China: The flip side of progress

I arrived in Beijing last week to prepare for another round of the GCC-China Strategic Dialogue, which was launched in Beijing in 2010.
Despite differences of opinion between the two sides over Syria, they have decided to go on with the dialogue, to implement the plans they had put in place over the past three years. Those ambitious plans span all areas — economic, political and cultural, government-to-government, business-to-business, and people-to-people.
When fully implemented, those plans would establish a long-term, all-encompassing strategic partnership benefiting both parties. Together with the marked shift in GCC trade direction from West to East, the two sides are determined to develop an all-around economic and cultural partnership. However, disagreement over Syria has slowed down the pace of implementation.
People around the world, including in the Gulf, are mesmerized by the “Chinese miracle,” a rapid transformation of an underdeveloped agrarian society to an industrial and financial powerhouse. Just a decade ago, the Chinese economy was only the sixth largest in the world, behind the US, Japan, Germany, UK and France. Gradually, it has surpassed these countries one-by-one, except US (for now). Since 2010, it has maintained the second-place ranking in GDP size. What has accounted for this unprecedented growth is still a mystery, but certainly the unleashed energy of ordinary and hardworking citizens is a key factor in all the explanations.
But is there a dark side to the economic miracle? Could it be that China has cut corners to achieve unprecedented rates of economic growth? Many Chinese seem to believe the answer is yes to both questions. I will discuss today three issues: Air pollution, public health, and limits on freedom of speech.
As soon as you land in Beijing, you notice immediately the smog. The entire city is enveloped in a dark cloud of pollution that seems to penetrate everywhere. You breathe it and you can almost taste it. Despite government efforts to reduce pollution, the smog has gotten worse. On Nov. 1, Xinhua, the official news agency, cited the China Meteorological Administration as saying that 2013 is the worst year in the number of smoggy days since 1961. Chen Zhenlin, head of the Department of Emergency Response, Disaster Mitigation and Public Services at CMA said that 2013 has witnessed 2.3 smoggy days more than the average.
According to the report, in October, central and eastern Chinese regions were frequently shrouded in smog. Around 10 to 15 smoggy days per month were recorded by some regions, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanxi, Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Hubei, Sichuan, Hunan and Guangdong. Some areas in Shanxi, Henan and Jiangsu reported 15 to 20 smoggy days last month.
A national action plan to combat airborne pollution was unveiled in September, but its results will not be seen for a long time, it seems. Its first objective is merely to get localities above a certain size to start monitoring 6 airborne pollutants and release the readings by the end of 2015. In other words, it will be a long time before Chinese citizens can see a difference.
In the meantime, the capital city adopted in late October an emergency program to reduce air pollution. According to the program, cars with odd and even numbers on their license plates will take turns being allowed on roads on alternating days and schools will close when a red alert for air pollution is issued. Meanwhile, 30 percent of the city’s government cars will be banned from streets on an odd-even alternating basis. From what I saw this week, this program has yet to reduce pollution during most days in the capital to a bearable level.
Besides air pollution, there is water and food pollution, which has also taken a toll in China, but officials in the past were loath to admit a link between pollution and serious health problem. About four years ago, after an earlier visit to China, I wrote in the Saudi daily Alriyadh about the so-called “cancer villages” in China, where cases of cancer had dramatically increased with higher rate of industrialization. Many organizations outside China sounded the alarm about the growing phenomenon, with the World Health Organization projecting a dramatic increase in cancer rates in China, unless of course the Chinese authorities did something about it. But while there was an extensive coverage of the problem in Chinese media, the reports were officially dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Now however, the problem is officially acknowledged, which is an important step toward solving it. Earlier this year, a couple of months after the new leadership of the ruling Communist Party of China was installed, Global Times (CPC official organ) published a map of “cancer villages.” The map is extensive, showing many localities throughout the eastern half of China. The paper also cited the Five-Year Plan for Prevention and Control of Environmental Risks from Chemicals, put together by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which included a “clear demonstration that because of chemical poisoning, ‘cancer villages’ and other serious health dangers have started to appear in many areas.”
The last dark corner I deal with today is China’s clampdown on social media, part of its overall strategy to restrict access to media. It is hard to imagine, but you cannot legally access most popular social media in China, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which the rest of the world takes for granted. Twitter was initially available in China, but then blocked in 2009. Instead, China has Weibo, its own Twitter-like program, but the two are not linked. Despite the ban, it was recently reported that over 84 million Chinese Internet users have used Twitter at least once, through different proxies and other hacking devices. While the significance of that high figure may be slightly exaggerated, it nevertheless points out the futility of banning such popular social media.
As the Chinese people consider the sustainability of their rapid growth miracle, other countries following the same path may well consider the downside of the Chinese model.

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