3.2 Contemporary China’s Environmental Crisis
Since the adoption of China’s “opening-up” policy, along with the introduction in the 1980’s of what some have called the “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” (The Rise of State Capitalism, 2012), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has accelerated at a growth rate of at least 10 percent per year for over 30 years (IMF, 2013). However, China’s economic growth has taken a serious toll on the environment, depleting much of its natural resource base, while generating major environmental problems, including severe urban air pollution, deteriorating water quality and water shortages (particularly in northern China), land degradation, soil erosion, desertification, loss of species and wildlife habitats, to name only a few. The Three Gorges Dam Project (TGDP) is one such development project, as we have seen, that has achieved a politico-economic goal on the one hand, but caused severe environmental degradation on the other. These problems not only threaten the health of those who inhabit China’s polluted cities, but they decisively also diminish the prospects of future generations to enjoy long-term economic prosperity based upon ecologically sustainable development.
There are more than 1.4 billion people in China and therefore per capita occupation of resources is very low. Official figures show the total amount of cultivated farmland in China has been gradually decreasing since the late 1950s (Smil, 1999). Currently, the farmland per capita of China is 0.777 hectare with a global rank of 145, taking only one third of the world average (People’s Daily, 2000). China’s per capita natural freshwater resources are 2,103 cubic meters in 2009, accounting for one third of the world average (FAO, 2010, China’s Water Crisis, 2010). Even worse, mismanagement and over exploitation of those limited resources is far too common in China. Put simply, China has during the last half century been guided by the western epistemology of power orientation, been assisted with its technological proficiency, and has all too often mindlessly expropriated the resources of nature in the name of economic progress and modernization.
As acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux observed of his travels in China in 1988:
“… I rarely saw examples of man’s insignificance beside the greater forces of nature. They [the Chinese] had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy [contrary to Prince Qin’s advice!]. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was said to be the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn’t a hill – it was a way of growing rice vertically.” (Theroux, 1998, p.251-252).
3.2.1 Environment Degradation in China
The Water Shortage and Water Pollution
The best of everything is water (Thales Miletus (640-546BC), quoted in Roy, 2011, p.281)
Among all the environmental problems China facing, water shortages are the biggest and imminent threat to livelihoods and food security (Li, 2010; Fan, et al., 2012). Although China ranks the sixth largest freshwater resources in the world in terms of volume, the per capita of water available is less than a quarter, however, thus ranking only number 110 in the world (Wang et al., 2008; Webber, 2011). Overpopulation and increasing demand, mismanagement and inefficiency of the traditional irrigation system, remain serious problems. Coupled with the poor maintenance of irrigation and drainage networks, along with the over extraction of water resources, pollution, and unequal distribution of available water resource, have given rise in China to a crisis of monumental proportion. This deficiency has been a major bottleneck to economic growth and severely impacts on people’s health and their quality of life. Due to the extremely uneven distribution of water resources, both geographically and seasonally, a ‘dry North’ (North of the Yangtze River) and a ‘wet South’ (South of the Yangtze River) in terms of water availability are common events. The Northern Chinese residents constitute 0.55 billion of the total population and are in possession of two thirds of the nation’s farmland, but only access less than one fifth of China’s national water resource. Inhabitants of the South, by contrast, have a population of 0.8 billion, and occupy only one third of the nation’s farmland and four fifths of its total water resources (Piao et al., 2010; Fan, et al., 2012). 400 of China’s approximately 660 cities have been experiencing deficiency of water and 110 of these cities suffer severe water shortages (Spooner, 2006; Song & Woo, 2008).
Second, the loot of water resources among major agricultural provinces and more industrialized provinces along the River have become increasingly furious. With surface water resources being scarce and polluted, the exploitation of groundwater far exceeds the rate of natural replenishment in many areas. This being so, water tables are falling quickly in both rural and urban areas (Spooner, 2006). In Hebei Province, for example, the deep water table has dropped rapidly at the rate of more than 2 meters per annum (Wang et al., 2009b). The underground water levels in Ordos in Inner Mongolia (North-eastern China) dropped by 0.15 to 0.25 meters annually between the years 2005 and 2008, due to the rapid urbanization with the increased demand of water resources (Yang, 2011). In general, water tables have fallen by 70 to 100 meters in some areas of NCP and more than 100 meters in some western areas over the last decade (Spooner, 2006). With falling water tables, rivers and lakes have dried up and disappearing during the dry season (Spooner, 2006; Song & Woo, 2008).
Water quality
It is estimated that 60 percent of the water in China’s seven biggest rivers (the Yangtze River, the Yellow River, the Huai River, The Songhua River, the Hai River, the Liao River and the Pearl River) in China have now been heavily polluted. It is also estimated that 75 percent of China’s lakes suffer from water Eutrophication[1]as a result of industrial, agricultural, and domestic discharges (Spooner, 2006), thereby creating yet another major health crisis with regard to having access to clean water. For example, about 300 million people living without access to safe drinking water in China now suffer diseases such as fluoride poisoning and chronic arsenic poisoning (World Bank, 2007). More than one third of industrial waste water and two thirds of domestic waste water in China are drained into the sewers of cities and towns without any treatment (Spooner, 2006; China’s Water Crisis, 2010). Moreover, both fertilizer production and its use are major agricultural sources of river pollution since the production and distribution of agricultural chemicals (fertilizers and insecticides) are heavily subsidized by the government in the hope of meeting the targets of grain production (Spooner, 2006). However, the efficiency of their use is relatively low (Spooner, 2006; World Bank, 2007). Chinese peasants now utilize fertilizers and pesticides, at a rate of 2.3 times as much as do their American counterparts on the same unit measure of farmland (Qie, 2011). For example, 200,000 people in a middle size city of Yancheng, Jinasu Province experienced a three days water supply cut due to the pollution of the water source by a chemical factory in February of 2009 (Qie, 2011; Yang, 2011).
Understanding the gravity of water shortage
Although China has been implementing ‘one-child policy’ since the beginning of the 1980s, its total population is still over 1.4 billion, the largest in the world. Moreover, China’s vast urban population has already exceeded the earlier estimated total of more than 700 million by the end of 2012 (NBS, 2012). It is also estimated that by 2025, an estimated 830 million people will be living in cities, where the newcomers will adopt middle-class urban lifestyles which entail a much higher water-consumption (Smil, 1993). This being so, the demand for water related to household use will be greatly increased. Water shortages have caused not only by substantial increases of population, but by the rapid growth of industrial demands. The growth of numerous local manufacturing industries absorbing the excess rural labor force, has exacerbated the water shortage situation dramatically (Smil, 1993; McCormack, 2001; China’s Water Crisis, 2010). While China’s per capita freshwater resources was 2,156 cubic meters in 2007, it is estimated to decline to 1,875 cubic meters by 2033 (1,000 cubic meters per capita is regarded as water poverty by the UN), according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (McCormack, 2001; Brown, 2003; China Water crisis, 2010).
Deforestation and Environmental Problems
The comprehensive interpretation of desertification includes processes such as land degradation, soil pollution, sand dunes, urbanization and all other natural and anthropogenic factors that severely reduce land productivity. China is now recognized to be among the world’s largest desert nations. Forest cover in China amounts to 21.9 per cent of land area (compared with 26 per cent in India, a comparable country in terms of population pressure) (FAO, 2010). Given that 37 percent of national land in China suffers from soil erosion in varying degrees, and that 40 percent of farmland in China is rapidly degenerating due to soil erosion, salinization and land pollution (Xinhuanet, 2013), the problems related to top soil quantity and quality is rapidly approaching an environmental and agricultural disaster. A research report by the Department of Rural Economy, Development Research Centre of the State Council identified soil erosion and desertification as the two most serious types of land degradation in China today (Han, 2006). Agricultural yield of arable land, unsurprisingly, has decreased significantly. There exists approximately 2.67 million square kilometers of Chinese land which is subjected to desertification, nearly 28 per cent of China’s entire national land mass (Han, 2006; NDRC, 2007). They are expanding at an average speed of 6,700 square kilometers per year (Han, 2007).
Alarmingly, the Gobi Desert in China is growing by 10,400 square kilometers a year, according to a report issued by China’s Environmental Protection Agency (Pocha, 2006). Desertification caused by overgrazing affected at least one-third of Inter Mongolia’s grassland (Smil, 1993). According to the Asian Development Bank, 4,000 villages in Gansu Province will face abandonment by 2020 as a consequence of desertification (Brown, 2003). Desertification has also caused the increasing frequency of disastrous sandstorms, from 8 episodes in the 1960s to 23 times in the 1990s (Han, 2006; NDRC, 2007). As a result, thousands of kilometers of roads and railway line are often blocked by sandstorms (Gluckman, 2000). A report by the Ministry of Science and Technology admits desertification causes huge losses in agricultural production throughout China, estimated at US$ 2-3 billion annually (Gluckman, 2000).
Soil pollution
Historically, there have been two ways in which to increase food production in order to satisfy China’s large and growing population. One of these is by expanding the area of land cultivated, and another is to increase land productivity. When expanding the farmable land was no longer possible, increasing the output per hectare through irrigation, chemical fertilizer, pesticide and mechanical inputs was regarded as the only option left to achieve the target of food production. However, the side-effects of some of these input-intensive agricultural practices have started to cause the serious problems (OECD, 2006). Statistics show that use of fertilizers rose 4.7 times in China during 1978-1999, an average increase of 7 percent each year (People.com.cn). Pesticides have been responsible for the pollution of approximately 13 to 16 million hectares of farmland (ibid). In the early 1950s China’s pesticide production was less than 10,000 tons a year; by the year 2008, it reached 1.73 million tons (People.com.cn; Zhu, 2008). High and intensive input has led to increased agricultural yields, but in doing so, the excess of pesticide caused a significant deterioration in the quality of soil and water, thereby consequently compromising people’s health in the long term (People.com.cn). It is estimated that about 22 million tons of various agricultural foods have been contaminated, and it is estimated that the total of agricultural food production output has been diminished by 10 million tons as a result of land pollution (Zhu, 2008).
Heavy metal pollution has also seriously affected people’s health, while simultaneously diminishing the potential of cropland production. In recent years, close to 20 million hectares of farmland (about one fifth of China’s entire farmland area) have been despoiled by pollution from heavy metals such as cadmium, arsenic, lead, chrome, and 12 million tons of food is contaminated by heavy metals each year, affecting about 0.13 billion farmers considering the farmland per capita in China (Wu & Yu, 2011). The economic vigour of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta regions, two famous rich areas in China, has been severely compromised by heavy metal toxicity (Cadmium, an element that leads to softening of the bones and kidney failure) and other deposits of organic pollutants, which were discharged from massive mining and other industrial activates over the years have caused serious health problems (Global Times, 2011). It is estimated that 60 percent of the rice purchased from those two regions was tainted with cadmium, according to a research report by Nanjing Agricultural University in 2006 (Brinkley, 2013). In some heavily polluted areas, pollution has been fatal. In 2001, in a little village in Shanxi Province with only 154 villagers, 36 people have died of cancer over the last 27 years since 1974. In yet another village called Huang Mengying, 114 people out of 2400 died of cancers associated with toxic poisoning within the last 14 years (Liu, 2010). ‘Cancer villages’ is a new term which has been recently introduced by media to describe the increasing number of villages with disproportionate rates of cancer death, due to various kinds of the heavy mental contamination. There are now more than 100 ‘cancer villages’ which have been identified in China (Watts, 2010).
Urban Environment Deterioration and Air Pollution
Urban environmental problems are closely related to the life-style and consumption mode. China has 2 cities on the list of the world’s top 10 worst polluted places, and 16 Chinese cities out of the 20 in total appear on the world’s most polluted cities, according to the Blacksmith Institute annual review issued in September of 2007 (Blacksmith Institute, 2007). Less than one percent of 500 Chinese cities tested for air pollution have levels acceptable to World Health Organization standards in 1990s (He et al., 2001). And about 0.26 billion urban dwellers from three large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Lanzhou suffer from the high concentration of suspended particulate matter made up of airborne smoke, soot, dust, and liquid droplets from fuel combustion, all of which affect human health, causing various respiratory system diseases and exacerbating heart disease and other conditions (He et al., 2001; WB, 2004). Approximately 750,000 people die prematurely from air pollution related disease each year, according to a 2007 World Bank report (Financial Times, 2007), accounting for 40 per cent of total death from the same cause in the whole of the developing world.
Environmental monitoring of data reveals that the main source of air pollution in Chinese cities is shifting from bituminous coal-caused pollution to car emissions (People.com.cn). One problem of China’s modernization epoch is that, not unlike the West, the growing obsession with owning an automobile (at least one or more) is contributing at an ever increasing rate to its already very serious problem of air pollution, particularly in the most densely populated regions. Despite the alleged benefits of the TGP in helping to increase power generation, the rapidly growing car industry has dramatically compromised these noble efforts. By 2008, China had already become the second biggest car consumption country in the world, next to the U.S. and the third largest car production country in the world with a 23.2 per cent annual growth in the number of private cars sold (China Today.com). One example explicitly shows how rapid the growth of the automobile industry has been. The average speed of motor vehicle in central Beijing has declined from 45 kilometers per hour in the 1990s, to 17 kilometers per hour in the 2009 (Peng et al., 2012). Moreover, increasing dependence on car transport, whether they are privately or corporately owned, have impeded government schemes designed to ameliorate air pollution. The goal was to reduce air pollution by shifting energy consumption from coal burning to oil and natural gases and other kind’s energy sources which release less harmful pollutants into urban air. The level of increasing air pollution has now become a monumental and nationwide health problem, significantly undermining China’s clean-air strategies.
In January of 2013, dense smog hit central and eastern China, including Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Jinangsu, Anhui and Zhejinang provinces. Visibility was cut to less than 1,000 meters, according to the National Meteorological Centre (NMC). This was the fourth time since December of 2012 that Beijing was hit by heavy smog. In some areas of the capital, visibility was down to less than 200 meters, raising health concerns among residents. Studies show that most of the chemical pollution smog comes from coal burning, motor vehicles exhaust, industrial emissions and dust. (Xinhua Net, 2013; China.org.cn, 2013)
3.2.2 Lack of Environmental Consciousness and Natural Resource Mismanagement
“Thundering down this road through the Gobi Desert are armies of heavyweight vehicles fully loaded with coal, petroleum, natural gas, and mechanical tools. The vast wildness is turning into a huge energy base. Abundant resources such as fossil fuels and iron ore in the junction of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Shaanxi Province are being tapped and loaded onto the economic express of China. However, the large-scale resource development and exploitation have caused severe damage to the already vulnerable ecological environment of these areas under the influence of the arid steppe climate.” (Chen, 2011; quoted in Yang, 2011, p.152).
As I described above, by adapting antiquated nineteen the century western development paradigms and maintaining an undaunted commitment to high economic growth rate, many capital and resource-intensive industries have been developed in China. In 2006, for example, China’s contribution of 5.5 percent of global GDP was obtained at the price of consuming of one-fifth of the world’s energy, two-thirds of the world’s metals and concrete (Lin, 2008). This is largely due to China’s lack of environmental concern and inability of sustainability environmental management. An example of the low input of environmental protection will well illustrate this accusation. China spent less than 1 percent of its GDP on environmental conservation before 2005, a ratio is pathetically low compared to that of Hong Kong, Eu-27, United States and Australia, given its high rate of economic growth along with the humongous geographic change across the whole country (Xinhuan, 2007). Although some rather comprehensive environmental laws and guidelines were set in place in China during the last decade, the enforcement and effectiveness of the implementation is compromised by various vested interest sections in society, most of which are represented by people who are so obsessed with the continued advance of rapid economic growth that they make only perfunctory efforts to slow the ecological deterioration in fear of compromising the growth that fills their wallets with Chinese Yuan (Chan, 2001).
However, this acute preoccupation with the resources development model is compromised by the fact that the rapid depletion of the critical environmental resources due to over-exploitation and mismanagement serves in the end to decimate the very resource on which the development model’s success depends. This self-stultifying paradox is also well-illustrated by an unusual situation that eventuated in western China. Due to the unique environment and natural resource advantages in western China, a resource-oriented industry cluster is rapidly growing in these regions. These ‘Development Rights Project’ have been initiated in the name of ‘developing the West’. Quite a few industry zones have been set up in China’s most underdeveloped regions to extract the mining of oil, natural gas, coal, and other chemicals (Chen, 2011).
The goal of sustaining the present levels of economic growth in China is highly problematic and environmentally perilous. Some experts are questioning development strategy of transferring distant sources such as water from the South to the East, or minerals from the West to the East. They are critical of this approach, arguing that it is not the most optimal environmentally friendly approach because it is not sufficiently grounded in conservation measures designed to protect the integrity of local resources. As one detractor of the project who is a recently retired professor from the Tsinghua University in 2005 has put it, China has achieved managed to exhaust 200 years of future resources with the fast economic growth of the last 30 years(He, 2004a). In regard to development rights programs China has very fragmented institutional arrangements with advisory agencies for the management and conservation of natural resources (Spooner, 2006). Water resources, for example, such as the management of water supply, water quality, waste water discharges, and treatment infrastructure often jurisdictionally overlap and thus conflict. Though seven relatively independent water committees have been established to be responsible for the general management of seven of the largest rivers in China, conflicts arise sometimes with the local and regional councils and vested interest groups, when one or other party is unwilling to share data, or coordinated conservation planning, based on well-considered strategy reports remain dysfunctional. In addition, environmental regulation agencies at different administrative levers have limited powers of enforcement and implementation in regard to the standards actually put in place to regulate pollution control and environmental protection issues. They are quite often subjected to intervention and disruption by local interest groups, who are often supported by local governments, which have vested interests inimical to the goals of environmental conservationism, or are themselves motivated by corruption.
“If we continue on this path of traditional industrial civilization, there is no chance that we will have sustainable development. China’s population, resources [and] environment have already reached the limits of their capacity to cope. Sustainable development and new sources of energy are the only road that we can take.” (Kynge, 2004; quoted in Song & Woo, 2008, p.11).
3.2.3 Environmental Injustice and Social Stabilization
Given the increasingly rapid growth of urban pollutions, exposure of residents in development areas to toxic incidents involving wastewater, waste solids and even noise pollution, have made urban dwellers more environmentally conscious of the ever growing array of contaminants confronting them. Under increasing public pressure assisted by environmentalists, Beijing and other major cities are at last and at least making efforts to address environmental issues (Chetham, 2002). To date a number of heavily polluted factories have been moved out of the major cities. Ironically, the problem remains that what is often being done is simply to relocate those polluted ‘manufactories’ to other remote and poor rural areas, without actually investing on the implementation of environmentally friendly approaches and equipment for clean production (ibid). The coping mechanism thus far to address public pressure on better environmental protection in many cities has been to dig long ditches to discharge wastewater out of their jurisdiction, rather than invest in the construction of wastewater treatment plants (Chetham, 2002; Feng, 2011). This is a process similar to what is called by some social scientists as the “Netherlands Fallacy” (Jorgenson & Rice, 2007, p.277). The ‘Netherlands Fallacy’ refers to an error in assuming that a country is acting environmentally by negotiating the importation of environmental resources from the more affluent nations, while confirming the exportation their own of waste to developing countries or regions, in order to reduce their environment impacts within their own national borders (Ehrilich & Ehrilich, 1991). That is exactly what China has done in the last decade within its own borders at the national level, when environmental issuers have become too publicly controversial and prominent. The developed eastern coastal region in China thus possesses a governmental infrastructure which can access the national political-economic-technical power to achieve environmental improvements in certain regions, while continuing to impose negative ‘externalities’ nationally (Jorgenson & Rice, 2007). The systemically and institutionally implemented strategy to ‘develop the West’ and to substitute the resources in the West with the technology in the East, serves as the perfect examples of the process. This potentially unbalanced dynamics of ecological exchange dynamics often leads to the disproportionate use of natural resources by developed regions at the expense of less developed regions. This pattern of what might be called an ‘ecological footprint’ has already been exhibited by the less developed western country regions in China, where natural gases were transported to Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities. In the meantime, many local residents and manufacturers in these remote and poorer areas have to purchase coal to meet their own daily energy needs, because the clean fossil fuels they unearth have been reserved for the big cities far away (Chetham, 2002). This discrepancy, I submit, is not simply the consequence of domestic economic driving forces, it is also the result of structural relations forged through vested interest and legitimated by administrational demand affirmation (Jorgenson & Rice, 2007).
For many people living in the Chinese countryside, industrialization has done little for them other than bring them face to face with various forms of environmental degradation they in turn When have to suffer. Urban elites are generally sheltered from the impacts of environmental degradation, but when country people have to close down their fish farms or witness the failing of their crop harvest because of pollution, drought or flood, there are no carpets big enough under which the ‘environmental dirt’ can be swept. When local politicians have refused to listen, villagers have sometimes taken to the streets in protest. In a relatively wealthy Zhejiang province in the eastern of China, for example, an incident took place in Huaxi village in April 10 of 2005 with more than 15,000 villagers gathering to fight against and actually drive off over 3000 paramilitary policemen who were sent to break-up those protesting against pollution from an industrial park (Yardley, 2005). And in July of the same year, thousands of out of desperation villagers from Mesishan County in Zhejian province tried to burn down a battery factory which they said was poisoning their children because of the lead pollution (ibid).
Environmental pollution is a global problem that most fast-growing economies facing (Song & Woo, 2008). In China, however, the increasing environmental crisis is more likely a result of its power-obsessed political and economic institutions, whereby conceding environmental mistakes is thought to be a way of showing the weakness and the incapacity of the government to handle those common ‘growing pains’ associated with growth. Current policy making and laws of environmental protection are limited in addressing China’s environmental dilemma of environmental protection and economic growth. Given the complicated and fragmental bureaucratic politics concerning environmental protection, the effectiveness and efficiency of implementation of environmental policies in China depend partly on the Chinese people’s concept of their relationship with the environment and partly on good governance, rather than simply enhancing investment and technology innovation (ibid).
3.2.4 The Dilemma between Economic Development and Environmental Protection
China’s rapid economic growth has been excellent in the past decade, but is still at a lower level compared with other industrial countries. This being so, the pressure to continue their growth is extremely high, yet difficult to resolve. It is also clear that a major slowdown in China’s growth rate will endanger China’s political and social stability. Given no great advantages at the moment in advanced production technology, the exploitation of natural resources such as soil, water, coal, gas, forests, animals and fisheries has yielded little more than current annual growth rate of about 7 to 8 per cent. The inefficiency of its use of energy resources ― especially coal ― contributes largely to the greenhouse gas emissions, and the trade-off between economic growth and environment deterioration seems inevitable in China, especially in the less developed rural areas. This pro economic growth attitude has neglected the growing problem of pollution and reflects a low level of environmental consciousness that has been conditioned and shaped by the epistemology of power. Obsessed that china must become the most or at least one of the most, technologically advanced societies on the planet, the government construes the considerable costs of environmental degradation on the one hand, and environmental protection on the other, as prices worth paying for China’s position of global supremacy.
“Pollute before control” is the concept held and practiced by power-driven Chinese policy makers and economists (Shen, 2011). Although China may well have been encouraged to avoid the mistakes made by western societies since the industrial revolution, their power-driven commitment is expressed in the belief that economic growth will inevitably resolve the environmental problem when it reaches a certain point (ibid). Their arguments are: for one, that excessive expropriation of the earth’s resources is the stage which all nations have to encounter in order to develop their economies. The idea is that this procedure has been implicitly approved by the industrial practice of major nations over the last two hundred years since the industrial revolution; secondly, exploitation of depletable resources is the only directly productive capital to which the poor, resource-dependent economies such as China have access. More recently, the situation has changed, and the development induced environmental crisis has become a global one with an increasing number of developing nations joining the ‘polluters’ club’. At the lower sector of economic development, the lack of “alternative opportunities, competition for resources, and uncorrected environmental externalities” can drive the power-driven agents involved to act in ways that not only “undermine the longer-term health of the natural resources base but also generate social costs at the local, national or even global scale” (Zhang & Yang, 2008, p.231).
Development has in yet another guise infiltrated ‘Nature Reserves’ in the name of scientific research. “Protection for development” or “protect first [means] and develop later [end]” is a covert purpose for establishing Nature Reserves (Shen, 2011, p.236). The typical example is the case where in order to construct a reservoir which involved part of a national nature reserve, the developer managed to change the range of the nature reserve (Shen, 2011; Yang, 2011). Another example explicitly shows how such utilitarianism policies are still wide accepted and implemented. A few years ago, the Administrative Committee of the Changbai Mountain National Nature Reserves, known as the earliest, largest, and most influential natural reserve in China, invited dozens of ‘well-known’ experts from inside and outside China to help in planning the ‘tailor-made’ future development plan of Changbai Mountain (ibid). It was here that the rationale emerged which expressed what was then though to be an ‘advanced concept’ of “protect first and develop later” mentality (Shen, 2011, p.236). This ideology of ‘conservation’ was criticized by deep ecologists as superficiality and hypocrisy (Nash, 1990). This being so, a question has been raised that why those projects have been ratified. Apart from political manipulation for economic gain, even though new laws require dam projects to undergo environmental impact assessments (EIAs), those laws are in practice easy to be circumvented, or ignored. EIAs in development projects in China only serve as rubber-stamps rather than real planning tools to anticipate problems in advance. Jiang Gaoming, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out that many projects without an EIA and an approval by the government have nevertheless been constructed. According to Jiang, “EIAs have become a marginalized and decorative process, seen as just a part of the cost of doing business… Both the builders and local government know that, to date, an EIA has never managed to halt a dam project” (Imhof & Lanza, 2010, p.13). The construction of Xiluodu Dam is an example of building a dam in a national reserve for several species of endangered fish with the EIA being deviously circumvented.
[1] Eutrophication is a syndrome of ecosystem responses to human activities that fertilize water bodies with nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), often leading to changes in animal and plant populations and degradation of water and habitat quality (Cloern, 2007).