Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [225]
Another distinctive inefficient feature of China’s economy is its rapidly expanding small-scale rural economy: its so-called township and village enterprises, or TVEs, with an average of only six employees per enterprise, and especially involved in construction and in producing paper, pesticides, and fertilizer. They account for one-third of China’s production and half of its exports but contribute disproportionately to pollution in the form of sulfur dioxide, waste water, and solid wastes. Hence in 1995 the government declared an emergency and banned or closed 15 of the worst-polluting types of small-scale TVEs.
China’s history of environmental impacts has gone through phases. Even already by several thousand years ago, there was large-scale deforestation. After the end of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, the return of peace in 1949 brought more deforestation, overgrazing, and soil erosion. The years of the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1965, saw a chaotic increase in the number of factories (a four-fold increase in the two-year period 1957-1959 alone!), accompanied by still more deforestation (to obtain the fuel needed for inefficient backyard steel production) and pollution. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, pollution spread still further, as many factories were relocated to deep valleys and high mountains from coastal areas considered vulnerable in case of war. Since economic reform began in 1978, environmental degradation has continued to increase or accelerate. China’s environmental problems can be summarized under six main headings: air, water, soil, habitat destruction, biodiversity losses, and megaprojects.
To begin with China’s most notorious pollution problem, its air quality is dreadful, symbolized by now-familiar photographs of people having to wear face masks on the streets of many Chinese cities (Plate 25). Air pollution in some cities is the worst in the world, with pollutant levels several times higher than levels considered safe for people’s health. Pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide are rising due to the increasing numbers of motor vehicles and the coal-dominated energy generation. Acid rain, confined in the 1980s to just a few areas in the southwest and south, has spread over much of the country and is now experienced in one-quarter of Chinese cities for more than half of the rainy days each year.
Similarly, water quality in most Chinese rivers and groundwater sources is poor and declining, due to industrial and municipal waste water discharges, and agricultural and aquacultural runoffs of fertilizers, pesticides, and manure causing widespread eutrophication. (That term refers to growth of excessive algal concentrations as a result of all that nutrient runoff.) About 75% of Chinese lakes, and almost all coastal seas, are polluted. Red tides in China’s seas—blooms of plankton whose toxins are poisonous to fish and other ocean animals—have increased to nearly 100 per year, from only one in every five years in the 1960s. The famous Guanting Reservoir in Beijing was declared unsuitable for drinking in 1997. Only 20% of domestic waste water is treated, as compared to 80% in the First World.
Those water problems are exacerbated by shortages and waste. By world standards, China is poor in fresh water, with a quantity per person only one-quarter of the world average value. Making matters worse, even that little water is unevenly distributed, with North China having only one-fifth the per-capita water supply of South China. That underlying water shortage, plus wasteful use, causes over 100 cities to suffer from severe water shortages and occasionally