The Adventures of CSE Students!

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

US: Olympic Host China Lacks Freedoms
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4429558
US Lists Rights Abuses in China, Russia, Iraq, Others in Annual Report
By ANNE GEARAN AP Diplomatic WriterWASHINGTON Mar 11, 2008 (AP)

The United States branded China an authoritarian human rights abuser Tuesday, citing alleged torture, state control of basic aspects of daily life, tight controls on religion and harassment of foreign charities.
China, host of the summer Olympics, has rampant and chronic human rights problems despite rapid economic growth that has transformed large parts of Chinese society, the State Department said in its annual accounting of human rights practices around the world.
The world's most populous nation, China is an increasingly important U.S. trade partner and a chief competitor with the United States for energy and shrinking natural resources. It is the object of broad U.S. economic and diplomatic outreach, with mixed results.
The United States, other nations and outside advocacy groups have tried to use the world media attention and prestige associated with the Olympics to leverage internal change and diplomatic cooperation from China, but the games are barely mentioned in the human rights report.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
"The government tightened restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, particularly in anticipation of and during sensitive events, including increased efforts to control and censor the Internet," the report said.
Forced relocations went up last year, the report said. It noted claims that people were forced from their homes to make way for Olympic projects in Beijing.
President Bush plans to attend the Olympics this year. Visiting U.S. lawmakers would get help from the U.S. Embassy for a "safe, memorable and enjoyable experience," the U.S. ambassador in Beijing wrote in a letter last year.
The report detailed the lengths some Chinese officials have taken to enforce their country's well-known "one child" policy, and gave a chilling account of alleged torture in China, including the use of electric shocks, beatings, shackles, and other forms of abuse. It includes an account of a prisoner strapped to a "tiger bench," a device that forces the legs to bend sometimes until they break.

Lydia's commentary:
Ever since winning the bid to host the Olympics 2008, China has been receiving much scrutiny under worldwide press regarding its efforts to spruce up the city for this event. Yes, I do agree that it has made China more well-known and recognised on the international platform on its every move, yet, this has proven to be a double-edged sword. The state has been criticized by the West on its dirty history of human rights abuse during the draconian One-Child Policy and political experiments Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Much of the stories have been laid out right in fron of the world to comment and I believe it has been hard on the government to justify for its past leaders actions. While I do believe that China has earned itseld as a country worthy of mention with its significant economical changes, it is hard for them to stay away from its haunted and tainted past.

Labels: 07S501, Administrative, air pollution, Biotech industry, blogs, China's Environmental Issues, chinese society

0 comments | comment?

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Earth Policy Institute : China Losing War With Advancing Deserts

China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China's territory each year. Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China's Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China's leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation. Overplowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace. For the outside world, it is these dust storms that draw attention to the deserts that are forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call "the fifth season"—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows. Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. In addition to having problems with breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, people are constantly working to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price. A report by a U.S. embassy official in May 2001 after a visit to Xilingol Prefecture in Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) notes that although 97 percent of the region is officially classified as grasslands, a third of the terrain now appears to be desert. The report says the prefecture's livestock population climbed from 2 million as recently as 1977 to 18 million in 2000. A Chinese scientist doing grassland research in the prefecture says that if recent desertification trends continue, Xilingol will be uninhabitable in 15 years. A more recent U.S. embassy report entitled "Desert Mergers and Acquisitions" says satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts—the Taklimakan and Kumtag—are also heading for a merger. Highways there are regularly inundated by sand dunes. In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, China is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and a livestock population of just over 400 million are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown. While overplowing is now being partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing continues largely unabated. China's cattle, sheep, and goat population tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle. China has 106 million. But for sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land's protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert. (See data.) The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the drifting sand covers their land. Expanding deserts are driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia provinces. An Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands. The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million "Okies" and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million—compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China's may eventually measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia" noted, "unfortunately, China's twenty-first century 'Okies' have no California to escape to—at least not in China." Planting marginal cropland in trees helps correct some of the mistakes of overplowing, but it does not deal with the overgrazing issue. Arresting desertification may depend more on grass than trees—on both permitting existing grasses to recover and planting grass in denuded areas. Beijing is trying to arrest the spread of deserts by encouraging pastoralists to reduce their flocks of sheep and goats by 40 percent, but in communities where wealth is measured not in income but in the number of livestock owned and where most families are living under the poverty line, such cuts are not easy. Some local governments are requiring stall-feeding of livestock with forage gathered by hand, hoping that this confinement measure will permit grasslands to recover. China is taking some of the right steps to halt the advancing desert, but it has a long way to go to reduce livestock numbers to a sustainable level. At this point, there is no plan in place or on the drawing board that will halt the advancing deserts. The entire world has a stake in China's winning the war with the advancing deserts given its economic leadership role. But winning will not be easy. Qu Geping, the Chairman of the Environment and Resources Committee of the National People's Congress, estimates that the remediation of land in the areas where it is technically feasible would cost $28.3 billion. Halting the advancing deserts will require a massive commitment of financial and human resources, one that may force the government to make a hard choice: either build costly proposed south-north water diversion projects or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually occupy Beijing.

Posted by: sarah quek

Sarah's commentary:
The never expansion of china's deserts pose a serious theat to the livelihoods of millions of people , the majority of them being the rural population. The expanding desert threatens the survival of China because as the desert "eats" up arable farmland,there is less farm produce for the people of Chnia. The farmers who have lost their farmland cannot move to the city because of the restricting hukou system. Even with the slight relaxation of this policy, they will still face discrimation and are not allowed accesss to healthcare and social security. With more people moving into the cities, it could lead to massive overcrowding in already very crowded cities. Peolple have also been moving into Inner Mongolia because of the desertification and this may be seen as an attempt to "invade" into their territory by the mongolians. thus it could also lead to social tensions as seen in the Xinjiang issue of "invading" Han migrants. Thus, the loss of arable land may lead to many issues that may rock social stability in China.

Sarah 07A201

Labels: China's Environmental Issues, loss of arable land, Political, Sarah 07A201

0 comments | comment?

Monday, March 31, 2008

Source: Time Magazine, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713335,00.html
Provided by: Sng Sze Ying

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008
Smoke and Mirrors
By Bill Powell/Shanghai

No country except the U.S. is crawling with more venture capitalists looking to fund green-energy deals these days than China. The rush has not yet reached dotcom-boom proportions, but VCs and entrepreneurs see big opportunities in helping the country cope with its horrendous pollution problems through alternative-energy development. Deals are getting done. China is applying green principles to the construction of entirely new cities such as Dongtan, an area outside of Shanghai the size of Manhattan, which will use recycled water only and generate electricity using biomass. Last year, 3.4 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy were added to China's electrical grid, making the country the fastest-growing market for wind power in the world. And by 2020, China will quadruple its nuclear capacity from 10 GW to 40, again the fastest rate of growth globally.
But to anyone laboring under the impression that China is well on its way to a carbon-neutral future, reality can be sobering. Despite progress on the alternative-energy front, demand for power is expanding at such an extraordinary rate that it can only be satisfied by the combustion of vast additional quantities of coal, oil and natural gas. For example, between 2008 and 2030, the incremental increase in China's consumption of oil alone is expected to equal India's total annual oil consumption today, according to the International Energy Agency. "The government is being very aggressive in its pursuit of hydro, nuclear and renewables," says Jone-Lin Wang, a senior director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a U.S. energy consultancy. "But overall you're not really moving the dial that much over the next 10 to 20 years. These things take time."
Time is not on China's side. The government has announced plans to add an astonishing 1,300 GW to its electrical generation capacity by 2020. (The U.S. is currently capable of generating 1,000 GW.) The goal is for 25-30% of this to come from clean and renewable technologies. But even if these ambitious targets are achieved, some 70% of China's electricity will still come from coal-fired plants in 2020. That's down from about 78% today.
One reason China is so power-hungry: beginning in 2002, the country began dramatically expanding its heavy industries such as steel and aluminum production and auto manufacturing — capital-intensive businesses that are huge energy hogs. Five years ago, the ratio of heavy industry output to gdp in China was 55%; that rose to a staggering 120% last year. Today, light and heavy industry accounts for nearly three-quarters of the country's energy use. As a result, China is not a particularly efficient consumer of power, lagging well behind Japan, the U.S. and other developed countries in the amount of economic output it generates for every gigawatt consumed. Hoping to become 20% more energy-efficient over the next 12 years, Beijing in 2006 ordered heavy industries and local officials to develop more judicious consumption strategies. The government also increased pressure on provincial governments to enact strict building codes to make new office buildings and shopping centers less wasteful.
Laudable moves, but there's another reason why China is becoming as addicted to hydrocarbons as the U.S.: the middle-class dream is coming true for tens of millions of mainlanders, who are buying their first cars, computers, clothes dryers and other electrical appliances. Some estimate that China last year surpassed the U.S. as the largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, yet the impact of the country's growing consumerism has barely started to spread across the world's energy and environmental landscape. To put matters into perspective, consider China's massive Three Gorges Dam, a $29 billion project that displaced millions of peasants in return for a big jolt of clean, affordable hydropower. According to a forecast by policymakers at Beijing's Sustainable Energy Program, electricity demand from air-conditioners purchased by Chinese in 2008 alone will exceed the total capacity of Three Gorges Dam.
Air-conditioners? What if 300 million Chinese decide to buy suvs? "The Chinese are sort of like the Americans," says CERA's Wang. "They like big cars and houses." That's an observation likely to darken the outlook of even the sunniest of solar-power advocates, and knock the wind right out of the sails of wind-power fans. No matter how much China invests in green technologies, it looks like it won't be enough.

My Comments:

I think China's efforts to cut pollution is reasonably commendable and successful for a country that is living beyond its own means. Yet due to several reasons, China has and will become the victim of its own success, as these environmental policies can have several impacts on the chinese society. Socially, the lives of the common people are in one way or another affected by China's plans to improve environmental conditions. Large-scale projects like The Three Gorges Dam is one good example to show that while it is a generally successful one for generating "cheap and affordable hydropower", it was done at the expense of the welfare and interests of the local people who lived near the dam. In a society where it is susceptible to social unrests, the forced displacement can easily incur the people's wrath and spark social upheavals that is detrimental to not only the social stability, but also to both the economic and political stability of the country as well. While efforts are aimed at solving environmental issues plagueing China, social problems like this will inevitably result and have a snowballing effect. Also, the effectiveness of China's plan to tighten regulations and enforce stricter rules on building codes to make office buildings and shopping centres more environmental friendly, remains to be seen and observed. Although on the surface level, "the government increased pressures on provincial governments" to enact these stringent rules, there is still uncertainty in whether this would work. After all, there is often a lack of political will amongst the provincial governments to prioritize environmental protection efforts over economic prosperity. Presently the provincial government are already running into deficit in funds for economic and social development of their respective provinces, hence there is less likely a chance that more funds will be given to them to invest in expensive green technology. Even if they do recieve funds from the government or earn enough from investments to fund these projects, corrupted provincial governments would not put this money into good use. Therefore, I agree with the author's stance that, "no matter how much China invests in green technogies, it looks like it won't be enough.".

Labels: air pollution, China's Environmental Issues, posted by Sze Ying

1 comments | comment?