China's Engine of Environmental Collapse

Richard Smith

Description

As the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation's CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. The country's lakes, rivers, and farmlands are severely polluted yet China's police state can't suppress pollution, even from its own industries.

This is the first book to explain these contradictions. Richard Smith explains how the country's bureaucratic rulers are driven by nationalist-industrialist tendencies that are even more powerful than the drive for profit under 'normal' capitalism. In their race to overtake the US they must prioritise hyper-growth over the environment, even if this ends in climate collapse and eco-suicide.

Smith contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Names of Rivers in this Volume

Introduction: China as an Environmental Rogue State

1. The “China Price”: Police-State Capitalism and the Great Acceleration of Global Consumption

2. “Blind Growth”: Scenes of Planetary Destruction from the Twelfth Five-Year Plan

3. The Damage Done: The Poisoning of China’s Water, Soil, and Foods

4. Cooking the Planet for What End?

5. China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse

6. Guanxi and the Game of Thrones: Wealth, Property, and Insecurity in a Lawless System

7. Grabbing the Emergency Brake

8. The Next Chinese Revolution

Appendix

References

Index

Sujets

• Green Business
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Esmog
• Pekín
• Beijing
• Eurasian Land Bridge
• General officer
• Environmental economics
• History of Asia
• Communist Party of China
• Xi Jinping
• General
• Asia
• Wen Jiabao
• Smog
• Pékin

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786806635
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

China s Engine of Environmental Collapse

First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Richard Smith 2020
The right of Richard Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4155 2 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4157 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0662 8 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0664 2 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0663 5 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Names of Rivers in this Volume
Introduction: China as an Environmental Rogue State
1. The China Price : Police-State Capitalism and the Great Acceleration of Global Consumption
2. Blind Growth : Scenes of Planetary Destruction from the Twelfth Five-Year Plan
3. The Damage Done: The Poisoning of China s Water, Soil, and Foods
4. Cooking the Planet for What End?
5. China s Engine of Environmental Collapse
6. Guanxi and the Game of Thrones: Wealth, Property, and Insecurity in a Lawless System
7. Grabbing the Emergency Brake
8. The Next Chinese Revolution
Appendix
References
Index
Preface
As I write the last pages of this book in late December, the Australian continent is ringed with wildfires and temperatures are soaring to 45 C (113 F) in Sydney, breaking all historical records. The incineration of tens of thousands of square miles of forests, pine and eucalyptus plantations, farms, exurban houses, cows, kangaroos, and koala bears in terrible fire tornadoes has thrown into sharp relief, as no other environmental catastrophe has yet done, the insoluble contradiction between the capitalist drive for infinite growth and finite planet we live on, and the ringing truth of Greta Thunberg s cry: The house is on fire. We need to act like it.
Nowhere are out-of-control economic growth and blind denialism greater than in China today. For decades, Western economists, academics, and media have celebrated China s economic miracle, for many good reasons: In 1979, at the outset of Deng Xiaoping s Reform and Opening, China was a very poor, stagnant, and isolated Stalinist socialism-in-poverty. From then until 2018, China s real annual GDP growth averaged 9.5 percent, a pace described by the World Bank as the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history. Such growth has enabled China to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and create an urban middle class roughly equal in size to the entire population of the United States. In 1979, China s economy accounted for just 1.8 percent of global GDP, as against 26 percent for the US. Today, China accounts for 15.5 percent of global GDP while the US share has dropped to 23.6 percent. China has become the world s second-largest economy, largest manufacturer, largest merchandise trader, and largest holder of foreign exchange reserves.
Australia s own economic boom over the past three decades has been powered by China s rise, as Australia ramped up exports of coal, iron ore, and liquified natural gas, in large part to fuel China s engines. China, Australia s largest trading partner, takes 40 percent of those exports (and 31 percent of all Australian exports). Australia s GDP grew more than ten-fold from 1979 to 2018, largely on the strength of its coal exports to China (and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). Mining-related equipment, technology, and services currently account for 15 percent of Australia s GDP, and one in ten Australian jobs.
The other side of the coin is that China s Stalinist-capitalist economic miracle is not just unsustainable, it s suicidal. China s reckless cheap-and-dirty mode of development has savaged its environment and ecology. Uncontrolled dumping has defiled rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Long stretches of China s rivers are officially classed as too toxic to touch. In 2016 the government reported that 80 percent of tested water wells across the North China Plain (home to 400 million people) were so badly contaminated with industrial and other pollutants as to be unsafe for drinking or home use, but urban residents and farmers have little choice but to drink those waters and irrigate crops with them. In 2013 the Ministry of Land and Resources conceded that three million hectares (11,580 square miles) of farmland, an area the size of Belgium, was too toxic to farm because of the overapplication of fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation with toxic industrial wastewater, and the dumping of toxic waste on fields. China s leaders trumpet the country as a new model society destined to supersede the declining West, but their police state can t even guarantee safe water, food, or medicines in any city or rural village in China. Builders and manufacturers have built shiny new cities and infrastructure at China speed as People s Daily likes to brag. But in their haste to build and overbuild, they ve wasted staggering quantities of natural resources and racked up the worst industrial health and safety record of any nation on earth, with more than 100,000 workplace deaths per year in recent decades. Even discounting for China s larger workforce this is many times the rates found in the US, Europe, or Japan. The government spends billions of dollars on high-tech life-science parks and biotech, medical, and pharmaceutical research institutes in the quest for scientific glory and industrial prowess, but it can t provide decent basic health care or even general practitioners for its citizens. The privatizing of health care in the 1990s resulted in what is probably the most corrupt medical system in the world, while leaving the uninsured and underinsured (which is almost everyone) unable to cover the costs of serious illnesses. Desperate parents or spouses have even been forced to sell organs to pay for cancer treatment for a loved one.
But of all the disasters resulting from China s economic miracle, the most urgent threat is this: In its race to catch up and overtake the US, soaring CO 2 emissions have made China by far the leading driver of global climate collapse. In 2018 China s CO 2 emissions were nearly as much as those of the five next-largest emitters (the US, India, Russia, Japan, and Germany) combined. 1 Yet China s population was only 68 percent as large as the total population of those five countries, and its GDP was just 32 percent as large as their combined GDPs.
What explains these incredible and shocking anomalies and contradictions? This book asks questions like these-and it proposes to answer them with a Marxist mode of production theorization of China s political economy that explains why these contradictions are built into the nature of its hybrid bureaucratic-collectivist capitalism and the framework of Communist Party rule. This book contends that both capitalism and China s hybrid economic system are completely unsustainable, and that the drive to planetary climate collapse cannot be reversed with carbon taxes, tech fixes, and marginal environmental cleanups. I contend, with Greta, that the time for half measures has passed.
Since the first international climate negotiations at Kyoto in 1992, all efforts to suppress CO 2 emissions (voluntary reductions, cap-and-trade schemes, and carbon taxes) have been subordinated to maintaining economic growth, because all parties understand that there s no magic trick to dematerialize production, no way to suppress emissions without suppressing growth, and therefore without closing or downsizing many of the world s leading companies. Of the ten largest companies on the Fortune Global 500 list, six are oil companies and two are auto manufacturers. How can we suppress emissions without shutting down or, at very minimum, drastically downsizing those companies? Given capitalism, profit maximization must be prioritized over all other considerations, including emissions reductions, or companies will fail, the economy will collapse, and mass unemployment and starvation will result. Climate change will kill us in the long run but suppressing economic growth will kill us in the short run-and so we keep kicking the can down the road until we now find ourselves at the precipice. Australia shows us that the long run is not far off.
I contend that sooner or later Australia is going to have to shut down its coal production, most of its iron mines, and more. That will hurt. But watching Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne go up in flames will hurt more. China is going to have to shut down, phase out, or downsize thousands of fossil fuel-based, unsustainable industries across the economy (see Chapter 7 ). The same goes for the US, the European Union countries, Japan, India, and the other nations that presently account for the bulk of CO 2 emissions. And when we shut down, phase out, or retrench those industries, we re going to have to create new low- or no-carbon jobs for the hundreds of millions of workers who will be unavoidably displaced. That s going to be a huge problem, no doubt. But what s the alternative? Either we organize a rationally planned, democratically managed industrial drawdown of fossil fuel producers and downstream fossil fuel-dependent industries- including transportation, energy generation, petrochemicals, mining and manufacturing, plastics, synthetics, disposables, industrial farming, cement and cons