subscribe to this pageChina's All-Seeing Eye China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
NAOMI KLEIN
Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM
world has never seen before. Chongqing has 12 million people and counting.
It's part of the central government's plan to bring some of China's economic
boom to its impoverished interior province where three out of four Chinese
live. Vanguard takes you on a whirlwind tour of the city---from inside a
cramped boarding house where migrant workers to inside a starter apartment
of China's new class of yuppies; from inside ancient, crumbling teahouses to
gleaming new car factories.
By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY
BEIJING, Aug. 25 - No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
But just as the speed and scale of China's rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country's 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
China's Chicago
Jul 26th 2007 | CHONGQING
From The Economist print edition
A giant city in the south-west is a microcosm of China's struggle to move millions from rural to urban areas
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-02-07 16:31
Beijing lacks 400,000 parking spaces, Zhao Fengtong, vice mayor of the Beijing Municipal government, said on Thursday.
With car ownership rocketing to the current figure of more than two million cars, not to mention more than 300,000 more cars annually, Beijing is struggling to keep up.
Besides building more underground parking lots and parking buildings, Beijing should create an internet parking information system showing all the available public parking spaces, suggested Li Xun, deputy director of China Academy of Urban Planning and Design.
Beijing announced earlier last year that 26 free or low-cost large-scale parking lots will be built near subway and bus stops to encourage drivers to use public transport in downtown Beijing.
Traffic problems topped this year's list of suggestions from representatives of the municipal people's congress. Traffic has been the number one issue for the last five years, said officials of the municipal people's congress.
npr weeklong series
Shanghai Builds for the Future
China is now undergoing one of the most massive urbanization in human history, and nowhere is that more evident than in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The city's population is now almost 18 million, and is forecast to rise to 25 million by 2020. This series looks at how the city is preparing for its futureWorld View Podcast
Summary: A transcript of Calvin Sims interviewing Times Hong Kong bureau chief Keith Bradsher about China's new love affair with cars.
Sims: Gives us some background, if you will, Keith. China is typically known as a country where you had just millions and millions of bicycle people. Probably that's the image they have when they see photos of Chinese, especially in big cities. What has been fueling this growth in car usage in the last couple of years?
Guangzhou Journal
First Comes the Car, Then the $10,000 License Plate
By JIM YARDLEY
...
But, as we all know, these numbers regarding China are completely bogus anyways. Because most MPAA member movies can't be sold in China so they have no loss. China only allows 20 foreign films to be imported each year, and usually 14 - 16 of these are from MPAA members. So what the MPA is talking about in this report isn't "profits lost to pirates in China" but "profits lost to closed markets in China".
China Rights Forum
2006
China's Environmental Challenge
by the Berkeley China Internet Project out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.