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By Root 1876 0

exports and imports of cars, textiles, agricultural products, and many other commodities. Already, China’s export industries tend to send manufactured finished products overseas and to leave in China the pollutants involved in their manufacture; there will presumably now be more of that. Some of China’s imports, such as garbage and cars, have already been bad for the environment; there may be more of that too. On the other hand, some countries belonging to the WTO adhere to environmental standards much stricter than China’s, and that will force China to adopt those international standards as a condition of its exports being admitted by those countries. More agricultural imports may permit China to decrease its use of fertilizers, pesticides, and low-productivity cropland, while importation of oil and natural gas will let China decrease pollution from its burning of coals. A two-edged consequence of WTO membership may be that, by increasing imports and thereby decreasing Chinese domestic production, it will merely enable China to transfer environmental damage from China itself to overseas, as has already happened in the shift from domestic logging to imported timber (thereby in effect paying countries other than China to suffer the harmful consequences of deforestation).

A pessimist will note many dangers and bad harbingers already operating in China. Among generalized dangers, economic growth rather than environmental protection or sustainability is still China’s priority. Public environmental awareness is low, in part because of China’s low investment in education, less than half that of First World countries as a proportion of gross national production. With 20% of the world’s population, China accounts for only 1% of the world’s outlay on education. A college or university education for children is beyond the means of most Chinese parents, because one year’s tuition would consume the average salary of one city worker or three rural workers. China’s existing environmental laws were largely written piecemeal, lack effective implementation and evaluation of long-term consequences, and are in need of a systems approach: for instance, there is no overall framework for protection of China’s rapidly vanishing wetlands, despite individual laws affecting them. Local officials of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) are appointed by local governments rather than by upper-level officials of the SEPA itself, so that local governments often block enforcement of national environmental laws and regulations. Prices for important environmental resources are set so low as to encourage waste: e.g., a ton of Yellow River water for use in irrigation costs only between and of a small bottle of spring water, thereby removing any financial incentive for irrigation farmers to conserve water. Land is owned by the government and is leased by farmers, but may be leased to a series of different farmers within a short time span, so that farmers lack incentive to make long-term investments in their land or to take good care of it.

The Chinese environment also faces more specific dangers. Already under way are a big increase in the number of cars, the three megaprojects, and the rapid disappearance of wetlands, whose harmful consequences will continue to accumulate in the future. The projected decrease in Chinese household size to 2.7 people by the year 2015 will add 126 million new households (more than the total number of U.S. households), even if China’s population size itself remains constant. With growing affluence and hence growing meat and fish consumption, environmental problems from meat production and aquaculture, such as pollution from all the animal and fish droppings and eutrophication from uneaten feed for fish, will increase. Already, China is the world’s largest producer of aquaculture-grown food, and is the sole country in which more fish and aquatic foods are obtained from aquaculture than from wild fisheries. The world consequences of China’s catching up to First World levels of meat consumption exemplify