rate. Even more remarkably, in comparison to Winnipeg a cubic meter of Beijing water costs less even as a share of average disposable family incomes! The approved rate increase for water will boost the new rate to about $0.25/m3, still only a fifth of the cost in Winnipeg, a city enjoying one of the most abundant water supplies in the world.
Rather than being an exception, China’s urban water prices have followed the world norm in undervaluing limited natural resources. Alarms about imminent and crippling resource scarcities thus appear in a very different light when one recognizes that the commodities in question have been, until recently, largely given away, using enormous government subsidies that have eliminated incentives for efficient use or substitution. There are other factors behind water scarcity in Beijing. Until recently, many households did not have a water meter and were charged a flat monthly fee. While this has been largely remedied, rice, a crop traditionally not grown in the area, is still planted in the Beijing municipality and in the surrounding Hebei province, a choice about as smart, and about as heavily subsidized, as growing rice in the semi-deserts of California.
Once again – without in the least trying to denigrate the extent or intensity of China’s environmental degradation or the challenges facing a rapidly modernizing country with relatively limited amounts of key natural resources – I simply do not see why sensible policies, now increasingly in evidence, should not bring incremental improvements and prevent the kind of deterioration that might seriously affect the country’s socio-economic security or even push it into external conflicts.
Different future
Undoubtedly, today’s China is full of unrealistic expectations. Its large population means that its rich natural endowment translates into relatively modest per capita resource availability, and its huge potential demand for all kinds of resources means that the country will not have the option of relying on imports of basic commodities to the extent Japan or the USA have done.19 Inevitably, a modernized China will not be a copy of North America. It will have to find a new consumption equilibrium, but so will the affluent nations, as too many of our demands are unsustainable. However, this reality does not have to translate into any objectionable declines in real quality of life. We have come to understand that improvement of health and educational indicators and the realization and maintenance of a comfortable standard of living do not keep pace with rising incomes or material consumption. J-bends, or saturation levels, often form at surprisingly low rates of energy use or disposable income.
Admittedly, it will take some time to get used to this profound lesson and to reorient economies accordingly. Yet the task is eventually unavoidable. We cannot keep increasing energy conversion and material output without serious environmental consequences. Managing this challenge will be a major task for the first half of the twenty-first century. In this sense, China’s predicaments are simply more circumscribed and more demanding versions of the tasks that will face every nation. Fortunately, there appear to be no insurmountable biophysical reasons why even China cannot achieve a great deal of incremental advances along this demanding path. Extremist policies that have plagued so much of China’s modern development may yet undermine much that has been already achieved. However, if China were to enjoy a generation of political stability, widening personal freedoms, and cooperative relations with the other four fifths of humanity, there is no reason why the state of its environment should not become a catalyst for further socio-economic advances, rather than a factor contributing to instability, conflict or even violence.
The cost of China’s environmental change: quantifying the economic impact
Those environmental catastrophists who were disappointed by my criticism of exaggerated claims of new securitarianism as it applies to China, found plenty of material that was more to their liking in my comprehensive evaluation of the economic impacts of China’s environmental change. This detailed report, prepared originally for the East–West Center in Hawaii (Smil 1996c), made it clear that those economic costs of China’s environmental mismanagement that can be at least partially quantified are not trivial, and that the real toll must be considerably higher.
We have been valuing natural goods for millennia: as categories and intensities of our desire change – fossil fuels instead of furs, silicon instead of copper – so do the outputs and prices. But one underlying reality has helped us make the growing populations more affluent in spite of the obviously limited amount of natural riches: a remarkable substitutability of most of the natural resources made possible by even more remarkable human inventiveness. And so the recurrent worries about running out are repeatedly relegated to forgotten cases of mistaken thinking. Here is just one example among many: in the age of wired communication we worried about running out of copper, but now most our messages run through glass (optical fibers) whose main ingredient is just clean sand – or through the air.
But we rely on nature not just for goods, but also for environmental services that include benefits ranging from pollination of crops by bees to soil formation by earthworms; from insect pest control by birds to decomposition of organic wastes by bacteria and fungi; and from oxygen release by photosynthesizing plants to nitrogen return to the atmosphere by denitrifying microbes (Smil 1997). There are no viable, biosphere-wide substitutes for these services: without them all our civilizing efforts would almost instantly fall apart. Consequently, these natural services are in many ways truly invaluable, and hence any monetization of human environmental impact is bound to be inherently incomplete.
Nevertheless, even the exercises limited to quantifying damages and degradations that are more amenable to monetization are helpful and revealing. The cost of air pollution can be measured indirectly by declining crop yields or by the increasing number of visits made by asthmatics to hospital emergency departments. The cost of soil erosion can be at least partially captured by quantifying the burden of additional cleaning of excessively silted canals, and of the disappearing water storage capacity in reservoirs. Even when they are based on fairly conservative assumptions, these valuations show that much of the vaunted modern economic growth is an illusion, as a substantial part of its undoubted benefits is erased by pollution and ecosystemic degradation, whose costs are never considered by standard economic accounts.
All quantifications of the economic costs of environmental change are inherently uncertain and open to adjustment and argument. But their goal is not – in any case unattainable – exactitude. They call our attention to those impacts of human activities that the traditional economic calculus leaves out: unabashedly, economists call them “externalities”, but ecological economists and ecologists are appalled by this treatment. That is why I dared to enter this tricky realm of environmental accounting: to bring a more realistic – though necessarily imperfect and in many ways flawed – assessment of the impact that China’s modernization is having on the country’s already much damaged environment (Smil 1997b).
As their shared ancient Greek root attests, economics and ecology are just two great branches of the same tree – but today’s mainstream protagonists of economical and ecological thought appear to have little in common. A closer look reveals a great deal of intellectual cross-pollination and creative ferment at the disciplinary edges20 – but, generally, there is still that distinct feeling that ecologists have too few numbers to make irrefutable arguments about the extent and the intensity of appropriate environmental management.
Of course, ecologists can offer a great deal of quantitative evidence concerning degradative processes, ranging from coastal eutrophication to tropical deforestation, and they have come to understand the intricacies of such anthropogenic changes as acid deposition or heavy metal accumulation. But nothing would help to make their argument stronger than the availability of realistic assessments of the economic impacts of environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation. Persuasive figures on economic losses caused by these changes would make it possible to offer revealing cost-benefit analyses and to reorient public policies, as well as environmental laws and investors’ thinking, toward more effective preventive actions.
Converting this need to acceptable results is an extraordinary challenge, even for affluent economies with long traditions of good statistical services and with a deepening interest in environmental matters in general, and in ecological economics in particular. Major difficulties complicate the task. As yet, there are no generally accepted standard procedures for such evaluations.21 These methodological uncertainties mean that individual researchers have no choice but to use subjective judgments about which variables to include and how to treat those inclusions.
For example, if a researcher is to quantify the health effects of chronically high urban air pollution, the approach may range from a minimalist account, limited to the value of labor time lost due to higher upper-respiratory morbidity, to the all-encompassing valuation monetizing every individual discomfort and including the cost of premature death. In the first case, it is not too difficult to work out the productive time lost to respiratory illness through sample surveys of major employers or health care providers, to compare it with a similar population living in a clean city, and to multiply the excess total by typical wage rates.
When pursuing the second choice, an enterprising researcher will uncover relatively rich, and fascinating, literature on the monetization of personal suffering and the value of life – but no objective criteria for putting monetary value on the respiratory discomfort, physical limitations and anxiety induced by recurrent asthmatic attacks provoked by rising levels of photochemical smog. And as far as the value of life is concerned, actuarial practice, economic considerations and moral imperatives will present choices whose totals may differ by up to an order of magnitude.22
But even a standard set of procedures would not make the challenge much easier: specific figures are needed as basic inputs in such calculations are commonly unavailable, even in affluent countries with extensive statistical services.23 Again, simplifying assumptions and subjective choices becomes unavoidable, weakening the persuasiveness of the eventual bottom line. Although some very ingenuous estimating procedures may have been employed in the process, the cumulative effect of even small departures from reality can easily halve, or double, the final figure!24
But perhaps the most limiting factor is the impossibility of any meaningful monetization of degraded or lost environmental services. If a peasant on a treeless plain removes straw from the field in order to cook or to heat the house, how can we value that loss? The value of plant nutrients in removed straw can be expressed rather easily by equating it with the cost of synthetic fertilizers needed to replace them. But the recycled straw would have improved the water-retention capacity of the soil, and it would have also provided feed for myriad bacteria and fungi, as well as for numerous soil invertebrates, without which there can be no living, productive soils, and hence no sustainable farming. How does one monetize those irreplaceable ecosystemic services?
But none of these obstacles should prevent us from trying. As long as we understand the limitations – that the valuations provide useful ranges of approximations and never any correct single-figure answers, that all of them are incomplete, and that even the most comprehensive ones will almost certainly undervalue the real impact of human actions on the long-term integrity of the quality of the environment – we can interpret the results.
Still, getting to that point is difficult, and the challenges are particularly great in countries where such evaluations may be needed most: in large, populous and still growing nations engaged in rapid socio-economic modernization which puts enormous demands on the integrity of their environment.
China’s recent record is remarkable in every one of these aspects. This nation of more than 1.2 billion people adds at least 13 million people a year, or the equivalent of France in less than five years;25 during the 1980s its GDP growth was surpassed only by that of South Korea, and during the early 1990s it was the world’s highest, with annual rates up to 14 per cent.26 But this unprecedented growth and modernization goes on in landscapes previously much abused by irrational industrial and agricultural practices, on a territory endowed with absolutely large but relatively limited natural resources, and in environments whose air, water and land are already much polluted.27
At the same time, China is a country abounding in dubious statistics and unverifiable claims, and peopled by masses of uncooperative bureaucrats prone to treating any unflattering figure as a deep state secret. If the Dutch or Germans try to express the economic cost of their environmental degradation, that may be one thing28 – but doing the same for China may seem overly ambitious. Surprisingly, a Chinese study was actually among the earliest attempts of its kind: it was initiated in 1984, and when published in 1990 it put the cost of the country’s environmental pollution at about 6.75 per cent of its 1983 annual GDP.29 Soon after I learned about this study I began to gather materials for a more comprehensive assessment, one that would also quantify at least some major consequences of ecosystemic degradation.
I eventually did most of the work on this project at the East–West Center in Honolulu,30 but even before this assessment was completed I thought it would be interesting if a small group of Chinese researchers were to make, quite independently, a similarly comprehensive evaluation. I hoped that a comparison of the two studies would show both the usefulness and the limitations of these valuations. When The Project on Environment, Population and Security directed by Thomas Homer-Dixon at the University of Toronto provided the necessary support, I was able to ask Professor Mao Yushi, a noted Chinese economist, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and now the director of Unirule Institute of Economics in Beijing, to commission studies on the economic costs of China’s environmental pollution, deforestation and land degradation.31
With both assessments now available,32 the opportunity to appraise the economic impact of China’s environmental change is better than in the case of any other large modernizing nation. Readers interested in detailed assumptions will have to refer to the two studies; here I will just review some of China’s most important environmental concerns, highlight the conclusions of both studies, and explain the reasons for some major differences in their results.
Air and water pollution
A small, pioneering opinion survey done in China a few years ago found that the public ranked air and water pollution only behind earthquakes and floods on the list of environmental hazards – but that people with science or engineering degrees put the two pollution risks ahead of natural disasters.33 China’s severe air pollution problems are all too obvious, a result of the country’s traditionally high dependence on coal (whose combustion produces the classic smog, made up of suspended particulates and SO2) and of the recent rapid increases of vehicular traffic (whose emissions of volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, take part in complex reactions resulting in photochemical smog).
While Chinese coals are of fairly good quality, only about a fifth of them are cleaned and sorted before combustion, and typical conversion efficiencies in tens of millions of household stoves and in thousands of small industrial and commercial boilers remain very low, resulting in extraordinarily high emission factors per unit of delivered useful energy.34 High urban densities, common commingling of residential and industrial areas, improperly vented household stoves, and use of smoky biomass fuels in rural areas, are additional factors aggravating the situation.
The combustion of fossil fuels now produces close to 20Mt of SO2 and about 15Mt of particulates a year, and monitoring shows the long-term averages of both pollutants to be multiples of maxima recommended by the World Health Organization.35 For example, for SO2 these limits are no more than 40–60mg/m3 for the annual mean – but in Beijing even the cleanest suburbs average 80mg/m3 a year, and the annual mean is double that value in the most polluted locations. Still, these are low levels compared to annual means (in mg/m3) of over 400 in Taiyuan and Lanzhou, and over 300 in Linfeng, Chongqing (Sichuan) and Guiyang (Guizhou).
In accordance with European and North American experience, particulate and SO2 damage to crops is relatively small, with most of the yields losses experienced in suburban vegetable farming. Damage to materials is considerably higher, and it is bound to grow with intensification of acid deposition in the rainy South.36 But it is the damage to human health that is most worrisome. I have estimated that at least 200 million Chinese are exposed to annual particulate concentrations of above 300mg/m3, and at least 20 million are exposed to twice that level. In addition, the diffusion of new industries means that 100–200 million rural inhabitants may already breathe air nearly as polluted as in cities.
These very high exposures resemble urban values that prevailed in West European and North American cities two to four generations ago, and they contribute to higher incidence of respiratory diseases, ranging from upper respiratory infections to lung cancer. But assessing the share attributable to outdoor air pollution is particularly difficult in China, because most people are also exposed to very high levels of indoor air pollution from inefficient stoves, and the nation abounds with smoking addicts.37
Water pollution is even more ubiquitous in China than air pollution. Several years ago a survey of nearly 900 major rivers found that more than four fifths of them were polluted to some degree, over 20 per cent so badly that it was impossible to use their water for irrigation.38 As for the drinking water, its quality meets state standards only in six of China’s twenty-seven largest cities drawing on surface sources, and in just four out of twenty-seven instances where underground sources are used.
Municipal wastes are commonly released untreated, even in large cities. Half of Shanghai’s waste is discharged into the Yangzi and into Hangzhou Bay; and the Songhua River and Ji Canal in Jilin and Heilongjiang still contain tens of tonnes of mercury, the legacy of pre-1977 uncontrolled releases which caused waterborne Hg concentration higher than in Japan’s Minamata Bay.39 And the recent multiplication of small and medium-sized rural and township enterprises outside large cities has brought a variety of water pollutants into China’s countryside. In Jiangsu province (the one surrounding Shanghai) there is now about one such enterprise per square kilometer! Unknown volumes of untreated waste from these plants goes into streams and networks of canals, contaminating waters used for drinking (about half of China’s population draws its drinking water from surface sources), animals and irrigation.
Besides such common industrial pollutants as industrial oils, phenols and heavy metals, China’s waters are now receiving much higher levels of nitrates leached from heavy fertilizer applications. The country is now the world’s largest consumer of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, with annual applications averaging around 200kg N/ha, and surpassing 300kg N/ha in the most intensively cultivated provinces. With the addition of animal and human wastes, such nitrogen loadings will eventually lead to serious nitrate contamination.40 The economic burdens of water pollution range from declining fish catches in streams and reservoirs, and a growing frequency of red tides affecting China’s shrimp aquaculture, to increased mortality and a higher incidence of tumors among livestock, and steadily growing rates of cancers of the liver, stomach and esophagus. Studies in the worst-affected localities found the incidence of cancers of the digestive system to be 3–10 times higher than in unpolluted places; other findings included enlarged liver, anemia, skin diseases, premature hair loss and a higher incidence of congenital deformities. Water pollution also helps to make viral hepatitis and dysentery the two leading infectious diseases in China.
Waterborne pathogens and parasite eggs in organic wastes recycled to cropland continue to be a major problem in China’s countryside. The frequency of ascariasis, ancylostomiasis and trichuriasis among China’s vegetable farmers has been in excess of 90 per cent in some regions.41 Substantial economic losses also arise due to the impossibility of using polluted water in industrial and agricultural production, and due to additional costs incurred in tapping new resources.
My conservative calculations put the total cost of China’s air and water pollution at roughly 30–45 billion of 1990 yuan, while Xia’s total came close to 100 billion of 1992 yuan. Even when increasing my estimate by about 20 per cent in order to account for China’s high rate of inflation during the early 1990s, Xia’s estimates are considerably higher. As shown in Table 4.1, most of the difference is explained by the treatment of impacts on human health.
Differing assumptions about population totals exposed to particular pollution levels, and different costs ascribed to typical treatments or lost labor hours, are major factors. For example, while Xia and I do not differ that much as far as the total urban population exposed to excessive air pollution is concerned, his averages for treatment costs of chronic bronchitis and lung cancer are, respectively 2,100 and 12,700 yuan, compared to 800 and 5,000 yuan used in my estimates. Such disparities are typical of many previous studies attempting to capture pollution’s toll on human health.42
Table 4.1 Economic costs attributable to air and water pollutiona
Land use changes and soil degradation
This broad category ranges from the desertification of China’s extensive interior grasslands to the disappearance of its coastal marshes but – given the combination of China’s relatively low per capita availability of agricultural land and continuing population growth that will add at least 300 million people during the next twenty-five years – losses of farmland and qualitative decline of arable soils are the most imminent concerns. China’s arable land area is substantially larger than the total of 95 million hectares claimed by the State Statistical Bureau: best values based on sample surveys and remote sensing are in the range of 120–140Mha.43 This means that in per capita terms the country still has more than twice as much farmland as South Korea and Japan, its truly land-short East Asian neighbors.
At the same time, official totals of China’s recent farmland losses may err on the low side. Cumulative losses of arable land during the past forty years have been larger than Germany’s total farmland, and the annual loss has averaged about half a million hectares since 1980. In addition, much of the lost area has been of good quality, alluvial soils in coastal provinces experiencing the fastest rate of urban and industrial expansion.
In addition to farmland losses, China’s agriculture is also affected by lowered soil quality, a change due mostly to greater soil erosion and to a decline in both the extent and the intensity of traditional recycling of organic wastes; improper irrigation, and more intensive cropping relying on higher applications of agrochemicals, are the other leading causes.
A nationwide survey conducted on almost half of China’s farmland identified various degrees of excessive soil erosion on 31 per cent of the land. Erosion rates are not high only on the naturally highly erosion-prone Loess Plateau. In Sichuan, China’s most populous province with more than 110 million people, 44 per cent of fields were eroding during the late 1980s beyond sustainable level (a fourfold increase compared to the early 1950s), and 2Mha of cultivated slopeland (or nearly a third of the province’s total) had annual erosion losses averaging 110t/ha.44 For comparison, recent US water erosion rates averaged just over 9t/ha, and wind erosion amounted to over 7t/ha for a total of about 17t/ha.
I quantified the economic costs of farmland losses and soil quality deterioration by calculating the value of lost harvests, decreased yields (or lower livestock production) and nutrients lost from eroded soils, as well as by estimating the burdens of faster reservoir silting, cleaning of silted canals and urban water supplies, and increased damage due to flooding. I also added approximations of key ecosystemic services provided by lost paddy fields and wetlands and by degraded grasslands. Ning’s coverage of detrimental effects arising from land use changes and soil degradation closely resembled my line-up. Given the nature of this accounting exercise, there is an excellent agreement between the two sets of calculations: my median value, adjusted for inflation, differs from Ning’s total by less than 10 per cent (Table 4.2).
Table 4.2 Economic costs attributable to land use changes and soil degradationa
China’s deforestation
By far the greatest disparity between the two studies concerns estimates of the economic consequences of deforestation – but the huge difference is not due to irreconcilable assumptions concerning the resulting soil erosion, stream silting, or the loss of water-retention capacity. Indeed, a closer look shows great similarities on all of these accounts. The reason lies in a fundamentally different approach to the scope of the problem. Professor Wang took what I would label a deep ecological perspective. First he estimated that China had lost a total of about 290Mha of forest since the beginning of the country’s history. Roughly half of this loss was due to conversion to farmlands, settlements and transport networks, an environmental change unavoidably exacted by the growth of an ancient civilization – while the other half represents excessive deforestation, an area that could have, with proper management, remained forested and been harvested on a sustainable basis. Then he proceeded to calculate the impact of this excessive deforestation on the desiccation of northern and northwestern China, as well as on accelerated erosion that results in stream and reservoir silting, and in increased damage during flooding.
In contrast, my estimates of the environmental cost of deforestation are based on the current extent of the excessive cutting of mature growth. Curiously, that approach could not be followed if China’s official statistics were taken at their face value. According to recent claims, China’s total wood increment has been surpassing the annual cut during most of the early 1990s: if true, this would mean no net deforestation. Even if we were to accept this obviously exaggerated statement, its impact appears in a different light once we put it together with the changing composition of China’s forests.
During the early 1990s no less than three quarters of China’s timberlands were young or middle-aged stands, while the growing stock ready for harvesting in mature forests amounted to less than a fifth of all standing timber, a total which could be cut in just seven to eight years. Forests approaching maturity will decline from almost a third of all timber in the late 1980s to less than a seventh by the year 2000.
Ministry of Forestry figures show that of the 131 state forestry bureaus in the most important timber production zones, twenty-five had basically exhausted their reserves by 1990, 40 could harvest up to the year 2000 – and by that time almost 70 per cent of China’s state forestry bureaus would basically have no trees to fell.45 In addition, the official figure for the average growing stock in forest plantings – 28.27m3/ha – makes it quite clear that the new plantings, whose growing stock may be yielding a statistical wood surplus, offer little hope for replacing the felled mature forests, whose growing stock would be at least 70–80m3/ha, for many decades. Consequently, even if real, the recent quantitative growth of Chinese forests hides a major qualitative decline.
In any case, estimates of the economic cost of China’s deforestation should be based on figures realistically representing long-term trends, rather than capturing short-term aberrations. A careful appraisal of available evidence indicates that the overcutting of China’s mature forests – that is harvests above the average annual increment of wood in stands storing the largest volume of phytomass harboring the greatest biodiversity, and able to provide various ecosystemic services incomparably better than recent plantings – has been recently proceeding at a rate of at least 50 and up to 100 million cubic meters a year.
With harvestable wood volume averaging around 90m3/ha this loss would translate to an annual disappearance of 0.5 to 1 million hectares of mature forest. In terms of lost sustainable supply of timber alone, this overcutting would cost between 13 and 26 billion yuan a year. Weakened, or destroyed, ecosystemic services include diminished water-storage capacity, reduced protection against both wind and water erosion (its rates are likely to increase by two orders of magnitude), and – effects which are most difficult to quantify – changes to local and regional climate, contributions to changes in the biospheric carbon cycle and possible planetary warming, and consequences for national and global biodiversity.
Monetization of these effects remains highly uncertain, with multipliers ranging from 1.5 to more than 20 times the value of the cut timber.46 Chinese foresters have put the combined ecosystemic benefits of mature forests between 8 and 25 times the profit from harvested timber sales. For example, a detailed study done for Changbaishan natural reserve in Jilin concluded that if the forest’s water-storage capacity were to be replaced by a reservoir, if the soil-erosion control were to be achieved by terracing of slopes, and if pesticides were used to control insects instead of forest-sheltered birds, the reserve’s worth would be equivalent to about 49,000 yuan (1990) per hectare, more than twenty times the value of sustainably harvested timber from the same area.47
Naturally, that ratio would rise with the inclusion of the forest’s contribution to local and regional climatic controls and to its preservation of biodiversity. Considerable value could be also imputed to future recreational worth and, in the long term, to the value of forests as potentially major carbon sinks. But even using 1.5 as the minimum multiplier value would result in between 20 and 39 billion yuan for lost ecosystemic services from 0.5–1.0Mha of excessive cutting. The value of timber lost due to unsustainable harvest and to forest fires brings up the grand total of forest mismanagement to roughly 40–70 billion yuan.
While I based my calculations on annual losses of 0.5–1.0Mha, Wang’s cumulative total of excessive deforestation comes to about 140Mha – but his calculations, amounting to 245 billion yuan, did not include any adjustments for lost ecosystemic services, which represented the highest share of my estimates. If such costs were included, Wang’s unusual historical approach, calling attention to the true extent of human impact on forests, would have ended up with an even higher total. On the other hand, some costs estimated by Wang were also considered by Ning (above all the effects of soil erosion), so a simple addition of the two sets of estimates would involve some double counting.
Wider perspectives
Although we tried to make our accounts as comprehensive as possible, we had no choice but to leave out a number of critical effects. Major impacts that could not be quantified due to the lack of basic information include such diverse categories as the increasingly important effects of photochemical smog in and near China’s large cities; damage attributable to China’s nuclear weapons sector; declining fish catches in China’s seas; and the foregone recreation value of lost forests, wetlands and beaches. Even more importantly, neither set of calculations tried to attribute any monetary value to human discomfort and suffering, reactions arising not only from excessive morbidity and premature mortality, but also from chronic exposures to high noise levels in China’s cities.48 Finally, neither study could ascribe any definite value to China’s loss of biodiversity, and to the country’s already huge, and rising, contribution to emissions of greenhouse gases, a highly worrisome source of potential biospheric instability.
Consequently – Wang’s estimate of deforestation costs aside – both sets of calculations are based on clearly conservative assumptions. As a result, there can be no doubt that the economic burden of China’s environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation was no less than 5 per cent of the country’s GDP in the early 1990s. A range of 6–8 per cent is the most likely conservative estimate, and values around 10 per cent would be in line with a more comprehensive, although still far from all-inclusive, coverage. Eventual monetization of a number of elusive valuations could raise the rate to around 15 per cent of the country’s annual GDP.
These burdens greatly surpass China’s recent spending on environmental protection: during the 1980s and early 1990s the annual investment in this area was equal to just 0.56–0.81 per cent of the country’s GDP. Only in 1996 came an official promise to raise this figure to just over 1 per cent by the year 2000. Even so, that would be an order of magnitude lower than the most likely economic cost.
What these burdens mean in international comparison is much more difficult to say. Unfortunately, it is much easier to note what currency conversions should not be used in order to express these costs in US dollars; to facilitate international comparisons rather than to choose the right value. Conversion using official exchange rates, the method favored until very recently by the World Bank, greatly underestimates real values (it puts China’s GDP at less than US$500 per capita), while the purchasing power parity (PPP) method favored by the International Monetary Fund (resulting in a per capita GDP of nearly US$3,000 in 1995) clearly exaggerates.
The latest World Bank study argues that China’s actual GDP was about US$2,000 in 1995, a rate implying PPP roughly four times larger than the exchange rate.49 Using this conversion, the annual burden of China’s environmental pollution would be about $50 billion (using Xia’s total), that of land degradation around $20 billion, and excessive deforestation would carry an annual price tag of no less than another $20 billion (my lowest estimate), but possibly over $100 billion (Wang’s historical appraisal). Even the lowest likely grand total of about $(1992) 90 billion is a huge sum, a total slightly larger than the value of all of China’s exports in 1992.
In closing, I must stress the dual nature of these valuations. These were exploratory exercises based on a necessarily limited amount of information, and requiring repeated assumptions; as such, they make no claims of accuracy, they can give no more than basic approximations, and they are open to easily justifiable critique. At the same time, all of their inherent weaknesses and uncertainties cannot negate their undeniable bottom line: the presented evidence is sufficiently robust to allow a number of practical conclusions.
First, there can be no doubt that China’s recent environmental changes already carry economic costs of roughly an order of magnitude higher than the country’s annual spending on environmental protection: tripling, or quadrupling, these outlays would easily meet even the strictest cost-benefit criteria. Second, given the fact that the economic burden of China’s environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation may already be in excess of one tenth of its annual GDP, the country’s recent aggressive quest for modernization must be a matter of serious national, and international, concern.
Perhaps the most obvious cases of contrasting economic benefits and environmental damage arise with the construction of modern megaprojects, engineering structures of uncommonly large size or processing capacity – be they large dams or steel mills, huge surface mines or massive offshore oil-drilling platforms. Cost-benefit appraisals and environmental assessments now routinely consider at least some of the environmental costs of these megaprojects, but unanticipated or underestimated impacts have been common, resulting in often truly tragic or economically burdensome consequences. I will close this chapter by describing just two of China’s notable megaprojects: one whose failure is now a matter of indisputable record, the other one still under construction, but perceived to be creating more environmental problems than any other project in China’s long history.
Megaprojects and China’s environment: a tale of two dams and rapid trains
Large-scale environmental degradation is a ubiquitous reality of the modern world. So is the fact that big events and spectacular effects power modern media and generate widespread public attention. The daily deaths of 125 people in motor vehicle accidents across North America is not news; a bus crash that kills thirty-five people instantly is. This principle is generally applicable. Using an example previously discussed in this book, building of tens of thousands of small dams across China, of which thousands had to be soon abandoned because of rapid silting or shoddy construction, was not worthy of any front-page attention; China’s decision to build the world’s largest hydroproject, whose reservoir may silt much faster than was anticipated by the original design, is.
Megaprojects are responsible for a small share of overall ecosystemic degradation and environmental pollution, but they attract attention to these regrettable phenomena, and they symbolize the frequent failures of our designs to minimize environmental damage, to anticipate risks and to approach the harnessing of natural resources with at least some humility. During the 1990s China’s Sanxia (Three Gorges) dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, came to exemplify these shortcomings as it received enormous media attention around the world. But we will have to see first the project’s completion and then years of operation before we will be able to tell which of today’s many worries will have materialized, and to what extent. But we already have an example of a spectacular failure of what was at its time China’s largest hydroproject: Sanmenxia on the Huanghe.
And so in this section on megaprojects I will deal first with Sanmenxia, whose failure I helped to bring to a wider Western attention during the late 1970s by combining Soviet sources from the 1950s, newly released Chinese materials, and satellite images of the reservoir acquired by LANDSAT, launched in 1972 (Smil 1979b, 1979c). Only then will I take a closer look at some aspects of Sanxia, and I will contrast these two cases of worrisome developments with suggestions for highly desirable megaprojects whose completion would make China a better place.
Sanmenxia
The poetically named Gorge of the Three Gates (Northern Gate of Man, Central Gate of the Soul, and Southern Gate of the Devil), located in Henan approximately 12km downstream from the rectangular river bend near Tongguan, was to be the largest and the most important of the original Huanghe cascade (Berezina 1959). Designs made with Soviet aid were finalized in 1957 for a 110m-high and 839m-long concrete gravity dam with 121m-wide base and 32m-wide top, which was to create a 3,500km2 reservoir and to retain as much as 36Gm3 of water, 1.5 times the average annual volume of flow at the site.
The giant project (at the time of its planning second only to the Soviet Kuibyshev storage facility) was to control 98 per cent of the annual runoff of the Huanghe, to cut the heaviest summer flood flow from 37,000 to between 6,000 and 8,000m3/s, to provide irrigation for 2.6Mha, and to enable the installation of 1.1GW of electricity-generating capacity. The total expenditure was to be a staggering 1.6 billion yuan, or approximately US$700 million at 1957 values. The main problem envisioned in building Sanmenxia dam was the flooding of numerous villages and the displacement of a large number of peasants. Originally, the highest reservoir surface was to be at 350m above sea level, a height that would have caused the flooding of 130,000ha and the evacuation of 600,000 people. To lessen the immediate impact, the reservoir was to be filled initially to only 335.3m above sea level so that only 215,000 villagers would be displaced; the remaining impounded area was to be flooded during the next 15–20 years, and the affected peasants gradually resettled.
The planners were, of course, aware of another serious difficulty – the danger of extreme silting. However, they thought that this could be controlled by a variety of measures. The master Huanghe plan of 1955 foresaw the enormous construction of 215,000 works to protect the heads of gullies, 683,000 check dams, and 79,000 silt-precipitation dams, as well as extensive afforestation, grassing and terracing to curtail erosion. The combined effort of these projects was to extend the life of the reservoir to at least 50–70 years. As the experts confidently concluded, any “difficulties that may arise in power generation, irrigation and navigation as a result of silting up the reservoir…will be comparatively easy to deal with” (Teng 1955: 15).
Although Soviet hydroelectrical engineers had at that time considerable experience of large and complex projects, their appraisal of silting at Sanmenxia turned out to be an astonishing and potentially extremely dangerous miscalculation. But the Soviet engineers were withdrawn just before the dam was completed in September 1960, after three and a half years of construction. The Chinese had to face the serious problem alone. Not only had the silting of the reservoir greatly exceeded the original projection – more than 90 per cent of incoming mud and sand was being retained in the lake – but the accumulation became especially worrisome as these deposits started to extend rapidly upstream to the Wei He above Laotongguan, elevating the inlet channel and gravely endangering the densely populated agricultural plain and the city of Xi’an, China’s ancient capital and now her eleventh-largest urban area.
The first turbines were already installed, but power production had to be stopped because the lowest water intake for a generation was still higher than the natural river level at Dongguan, allowing rapid silting of the lower Wei He to continue. The removal of turbogenerators and the abandonment of water storage did not solve the problem, because spillway intakes were too high and silt kept accumulating. The only solution was a major reconstruction of the dam to increase the silt-discharging capacity of the reservoir. This difficult and lengthy process started in February 1965. During its first phase, one that lasted four years, two tunnels with a width of 11m and a total length of 900m were cut through a rock cliff on the left bank of the dam, and four of the eight penstocks were turned into discharging outlets in order to double the discharge from 3,080m3/s to 6,000m3/s at 315m above sea level. The second phase raised the discharge to 10,000m3/s at 315m by opening eight outlets at the bottom of the dam and by lowering the remaining steel penstocks and one of the new silt-discharge tubes by 13m.
By the end of 1973 the reconstruction was finished, and the Chinese engineers had installed the first small 50MW turbine, specially coated with two layers of epoxy resin and corundum to withstand the sandy-mud abrasion. Two more 50MW sets were later added, and the total capacity will be eventually only 200MW, less than 20 per cent of the original design. Two other key roles of the reservoir – storage of water for irrigation, and, above all, guarding against floods and prevention of damage to dikes downstream in Henan and Shandong – have been no less compromised by the reconstruction. Minimum discharge had to be raised. Because the floodwaters between July and October carry more than 80 per cent of the annual silt load passing through Sanmenxia (although the volume constitutes only 60 per cent of the average flow), summer flood impoundment had to be cut drastically to minimize silting.
Consequently, water is now stored only between flood seasons when the river carries some 40 per cent of its average annual flow but only 10–20 per cent of its silt load. The Chinese strategy of “storing clear water and discharging muddy water” is well confirmed by satellite monitoring. Winter and spring LANDSAT images show the gorge segment of the reservoir between the dam and the Huanghe’s confluence with the Wei He filled with relatively clear water, swelling in the least confined place to a width of more than 6km and covering as much as approximately 250km2 (Figure 4.7). On the other hand, at the peak of the flood season the reservoir below Tongguan shrinks to a narrow ribbon of silted water with an area as small as 90km2 (Figure 4.7). Conditions upstream from Tongguan are almost the reverse. When the summer floodwaters burst from the confines of Longmen (Dragon Gate), they create a shallow, muddy lake approximately 120km long and 3.5–7km wide. In contrast, the winter flow meanders erratically in numerous channels amid silt deposits.
What has been the effect of Sanmenxia reservoir in Shaanxi, Henan and Shandong? The reservoir has very likely worsened the danger of flood in Shaanxi, and, as the Chinese also admit, the reduced version cannot eliminate the risk of flooding in the lower reaches. However, Sanmen reservoir can at least alleviate the summer flood by moderating the rate and the force of the flow; the Chinese claim that the reservoir did halve the force of the 1977 summer flood, the worst high water in the river’s upper and middle course in forty years.
Only a few corrections and additions should be made in 2002, based on the most comprehensive Chinese description of the project and its history published in 2000 as a part of China’s review of major dams for the International Committee on Large Dams (ICOLD 2000). Sanmenxia’s second reconstruction was not completed in 1973 as originally claimed. Its first stage lasted from 1969 to 1979, and it included the reopening of eight diversion outlets, the excavation of five penstock intakes, and the installation of five 50MW generators; the second stage (1984–2000) involved the conversion of bottom outlets #1–8, and the reopening and conversion of bottom outlets #9–12. Not surprisingly, there is no information on the cumulative cost of this thirty-five-year-long reconstruction.
Every year Sanmenxia makes 1.4Gm3 of water available for spring irrigation downstream, servicing up to 2.67Mha of fields; the reservoir’s water is also used by several major cities, including Zhengzhou, Xinxiang and Kaifeng, and by the Zhongyuan oilfield. With additional turbogenerators installed in 1994 and 1997, the total capacity is now 400MW, a third of the original design, but the load factor remains very low. The operation mode of storing clear water and discharging muddy flow (xu qing pai nun) limits the hours of generation to a few hundred a year, compared with an average of nearly 2,900 hours for all of China’s large hydrostations. The Chinese, making a virtue of the costly necessity, now describe the project as a great learning experience and a training ground for the construction, operation and management of large dams: “Sanmenxia is considered as the cradle of high dam construction in China” (ICOLD 2000: 4). But the pride and approbation go only so far: when ICOLD met in 2000 in Beijing, Sanmenxia was not on the list of more than forty hydrostations that participants could visit after the conference on tours roaming all over China.
And, unfortunately, it appears that the key blunder in Sanmenxia’s design – underestimating the future rate of reservoir silting – is to be repeated as the Chinese builders are nearing completion of the Sanxia dam, the world’s largest hydrostation, and undoubtedly its environmentally most controversial megaproject. But before I turn to this now-infamous megaproject, I should briefly describe what could be best termed Sanmenxia’s bigger twin, the Xiaolangdi dam, built during the 1990s (Power Technology 2002). The dam, 1,667m long and 154m high, is just 130km downstream from Sanmen Gorge and 40km north of Luoyang in Henan. When fully filled its reservoir should create a 130km-long lake of 12.8km3. Its hydroelectric capacity of 1.836GW is the largest on the Huanghe (and as of the year 2000 the fourth largest in China, after Ertan, Gezhouba and Lijiaxia), and the project’s other long-term purpose is to control, in conjunction with other dams, a once-in-a-thousand-years flood.
Unlike the original Sanmenxia that was to store water and block silt (xu shui lan sha), Xiaolangdi was designed with silt-discharge tunnels to store clear water and discharge the muddy flow, but the deposition behind the dam will still be considerable: its is estimated that over the next fifty years the reservoir will reduce the amount of silt deposited downstream of the dam by the equivalent of about twenty years’ normal accumulation. Electricity generation began in January 2000, but it had to stop on 20 May as another severe drought forced the central government to order the release of water in the reservoir to relieve downstream shortages (Becker 2000). The likely recurrence of such episodes will make it impossible to reach the planned generation target of 5.1TWh a year that would imply nearly 2,800 hours of operation, almost equal to China’s average that includes southern rivers with dependable water flows.
The Three Gorges (Sanxia) project is undoubtedly the greatest cause célèbre of the now worldwide anti-dam-building movement that gathered both breadth and intensity during the 1990s. Spectacular gorges in western Hubei and eastern Sichuan – whose plunging cliffs and rushing waters were admired and feared by generations of poets, nature connoisseurs, river boatmen, merchants and travelers – suddenly became a symbol for the destruction and desecration of rivers by megaprojects. And in this case it was to be the largest project of them all. Not the highest or the longest dam – those primacies belong, respectively, to the Rogun dam on the Vakhsh in Tajikistan (325m tall) and to the Yacyreta-Apipe dam on the Parana between Paraguay and Argentina (69.6km) – nor the most voluminous lake (39.3Gm3 compared to the 170Gm3 of Bratsk reservoir on the Yenisey). But the dam will house turbogenerators with 18.2GW of installed capacity, making it 44 per cent larger than the next largest hydrostation, Itaipu on the Parana between Brazil and Paraguay, rated at 12.6GW. And the dam’s peak flood discharge will be 124,300m3/s, another world record (ICOLD 2000).
In my first book on China’s energy (Smil 1976a) I noted, when reviewing China’s plans for hydroelectricity expansion, that the largest of the Changjiang projects, the 15–20GW Sanxia dam, might be built before the year 2000. As plans to start the construction intensified during the mid-1980s, I was asked by my Beijing colleague and friend Mao Yushi, acting in this instance on behalf of the China Energy Research Society, to contribute to a collection of papers that would provide comprehensive reasoning why Sanxia should not be built. I wrote my brief contribution by approaching the problem from a general systems point of view (Smil 1989), and leaving the details to my better-informed Chinese colleagues. The piece was written in 1987, when the project was to have the capacity of “only” 13, rather than 18.2GW, and when the Economic Construction Group of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee (1987) surprised everybody by publishing its call against proceeding with the Sanxia project in the short term.
The book came out during the period of relatively free speech just preceding the Tian’anmen killings (Tian and Lin 1989) and these were my principal arguments why Sanxia should not be built (Smil 1989).
After decades of studies and scores of expert appraisals, it is hardly possible to come up with new technical details in order to spare China the unnecessary and multiply unprofitable endeavor of building the world’s largest dam. Instead of recapitulating various well-appreciated particulars, I will make just one fundamental argument against the construction.
This overriding argument concerns the very size of the project. Undoubtedly, it is unnecessarily large – and as such it is unforgiving and excessively demanding. Sanxia’s 13GW will require an unprecedented level of investment and concentration of skilled labor – but these challenges can be met by a combination of domestic and foreign expertise and funding. The project can be obviously built, but why should it be so huge? If China is to learn from the West it should not copy its outdated strategies. During the 1950s and 1960s, post-World War II reconstruction and the quest for higher individual affluence favored the construction of ever-larger engineering projects, be they power plants, steel mills or car factories. But since then all of the leading Western economies have come to recognize the perils of such projects: their inordinate demand for financial and human resources, their negative environmental side effects, and, above all, their inherent inflexibility.
Clearly, the optimum levels have been overshot on numerous occasions, and adjustments during the past fifteen or so years have been setting new, more manageable standards. Perhaps the best way to generalize this important trend is to say that we have discovered the advantages of being complexifying optimizers rather than simplifying maximizers. A simple assessment may show the purely economic benefits of a very large project – but a complex evaluation of its indirect costs makes these investment gains doubtful, and a consideration of possible long-term risks that cannot be quantified in the project’s planning stages definitely sways the optimum toward a smaller, albeit still relatively large, size. In the case of large hydroelectric projects, the greatest long-term concern is certainly about their environmental consequences.
Whatever the eventual negative effects of Sanxia may be – and they could include such sudden dangers as massive rockslides in the reservoir area, and such gradual degradation as the loss of coastal fishing in the East China Sea (China’s richest fishing grounds off the coasts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang obviously depend on the influx of nutrients in the Changjiang waters) – these risks would be unnecessarily heightened by the large size of the project. If China had little choice in siting large hydrostations Sanxia would become at least more understandable. But the country abounds in excellent sites suitable for building hydroelectric projects that, while large, could be more manageable than Sanxia.
The construction of six or seven plants of 2GW each, instead of the 13GW Sanxia, would have a much more positive influence on the country’s economy, owing to the diffusion of regional economic multiplier benefits in a nation that must encourage decentralization in order to prosper – while minimizing any long-term environmental complications. Multifocal development of large, but not gigantic, energy capacities is thus a sounder strategy than an extreme concentration of resources on one project whose eventual long-term environmental consequences may transform its simplistically seen economic benefits into an overall loss for the society.
Remarkably, one month after the Tian’anmen massacre, a previously scheduled and unusually long article by Sun (1989), detailing his opposition to the Sanxia project, nevertheless appeared in the Beijing Review. Afterwards, all domestic publications questioning the merits of the projects were suppressed. Meanwhile, I explained in greater detail in my second book on China’s energy (1988) why the project was not a desirable choice from a number of perspectives.
When Probe International was putting together a critique of the Three Gorges Water Control Project Feasibility Study (Ryder 1990), a government-funded Canadian undertaking that basically rubber-stamped the Chinese desire to build the dam, I was asked to contribute a chapter from an energy perspective.
I did so (Smil 1990), but my contribution was overshadowed by a quote from me that the editors chose for the back cover: “This is not engineering and science, merely an expert prostitution paid for by Canadian taxpayers”. But by the time that opposition to the dam had become fashionably international, I was not writing about Sanxia any more. By the early 1990s all key arguments against the dam had been identified and appraised, ranging from the human cost of massive forced resettlement to both upstream and downstream environmental impacts and safety concerns. I had been aware of most of these arguments for many years, I had articulated many of them at a time when the project was a matter of concern only for a small group of energy experts – and I was convinced that nothing more could be done.
I believed this, above all, because of Li Peng’s key position: China’s premier at that time was an electrical engineer trained in Stalinist Russia, and it was clear that he would do anything to ensure that the project was approved and built. If there ever was a battle lost long before it commenced, it was the opposition to Sanxia. So I decided that no more could be done, but recently I agreed to write a short entry on Sanxia for the International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics, whose partial reprint brings the story up to date (Smil 2002c).
The Three Gorges (Sanxia) area of the Changjiang (Yangzi) is a spectacular section of China’s largest river in western Hubei province, beginning about 40km west of Yichang where the river leaves the mountains and enters the Hubei plain. The three gorges (Xiling, Xia and Qutang) confine the river to a narrow channel by tall, steep rocky slopes extending more than 100km westward into eastern Sichuan. The gorges appear to be an obvious location for a very large dam, and the first mention of such a project was contained in Sun Yatsen’s 1919 plan to develop China’s industry. In 1932 the Nationalist government announced its intention to build a dam in the region, and in 1944 the US Bureau of Reclamation prepared a preliminary construction plan.
After the worst ever flood in the river’s middle and lower basin in 1954, Soviet hydroengineers helped China to conduct necessary surveys, and silting and design studies, and the Beijing government set up the Changjiang Valley Planning Office which became the project’s principal, and steadfast, promoter during the next three decades. The dam was also favored by the ministries of water resources and electric power, which also saw the gargantuan project as an outstanding mark of China’s technical maturity. The world’s largest electricity-generating capacity, effective flood control in the heavily populated Yangzi basin, and improved navigation as far inland as Sichuan were to be the project’s principal benefits.
But the enormous cost of the project was the principal cause for repeated postponement of the final decision to proceed with the construction of the Three Gorges dam. In 1984, after the country’s economic situation began improving with the progress of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the State Council approved the construction of a 175m-high dam to start in 1986. But a more relaxed political situation in China of the mid-1980s led to unexpected public debate about the merits of the project – and to its wide-ranging criticism. In 1986 the Economic Construction Group of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress recommended to the State Council and to the Communist Party’s Central Committee that the project should not go ahead. A year later an edited book published in Hunan gathered a wide range of arguments against the dam, and in February 1989 an unprecedented alliance of journalists, engineers, scientists and public figures organized a press conference to launch a new book vigorously arguing against the dam.
None of these arguments swayed the leadership. Not long after the Tian’anmen massacre of June 1989, any criticism of the project in the Chinese media was strictly forbidden, and Dai Qing, the editor of the 1989 book and the country’s best-known female journalist (who trained as an engineer and became an environmental activist), was jailed for ten months (Dai 1994). Although no criticism of the project appeared in the Chinese media until 1999, Dai Qing continued her campaign against it, both in China and abroad, throughout the 1990s.
The final decision to proceed with construction was taken on 3 April 1992, when a motion approving the project was put to the National People’s Congress (China’s normally docile version of a parliament) and was passed with an unprecedented third of all delegates either abstaining or voting against. At that time the bureaucracies in favor of the project had, as I already noted, the strongest possible ally in Li Peng, the country’s Prime Minister, who thought the dam was a most desirable proof of the country’s technical prowess.
Some preparatory work at the site had been already done before the final vote; work on the main construction site and on the river’s diversion began in 1993. The world’s third most voluminous river was diverted from its main channel on 8 November 1997. The completed dam should be 175m tall, its reservoir will inundate about 630km2 of land and displace at least 1.2 million people. The dam will have about 18GW of generating capacity and produce annually 84TWh of electricity. Sanxia will thus become by far the world’s largest hydrostation: the Itaipu project on the Parana between Brazil and Paraguay has 12.6GW, and the largest Russian and American plants generate about 6GW, as does Egypt’s Aswan dam across the Nile.
But the project’s progress has done little to eliminate the widespread opposition, in China and abroad. A long list of arguments against the dam embraces human, engineering, economic and environmental considerations. The human impact of the project is unprecedented, as the dam’s 600km-long reservoir will displace anywhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million people. Because there is very little suitable (i.e. flat and fertile) land available for their resettlement in the dam’s immediate vicinity, reclamation has been proceeding on slopes steeper than 25°. In the spring of 1999, Zhu Rongji, Li Peng’s successor as China’s premier and a man who has not shown any enthusiastic support for the project, urged an end to such dangerous practices.
The lagging pace of resettling hundreds of thousands of people, together with chronic construction problems (including the collapse of a bridge in the resettlement area), led to other official expressions of concern in the spring and summer of 1999. The original plan to resettle most of the displaced people close to their former towns and villages is proving to be quite impractical, and more than half a million peasants will have to be moved far from the site, most of them even into other provinces.
The key engineering argument against the Sanxia dam questions the necessity of such a gargantuan project in a country which has the world’s largest hydroelectricity-generating potential and hence no shortages of sites where smaller (although in absolute terms still very large) dams could be built at a lesser financial, environmental and human cost. By concentrating on more manageable projects, China could rely much more on her domestic engineering capability, while most of the electricity-generating equipment needed for the Three Gorges project will have to be imported. And with smaller projects there would be a welcome diffusion of regional economic multiplier effects, an important consideration in a nation which must encourage decentralization in order to prosper.
The official Chinese projection for Sanxia’s total cost is 200 billion (1996) yuan, or close to US$ (2000) 25 billion when converted by the official exchange rate. A quarter of this sum is to be spent on the dam itself and a fifth on the resettlement. But, as we have learned from numerous megaprojects inside and outside of China, this total is almost certainly a substantial underestimate, and the final cost may be easily twice as high.
While engineering and economic considerations are undoubtedly important, concerns about the environmental effects of this unprecedented undertaking came eventually to dominate the surprisingly widespread opposition. Environmental risks that have been discussed most frequently include excessively rapid siltation of the reservoir caused by extensive deforestation in the river’s upper basin; loss of silt deposition downstream from the dam and possible coastal erosion of the river’s delta; flooding of sites containing toxic wastes; fluctuation of water levels at the reservoir’s upper end, exposing long stretches of the riverbed loaded with untreated waste from Chongqing, a city of more than 10 million people; risks of reservoir-induced earthquakes in the seismically active area; dangers of massive rock slides causing the overtopping of the dam; and effects on the river’s biota, including such rare species as the white river dolphin. Other concerns range from the loss of one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes and tourist attractions to the encroachment of salt water into the Yangzi delta during periods of low water flow.
While the environmentalists lost the fight in China, their arguments were critical for shaping Sanxia’s perception abroad. Probe International, the International Water Tribunal and the International Rivers Network have been among the dam’s most outspoken opponents (Ryder 1990). The governments of the USA and Canada, two of the Western world’s most experienced builders of large dams, were initially rather enthusiastic supporters of the project. In 1985 a US consortium made up of government agencies and private companies began laying the ground for a joint project with China to build the dam, and in 1986 a feasibility study undertaken by a consortium of Canadian and Chinese institutions and paid for by the Canadian taxpayers through the Canadian International Development Agency, endorsed the official Chinese design (CIPM 1988). But both governments eventually refused any direct participation in this controversial project, as did the World Bank.
Completion of the project is planned for the year 2009, but delays are almost certain. Disclosures made in 1999 about the use of substandard concrete in the dam’s foundations, and the necessity to invite foreign quality-control engineers in order to circumvent widespread corruption at the site, confirm such a conclusion. But abandoning the project at this relatively late stage is very unlikely. Although opponents of the dam still feel that the government may decide to build a lower dam (165m), such a decision, while reducing the flooding and population displacement, would halve the amount of planned electricity generation. Only one thing remains certain: Sanxia dam will continue to be a highly controversial project and a great environmental cause célèbre for many years to come.
There seems to be no end of bad news regarding Sanxia. As I close this review of China’s most spectacular and most controversial megaproject, I read about the problems facing the massive cleanup of settlements, animal sheds, cemeteries and garbage and toxic waste dumps that will be submerged by the reservoir. The original budget for this cleanup was a mere $1 million compared to $1.4 billion for the resettlement of people. But without an effective cleanup of the reservoir bed the water quality could be compromised for decades to come. Moreover, large numbers of rats not killed during the cleanup would move to higher ground and infest new settlements (TGP 2002). Another greatly underestimated problem is the cleanup of more than 1Gt of industrial and 300Mt of urban waste water discharged into the Changjiang, and shortly into the uppermost part of the Sanxia lake, by the new supermunicipality of Chongqing, now administratively the world’s most populous city. While Zhang Guangduo, a Qinghua University expert and a lead examiner of the project’s original feasibility study, concluded that $37 billion was needed for this cleanup, only $5.37 billion was committed by early 2001 for a period of ten years (TGP 2001).
Far more intractable is the problem of excessive silting. Recently announced plans for the construction of two more megaprojects in the Changjiang’s upper basin – Xiluodu (11.4GW) and Xiangjiaba (5.7GW) on the Jinshajiang in Sichuan, whose combined capacity will be just 6 per cent smaller than that of Sanxia – have been prompted more by the need to trap sediment before it reaches the Sanxia reservoir rather than by any immediate need for more hydrolectric power in the region. Pre-1985 monitoring put the mean annual sediment load in the Three Gorges at 521Mt – but about 710Mt actually passed through the site in 1998 (TGP 2001).
But I should end this megaproject story on a more upbeat note. A few years ago I did actually write an editorial for the Asian Wall Street Journal arguing that China needs megaprojects – but only those that will improve the environment even as they are providing great economic and social benefits. What follows is the essence of those suggestions (Smil 1999d)
Environmentally desirable megaprojects
The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River, now in its second phase of construction, is reportedly running into problems. This past week the authorities announced that foreign firms would take over supervision duties because the local overseers couldn’t guarantee quality. The dam’s other problems are already well documented: it is simply too big, it is taking too long to build, it costs too much and it will cause too many environmental problems. Wobbly foundations are not the dam’s only problem – top-level support for the project also appears to be weakening. In a clear contrast to his predecessor Li Peng, who remains the dam’s biggest supporter, Premier Zhu Rongji did not even mention it in his annual report on the work of the government. Opponents of the dam hope that this may be the beginning of the project’s end. The best solution at this point – after so much money has been spent, the river diverted and hundreds of thousands people already uprooted – would be to fix the structural problems and proceed with a substantially scaled-down version of the project.
But this experience should not dampen China’s enthusiasm for more appropriate megaprojects. Their days may be over in affluent countries, but China, like any other modernizing country, needs them. That is, China needs the right kind of megaproject in order to put in place many essential, long-lasting and highly beneficial infrastructures. There is no shortage of excellent examples from elsewhere in the world. Cold War fears were the proximate reason for US President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to construct an interstate highway system, but the resultant web of multilane roads makes the country the safest place to drive. The French decision to build large nuclear power plants has been both an economic and an environmental success. And long before it became a rich country, Japan took a bold step with its bullet trains, which were twice as fast as any scheduled service at that time.
China’s greatest challenge during the coming generation will be the movement of tens of millions of people into its rapidly growing cities. Maoist policies basically froze China’s urbanization until 1984, the year when food rationing tied to place of residence ended. Since that time China’s cities have added about 100 million people, and at least 150 million more will move in during the next quarter-century. Three kinds of megaproject will help the country meet the challenge.
A much more aggressive program of widespread, state-of-the-art subway construction Huge numbers of people will have to be moved within the cities, and subways are the fastest, most efficient means to do this. In every metropolitan area of more than 2–3 million people, China should be planning or building the first few links of gradually expanding networks. It is counterproductive to wait until the city tops 10 million, as in Shanghai’s case. Beijing, too, has lost a great deal of ground – new radial connections augmenting its circular line would have benefited the city much more than the construction of multilane ring roads, now the major source of chronic photochemical smog and generator of clogged-up traffic.
A bold commitment to build the world’s most extensive network of high-speed trains, traveling at more than 300 kilometers per hour, throughout the eastern third of the country Official Chinese policy envisages that eventually every family in China will have its own car – and practical steps in that unfortunate direction have included numerous joint ventures with foreign automakers, and the construction of multilane highways. This is a mistake in a country which has relatively modest crude oil resources – but already one of the world’s worst problems with smog.
A network of rapid intercity trains would limit the loss of China’s precious high-quality periurban and alluvial farmland, and would go far toward reducing the country’s rising ozone concentrations, the worst product of photochemical smog. These transport systems should be electricity-driven, helping to maximize the country’s energy conversion efficiency.
A massive effort to put in place the world’s largest, most advanced and most efficient system of municipal and industrial water-treatment plants Two thirds of China’s rivers, the sources of water for daily use, are seriously polluted. Advanced recycling would create new water supplies throughout North China, where more than half a billion people experience recurrent and even chronic water shortages. Appropriate pricing of the recycled water would raise the ridiculously low rates paid for water by China’s urban dwellers, farmers and industries, and hence compel more efficient water use. This would obviate the need for a massive south-to-north water transfer from the Yangzi to the Yellow River basin. This interbasin transfer, contemplated since the 1950s, could have even more disastrous environmental effects than the Three Gorges dam.
At his recent Washington press conference, Premier Zhu boasted of his country’s more than $100 billion in foreign reserves. It would be a sign of a farsighted policy – of a vision commensurate with his wish to see China among the leading nations of the world – if he committed a share of this wealth to these three “no-regrets” megaprojects.
As this book goes to press, four years after the above comments were written, there has been no wholehearted embrace of the three suggested no-regret priorities, while the Sanxia dam, the paragon of China’s questionable megaprojects, is moving toward its completion and work has begun on China’s other questionable megaproject, the South/North water transfer. The history of every nation offers many examples of unwise choices and missed opportunities, some only marginally important, others truly fateful. Politicians may use these facts for recrimination or for defining their own agendas; historians may take them as bases of what-if scenarios to construct alternative pasts. I view them with the mixture of regret and frustration. “Better late than never” is a poor consolation when knowing that the right decision could have been making a difference for many years.
Some steps I have advocated for two decades were finally taken during the 1990s. The first link of Shanghai’s metro light-rail system (north–south line) opened in April 1995, the first phase of the first Guangzhou subway line began running in summer 1997, and the Ministry of Railways completed initial design work for a Beijing–Shanghai high-speed train in June 1998 (Railway Technology 2002). The Ministry of Construction, and a number of other central institutions, are now engaged in developing and implementing standards for energy-efficient buildings and appliances. All laudable, but all mere beginnings: China has a very long way to go before putting in place modern, energy-efficient and environment-sparing infrastructures.
Notes
1 My previous writings touching, or confronting, matters of environment, conflict, and security have been: “Environmental change as a source of conflict and economic losses in China”, occasional paper series of the project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict 2: 5–39 (Cambridge MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1992); “Some contrarian notes on environmental threats to national security”, Canadian Foreign Policy 2(2): 85–87, 1994; “L’environnement et la politique internationale”, Etudes internationales 26(2): 361–371, 1995; “China’s environmental refugees: causes, dimensions and risks of an emerging problem”, in K.R. Spillmann and G. Bachler (eds) Environmental Crisis: Regional Conflicts and Ways of Cooperation (Berne: Swiss Peace Foundation, 1995) 75–91.
2 R. Kaplan (1994) “The coming anarchy”, The Atlantic Monthly 273(2): 44–76. Kaplan preaches with conviction and with the simplistic zeal of a prophet. His conclusions are based on unqualified generalizations unmindful of enormous environmental and socio-economic peculiarities; he does not hedge his remarks and he sees no detours or surprises on the road ahead. He knows the environment will be “a terrifying threat” to our security, and not satisfied with some local skirmishing, he predicts a frightening array of wars driven by the disappearance of fish and appearance of refugees.
3 See, for example, K. Butts, “National security, the environment and DOD”, Environmental Change and Security Report 2: 22–27, 1996. And one can have no doubt about a speedy bureaucratic appropriation of the concern when reading that the first conference on “Environmental security and national security” organized by the US Department of Defense in June 1995 called on various governmental agencies “to prioritize international environmental security issues in order to enhance US national security”.
4 UNDP, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also UNDP, “Redefining security: the human dimension”, Current History 592: 229–236, 1994.
5 As a former citizen of the Soviet empire, I draw an obvious analogy with politics in Communist states, where even the most mundane affairs became matters of political import, requiring guidance, vigilance, struggles, and campaigns waged by the ever-alert Party. The how-people-live-and-breathe school of security studies goes even beyond that. Communists had an obsessive interest in my class background, and the ever-present informers in my casual remarks, but with breathing they left me pretty much alone. Obviously, conceiving politics or security in such a fashion robs the terms of any real meaning.
6 Among many relevant recent contributions, see: “The liberation of the environment”, Daedalus summer 1996; J.L. Simon, The State of Humanity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); V. Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview, 1994).
7 For a sampling of these arguments, see: D. Deudney, “The case against linking environmental degradation and national security”, Millennium 19: 461–476, 1990; G. Porter, “Environmental security as a national security issue”, Current History 592: 218–222, 1994; T. Homer-Dixon, M. Levy, G. Porter and J. Goldstone, “Environmental security and violent conflict: a debate”, Environmental Change and Security Project 2: 49–71, 1996.
8 R. Ullman, “Redefining security”, International Security 8: 129–153, 1983.
9 For detailed analyses of the state of China’s environment, see: V. Smil,, The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1984); Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993); and R.L. Edmonds, Patterns of China’s Lost Harmony (London: Routledge, 1994).
10 These concepts are discussed, for example, in H. Daly and J.B. Cobb, For the Common Good (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1989); V. Smil, Global Ecology (London: Routledge, 1993).
11 V. Smil, Environmental Problems in China: Estimates of Economic Costs (Honolulu: East–West Center, 1996); V. Smil and Mao Yushi (coordinators) The Economic Costs of China’s Environmental Degradation (Boston MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998).
12 For details see Smil (1996), note 11 above.
13 P. Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke (London: Routledge, 1987).
14 For more on nitrates in the environment see V. Smil, Cycles of Life (New York: Scientific American Library, 1997).
15 I am using a conversion based on the most plausible purchasing power parity value, not on the official exchange rate. While the latter calculation puts China’s per capita GDP at only some US$500, a misleading underestimate, the former valuation puts China’s 1995 GDP at about US$1,800/capita. For the latest reappraisal of China’s GDP, see World Bank, Poverty Reduction and the World Bank: Progress and Challenges in the 1990s (Washington DC: World Bank, 1996).
16 I.Yamazawa, S. Nakayama and H. Kitamura, Asia-Pacific Cooperation in Energy and the Environment (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1995).
17 All of these figures are readily available in: World Resources Institute, World Resources 1996–97 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), or at http://www.wri.org/wri.
18 For a critique of these figures see V. Smil, “China’s environment: resilient myths and contradictory realities”, in K.K. Gaul and J. Hiltz (eds) Landscapes and Communities on the Pacific Rim (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000) 167–181.
19 For example, if China were to import 70 per cent of its total grain demand, the share corresponding to recent Japanese imports, it would absorb more than the total mass of corn, wheat and rice sold annually worldwide.
20 Even when limited to English-language books, the comprehensive list of relevant writings would be too long. The following volumes will give a wide-ranging introduction to recent thinking: F. Archibugi and P. Nijkamp, Economy and Ecology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989); R. Costanza (ed.) Ecological Economics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); H. Daly and K.N. Townsend (eds) Valuing the Environment (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993).
21 For a detailed survey of possible valuation techniques see: J.A. Dixon et al., Economic Analysis of Environmental Impacts (London: Earthscan, 1994).
22 A.M. Freeman, The Measurement of Environmental and Resource Values (Washington DC: Resources for the Future, 1997); S.E. Rhoads (ed.) Valuing Life: Public Policy Dilemmas (Boulder: Westview, 1980).
23 This is obvious by looking at the analytical framework recommended for national assessments of environmental impacts by the United Nations: UNO, Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (New York: UNO, 1993).
24 For example, estimating that 80 per cent of people in a region are exposed to excessive concentration of a pollutant whose effects cause a 40 per cent rise in the incidence of upper respiratory morbidity, and that a typical illness event is associated with a 30 per cent increase in absence from work, there will be roughly a 10 per cent rise in lost labor hours. Changing the fractions marginally to, respectively, 70, 30 and 20 cuts the total by more than half.
25 Thanks to a generation of fairly strict birth controls, China’s relative population growth, recently at just around 1.1 per cent a year, is much lower than in any other populous modernizing nation (India’s rate has been about 1.9 per cent, Brazil’s 1.6 per cent) – but the huge base makes the absolute additions still highly taxing.
26 China’s inflation-adjusted GDP averaged 9.4 per cent a year between 1980 and 1991, compared to South Korea’s 9.6 and India’s 5.4 per cent. Since 1991, China’s growth rate of just above 10 per cent has been unmatched worldwide.
27 Two comprehensive surveys of China’s current environmental ills are: V. Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993); and R.L. Edmonds, Patterns of China’s Lost Harmony (London: Routledge, 1994).
28 The two country studies – the Dutch one calculating pollution costs in the year 1985 and the West German account for the years 1983–1985 – ended up with very different conclusions. The Dutch study put the annual cost of air and water pollution and noise at just 0.5–0.9 per cent of the country’s GDP, while the German total was 6 per cent, an order of magnitude higher: J. Nicolaisen, A. Dean and P. Hoeller, “Economics and the environment: a survey of issues and policy options”, OECD Economic Studies spring 1991: 7–43. The main reason for the higher German value was in accounting for the disamenity effects of air pollution and for the impact of noise on property values.
29 National Environmental Protection Agency, Environment Forecast and Countermeasure Research in China in the Year 2000 (Beijing: Qinghua University Publishing House, 1990).
30 V. Smil, Environmental Problems in China: Estimates of Economic Costs (Honolulu: East–West Center, 1996).
31 Mao Yushi chose Professor Wang Hongchang of the CASS to prepare a paper on deforestation, Professor Ning Datong of the Beijing Normal University to write about land use changes, and Xia Guang of the National Environmental Protection Agency to evaluate costs of air and water pollution.
32 V. Smil and Mao Yushi (coordinators) The Economic Costs of China’s Environmental Degradation (Boston MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998).
33 Zhang Jianguang, “Environmental hazards in the Chinese public’s eyes”, Risk Analysis 14: 163–167, 1994.
34 Conversion efficiencies range from just around 5 per cent for steam locomotives and 10–15 per cent for poorly designed traditional stoves to 30–40 per cent for better urban stoves and 50 per cent for small boilers. In contrast, the best household natural gas furnaces have efficiencies in excess of 90 per cent, as do the largest industrial boilers.
35 For comparison of recent air pollution levels in the world’s largest cities, see: Earthwatch, Urban Air Pollution in Megacities of the World (Oxford: WHO/UNEP/ Blackwell, 1992).
36 Zhao Dianwu and H.M. Seip, “Assessing effects of acid deposition in southwestern China using the MAGIC model”, Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 60: 83–97, 1991.
37 On indoor air pollution see: K. Smith and Youcheng Liu, “Indoor air pollution in developing countries”, in J.M. Samet (ed.) Epidemiology of Lung Cancer (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1994) 151–184.
38 China is now the world’s largest producer of cigarettes, and its total of 350 million smokers is growing by 2 per cent a year; the average number of cigarettes smoked rose from 10 per person per day in 1994 to 14 in 1996: China News internet files, 25 November 1996.
39 D. Gao et al., “Mercury pollution and control in China”, Journal of Environmental Sciences 3: 105–11, 1991.
40 For details on nitrogen enrichment of the biosphere see: V. Smil, Cycles of Life (New York: Scientific American Library, 1997).
41 Ling Bo et al., “Use of night soil in agriculture and fish farming”, World Health Forum 14: 67–70, 1993.
42 Recent cost-benefit studies of controlling air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin are a perfect example. Total annual health benefits from reduced morbidity were found to be as low as US$ (1990) 1.2 billion, or as high as US$ (1990) 20 billion: A.J. Krupnick and P.R. Portney, “Controlling urban air pollution: a benefit-cost assessment”, Science 252: 522–528, 1991; J.V. Hall, A.M. Winer, M.T. Kleinman, F.W. Lurmann, V. Brajer and S.D. Colome, “Valuing the benefits of clean air”, Science 255 (1992): 812–817. Given the cost of US$ (1990) 13 billion which may be required to clean up the basin’s air, morbidity costs alone can either easily justify the effort, or make it economically quite unappealing.
43 For more on China’s changing farmland, see: F.W. Crook, “Underreporting of China’s cultivated land area: implications for world agricultural trade”, China Agriculture and Trade Report RS–93: 33–39, 1993; V. Smil, “Who will feed China?”, The China Quarterly 143: 801–813, 1995.
44 Han Chunru, “Recent changes in the rural environment in China”, Journal of Applied Ecology 26: 803–812, 1989.
45 Li Yongzeng, “Chinese forestry: crisis and options”, Liaowang (Outlook) 1989(12): 9–10.
46 See, among many others: D. Heinsdijk, Forest Assessment, Wageningen: Center for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1975; R. Repetto, R. Solorzano, R. de Camino, R. Woodward, J. Tosi, V. Watson, A. Vasquez, C. Villalobos and J. Jimenez, Accounts Overdue: Natural Resource Depletion in Costa Rica (Washington DC: World Resources Institute, 1991).
47 Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994).
48 For more on noise in China’s cities, see V. Smil, Environmental Change as a Source of Conflict and Economic Losses in China (Cambridge MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1992).
49 World Bank, Poverty Reduction and the World Bank: Progress and Challenges in the 1990s (Washington DC: World Bank, 1996).