Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
exception. There are concerns that excess accumulation of silt
upstream from the dam may eventually clog upstream port cities,
while a reduction of sediment flow downstream from the dam may
lead to the erosion and sinking of coastal cities on the Yangzi Delta,
including the great metropolis of Shanghai itself. China's Grand
Canal, a once-ballyhooed major water conservancy project completed
during the Sui dynasty (589-618), was eventually rendered useless
because of unmanageable siltation. The Aswan High Dam on the
upper reaches of the Nile in Egypt, completed with Soviet assistance
in 1970, is (or should have been) a cautionary tale for China. The dam's
lake, Lake Nasser, flooded out important cultural and archaeological
sites and deprives the rest of the Nile of the very silt that made the Nile
Delta so fertile agriculturally. On the Nile Delta the interruption of silt
flow has led to erosion, salination resulting from the inundation of the
Mediterranean Sea, and decreased agricultural yield. The same prob-
lems await China because of its Three Gorges Dam, and perhaps on a
much larger scale.
Health and Health Care
If American public health is threatened by the obesity epidemic, the
greatest threats to Chinese public health today are cancers caused by
environmental pollution and cigarette smoking. Nearly two-thirds of
all Chinese men smoke, and increasing numbers of Chinese women
are also taking up the filthy habit. The manifold ill effects of smoking
are clearly known to the medical care profession in China, but nearly
half of all male doctors in China still smoke. Meanwhile the Chinese
government, which operates and profits from the tobacco industry, is
doing little or nothing to encourage its citizens to kick the habit. In
the foreseeable future the number of lives prematurely snuffed out in
China due to lung cancer and emphysema will only increase, and
probably quite dramatically. It is already projected that over the next
decade in China's cities, more than half a million people each year will
die prematurely from air pollution. The situation is even worse in the
countryside, where one in four deaths are associated with respiratory
diseases caused by air pollution, cigarette smoking, or both. In some
cities in China, cancer mortality rates are so high that they are referred
to simply as “cancer cities.”
Health care in Chinese cities is vastly superior to that in the country-
side, and patients who have the most money to spend get the best health
care. The rural and urban poor are largely left to die of their illnesses.
