China Cleans up for the Olympics, but its Citizens Still Suffer

Looking out across the horizon from a tall building in the southeastern part of China on an average day, you won’t see much. The skyline is obscured by a gray haze generated by the country’s many polluting factories and automobiles. From the ground, sometimes it’s difficult to see the tops of the buildings around you. Though the area does occasionally see clear days, they’re getting fewer and further between.

The rather startling satellite image below shows a thick layer of polluted air covering a large swath of southeastern China. It was taken in January 2008 by NASA’s AQUA satellite. When you realize that China is the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter (recently taking the title from its previous owner, the United States), it’s not so surprising.

It’s hardly an ideal spot for world-class athletes to practice and compete, and yet here they are, opening day of the 2008 Summer Olympics, huffing and puffing, many wearing masks to protect their airways from the heavy smog. In fact, it’s so bad that endurance events like the marathon and road cycling will need to be postponed if smog levels continue to increase before the games are set to begin.

Many had hoped that the Olympics would provide a strong incentive for China to clean up their pollution problems, since the country pledged to present “pristine skies, waterways, and cityscapes” during its bid to host the games back in 2001. They’ve had seven years to follow through, but only started last-minute emergency efforts to reduce the obvious smog in the skies this summer.

An article by The Guardian on Wednesday explained the worrisome problem:

Official readings collated by Beijing’s municipal environmental protection bureau yesterday gave an air pollution index (API) of 91 for Beijing as a whole, and 87 at the Olympic stadium. The World Health Organisation regards an API of more than 50 as high, and a reading of 100 or more is considered unsafe. The authorities monitor air quality hourly, including levels of particulates, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, and take limited readings for ozone.

Of course, Chinese officials will tell you that the oppressing haze that cloaks the city is nothing but mist, and that the media is exaggerating pollution problems. They’ve even got the International Olympic Committee repeating their stance, with chairman of the medical commission Arne Ljungqvist stating, “The mist in the air that we see in those places, including here, is not a feature of pollution primarily but a feature of evaporation and humidity.”

China has spent the last month in a desperate race to clean up the air pollution in Beijing before the Olympics, going so far as to severely limit traffic within city limits and shut down hundreds of polluting factories and other businesses. The city is alternating the days citizens can operate their cars on the roads according to whether they have odd- or even-numbered license plates. Only Olympic vehicles and taxis are exempt.

Right now, the air pollution issue in China is big news because of the Olympics, but citizens of this populous, rapidly industralizing nation are the ones who will be facing it for decades to come. It poses little threat to visitors and athletes, who will only be exposed to it for a short period of time. Far greater is the danger it places upon the Chinese people: athsma, infections, heart disease and lung cancer.

The World Health Organization has deemed China’s air pollution the deadliest in the world, estimating deaths caused by indoor and outdoor pollution at 656,000 per year. Polluted drinking water kills another 95,600. Damaging air pollutants include ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter (a mixture of very small particles and water droplets). China’s people are breathing in coal smog, tailpipe emissions, concrete dust and plumes of who-knows-what from steel mill smokestacks.

Though China has been furiously struggling to clean up the air in recent times, things will undoubtedly go back to the way they were before after the games are over. All of these measures are merely temporary, and can’t be sustained. China isn’t likely to step up to the plate to protect its own citizens from health ills when the future of the country’s economy is top priority. The World Health Organization is currently trying to work with the Chinese government on more permanent measures, but considering China’s single-minded march toward building as many coal plants as humanly possible, success is doubtful.

Polluting factories play a vital role in China’s development, and the government cites the number of jobless people who would starve if they were shut down. They see it as choosing one or the other: economy or environment. The people of China, on the other hand, want to see more emphasis on cleaning up pollution. According to NPR, 93% of the residents in Shanxi province believe that cleaning up environmental pollution should be a priority.

The United States plays a large part in China’s energy and pollution problems. In pre-Olympics coverage, the media has largely ignored the fact that America and other Western nations bear some of the blame for China’s dirty air and water. As our country’s companies have moved into China to take advantage of cheap labor, they’ve created many of the factories that are now spewing toxins into the air the Chinese people breathe. The fact is that these companies don’t care if they’re harming the health of people on the other side of the earth; they care about their profit margin.

China certainly needs to step up and put regulations in place to control the issues that are harming citizen’s health so dramatically, but until we stop fueling the problem, not much will be achieved in terms of cleaning up this country of 1.3 billion people. Standards need to be created in the United States as well. Until we clean up our own country and demand that American companies take responsibility for the pollution they create in China, we can’t expect China to get very far.

We need to show other nations in the world that it’s possible to have a strong, growing economy that thrives on renewable, non-polluting energy. We’ve given China a very bad example to live up to, and that’s exactly what they’ve done – in the country’s own efforts to achieve better standards of living, they’ve made the same mistakes that the United States has made. We’ve got to set a better example going forward – a clean, green example.

Photo credit: Flickr user gbrunett + Yves Herman/Reuters + Flickr user Terminalnomad Photography

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