Pollution in China

[alhoon]

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/p...-photographs#1

The pictures speak of themselves. There are places in China that are beyond words! The pictures are stunning.
I wonder what's the mean life expectancy around those places is. Is China really so determined to lower their population that are willing to do with an ailing population that from 40years on have terrible health problems?

[hellheaven1987]

Hey CCP claim that is internal affair, so foreigners keep your mouth shut.

[caratacus]

Hey CCP claim that is internal affair, so foreigners keep your mouth shut.

And yet it is through foreign business that so much pollution has been generated. China really needs a strong environmental lobby, to hold people to account for the degradation they are doing to the Country's environment.

In Britain during the Industrial Revolution, powerful industrialists made large amounts of money irresponsibly polluting the atmosphere, rivers and soils. China is now going through the exact same process. But with greater knowledge of the effects and a government that has strong controls over all activities, there is absolutely no excuse for what has been going on and the Chinese Government itself must be held primarily responsible.

As in so many things, I think China should reappraise its identity and look to its ancient past, in which Buddhist and Confucius thinking would have made for a more suitable way of thinking about such things. The country has become nothing more than the soulless pursuit of money and power, for which no good will come.

[Roma_Victrix]

As in so many things, I think China should reappraise its identity and look to its ancient past, in which Buddhist and Confucius thinking would have made for a more suitable way of thinking about such things. The country has become nothing more than the soulless pursuit of money and power, for which no good will come.

Somewhere even Kong Fuzi is rolling around in his grave, which is funny considering how he was your typical aristocrat in that age who believed that peasants should know their place in the hierarchy.

In Britain during the Industrial Revolution, powerful industrialists made large amounts of money irresponsibly polluting the atmosphere, rivers and soils. China is now going through the exact same process. But with greater knowledge of the effects and a government that has strong controls over all activities, there is absolutely no excuse for what has been going on and the Chinese Government itself must be held primarily responsible.

This is an apt comparison, considering how the economy of the PRC has become a bizarre mix of totally unregulated Laissez-faire capitalism leading to horrible abuse of workers while other industries and internal markets are entirely planned and managed by the government in true communist fashion. Unfortunately, the ruling CCP doesn't allow for open protest or freedom of expression, so good luck organizing street protests calling for change. Even online protests on social media and blogs are shut down by Internet censors working around the clock for the party. I have to wonder if that becomes a depressing job after a while, to know that it's your role to squash the speech of others who are suffering. I'm sure many get off on it, though, with an authoritarian power rush.

[hellheaven1987]

And yet it is through foreign business that so much pollution has been generated. China really needs a strong environmental lobby, to hold people to account for the degradation they are doing to the Country's environment.

Woah, implying foreign business try to restrict China to set up environment regulations.

[AqD]

Hey CCP claim that is internal affair, so foreigners keep your mouth shut.

CCP members are also busy moving out. Soon the pollution won't be their problem anymore.

[Davius]

Eh, they've got a surplus of worker bots to make our cellphones. Shortened life expectancy should not really hurt the nation.

[Twido]

I spent a couple of weeks in October travelling around China. The only big cities I visited were Beijing and Chongqing but I have to admit I did not find the pollution nearly as bad as the images presented. Obviously this is anecdotal; I could have been lucky with the weather and I avoided walking near the busiest roads.

From my experience I would say there is a glimmer of hope for China; air pollution is often debated on the TV (and given that that is state controlled this is a big deal) and the issue is important to my friends there. The first step in bringing about change is for the population to recognise that there is a problem and then generate political pressure and I would say that is definitely happening.

From another point of view, I work in a UK university in a department looking at power generation. I see more and more collaboration with Chinese universities and institutes looking at the problems of pollution. There seems to be increasing funding in China for these projects and there is a clamour in western universities to work with their counterparts in China.


Personally I am more concerned about India in terms of pollution. There population will soon pass that of China's and the pollution debate in India does not seem as mature as the one in China. There just does not seem to be the same political willingness to tackle the problem.

Finally, that first image is very dark since the journalist almost certainly made the child swim in the algae to highlight the problem!

[sabaku_no_gaara]

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/p...-photographs#1

The pictures speak of themselves. There are places in China that are beyond words! The pictures are stunning.
I wonder what's the mean life expectancy around those places is. Is China really so determined to lower their population that are willing to do with an ailing population that from 40years on have terrible health problems?

Could be interesting to see what kind changes we will see in the population due to this, not right now obviously, but in say 30 years we should see some change in the people living daily in these conditions, especially those born in them.

Also how the plant and animal life will adapt to this and the bacteria.

It's a great biology experiment, we could learn a lot from this.

It must suck to be Chinese in one of those area's though

[Dr Zoidberg]

I lived in Beijing in 2009/2010. The pollution could be awful on some days; others it was blue skies and beautiful. It often depended if there were certain events or speciic visitors in town which would see the Government shutting down the factories outside Beijing in the days prior to reduce the pollution.

The US Embassy has a weather monitoring site that would tweet its own measurements of the daily air quality, and its readings were usually much worse than the official government measurements. Turns out the US Embassy was measuring to a finer level of particles in the atmosphere, which of course meant worse readings as it was measuring more pollutants.

When asked why the government didn't measure to the same level of particle, the government's official response was - and I you not - essentially along the lines of "Well, if we did that, then the readings wouldn't be as good."

I'd love to go back and live in Beijing again, but Ive now young kids and there is no way in hell I would wish to expose their lungs to that level of pollution daily.

[alhoon]

I lived in Beijing in 2009/2010. The pollution could be awful on some days; others it was blue skies and beautiful. It often depended if there were certain events or speciic visitors in town which would see the Government shutting down the factories outside Beijing in the days prior to reduce the pollution.
When asked why the government didn't measure to the same level of particle, the government's official response was - and I you not - essentially along the lines of "Well, if we did that, then the readings wouldn't be as good."

I'd love to go back and live in Beijing again, but Ive now young kids and there is no way in hell I would wish to expose their lungs to that level of pollution daily.

Very interesting... If I may ask, aren't you afraid of what the pollution would do to you? Why would you return to a city that even some days, pollution would be awful?

[Dr Zoidberg]

Very interesting... If I may ask, aren't you afraid of what the pollution would do to you? Why would you return to a city that even some days, pollution would be awful?

Oh absolutely. It definitely affected me too. Who knows what I was breathing in? I remember when I first arrived, I found it harder to breathe. Best way I can describe it is that the air felt "heavier".

And I did spend a few days hocking up black crap when I returned home to Oz. If I did go back, I'd invest in a high quality respirator for travelling around town on bad pollution days.

[RollingWave]

It should be noted that a gigantic part of that super smog is due not to industrial pollution but the fact that Beijing is next to a desert (and is quickly becoming one.) of course, desertification is a man made problem too, but not exactly the same thing.

Beijing itself actually have relatively few industrial capacity for a major chinese city, it's too expensive to set up shop there, most of the industry are in the south and those places rarely have smog that bad.

That is not to say that China doesn't have pollution issue it needs to (and is) tackle, but the focus is often misled.

[Nergal1610]

I spent last spring in China and I was both positively and negatively surprised by the pollution. Like someone already mentioned, if the wind was coming from the right direction, the sky was very clear and the only hint of pollution was a slight burning smell. Days like that were great. On a bad day, you couldn't see much at all and I didn't enjoy being outside.

What surprised me the most was the opinion of the Chinese people. They are generally very self-conscious about any criticism you have, no matter how gently you want communicate it. They felt any criticism of the environmental policy was a criticism of their political system and aimed at Chinese people in general. However, they are absolutely fine with arguing about the policies among themselves, but they don't like foreigners having critical opinions.

[Chukada1]

Those photos are a day old. Things have improved remarkably since then.

[DaVinci]

The atmosphere is a shared item of the earth, that's the reason of international negotiating (nation borders mean especially in the matter of emissions).

[anant]

Places in china might be bad, but I helped film a documentary about miners in tyne-side England, and the memories they had of an industrial era Britain seemed eerily similar to the industrial wastelands of the "new" industrial revolution in China and India...no doubt people suffered in the industrial west (in some ways, they suffered far worse...toxic chemicals for instance, which are now know to be deadly, were handled bare handed. often by boys and pregnant mothers!) during it's heyday, and no doubt they are suffering in China now...the flipside is the enormous leap of material comfort they have taken as a result of this industrialization...the "working classes" of the west underwent this transformation in the 1900's (the brits went through it much before), so you can't really understand the ecstatic adulation simple material growth brings in "peasant" lands...it SEEMS well worth the price of polluted air and water, dying forests and drying rivers...those who see through this process (and there were many, even in the industrial west) again, SEEM powerless to stop it...it leads inevitably to a melancholic creative streak in the concerned culture. Someone once said, "White people sing when they are sad, others sing when they are happy...", I think it's because "the others" still had their forests...but it seems now that these "others" are headed down the same road towards post-industrial melancholia.