Rahul Goswami :
During the winter months especially, the anti-pollution face mask in China is as essential as the mobile phone. For all of the last decade, grim statistics of coal emissions and readings of airborne particulate concentrations have become commonplace in China, as much inside the country as outside.
The appalling levels of air pollution in the People’s Republic – together with widespread environmental degradation and the exposure of human and animal populations to chemicals and pesticides – are said to cause 1.2 million premature deaths per year, caused by cardiovascular disease, respiratory ailments and virulent cancers of the liver, bone, lung, breast and blood.
These are the casualties of China’s rapid economic ‘growth’, and the legion of multinational corporations which have outsourced manufacturing jobs to China on such a vast scale must be considered complicit. That has been the depressing tale so far, but China’s middle class now demands a better quality of life and that includes – at the top or near the top of the agenda – better air to breathe.
Solutions will certainly not come easily. The central government in Beijing recently announced a ban on all coal use in the capital by 2020, but China’s existing coal plants will spew out carbon pollution elsewhere for decades to come.
What looks like alternatives carry environmental costs of their own – coal gasification plants have been encouraged in order to transform abundant Chinese coal into cleaner-burning synthetic gas or liquid fuels, but ‘syngas’ (as it is now popularly called) has nearly double the carbon footprint of coal and the process is water-intensive.
The problem, despite its mind-boggling size, scale and effects, is seen as an emergency by the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and that is why the elevation of the president of China’s most prestigious university to the job of government minister was significant.
Given the tarnished reputation of a ministry that is widely viewed within China as having failed, the move is now being welcomed – the former president of the Tsinghua University, Chen Jining, is China’s new Minister of Environmental Protection and Chen now has one of the toughest jobs in the country, with high-profile environmental disasters that have became an increasing source of public discontent, and of discomfort to the party leadership.
So central to life has pollution in China become that a work of fiction, written by Li Chunyuan, the deputy head of the environmental protection bureau in the Hebei city of Langfang, has become extremely popular.
Working experience informed Li that the public will in China will loudly and frequently complain of pollution – his city is only 40 kilometres away from Beijing – and when that happens, environmental officials are in the firing line.
In his book, Li has described the problem through fictional characters who are based on his own working scene – such as local party bureau chiefs replaced every two or three years, some positions lying vacant for a long time because candidates prefer to take fewer prominent roles (or even accept a demotion) than work in environmental protection.
Li’s fictional work owes it popularity to how accurately it describes the real world of pollution in China and the official responses to it – all too often diversionary and clumsy. Air pollution levels in and around Beijing remained dire all through 2014.
The area surrounding Beijing accounted for the worst air pollution in China, with Hebei province containing six cities judged as having the country’s worst air quality, according to figures released by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
It has been a year since premier Li Keqiang said that tackling chronic poor air quality would be a national priority, but the new and entirely official figures show that heavily-industrialised areas surrounding the capital are still churning out harmful particulates on a massive scale despite the announcement of policies last year aimed at curbing coal use.
Average levels of PM2.5, tiny particles in air pollution regarded as the most harmful, did drop from 106 micrograms per cubic metre to 93 micrograms in the Beijing, Hebei and Tianjin region in 2014, the MEP said, but this reduction placed air quality far below the 35 microgram level deemed as safe by Chinese authorities.
Adding to the political pressure has been Beijing’s mayor, Wang Anshun, who in a report in January, published by the widely read China Youth Daily newspaper, said his administration wants “to establish a first-tier, international, liveable and harmonious city” and is working hard at the task, but that “at the present time, Beijing is not a liveable city” because of its atrocious air quality.
Yet change has come at last to China in the official recognition that to breathe the very air in the People’s Republic is hazardous to health. It is now time for China to translate that recognition into a concerted programme away from polluting industry, power generation, and chemicals and pesticides use.
(Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
