Choking on Growth — page 2

It was Hui Ouyang's fear for her seven-year-old son's health that finally made her leave the pollution of Beijing. "An adult can endure it," she says. "But a child cannot." For years, the boy struggled with respiratory ailments that would worsen on days when the air was dark with smoke, dust and car exhaust. Finally, this past January, Hui decided to move to Shanghai, where the air isn't quite as bad. Her son's cough has cleared up, and he can play outside again. "I find it's better for him here," Hui says. "Beijing surely is the worst."

The capital is certainly among the most polluted cities in China, but it has plenty of competition. According to the World Bank, 16 of the 20 most polluted cities globally are in China. China's Ministry of Science and Technology says air pollution kills 50,000 newborn babies a year. With the country's ravenous demand for energy only increasing and its automobile revolution just gearing up, however, China's current air pollution may be only the tip of the smokestack. "The danger in China is that you're getting to the point of no return," says Dr. Elizabeth C. Economy, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future.

Nowhere is that sense of urgency more keenly felt than in Beijing, where in less than four years Olympic athletes must run a marathon through streets where respirable particulate levels average three to four times U.S. safety levels. The capital has already passed some of China's most ambitious environmental measures, spending $8.1 billion on environmental-protection projects from 1998 to 2003. Tighter emission standards took effect this fall, public buses that run on alternative fuel are being used, and the city has promised stricter emissions standards on cars by 2007. Despite these efforts, Beijing's air has become increasingly hazardous to human health. Dr. Seamus Ryan, chairman of family medicine at Beijing United Family Hospital, says he sees a rise in respiratory admissions on particularly polluted days: "When the air gets bad, you see people coming in with coughs and rhinitis."

In China's urban areas, the chief culprit is coal. Cheap and abundant, it supplies 70-80% of the country's energy. Though the government has pledged to use more renewable energy and cleaner fuels like natural gas, the scale of China's power demand means that coal use is still expected to nearly double by 2030. When the country faced a huge energy shortage last year, coal mines and power plants that had been closed for environmental reasons were quickly reopened and sulfur-dioxide emissions soared.

It doesn't help that China has fallen dangerously in love with the automobile. In Guangdong alone the number of cars per household rose 31% last year. China's Ministry of Communications estimates China could have 140 million vehicles on the road by 2020, compared with more than 20 million today. Even if emission controls are enforced, this car boom is an environmentalist's nightmare. "You can do a lot of things right," says Economy, "but the question is whether the scale is simply going to dwarf everything you've tried to accomplish."

Air pollution doesn't respect international boundaries, either, so China's neighbors are saddled with its exports. Hong Kong has long had one of the region's best air-quality-monitoring systems, and it impressively curtailed its own pollutants in the 1990s, not least by shifting its energy mix away from coal toward natural gas and promoting cleaner fuels in taxis. But that progress is being reversed, to the dismay of victims like Lincoln Chan. The Hong Kong native has had asthma since childhood, except for an eight-year reprieve when he lived in the U.S. Now, on polluted days, his lungs act up. "I'm almost like a detector," he says. "I can tell when it's a bad-air day." He's thought about fleeing to a cleaner climate, but his job in construction won't allow it. Now he fears for his three-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who's already begun to have respiratory problems. "I'm really worried about her, but there's not a lot I can do. I'm stuck here."

Hong Kong itself is hardly guiltless. China Light & Power (CLP), which provides the majority of Hong Kong's electricity, burned significantly more coal in 2003-4 to make up for a sharp drop in its supply of natural gas. Although the company last week announced plans to clean up its coal plants and increase its gas capacity, this won't take effect for years; CLP's commercial director, Richard Lancaster, says Hong Kong might not see significant improvement in air quality until 2020. But as much as 80% of the city's air pollution comes from across the border, where the factories and power plants operate with far fewer environmental restraints. Call it "one country, one sky." "Guangdong sends polluted air to us, and we send polluted air to Guangdong," says Alexis Lau, who studies air pollution at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Lau's work shows that emissions on both sides of the border have created a pollutant trap over the delta that circulates air pollution around the region (see graphic). As emissions and urban sprawl increase, the trap becomes tighter, making it harder to clear out the pollution even on windy days.

How does a developed city like Hong Kong avoid being swamped by the air pollution of its developing neighbor? Although Hong Kong and Guangdong swear fealty to the same flag, cross-border cooperation is a delicate matter. In 2002 the two governments completed a regional survey of air quality in the Pearl River Delta and agreed to deep cuts in pollutant levels on both sides by 2010. Those cuts are on a "best endeavor" basis, however, meaning the emissions targets are merely aspirations not enforceable caps. "The best-endeavor basis is just accepting the likelihood of failure," says the University of Hong Kong's Hedley. "If this were an infectious disease, we would not be dealing with it on a best-endeavor basis." Still, the mainland won't be hurried, says Sarah Liao, Hong Kong's Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works: "China is very conscious of the problem. But working with the mainland, you have to go slower. This is a collaborative work. You can't be seen to be criticizing them."

In the meantime, the problem in Hong Kong is exacerbated by the so-called "canyon effect," whereby polluted air gets trapped between the city's tall buildings. Though Hong Kongers are often typecast as caring only for their pocketbooks, recent polls have shown a ground-swell of environmental concern among these captives of the polluted urban landscape. A survey last month of Hong Kong professionals and managers found that 84% believed the government was not doing enough to protect the environment, and the South China Morning Post, the city's main English-language daily, has campaigned relentlessly for the government to confront the crisis. "As people understand what's going on, they're changing their attitudes," says Edwin Lau, assistant director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth Hong Kong.

The mounting sense among regular people that something must be done has spread to the mainland, too. In the boomtown of Shenzhen, solidly middle-class owners of luxury flats are complaining about the construction of a tunnel that's part of a transport corridor linking the city to Hong Kong's container port. They say an environmental-impact study commissioned by the Shenzhen government radically underestimated the pollutants that will leak out of the tunnel due to traffic. The study said that nitrogen-dioxide emissions would be within national standards, but a study conducted by two of the residents, who are both retired engineers, and verified by independent environmental experts, puts emissions at 20 times the national acceptable levels. At a meeting of the informal group's representatives last month, one resident complained: "My apartment is next to a park, which is why I moved here in the first place. Now the highway will run straight through it." She adds: "Why should Hong Kong have so much better laws than we do when this is a cross-border project?" (TIME's attempts to reach the Shenzhen government for comment were unsuccessful.)

Some of the residents are now starting to raise money to finance lawsuits to stop the project. This would be just the latest in a string of cases brought by ordinary Chinese citizens to force their government to live up to its pollution pledges. Without such pressure from the public, economic concerns inevitably tend to trump environmental considerations. "We understand that China is a poor country that needs to develop economically and that this isn't easy," says Shi Zekang, a retired aviation engineer who co-authored the Shenzhen residents' environmental study. "But I've really started to lose confidence that the government will do the right thing." Others share his skepticism. "Of the laws and regulations on environmental protection, only 10% are being enforced," reckons Wang Canfa, a Beijing-based environmental-law professor who, in 1999, founded the Center for Legal Assistance to Victims of Environmental Pollution. "And people tell me that's an optimistic estimate."

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