China'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

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.

A series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.

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

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.

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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?