As one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world, China has doubled its population since its founding and is projected to surpass the United States to become the world’s largest economy. It boasts modern cities populated with millions of people and global financial hubs comparable to the major cities of the West. Yet, my experiences living in Beijing in the 2010s were wildly different from my life in the US. Instead of watching the weather forecast anticipating a snow day, my classmates and I followed the air quality index as it dipped below habitable levels, forcing school closure as it was unsafe to be outdoors. Unlike snow days, “smog days” were not a rarity; we constantly lived under masks longing for a sliver of blue sky. Such unimaginable conditions resulted from decades of unchecked industrialization, spurring rapid economic growth that proved detrimental to the environment and citizens. Beijing was forced to halt numerous factories and enact restrictive laws to improve air quality. While these efforts were eventually effective, they underscore the tradeoff between economic development and environmental sustainability, an issue ingrained in China’s history. In the 1950s, China’s economic policy disregarded environmental sustainability due to the need to industrialize rapidly. However, public protest and international pressure in the 2000s initiated a shift towards environmental protection. Despite early challenges, China has recently achieved significant progress in reducing emissions while integrating with green capitalism, underscoring the importance of governmental commitment to prioritize sustainability.
In the 1950s, campaigns like the Great Leap Forward focused on rapid industrialization and misguided efforts, deteriorating China’s environment as the developing nation sought self-sufficiency and modernization. Many agreed that “the widespread ideology of ‘development first, environmental protection later’ is a root cause of China’s low ranking in environmental sustainability” (“China’s Road to Sustainability”). The government adopted a Soviet-like strategy, which involved exercising tight state control in production and collectivization of agriculture. This model allowed the regime to pursue its agenda without obstacles, which meant disregarding sustainability, as incorporating environmental factors would force additional restrictions on industries, stunting their growth. Specifically, “these abusive programs included population control in the 1950s, the building of the first big dams, ‘grainfield in the lakes,’ wetland destruction, and the forced relocation of urban youth” (Sze 30). Precious ecosystems such as wetlands were harnessed for agriculture, and the government’s tendency to build impressive infrastructure projects to project power consumed large amounts of energy. Pressured to replicate centuries of industrialization in the West in mere decades, China concentrated all resources on modernization. The result was crowded urban cities with inadequate living conditions, permanently depleting natural resources. Tasks distributed to individual households were part of the plan to industrialize, worsening the devastating effects of climate change. For instance, during the Great Leap Forward movement initiated in 1958, “Beijing instructed villages to produce their steel in small backyard furnaces” (Yaghmaian 41), where unregulated furnaces spewed copious amounts of smoke into the air, exacerbating air pollution. Widespread deforestation ensued to provide fuel for the furnaces, causing soil erosion and tipping the ecological balance. Structural issues remained into the next century, where “in 2003, Shenzhen had 131 days of smog in the year as coal power plants were not equipped to remove smaller particles such as sulfur dioxide” (Sze 34). The smog storms culminated decades of pollution and disregard for sustainability, among other early signs of environmental depletion in industrialized China. It is clear that China heavily favored economic growth over sustainability, and environmental policies were not considered part of its agenda during this period. However, spurred by the world’s focus on sustainability, China gradually shifted its policies.
China began incorporating environmental policies in the early 2000s amid modernization and faced difficulties committing to bettering sustainability. Yet, beyond countless speeches and promises for improving the climate, a lack of willingness to sacrifice economic development resulted in a mere facade of sustainability, leaving structural issues intact. As one of the first initiatives, Hu set goals to construct over 150 eco-cities around China, featuring large urban plans of green public spaces, futuristic buildings, and excessive public transit (Sze 38). Although the central government had enough resources and power, implementing these eco-cities was highly unrealistic. This was due to the large wealth gap left by years of forced industrialization, where “the average income of the top 10 percent of the population was eleven times that of the poorest 10 percent” (Yaghmaian 139), making it much more severe than today. As a result, the average citizen could not afford to live in these cities, as housing prices were ridiculously high with the addition of green common spaces, and strict environmental regulations meant finding a traditional labor job in the cities was nearly impossible. Ultimately, eco-cities became utopias for the upper echelon to enjoy inof a universal solution to ecological depletion. The unwillingness to restructure monetary policies to support sustainability and barriers for citizens to partake in these environmental initiatives combined meant that most ecological visions put forth by the government were meaningless on the ground, and created nothing more than an ideological illusion of environmental protection. The illusion continued as the 2008 Olympics hosted in Beijing were an opportunity for China to showcase to the rest of the world, where “the Bird’s Nest, the hysteria over pollution, and the Olympic Park show how ecological images are at a central part of the story… to represent Beijing and China as a whole as a clean, green, developed, and highly organized place” (Sze 46). The CCP utilized a high-profile event like the Olympics to project the image of China as an environmentally conscious and advanced country. At the time, citizens took pride in the landmarks of the Olympics, which were built around the central theme of sustainability, and in the green infrastructure built in Beijing in preparation for the foreign press. In reality, the tendency of the government to construct large, impressive structures consumed huge amounts of resources, and the rebound from strict pollution policies after the Olympics would trigger even more severe environmental issues.
Behind the government’s effort to put forth a sustainable image, the reality of widespread pollution and environmental damage was felt by Chinese citizens, who demanded change from authorities through protests. Over the next couple of years after the Olympics, Beijing would be engulfed in heavy smog from factories. Despite trying to uphold a sustainable image, the government was “faced with an Internet-led brush fire of criticism, the edifice of environmental propaganda is collapsing…after years of concealing its data on such pollutants, Beijing began publishing hourly readings from one monitoring station” (“Activists Crack China’s Wall of Denial About Air Pollution”). Following repeated empty promises, people demanded real change, taking action online to undermine the popularity of officials and force them to enact more substantial policies. The sheer amount of posts online proved hard for the government to censor, even overflowing to foreign social media and reflecting badly on the CCP, forcing them to react. The publication of air quality data monitored in Beijing signaled that the government was more willing to be transparent with its citizens and fulfill the promise of eradicating air pollution. Beyond Beijing and online protests, entire movements were created to prevent further pollution. Among them, the most notable was the Shifang movement based in the province of Sichuan, where “locals and police clashed during demonstrations against a planned molybdenum and copper refinery. The next day, the government announced a halt to the project, ” (“Shifang: A Crisis of Local Rule”). Motivated by the success in Beijing and Shifang, Chinese people collectively rose to protest despite the tight regime and began succeeding in blocking environmentally damaging projects at local levels, which would eventually amount to the government prioritizing sustainability.
Cover Image From: https://www.youlinmagazine.com/story/china-push-toward-a-cleaner-and-greener-future/MjY0Ng==
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