The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy

The Battle over the Environmental Kuznets Curve

118 the battle over the environmental kuznets curve o n November 13, 2005, an accident at a petrochemical plant in Jilin Province, north central China, sent a large but unknown quantity of benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River. Downstream, the capital of neighboring Heilongjiang Province draws its drinking water from the river. Authorities there didn’t alert the population to the danger but tried to dilute the toxic plume. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work, and they soon were forced to shut off the water supply to the city’s 3.8 million residents—well after citizens had noticed that the water coming out of their taps was contaminated. (The explanation the provincial authorities gave for the shutdown: “to carry out repair and inspection work on the pipe network.”) After the resumption of service, the governor of the Province, Zhang Zuoji, drank a ceremonial glass of water in the home of a seventy-five-yearold citizen and told the official news agency, “I took the first drink . . . to reassure the public and dispel their worries.” Given the delay and dissimulation, the gesture seems unlikely to have had its full intended effect. The previous April the New York Times had reported on a riot in the southeastern province of Zhejiang: as many as sixty thousand residents blockaded the entrance to the Zhuxi Industrial Function Zone, protesting the pollution that its thirteen chemical plants spewed into their lives; the demonstration turned violent when officials dispatched three thousand police officers and government workers to take down the protester’s tent city. The protesters repelled the assault and held their ground, overturning police buses and cars and setting them afire. Official reports said that officers and government employees were attacked by a crowd wielding clubs and rocks and that thirty officials were hospitalized , some with serious injuries. No reports were offered of injuries or battle over environmental kuznets curve 119 deaths to the protestors, although bloggers posted photos that included civilian bodies on the ground. These were not isolated incidents. In March 2004, a million people lost water for twenty-five days when a chemical spill in the Tuojiang River shut down urban water systems. In July 2005 in Xinchang, an estimated 15,000 people rioted for three days protesting pollution from a recently built pharmaceutical plant. (It was, the New York Times reported , “a pitched battle,” with the crowd “overturning police cars and throwing stones for hours, undeterred by thick clouds of tear gas.”) In June 2007, in the coastal city of Xiamen, demonstrators protested the proposed construction of a chemical factory that would have undercut the city’s role as the center of a lucrative ecotourism trade. May 2008, in Chengdu, saw another demonstration against a proposed petrochemical factory and oil refinery. By 2006, the Chinese government was receiving six hundred thousand official environmental complaints per year, a number that had risen by about 20 percent per year from 2002 on. That complaints are voiced can be taken as a sign of progress: China is more open than it was. But the magnitude and number of the problems suggest that China’s bureaucratic culture of secrecy and its centralized, commandand -control decision making have survived the liberalization of capital ownership and the transition to a privatized, free-market, corporatized economy—and that Chinese officials continue to take the imperative of industrial expansion as a public interest so compelling that it overrides other public interests—in free speech, in freedom of assembly, in having a nonpoisonous environment. Citizens harmed by the damages that economic development has imposed on them risk their lives in protest. In the thirty years from 1978 and 2008, the Chinese economy, as measured by GDP, grew tenfold. (In contrast, the GDP of the world’s largest and strongest economy, that of the United States, did not quite triple in the same period.) The growth has come at considerable and notorious cost in dirty air and water and other “disamenities,” including environmentally caused human illness and death. A report by the Council on Foreign Relations affirms that China’s “focus on economic development at breakneck speed has led to widespread environmental degradation” and catalogues the “environmental challenges” that the country faces: One-third of the population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. 120 the other road to serfdom Seventy percent of the country’s rivers and lakes are polluted. (Roughly 200 million tons of untreated sewage...