Doubts rise on Single's Day - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Internet giant Alibaba might have sold for close to 31 billion US dollar at China's Single's Day, but author Zhang Lijia notices also growing concern on the massive shopping festival, she tells Upm Pulp. Consumerism and environmental concerns emerge with the growing turnover.

Upm Pulp:

The Singles’ Day shopping bonanza means also over one billion packages flying across the globe. Millions of packages add up to tonnes of cardboard, plastic, tape and bubble wrap. Along with impressive sales figures, Singles’ Day has also become to signify a huge amount of waste. 

Last year Singles’ Day sales resulted in an estimated 300 000 tonnes of unrecycled packaging waste in China. Recently many have started to voice concern over the impact of the one-day shopping spree on the environment. One of those uneasy about the blatant commercialism is the author and journalist Lijia Zhang. 

“Online shopping has really caught on in China in a big way,” Zhang says. “The Chinese Government has realized the problems for the environment and has set a body to oversee the environmental impact of logistics companies. But many ordinary people don’t know or care about the disastrous result this shopping festival has on the environment.”

More at Upm Pulp.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Are you interested in having her as a speaker? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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How China targets green development - Sara Hsu

Sara Hsu

China tries to target green development on every thinkable level. Financial analyst Sara Hsu gives in the Diplomat an overview, for example how finance for green targets are being organized by the Green Target Task Force.

Sara Hsu:

Green finance is increasingly encouraged to fund environmental enhancements. The Green Finance Task Force submitted a report last year, noting that economic incentives to encourage green investment should function by increasing the return on green projects, reducing the return on polluting projects, and increasing consumer and investor awareness of these issues. Financial support for green investment is to be raised through discounted green loans, green bonds, and green IPOs. 

China has set forth rules in December 2015 on issuing “green bonds,” which provide funding for sustainable activities such as saving energy, preventing pollution, conserving resources, protecting the environment, adapting to climate change, and promoting clean energy. Significant funding will be needed to improve China’s environmental outlook. China’s green development strategy has been repeatedly emphasized in state-level objectives. While all objectives that fall under this umbrella are significant, the multipronged nature of the green development strategy renders it somewhat cumbersome to assess. The green GDP measure that the nation had in place several years ago will help to unify the disparate measures associated with the overall policy. Green GDP will account for costs associated with environmental degradation and the value of natural resources. Green GDP estimates for 2004 were released in 2006, but the practice was quickly rejected as GDP growth without consideration for the environment remained of paramount importance to local officials. However, given the reiterated importance of environmentally friendly production and consumption, a unifying, quantifiable target for green practices is essential. 

After all, China is making progress on many fronts, and understanding and publicizing these successes are likely to work in its favor.

More at the Diplomat.

Sara Hsu is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

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The greening of China - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Slowly, very slowly, some good news about China´s environment is coming in. Journalist Ian Johnson talked for the New York Times with Mark Clifford, author of The Greening of Asia, about the changes in the world´s largest coal consuming country.

Ian Johnson:

Q. You have a lot on China.

A. The good news is we have good policies coming down from the top levels of the Chinese government. Where China continues to struggle is the implementation at the ground level. There’s not always enforcement, and there’s no civil society to act as a check. The time when China decides that the environment and energy issues are as much of a threat as the color revolutions were, or the Hong Kong protests were last year, that’s when we’ll know we have serious progress. We’ve seen with Chai Jing [whose popular documentary film on the environment, “Under the Dome,” was banned] that civil society is muted.

Q. We read a lot about air pollution, but you also think that water is crucial.

A. Increasingly, water is a hard-stop issue. Air pollution is horrible, but most people affected by it are still living. But no one can live without water. I don’t know what people will do when the water stops. In China, projects like the South-North Water Diversion Project just delay the day of reckoning. What concerns me is that even most otherwise far-sighted governments are not facing up to the challenges.

For example, what do you do if you’re a municipal official, and you have an industry, say semi-conductors, which uses a lot of water? What do you do when you have to make a choice: water for the factory or the town? These are the kinds of choices that aren’t going to happen today or tomorrow, but governments will face this.

Q. And yet there are signs of hope in China.

A. China is about to overtake Germany as having the largest amount of installed solar power capability. It also has large wind turbine facilities. All of this is important because China burns half the world’s coal and accounts for 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. So to fix China, we need to cut coal use. Coal is supposed to peak in 2030, but it could happen a lot faster. So these are huge challenges, but China is potentially further ahead than many people realize.

More in the New York Times.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form.

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China's home-grown green laws - Charles McElwee

Charles McElwee

China's environmental laws use elements from green laws in Europe, the US and Japan, but the result is uniquely Chinese, writes environmental lawyer Charles McElwee in ChinaDialogue.

While China’s environmental law regime comprises a set of national laws and regulations similar to many western models, it is important to understand that the Chinese tend to define the fundamental aspects of their environmental legislation in terms of a set of systems or principles, not individual national laws.

As Dr Yin Fucai of the Anhui province Environmental Protection Bureau has put it: "[i]n China, every environmental man knows eight environmental regulations and policies.” Or seven or ten depending on which “environmental man” you are talking to, but the perspective revealed by this statement is the same. Most observers seem to ascribe to the notion that there are “three principles” (such as “polluter pays”) and at least seven generally accepted “management rules” (for instance the “Three Simultaneous” system – which requires that a facility and its mandated pollution control measures are designed, constructed, and placed into operation at the same) at the core of China’s environmental regulatory scheme.

These principles and regimes were formulated primarily during the three national environmental-protection conferences in 1973, 1983 and 1989 andset forth in the statements summarising the conference discussions. All of them were incorporated into the 1989 version of the Environmental Protection Law, and other laws and regulations adopted subsequently.

More in China Dialogue

 Charles McElwee is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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Green tech: China's only way - Paul Denlinger

Paul Denlinger via Flickr

Business analyst Paul Denlinger explains in Forbes why China has to go green, for offering its citizens a Western lifestyle, while preserving the environment at the same time. Becoming a dominant player in green technology is the country's only choice, argues Denlinger. It might not make China popular in the rest of the world, for example by its recent efforts to retain rare earth resources for itself, rather than export.

At the same time, Beijing wants to cut back rare earth exports to the rest of the world, instead encouraging domestic production into wind and solar products for export around the world. With patents on the new technology used in manufacturing, China would control the intellectual property and licensing on the products that would be used all over the world. If Beijing is able to do this, it would control the next generation of energy products used by the world for the next century.

More arguments in Forbes.

Commercial
Paul Denlinger is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your conference, do get in touch.

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Green knights, on your horses

Earlier this year I listed the long row of urgent priorities by the central government. I found the list impressive and actually none of the subjects could be missed there. Without addressing each of them, China would develop a massive problem. Since then, with the product quality scandals and a few more, the list has only grown. At that time, I was also wondering which of those priorities would survive the year-end. Some things move faster than expected.
Politics in China is governed by negotiations between the central and many, many other governments. Much of the real power is in the hands of local power brokers and state-owned companies and only by getting their consent, the central government can realize some of its priorities. The question is therefore: what urgent priorities will drop off the list?
I have been discussing the subject with a range of fellow China-watchers and there is a consensus that the environment has dropped out. Some actually say, it has never been on it, but for a while at least investments in environmental projects went up. Local authorities do not mind those, since they benefit from every investment.
A few times over the past months, the government departments in charge of the environment had to take severe political hits. One report by the World Health Organization on the number of environmental reports in China and one developed with the World Bank on the Green GDP, a pet-project of Hu Jintao, where killed. They still had some effect because they of course leaked out, but it gave a clear signal that the environment as an issue should back-off.
Some of my friends dismissed those reports anyway as meaningless propaganda tools. That might be true, but when even meaningless propaganda kits gets killed, there is something rotten.
What those reports could and should have done is creating a climate for real measures, like a stiff increase of energy prices, so the usage of energy could slow down and that could force even the economy at large to cool down, something the central government has not yet been able to do. But when anything goes against the interest of the local power brokers, it is a slowdown of the economy. Those in charge are making money on the booming economy now and do not want to share that with a next generation of leaders.
Of course, China is never going to remove the environment as an issue from its political agenda. And of course, next year Beijing needs to have some breathable air for at least a few weeks in August as the Olympics take place. In the official propaganda, the environment will remain an issue, but not one with a high priority.
Knowing this, what can be done?

First, the environmental struggle has seen severe setbacks and the prospects do not look good. But not all is lost yet and the green knights should get on their horses and get their act together.
Second, companies involved in environmental projects should get their things implemented as soon as possible. Funding that is available should be used as much as possible, because a drop on the political agenda will be followed by a drop in funding
For the record, of course I hope this gloomy analysis is wrong.

Second report on environmental damage killed

At the beginning of this month China's environmental authorities got critiziced after they forced the World Bank to tone down a report, estimating the annually 750,000 Chinese would die prematurely from environmental damage. Now, according to the Los Angeles Times, an annual report on the environmental damage for the GDP, due in September, was killed.
Last year the so-called "Green GDP" said environmental damage had cost China US$ 67.7 billion or 3 percent of its GDP over 2005.

Chinese and Western experts, however, said Monday that authorities might have acted for reasons not readily apparent to casual observers. They said the reluctance to publicize the country's environmental woes might have had more to do with political relations between the central government and provincial leaders than with a fear of airing dirty laundry.

The now cancelled "Green GDP" report would also be a tool to put a price tag on the environmental damage per province, a problem for those provinces who are more focused on economic growth than on environmental protection.

Looking for job in China?

Poor labor conditions have caught the attention in China and it does not look it is going away very fast. Global Voices points at this report in Moobol.com on a illegal black cotton factory in Wuhan. A picture says more than words.

Update: Got some more words anyway. CSR Asia translated the store and you can find it here.

Contaminated imports from the US and Europe

also from Japan

Shanghai Scrap gets rightfully annoyed by all the news of bad Chinese products, while the world forgets the container-loads of contaminated garbage China receives from the US, Europe and Japan.

For almost five years I have covered the Chinese scrap trade, and in the course of visiting Chinese ports and scrap facilities, I have seen American scrap shipments contaminated with medical waste, household garbage, dead animals, sludge, mud, and other items not included on the shipping manifest. And these are just the shipments that DON’T contain e-waste. All of this occurs despite China’s strict laws on waste imports – many of which were implemented in reaction to American exports of hazardous materials to China.

China censors 750,000 environmental deaths

About 750,000 premature deaths caused by the environmental degradation have been eleminated from a World Bank report, writes the Financial Times (here in a pick-up from Howard French). The fear of "social unrest" was quoted as the reason to skip the information from the report.
The report has not been released officially, but a draft was available last year on the internet.

Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities is leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year. A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research.
Another 60,000-odd premature deaths were attributable to poor-quality water, largely in the countryside, from severe diarrhoea, and stomach, liver and bladder
cancers.

The China Opportunity - the WTO-column

Shanghai - "Are you positive or negative about the effects of China on the world?" I tried to look no too cynical when the leader of a European delegation formulated last week the questions he wanted me to answer. Shanghai and China are flooded by delegations full of curious business people, government officials, NGO's, eager to find out how China is going to change the world. Most of them seem genuinly lost when it comes to the more fundamental questions.

All to often those relative newcomers try to fit China's development in some easy to catch cliches, since making a real assessment of what is going on is darned difficult. I try not to let them get away with all too easy ways of framing the China story. My task is to confuse you, I tell them, rattle their all to simple assumptions about the dangers and opportunities in China, try to liberate them from the all to simple ideas they might have had about China.

By the time I meet them, most visiting delegates have already made one simple but rather essential observation. "This is a huge country." While everybody might know the figures, only when you are traveling here, face the huge distances, the internal differences, people start to realize that even Shanghai - with mostly a bigger population than the region they come from - cannot be described in cliches only.

It is a delicate balance: trying not to deny the huge problems China is facing, while at the same time also avoiding all too easy doomsday scenario's that sell very well in the media. China's voracious hunger for energy and raw materials. The water crisis in Wuxi, the dead fish in China's lakes, the growing number of stories about social unrest: it's sizzling economic growth does seem to come at a price that might be too high.

China as a country has been used to an almost permanent state of crisis management and has become pretty good in managing crises of all kinds of nature. That is not meant as a compliment, but might help to understand why despite an endless row of serious incidents, there might be a way to continue economic progress without turning the environment or global economic relations into a real disaster mode.

What strikes me in China is the high level of inefficiency in using energy, labor, raw materials, almost anything that is needed for fuel its economic growth. Getting more coal and oil in has been the most important strategy to deal with the growing need for energy. But there could be another way. The level of inefficiency is so high that even a marginally successful program to save energy could make a huge difference and allow years of economic growth without the need for more coal or oil.

I'm not familiar with the current figures, but a few years ago China needed eight times as much energy to generate one US dollar worth of products compared to the United States, for sure also not a country that has a clean record when it comes to energy saving.

Efficiency is going to be a key word in the years to come. That might go against the slight anarchistic nature of China and its citizens, but when there is no other way out, China's crisis manager will find that way.

Fons Tuinstra

Beijing is full

In Beijing now each 1.46 family has a car, reports China Car Times. The difference between the rush hours and the rest of the day have now mostly disappeared as traffic is hardly moving. More than three million cars are on the road and perhaps it has to look at the situation in Tokyo or New York were using that car is very hard.

The car manufacturers will be happy with that situation. They do not want you to use a car, but only to buy it. Then their job is over.

Death and destruction at Wuhan

Ever wondered how environmental destruction could look like? The China Environmental News has a few pictures of the tons of dead fish that have to be cleared in the region of Wuhan. Things really start to look nasty.

A battle won for the environment in Yunnan

the three parallel rivers

Josie Liu points at a pledge the Yunnan provincial government has made to protect the environment. There will be no dams and no mines in the region of the three parallal rivers, one of the World Natural Heritages sites, listed by UNESCO.

Mobile calls cause global warming

Houston, we have a problem

Chinese state media have of course been silent on the next environmental disaster China is causing for the world, but fortunately, the Dutch media are on top of it. While in China the number of mobile callers is rapidly nearing the half billion, a group of fifty scientists in Columbia have revealed that mobile phones contribute to global warming.

Not the batteries are the problem, but the billions of calls heat up the waves. Solutions have not been given, but we can better start raising pigeons again. Hold on, maybe we should first ask fifty scientists if raising pigeons is not bad for the world.

Fighting for China's clean air

Orville Schell

China-veteran Orville Schell pleads for action on the world's growing environmental problems in this essay in China Dialogue:

How should we proceed? By forming a coalition of respected scientists, business leaders and policy experts, calling a high-level emergency summit with their counterparts in China and then enlisting the US presidential candidates to pledge to make the coal/climate change issue a priority. The ultimate goal should be to undertake a US$25 billion collaborative effort, with the United States providing capital, technological know-how and entrepreneurial and managerial skills and China providing some resources of its own, research, critical leadership among developing countries, its low-cost manufacturing base and its prodigious market energy.

Lenovo tops Greenpeace' guide

Lenovo, China's largest manufacturer of PC's, head a Greenpeace listing on green policies, report ChinaCSR and China Tech News.

"Given the growing mountains of e-waste in China - both imported and domestically generated – it is heartening to see a Chinese company taking the lead, and assuming responsibility at least for its own branded waste," said Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace International Toxics Campaigner, "The challenge for the industry now is to see who will actually place greener products on the market."