Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
advances in manufacturing and transportation (and their impacts across
vast distances), changing multinational corporate practices, and ascendant
globalizing ideologies of privatization and neoliberalism. Taken together,
these technological, political, and ideological shifts have functioned to
essentially make China the “factory” for the world. h e cultural question of
the impacts of Chinese pollution reveals as much about the problems of
Western consumption as of Chinese production. h is question begs another:
how much “Chinese pollution” belongs to China, if a large percentage of the
pollution produced is for the international export market?
According to the International Energy Agency, more than a third of Chi-
na's carbon emissions come directly from making products for foreign con-
sumers.
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How, then, does it make sense to talk about “national” pollution
data when the catalysts for this pollution in the Chinese context are, in large
part, Western corporations producing goods for European, U.S., and Austra-
lian consumers (though of course also for a signifi cant and growing Chinese
middle class)? Not only is China the “world's factory,” it is also, some argue,
its smokestack. For example, the growth of China's industrial economy must
be understood in inverse relation to Germany's, which has seen its carbon
emissions decline by 19 percent since 1990 as a signifi cant percentage of its
industrial production has moved off shore to China.
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Similarly, calculations
of British carbon emissions leap if output within China for British factories is
counted as U.K. rather than Chinese emissions.
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Of course, the growth of manufacturing and the impact on rural-to-
urban migration within China are closely linked. Urbanization is closely tied
to economic growth. Currently, 70 percent of Europeans and North Ameri-
cans live in urban areas, while only 40 percent of the African and Asian pop-
ulation is urban. According to a 2008 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
report, China's population was 1.3 billion with a 45 percent urban popula-
tion, and it is expected to reach 70 percent by 2050. Another estimate has
China's urban population expanding from 572 million in 2005 to one billion
