China now third largest economy in the world

[Alpine Trooper]

China is a garbage dump that wreaks.

 

[Ecofarm]

Most of Asia is made of developing countries. In relative to other developing countries, China has a strighter environmental law. Find me a source that prove me wrong. Other large Asian countries like Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam has more relaxed environmental laws. Find me a source that prove me wrong.

Instead of comparing it to Vietnam, how about we compare it to countries of similar economic development levels?

It will increase CO2 output more than Kyoto will reduce, in total.

Our results suggest that the anticipated path of China's Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions has dramatically increased over the last five years. The magnitude of the projected increase in Chinese emissions out to 2015 is several times larger than reductions embodied in the Kyoto Protocol.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/forecasting-the.html

Check out this article:

Decades of extraordinary growth have catapulted China to the top of the world's economic charts, earning the admiration of much of the rest of the world.

Indeed, China's continued economic rise has been one of the few certainties of the 21st century. Increasingly, however, the China story is not one of economic miracle but of environmental disaster.

Worries over air quality at the Beijing Olympics, tainted products and China's rapidly growing contribution to global climate change have focused international attention on the environmental downside of China's growth.

At home, the Chinese people watch as environmental degradation and pollution transform their landscape, and in the process endanger their health and future livelihoods.

No one is exempt from the environmental consequences of China's brand of unfettered economic development, but as Stephen Voss' pictures so heartbreakingly illuminate, China's poorest are particularly vulnerable. Hear Voss describe his photos in an audio slideshow »

In China's cities, merely walking out the front door results in an immediate assault on the senses. The Chinese people complain most often about noise pollution. A cacophony of construction booms and car horns is a permanent fixture of life. The sky is often blanketed in a thick gray haze of pollutants.

The culprits are the ever-present coal-fired power plants and giant heavy-industry complexes that fuel the country's growth, and more and more the noxious emissions of automobiles.

The Chinese are in the midst of an American-style love affair with private cars. The country is adding 14,000 new cars to its roads every day and is in the process of laying 52,000 miles of new roadways -- 10,000 more miles than the entire U.S. interstate highway system. By 2030, China is expected to surpass the United States as the country with the most cars on its roads.

More broadly, Chinese consumption patterns are also following those of the West, despite the warnings of prominent Chinese cultural and environmental leaders. The country's moneyed city dwellers desire air conditioners, refrigerators and second homes.

Popular leisure activities for the wealthy include carbon-intensive activities such as yachting, golfing and car clubs. In the process, urban residents consume 350 percent more energy than rural Chinese, and more than 70 percent of this energy comes from dirty burning coal. Every seven to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant, big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego, opens somewhere in China.

The environmental toll is enormous. China has five of the world's 10 most polluted cities, and on an average day in China's major cities, 75 percent of the residents are breathing unclean air. The end result: 750,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from air pollution-related respiratory diseases.

For all their wealth, China's cities have yet to conquer the challenge of clean water. Among all of China's 660-odd cities, only one small city of 200,000, Lianyuan in Hunan Province, can claim to provide clean drinking water straight from the tap. In the rest of the country -- even the country's capital, Beijing -- residents boil their water or buy it in bottles.

Even then, they have no real assurance that the water is safe to drink. And in this desperately water-scarce country, the urban infrastructure does little to conserve. Urban China loses up to 20 percent of its water through leaky pipes. Cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin have sunk six feet over the past decade and a half as precious underground water reserves are drawn down, causing skyscrapers to tilt and encouraging coastal flooding.

Yet tilting skyscrapers are the least of the cities' concerns. In Beijing, factories, buildings and underground pipelines have all been destroyed by the plundering of underground aquifers and the resultant land subsidence.

The environmental costs levied on China's 400 million urban residents pale in comparison, however, to those faced by the country's more than 800 million farmers and other rural residents.

Much of China's countryside suffers from severe land degradation, the result of centuries of deforestation and poor land management.

Today, China -- which is roughly the same size as the United States -- is almost one-quarter desert, and the desert is advancing at more than 1,300 square miles, approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island, each year.

Entire villages in China's north have been lost, submerged in sand by the encroaching desert. The country's State Forestry Administration estimates that desertification affects 400 million Chinese, many of whom lose the ability to farm their land or graze their animals and join the ranks of the tens of millions of internal environmental refugees, who often migrate to the big cities in search of new homes and jobs.

Rural Chinese must also contend with a dire water situation. The small-scale industries that have sprouted throughout the countryside pollute with impunity.

As Voss' photographs illustrate, pulp and paper, tanning, chemical and other factories set up shop along the banks of China's rivers and simply dump their waste into the water. Often the factories are protected by local officials who have a financial stake in their survival. More than a quarter of the water that flows through China's seven major river systems and their tributaries is unfit even for industry or agriculture, much less human consumption.

The Yellow River, one of the world's longest, supplies water to more than 150 million people and 15 percent of China's agricultural land. Yet two-thirds of its water is considered unsafe to drink, and 10 percent is classified as sewage. In 2007, Chinese officials announced that over one-third of the fish species native to the Yellow River had become extinct due to damming or pollution.

Such alarming statistics beget other even more alarming numbers. Nearly 700 million people drink water contaminated with animal and human waste, and according to the country's Ministry of Water Resources, 190 million Chinese drink water so contaminated that it makes them sick. It doesn't help that an estimated two-thirds of China's rural population lacks access to piped water -- a development failure that has become one of the leading causes of death among children under the age of five. Local economies also suffer when villagers can't sell their grain or eat the crops planted along the river because the water is so polluted. As much as 10 percent of China's farmland is believed to be polluted, and each year 12 million tons of grain are contaminated with heavy metals absorbed from the soil.

China's environmental challenge moves well beyond simply the problems faced by any society at the height of its industrialization.

The lack of transparency, official accountability and rule of law that defines China's authoritarian political system makes protecting the environment particularly difficult. Perhaps no project better exemplifies this challenge than the Three Gorges Dam.

After decades of promoting the virtues of the dam -- the largest in the world -- Chinese officials are only now beginning to acknowledge the dam's failures. The potentially negative consequences of the dam, including dramatically rising levels of water pollution, deadly landslides, loss of species and relocation of millions of Chinese, were all known to those involved in the planning of the dam for decades, yet open discussion was forbidden.

A journalist, Dai Qing, was imprisoned for 10 months for her efforts to air publicly the dam's likely costs and benefits. Now that the dam has contributed to the death or homelessness of thousands and there is talk of relocating three to four million more Chinese, the price of silence has become clear. Yet still, the Chinese government refuses a fully honest and open assessment of the situation.

The Chinese people increasingly have little patience for official obfuscation and corruption. Journalists push to report honestly on pollution disasters, and lawyers bravely take cases on behalf of pollution victims.

When confronted with poisoned water and air, sick children, and ruined crops, the Chinese people sometimes simply take to the streets. There are more than 50,000 environmental disputes in China every year. For example, in 2006, the residents of six neighboring villages in the poor interior province of Gansu held repeated protests over a six-month period against zinc and iron smelters that they believed were poisoning them. Fully half of the 4,000 to 5,000 villagers exhibited lead-related illnesses ranging from vitamin D deficiency to neurological problems. In 2007, when local officials in southern China illegally confiscated farmers' land to construct a power plant, there were violent demonstrations.

In the cities, where education levels are often higher and information flows more freely, Chinese citizens have even begun to protest in advance of a potential environmental threat. In 2007, for example, Beijing residents protested a proposed waste incinerator, and the people of the coastal city of Xiamen marched by the thousands, successfully halting the planned construction of a petrochemical plant near the city center.

As pressure on China's leaders mounts from below, the rest of the world is also increasingly impatient with the country's failure to turn its environmental situation around. Pollutants that build up and threaten China's ecosystem and the health of its people also traverse the Pacific and affect the United States and other countries.

China's contribution to global climate change will soon dwarf that of the rest of the world. The country already ranks as the world's largest importer of illegally logged timber and the biggest polluter of the Pacific Ocean.

China's leaders are well aware of the crisis they confront. The environment has moved to the top of their political agenda, and they have promised increased environmental investment, set impressive targets for reducing pollution and launched grand-scale campaigns to address particularly challenging problems of environmental degradation.

International environmental nongovernmental organizations and their counterparts in China are working aggressively to provide grassroots support for environmental protection. A number of multinational corporations have even adopted environmental protection as an important and integral part of their business ethic in China.

Public pressure from around the world counts in Beijing. Yet the situation continues to deteriorate. Rapid growth remains the priority for many in Beijing, and certainly for most local officials. Hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in relative poverty; per-capita GDP amounts to less than $2,000 annually.

In such an economic environment, the up-front costs of environmental protection can appear daunting, particularly for officials in the less-developed interior of the country with far fewer economic resources. And there are few incentives for local officials to put the environment first.

Moreover, opening the political space to allow for greater citizen involvement in environmental protection -- through a free media, unregulated nongovernmental organizations or an independent judiciary -- is seen as too politically risky by most Chinese Communist Party officials, whose primary concern is maintaining power.

Yet only this type of fundamental reform of the country's political economy will yield the environmental improvements the Chinese leaders and people desire. In the meantime, local economies will suffer, people's health will deteriorate, social unrest will grow and the China story may, in the end, change from economic miracle to environmental collapse.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/27/what.matters.huai/index.html#cnnSTCText

I don't care what their policy says on paper. That's the reality.

Anyone want to keep pretending that everything is skippy, cutting trees is illegal and dumping is harshly punished? Individuals might be harshly punished, but the government and its companies do so unfettered.

 

[mrt144]

And that's really something to be proud of, your country living on welfare from the rest of the world.

And what does the rest of the world have to show for it?

 

[sebanaj]

China is a lie. What about human development? Don't measure just economy. However, in economic terms, i bet their gdp per capita must be very low and also really poor wealth distribution. China's human development won't reach Europe in cultural terms for another 100 years. Don't believe all the media hype. Like if having one million hammers more than the neighbor would make me more developed.

 

[Kerozine]

This whole thread is nuts.

 

[Mise]

EU's GDP is #1 in the world. So we feel pretty good about it!

I'll remember to include Kosovo the next time some of you want to compare things on a per capita basis

Only the most flattering statistics are statistically valid.

If you want genuine bragging rights, become a real country.

We're 27 real countries!

27 > 1

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

China uses monopoly (state controlled) currency, slave labor and zero environmental law enforcement.

Same as the burgeoning economies of the Industrial Revolution. Not too sure about the currency one, though.

 

[Ecofarm]

Same as the burgeoning economies of the Industrial Revolution. Not too sure about the currency one, though.

They have 100 years of technology and knowledge to draw from. So it's not quite the same thing. The technology makes it far more devestating and the knowedge makes it more disgraceful.

 

[FriendlyFire]

China uses monopoly (state controlled) currency, slave labor and zero environmental law enforcement.

Someday (soon, I hope), it will all go poof.

The Chinese economy is a house of cards built with horrible things. It's the ultimate paper tiger.

It because of the success of Japans economic model which is very very heavily slated towards US export market which now emerging asian countries have more or less modelled there economies too.

I think its growth is unsustainable but there should switch back to there own domestic markets which still has huge potential.

 

[carmen510]

China DOES have some of the strictest environmental laws in the world. As for loopholes and actual enforcement, well, that explain the high corruption rate.

 

[Shekwan]

Well China should have the biggest GDP.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Why is it that I misread this at first as "China is now the largest third world economy?"

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

They have 100 years of technology and knowledge to draw from. So it's not quite the same thing. The technology makes it far more devestating and the knowedge makes it more disgraceful.

Technology isn't the only thing you need to build an economy. The Industrial Revolution brought profound changes to the societies of its nations. What I'm saying here is just give them some time.

 

[Dachs]

Technology isn't the only thing you need to build an economy. The Industrial Revolution brought profound changes to the societies of its nations. What I'm saying here is just give them some time.

You would still think that a professedly Communist state, theoretically adhering to an ideology that was born out of the social plight created by industrialization, would be dealing with it better, though.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

With a society that decides to undergo such things as the Cultural Revolution and the Five Year Plans, I'd think otherwise.

 

[mangxema]

Yeah, I'm not worried about China... China will have so many issues during my lifetime, it's not even funny. And I have one morbid sense of humor.

They have 100 years of technology and knowledge to draw from. So it's not quite the same thing. The technology makes it far more devestating and the knowedge makes it more disgraceful.

QFT. They should know better. Everyone should. Technically, the only country that gets a free pass is England 'cause they went first. Other countries that industrialized early get some slack too. But China has no excuse. On top of the technology and the knowledge they have the political power to do whatever they want. There's no party deadlock like there would be here. They could unilaterally fix this if they wanted to, but they don't. And so when my friend went to Shanghai for merely six weeks, they all came back with smokers' coughs for about a month afterwards. It's terrible.

 

[sp1023]

Honestly, though, I presumed China’s economy to be only behind the US, with everything being MADE IN CHINA.

 

[Elta]

Honestly, though, I presumed China’s economy to be only behind the US, with everything being MADE IN CHINA.

It would be, but they artificially make their currency worth less (two words, I am not saying they make it with out worth, just lower in value)

If they did allow it to float freely in the world markets the GDP would be a lot higher. Though things we buy from them would cost more. So the leaders in China have decided to force it low, sell lots of junk as to keep more people employed and get more for out of foreign investments.

Time will tell if this is an effective strategy in the long run for the well being of an average Chinese person.

 

[Tee Kay]

On top of the technology and the knowledge they have the political power to do whatever they want. There's no party deadlock like there would be here. They could unilaterally fix this if they wanted to, but they don't. And so when my friend went to Shanghai for merely six weeks, they all came back with smokers' coughs for about a month afterwards. It's terrible.

China is dangerously decentralised. Despite the CCP rambling on about stability and sovereignty the local cadres and governors act like quasi-autonomous satraps. Beijing decreed the policies but there's no actual guarantee the local leaders would follow it, like Imperial times. Local authorities readily suppress opposition and dissent because that threatens their power too, but as far as environmental laws are concerned they're just paying lip service.

 

[Winner]

Man, how backwater does Europe feel right now?

80 million Germany producing about as much as 1300 million China? That really hurts... the Chinese