When a Billion Chinese Jump

27. Researchers from the government’s Institute of Soil Science in Nanjing have found that soils in fields converted to growing vegetables are becoming dramatically more acid, with average pH falling from 6.3 to 5.4 in ten years. Meanwhile nitrates are at four times previous levels, and phosphate levels are up tenfold (Environmental Geochemistry and Health 26, pp. 97, 119). The changes in soil chemistry have been accompanied by an equally dramatic decline in soil bacteria and an epidemic of fungus. The deterioration is worst when the crops are grown under plastic (Fred Pearce, “China’s Changing Farms Damaging Soil and Water,” New Scientist, September 18, 2004).

28. Interview with Qian Zhengying, former minister of water conservancy and power.

29. More use of fertilizers means more nitrous oxide emissions, which are 200 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide (Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends, p. 225). The rising demand for rice means more methane emissions from paddies.

30. “The Limits of a Green Revolution?” BBC News, March 29, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6496585.stm.

31. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, “Eating Fossil Fuels,” October 3, 2003, www.fromthe wilderness.com.

32. In 2001, there were six covering a combined area of less than 3,000 square kilometers. Five years later there were more than forty spanning more than 15,000 square kilometers. (Figures based on research by Zhou Mingjiang, former head of the Institute of Oceanology.)

33. Jin Xiangcan, vice director of China Society of Environmental Sciences, said the affected area was about 135 square kilometers in the 1970s, but due to the rapid development of the economy and society, it increased to 8,700 square kilometers by 2009 (“Areas of Lakes Affected by Eutrophication in China Increases 60 Times in 40 Years,” Xinhua, November 6, 2009; http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2009-11/05/content_12391302.htm).

34. Wastewater treatment expenditure from National Statistical Yearbook 2006. In June 2007, the provincial Maritime Fisheries Bureau confirmed severe pollution off the coast of Shandong at Laizhou Bay, Jiaozhou Bay, the southern Bohai Gulf, and the mouth of the Yellow River. The contaminants were inorganic nitrates, lime phosphates, and oil (“Dark Water: Coastal China on the Brink [I],” Southern Metropolis Daily, April 8, 2008).

35. Shi Jiangtao, “Bohai Sea Will Be Dead in 10 Years,” South China Morning Post, October 19, 2006.

36. At Yanwei in Jiangsu, the stench from polluted water was so bad in 2007 that children had to be sent home from their school. In the far south tourist resort of Silver Beach in Guanxi Province, Xinhua reported the runoff from a shellfish processing plant turned the sea into a stinking red patch of effluent (Liang Siqi, “World’s Best Beach Polluted, Stench from Discharge Pipe Unbearable,” Xinhua, February 15, 2007 [in Chinese]).

37. In 2006, in the heavily industrialized southeastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, almost 8.3 billion tons of sewage were discharged into the ocean without treatment, a 60 percent increase from 2001. More than 80 percent of the East China Sea, one of the world’s largest fisheries, was graded at the second highest level of pollution or worse in 2006, up from 53 percent in 2000.

The state news agency reports that the seabed is suffering desertification because of a discharge of sewage and pollutants (Xinhua, “China’s Seabed Undergoing Desertification Caused by Pollution,” December 15, 2006), although the scale of such phenomena is difficult to gauge. Xinhua, once unreliable because it was merely a mouthpiece for the Communist Party, is now prone to exaggerating environment scares because it is now freer in this area to stir up a circulation-boosting storm. Two scholars told me the damage caused by industrial pollution and overfishing on the seabed is overstated.

All but ten of the fifty-three waterways that flow into the Bohai Sea are rated “heavily contaminated.” Together they release 2.8 billion tons of polluted water into the Bohai annually, leading to a buildup of heavy metal in the mud 2,000 times higher than the national safety standard (Yingling Liu, “China’s Coastal Pollution Necessitates Rethinking Government Role,” Worldwatch Institute, November 8, 2007).

38. The clearest illustration of this was the lead-contamination scandal of 2009. Thousands of children were poisoned by the steady buildup of heavy metals from factories in Shaanxi and Hunan. It arose because the government monitored data only on the daily proportions of emissions; it was not measuring the accumulated total of lead in the soil.

39. “DDT-laced Seafood from China May Pose a Threat to Humans,” Under-watertimes.com News Service, May 17, 2007, citing a study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

40. The 32 million tons of farmed fish produced in China in 2005 was equal to roughly a third of the world’s oceanic fish catch.

41. This theory is credited to biogeochemist Graham Logan of the University of New South Wales: Graham A. Logan, J. M. Hayes, Glenn B. Hieshima, and Roger E. Summons, “Terminal Proterozoic Reorganization of Biogeochemical Cycles,” Nature, July 6, 2002.

42. This theory is put forward by paleontologist Ronald Martin of the University of Delaware: “Secular Increase in Nutrient Levels through the Phanerozoic; Implications for Productivity, Biomass, and Diversity of the Marine Biosphere,” Palaios 11 (1996): 209–19.

43. Frederik Leliaert, Zhang Xiaowen, et al., “Identity of the Qingdao Algal Bloom,” Phycological Research 57 (2009): 147–51.

44. Ibid.

45. Algaculture is already under way in several countries, including China. One use is to absorb carbon sequestered from coal-gasification plants. In Japan, a very similar technique is used to harvest nori seaweed.

46. Jonathan Watts, “A Hunger Eating Up the World,” Guardian Weekly, January 20, 2006.

47. Climate change will have a devastating effect on agricultural production in China. If no measures are taken, the overall productivity of Chinese farming industry may decline 5 to 10 percent by 2030. By the second half of the twenty-first century, the production of major crops in China’s wheat, rice, and corn could see a maximum reduction of 37 percent (Lin Erda et al., “Investigating the Impacts of Climate Change on Chinese Agriculture, China-UK Collaborative Project,” www.dfid.gov.uk, 2008).

15. An Odd Sort of Dictatorship: Heilongjiang

1. Official translation.

2. Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution —and How It Can Renew America (Allen Lane, 2008). Friedman advocates the adoption of China’s authoritarian powers as a temporary measure for “one day.” In parentheses, he steps back by saying “(not two).”

3. Thomas Friedman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 9, 2009.

4. Heilongjiang recorded the lowest temperature in Chinese history of minus 52.3°C on February 13, 1969, at Mohe.

5. Heilongjiang was the front line for 1.25 million of them (Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature [Cambridge University Press, 2001]).

6. The crisis with the Soviet Union abated when Mao met U.S. president Richard Nixon and gained the support of the world’s most powerful military.

7. In 1995, Ma won over the newly formed Environmental Protection Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. Senior politicians were impressed by his argument that wetlands are a cost-effective form of flood control, while swamps have a kidneylike function in cleansing polluted waterways and processing toxic waste. The agriculture ministry objected. They opposed any brake on the conversion of land for food production. But Ma was in the ascendant and so, it seemed, was the conservation movement (Joanne R. Bauer [ed.], Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood, and Contested Environments [M. E. Sharpe, 2006], p. 66).

8. This was of international importance as China has the biggest wetlands in Asia. Including marshes, swamps, lagoons, deltas, lakes, rivers, and coastal areas, they cover approximately 25 million hectares, or about 2.5 percent of its territory. See www.ramsar.org.