August 14, 2008
-
Why Can’t China be Green?
China is still not a democratic country. This is unquestionable. And everyone of us is working on the project of claiming the human rights of Chinese Nationals as a Chinese National. However, if there are still some people thinking that China is a totalitarian country, (Who knows? Some people are stubborn McCarthyists!) they are much shallower than ordinary people.
China has already been the playground of transnational enterprises and fearless entrepreneurs. This is the fact! The costs of labour and land are low. The governments, the central or the local, can be manipulated as long as the surface objectives are for the benefits of the local economic growth. The domestic demand is huge. The concept of sustainable development is still budding. The autonomy capacity of business is comparatively large as China is still a developing country and the legal system has not yet been fully established (or fully utilised). The upward tendency of economic growth seems unstoppable. As long as you have good “guanxi” with all the bodies in China, you can play whatever you like. Of course, if the wind is not with you, there are places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the rest of South East Asia you can flee to. Who or which transnational enterprises will not be tempted to play in such wonderful playground of entrepreneurship?
These enterprises and entrepreneurs are bound by the legal systems in their homelands. But they do not need to be loyal to the Chinese Nationals. When China has not yet prohibited inland tree-felling, those big international tree-felling companies rented pieces of land in the disguise of developing the land. Once they felled all the trees, they took flight without a trace. Now inland tree-felling is prohibited, the forest of China can be spared. (But the forest of South East Asia is receiving larger blow as all these tree-felling companies flee to pirate the land there.) There are still many other examples of such kind.
Why can’t China be green? Ask the world! Ask all the enterprises and the entrepreneurs of the First World! (I don’t think that most of the developing countries can be involved in the “conspiracy”.) Once China gains much economic significance and enters the world stage of division of labour, everything is so interactive. Among all the relationship, the consumption of the First World Citizens decides every direction. This is not only the situation in China but this is a fact in nearly all the Newly Industrialised Entities. If you comply with the rules (or the directions) set by the First World, you are friends but you sacrifice your resourceful nation. If you do not comply, you are practicing dictatorship. Cruel? But this is the bloody plain fact.
Why can’t China be green? This is not the correct question. One should ask why all of us, the Global Villagers, cannot be green!
Comments (2)
Can’t agree more! On one hand, the first world citizens criticized the developing countries like China and India for not doing good enough in pollution control; but on the other hand, they keep on dumping tonnes of like electronic wastes in the third world. And on a per capita basis, the US among other developed countries are actually generating the most carbon dioxide due to their great demand in HVAC, vehicles, consumer goods, etc,. as mentioned in your entry. Who’s the killer?
And I would like to speak a few words more regarding “legal system has not yet been fully established (or fully utilised)” after I attended a seminar regarding this issue (the speaker is a CUHK law professor researching in environmental laws in PRC). That’s true. But in the environmental protection aspect, China has actually been laying a good foundation by setting dozens of laws and regulations which cover up all sorts of pollutions and most industries over the last 2 decades. The problem is in the execution of these laws and regulations. The complicated interest conflicts among the local governments, enterpreneurs, and the legal system itself is one of the reasons. The rate of prosecution is so slow, about 10~20% as far as I remember. Another reason is that the standards set by laws and regulations are a bit unrealistic to the current situation. Nobody would like to take a much higher costs and accept a major cut down of the profits in order to comply with the standards. But anyway, this still gives the Central Government the legal support when the situation allow a tightening in environmental protection measures. As we can see in recent years, many high pollution factories in the Peral River Delta region are being forced out from the market. So I think China is actually heading to the right direction and I feel optimistic on the situation!
Hong Kong, however, takes years for implementing the plastic bag tax, smoking ban, recycling, 垃圾源頭分類 and wasting years in the legislation of 停車熄匙 which will only have negligible improvement in the air quality. Some giant developers don’t even bother to consider air conditioning systems with environmental friendly refrigerant because of cost consideration. We shall take up more responsibilities, if we believe it’s necessary to preserve our Earth …
@cttytony - Exactly. Many real environmentalists love Chinese Government much more than the governments of other countries. At least, the Government puts something in action much faster than anyone can expect.