Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [230]
Even worse than garbage, while many foreign companies have helped China’s environment by transferring advanced technology to China, others have hurt it by transferring pollution-intensive industries (PIIs), including technologies now illegal in the country of origin. Some of these technologies are then in turn transferred from China to still less developed countries. As one example, in 1992 the technology for producing Fuyaman, a pesticide against aphids banned in Japan 17 years earlier, was sold to a Sino-Japanese joint company in Fujian Province, where it proceeded to poison and kill many people and to cause serious environmental pollution. In Guangdong Province alone the amount of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons imported by foreign investors reached 1,800 tons in 1996, thereby making it more difficult for China to eliminate its contribution to world ozone destruction. As of 1995, China was home to an estimated 16,998 PII firms with a combined industrial product of about $50 billion.
Turning now from China’s imports to its exports in a broad sense, China’s high native biodiversity means that China gives back to other countries many invasive species that were already well adapted to competing in China’s species-rich environment. For instance, the three best-known pests that have wiped out numerous North American tree populations—the chestnut blight, the misnamed “Dutch” elm disease, and the Asian long-horned beetle—all originated in China or else somewhere nearby in East Asia. Chestnut blight already wiped out native chestnut trees in the U.S.; Dutch elm disease has been eliminating the elm trees that used to be a hallmark of New England towns while I was growing up there over 60 years ago; and the Asian long-horned beetle, first discovered in the U.S. in 1996 attacking maple and ash trees, has the potential for causing U.S. tree losses of up to $41 billion, more than those due to the other two of those pests combined. Another recent arrival, China’s grass carp, is now established in rivers and lakes of 45 U.S. states, where it competes with native fish species and causes large changes in aquatic plant, plankton, and invertebrate communities. Still another species of which China has an abundant population, which has large ecological and economic impacts, and which China is exporting in increasing numbers is Homo sapiens. For instance, China has now moved into third place as a source of legal immigration into Australia (Chapter 13), and significant numbers of illegal as well as legal immigrants crossing the Pacific Ocean reach even the U.S.
While inadvertently or intentionally exported Chinese insects, freshwater fish, and people reach overseas countries by ship and plane, other inadvertent exports arrive in the atmosphere. China became the world’s largest producer and consumer of gaseous ozone-depleting substances, such as chlorofluorocarbons, after First World countries phased them out in 1995. China also now contributes to the atmosphere 12% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions that play a major role in global warming. If current trends continue—emissions rising in China, steady in the U.S., declining elsewhere—China will become the world’s leader in carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for 40% of the world’s total, by the year 2050. China already leads the world in production of sulfur oxides, with an output double that of the U.S. Propelled eastwards by winds, the pollutant-laden dust, sand, and soil originating from China’s deserts, degraded pastures, and fallow farmland get blown to Korea, Japan, Pacific islands, and across the Pacific within a week to the U.S. and Canada. Those aerial particles are the result of China’s coal-burning economy, deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and destructive agricultural methods.
The next exchange between China and other countries involves an import doubling as an