Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
have been working on this issue over the past two decades, but serious prob-
lems persist.
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One news segment documented a southern Chinese town
named Guiyu, where women were heating circuit boards over a coal fi re,
pulling out chips and pouring off the lead solder. h e town has the highest
levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies were six times
more likely to end in miscarriage, and seven out of ten kids have too much
lead in their blood, a condition that leads to major brain and developmental
problems.
30
China is central to global environmental discourse, policy, and practice,
understood to be the central component to any serious ostensible “answer”
to the global environmental crisis. h ose interested in global pollution have
to take China into account, given the sheer scale of pollution produced there.
Policy rationale, paranoia, envy, and fuzzy boosterism compete for space on
the “China-watching” stage, jostling for infl uence within China, and among
the cosmopolitan and technocratic elites. h e broad international cultural
consensus is that the “action” is taking place in China, especially in terms of
building projects. Part of this is purely economic. China's growth created an
economic surplus used to build infrastructure (as I detail later, some U.S.
and U.K. architecture and engineering fi rms have more than 40 percent of
their staff based in China). h is perception of “action” is not just economic,
but ideological. h e Chinese government has used domestic “soft power,”
focused as much on events and buildings, as it has on its o' cial foreign pol-
icy. And Shanghai, in particular, rests on its soft power, specifi cally in rela-
tion to its skyline.
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In architecture, planning, and contemporary art, China
is the new frontier, the utopian future where anything can happen.
China is, in other words, what the “West” was to the United States in the
nineteenth century or, even earlier, what “America” was to Europe in the
eighteenth. h ese frontiers are the peripheries unchained from the social and
cultural strictures of their centers, and freer in their manipulation of the
landscapes around them. h
ese frontiers are also where the exploitation of
