Cadmium, Nickel and Arsenic

China is an amazing country with a fascinating and rich cultural heritage. The new “communist” government – a political system premised on an elite cadre of carefully recruited and groomed officials charged with doing what’s best for the people – has lifted over one billion people out of the depths of dire poverty and moved this nation to a clear vector to become the largest economy on earth. Its megalopolis urban centers are glistening tributes to modern architecture, its factories among the most productive on earth and its infrastructural triumphs often put Western counterparts to shame. This centrally-directed growth has produced staggering wealth, legions of new millionaires and billionaires and global influence that Mao Zedong could never have envisioned during his tenure at the top.

True, this growth hasn’t reached all of China; there are hundreds of millions of Chinese in rural and central areas that have yet to see the kinds of benefits seen in the coastal towns and larger cities. That’s on the government’s agenda for the next few years. But rapid growth, directed at the expense of just about everything else, has left China with two massive problems that are deeply problematical for China’s President Xi Jinping: massive high-level corruption and one of the most polluted environments on earth. These issues are actually two sides to the same coin.

With new coal plants by the hundreds coming online every year, king coal has decimated the air quality all across China, and even the capital, Beijing, has air quality so bad that instruments that measure emissions see the needles pinned beyond extreme danger zone (they can’t even get readings), and anyone who can afford them has expensive air filters in their cars, offices and homes. That glistening architecture often isn’t even visible behind the thick haze.

Waterways are deeply polluted. Dead fish and livestock wash down rivers, lakes are no longer able to be used to secure drinking water, and continuous toxins wash out of unregulated factories and carry the dangerous chemicals leached into the soil back into waterways, defying solutions. Until now, it has been a state secret as to exactly how bad it is. But Xi Jinping is serious about fixing the problem, and that means increasing transparency. He knows that public unrest at this horrific problem is becoming a threat to party control. A new Chinese government study, now released to the public, is a strong statement as to President Xi’s new priority.

“Almost a fifth of China's soil is contaminated, an official study released by the government has shown… Conducted between 2005-2013, it found that 16.1% of China's soil and 19.4% of its arable land showed contamination…The report, by the Environmental Protection Ministry, named cadmium, nickel and arsenic as top pollutants.

“There is growing concern, both from the government and the public, that China's rapid industrialisation is causing irreparable damage to its environment…The study took samples across an area of 6.3 million square kilometres, two-thirds of China's land area.

“‘The survey showed that it is hard to be optimistic about the state of soil nationwide,’ the ministry said in a statement on its website… ‘Due to long periods of extensive industrial development and high pollutant emissions, some regions have suffered deteriorating land quality and serious soil pollution.’.. Because of the ‘grim situation’, the state would implement measures including a ‘soil pollution plan’ and better legislation.

“Levels of pollution ranged from slight to severe…About 82.8% of the polluted land was contaminated by inorganic materials, with levels noticeably higher than the previous survey between 1986 and 1990, Xinhua news agency quoted the report as saying… ‘Pollution is severe in three major industrial zones, the Yangtze River Delta in east China, the Pearl River Delta in south China and the northeast corner that used to be a heavy industrial hub,’ the agency said.” BBC.co.uk, April 18^th 

Got it, but why? Toxic dumping? Some. But it mostly comes down to where farmers get water to irrigate. Pour water that has been fouled with toxic metals by processing plants or factories, and the land absorbs that water for a very, very long time. For crops like rice, where fields are intentionally flooded, the damage is so much worse: rice in particular absorbs those toxic metals rather completely, adding poison to the food chain. Chinese vegetables, anyone? And poisoned food terrifies people, and threatens politicians who let it happen.

Those are statistics. Here are the facts: It has been a long-standing policy that local communist party branches (even though party officials are often moved across the country by the central authorities) control local businesses and permitting. And until they reach the highest levels of national party administration, there’s an unwritten rule that local party regulators are able to sit on the boards of the companies they regulate and get compensated in cash and stock for those services.  Even when senior party officials have to cut their ties to such corporate positions to rise to the top, the “no company interests rule” often skips over the positions of power that remain with their immediate family.

Here’s how all that comes out in the Western press: “The central government has promised to make tackling the issue a top priority - but vested interests and lax enforcement of regulations at local level make this challenging… The public, meanwhile, have become increasingly vocal - both on the issue of smog and, in several cases, by taking to the streets to protest against the proposed construction of chemical plants in their cities.” BBC.co.uk.

How does this work? Beijing tells the local party officials to begin implementing a clean-up. The party official tells that to the companies they regulate and on whose boards they sit. The CEO tells the “board member” what the clean-up costs will be, how long the plant has to be shut down to effect the changes… and that they will, unfortunately, have to suspend payments to “board members” until it’s all done. All-too-often, the board members then vote to defer the clean-up until some undefined later period. Oh, and the company needs more access to energy to grow, so another coal-fired regional plant is authorized and built. And so it goes. Xi knows the drill, but he also knows if the people get pissed enough, the party will begin to lose legitimacy, so he has to figure out how to implement a fix.

Before we get too smug about our environmental policies, let’s say that incumbent businesses in the U.S. have paid substantial sums to American politicians and their campaigns to under- or de-fund state and federal environmental agencies, taken away or reduce their power, appointed industry-friendly administrators, have supported the gridlock in Congress that effectively stops tighter controls from being implemented and prevented the United States from entering into global treaties with clear goals to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant release of disastrous greenhouse gasses. As horrible as China’s environmental problems might be, they could actually embarrass us by beginning a massive clean-up before we do. Truth is that we all needed to start this clean-up…. yesterday.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes “legitimized” corruption is infinitely more destructive than that under-the-table stuff!