A February 1999 report from U.S. Embassy Beijing
Summary: “Grave Concerns? an October 1998 book written by two Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Environmental and Development Institute researchers, presents an overview of China’s environmental problems, Chinese views on the international dimensions of sustainable development, and a deep analysis of the technological, social and political barriers to sustainable development in China. The authors point out that China has reasonable environmental laws and policies but has been unable to implement them because of poor coordination among ministries and between local governments and the center. The authors conclude that waste arising from a collective property system in which no one exercises property rights over natural resources, widespread corruption, and the failure to respect laws and individual economic rights are the principal obstacles to sustainable development in China. This is the first in a series of five reports which present a summary translation of “Grave Concerns? Part one examines the awakening of China to environmental deterioration during the 1970s, an overview of China’s environmental problems, and the international and Chinese internal debate on sustainable development.
“Grave Concerns -- Problems of Sustainable Development for China?[Shendu Youhuan -- Dangdai Zhongguo de Kechixu Fazahan Wenti] is a volume in the influential China’s Problems Series. “Grave Concerns?was published by Today’s China Publishing House in October 1998. Authors Zheng Yisheng [STC: 6774 2496 3932] and Qian Yihong [STC: 6929 5650 4767] are the Vice Director and the Secretary-General of the Environment and Development Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Like many other books published since the Fall 1997 Fifteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, “Grave Concerns?finds that not just corrupt individuals or bad policies but deep structural problems in China’s political and economic system are the key barriers to China’s social and economic progress.
Part one of this five part series of summary translations from “Grave Concerns?covers a brief introduction to China’s environmental predicament; Chinese perspectives on the injustice of the world economic order and the international development of sustainable development; China’s effort to “win equality for China in the eyes of the foreigners while combating ignorance at home? how China must confront simultaneous and increasingly acute crises of population, food and pollution in the coming decades; China’s position in the international global warming and CO2 emissions debate; and a short account of environmental protection in China since 1972.
Page numbers refer to the first edition of “Grave Concerns?published as a volume of the China’s Problems series by the Today’s China Publishing House [Jinri Zhongguo Chubanshe] in October, 1998. Embassy Beijing summary review/translations of two other volumes in the China Problems series -- “China Doesn’t Want to Be Mr. No?and “Competition on the Pacific Ocean?-- are available on the Embassy Beijing Environment, Science and Technology Section web page at http://www.usembassy-china.gov/english/sandt/bjbkwrm.html
SUMMARY TRANSLATION BEGINS
Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine epidemiological studies conducted 1976 ?1980 in a study of 26 large Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin found a strong correlation between air pollution concentrations and lung cancer deaths. During the late 1980s, health studies in polluted districts of Shenyang having a population of 2.2 million attributed 3000 annual early deaths, twenty percent of chronic illnesses and 35 percent of acute illnesses to severe air pollution. These figures probably considerably understate the problem since other relatively unpolluted areas of Shenyang, used as a baseline in the study, themselves actually exceeded the World Health Organization standard for total suspended particulates (60 ?90 micrograms per cubic meter) by three to five times. In the early 1980s, a study of 1.28 million fisherman and nearby farmers in northern China found markedly higher mercury, cadmium and lead levels as well as a higher death rate in the fisherman. The Jilin Province Environmental Protection Bureau found high mercury levels in the Songhua Jiang river. After the discovery of DDT in mother’s milk in some areas which exceeded WHO recommendations by ten times, China banned organic chlorine pesticides, including DDT, in 1983. [pp. 8 ?10]
Just as Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring?awakened the environmental movement in the United States, so do does environmental education have an important role to play in China. By 1990, the United States had 5000 citizen environment groups. Many Chinese people, too, care about their environment ?much more than many people realize and the popular concern about China’s environmental is growing. Environmental degradation exacts a toll on national economies. Some experts say that if damage to health and decreasing production are considered, the environmental toll on many developing countries is about ten percent of GNP. Yet not just GNP but the total welfare of a country should be considered. [pp. 10 ?18]
Concern about the environment is not merely something imported from Western countries but something Chinese people have out of concern for the fate of their own country. Talk like “our national circumstances are different?[guoqing bu tong] and “we are at a different stage of development?[fazhan jieduan bu tong] are excuses we should not be making as China enters the Twenty-First century. [p. 40]
At the Stockholm Environmental Conference of 1972, the developed countries were concerned about pollution, overpopulation, and environmental protection while the developing countries placed a higher priority on the problems of poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy and unemployment. The Stockholm Conference refuted the idea of limitless resources and pointed out that we are all fellow passengers on lifeboat Earth. Some delegates pointed out the injustice of a world in which one-fifth of the world’s population consumes 80 percent of the resources.
In the late 1980s, the Brundtland Committee worked out a framework called “sustainable development?which included the concerns of both the developed countries of the North and the developing countries of the South. At the 1992 Rio de Janeiro “Global Environment and Development Summit? the sustainable development concept was accepted by the assembly and a global Agenda 21 was passed. The Rio summit also delineated the responsibility for pollution and opened the way for funding. The responsibility for regional and global pollution rests with the developed countries. Moreover, some of the environmental problems of developing countries result from the pillaging or purchase for an excessively low price by developed countries of developing country resources. An understanding was reached that the developed countries would each year give 0.7 percent of their GDP to help developing countries solve their environmental problems. [pp. 43 ?47]
Yet the developed countries did not keep their promise. In fact, the level of official development assistance from the developed to the developing countries fell from 0.35 percent of GDP in 1991 to 0.27 percent of GDP in 1995, the lowest level in 25 years. Moreover, many developed countries are not eager to transfer technology to the developing countries. There is a fundamental contradiction in the global interest and specific national interests. This can be seen very clearly in the arguments over global warming at Kyoto in 1997.
Many of the developed countries are disturbed that they must replace costly industrial plant well before the end of its design life in order to meet Kyoto emissions reduction commitments while developing countries can go on increasing their emissions as their economies grow. Some developing country leaders say that the developed countries put pressure not only on their own resources but those of other countries as well not because of a large population but because of wasteful developed country lifestyles. At the root of many environmental problems in the developing countries is an unjust international order. [pp. 52 ?60]
Many developed countries through differentiated tariff treatment (example: a 5 percent tariff for wood but 15 percent tariff for furniture) make it hard for developing countries badly in need of export earnings to escape their role as mere providers of raw materials. Loans to developing countries to create big plantations for cash crops have often resulted in unsustainable development. When economies turn sour, reverse capital flows to the developed countries of which former World Bank director Robert MacNamara said “This is like a blood transfusion from the poor to the rich.?[p. 65]
Some in the developed countries understand. The former Norwegian Foreign Minister said at an opening ceremony of a World Environment and Development Commission meeting, “We should reflect upon all our international relationships including trade, investment, and development assistance as well as industrial and agricultural relations. These relations are the cause of underdevelopment and environmental devastation in the Third World. Our task is to take measures that will reduce the bad effects [of these relations].?/P>
The developing countries want to close the gap with the developed countries but the developed countries want to maintain the present situation. In some area, developing countries such as China and Brazil are closing the gap but in other such as information technology, the gap between the developed and developing countries is widening. The end of the Cold War and the greater integration of the world is helping some countries, notably in Eastern Europe, to develop more rapidly. Although international corporations are much criticized, they are increasing economic cooperation among countries. [p. 72 - 73]
While it is easy to criticize the views of the developed countries on global sustainable development, we Chinese should not forget our own responsibilities for sustainable development. Chinese revolutionaries for over a century have had the twin tasks of “Winning equality for China in the eyes of the foreigners while combating ignorance at home.?We need to understand how international politics and economics affects environmental issues and how some people in the developed countries want to “restrain?China’s development. We also need to clearly explain to China’s people the seriousness of China’s population, resources and environmental dilemmas. We need to convince them of the urgency of changing old ideas, making changes in the structure of government, and reforming the system. [pp. 83 - 84]
Understanding China’s problems is harder than understanding international problems. Slogans and nationalistic feelings often prevent serious consideration of these issues. Some people even say that “sustainable development?is just a slogan to use on foreigners but fortunately those people are only a small minority. The plain truth is that even if there had never been an international Conference on the Environment and Development, no “Agenda 21?and no sustainable development slogan, China would still need to develop sustainably. [p. 84]
Although China’s Cultural Revolution was still going on in 1972 when the Stockholm Conference was held and China at that time held that “environmental pollution exists in capitalist but not socialist societies? Zhou Enlai sent a Chinese delegation to Stockholm. International meetings were new to the Chinese delegates, but they participated in the drafting of the Stockholm Declaration. It may well be that the three quotations from Chairman Mao that made it into the final declaration, including “We need passionate but steady feelings and intense but orderly work? was their major contribution to the conference. The delegation brought ideas about the environment back home to China, yet just as in the West, there were already intellectuals in China who had begun to think about environmental problems. [pp. 84 - 86]
Beijing University President Ma Yinchu proposed family planning in 1957 to slow China’s population growth but was condemned as a rightist and his ideas buried for twenty years. In 1998, Zhongshan University teacher He Bochuan’s book “Shanao Shangde Zhongguo?[Translator’s Note: Published in English as “China on the Edge?in 1991 by China Books and Publications. End note] shocked many Chinese raised on a diet of triumphant slogans with his perspectives on population, resources and environmental crises confronting China and his call to action. [pp. 86 - 89]
The 1988 report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Committee on China’s Situation [Guoqing fenxi baogao] report “Survival and Development?[Shengcun yu Fazhan] analyzed China’s population, resource, environment and food situation on the basis of information collected during previous Chinese Academy of Sciences natural resources surveys. The report considered issues such as the growth and aging of China’s population, increasing pressure on China’s agricultural resources and their population carrying capacity; unemployment; spreading environmental pollution and ecological deterioration; and a growing demand for food.
The report concluded that the Chinese people must rid themselves of several illusions: that China’s resources are limitless, that it would be able to thoroughly modernize quickly, and that it would be take the same path as the western countries to modernization. According to the report, “China is now faced with unprecedented multiple simultaneous crises.? “History has left little maneuvering room to us and to our posterity. The time we have to change is short, and the conditions we will have accept are arduous? “We should tell the people that there is no way that China can achieve the same resource consumption levels of the United States and Europe or even the consumption levels of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao? From this short review of sustainable development ideas in the PRC, we can see that these ideas are not a passing fashion, but arose from a conjunction of China’s needs and the ability of intellectuals who were able to give them due attention. [pp. 89 ?92]
China’s Agenda Twenty-One also called the “White Paper on China’s Population, Environment, and Development in the Twenty-First Century? approved by the State Council in March, 1994 is a plan drawn up by 300 experts in 57 ministries and agencies for implementing China’s sustainable development strategy. [pp. 92 ?98] [Note: China was one of the first countries to complete drafting its national “Agenda Twenty-One? For more information, see the China Agenda Twenty One website at http://www.acca21.edu.cn End note]
China in 1995 had a population of 1.21 billion or 22 percent of the world total. Declining fertility, down from an average of six children per woman in the 1950s and 1960s to about two children per woman [fertility drop of 17 per thousand to 7.1 per thousand] by the early 1990s, meant that 200 million fewer children were born during the last two decades than would have been born otherwise. The Chinese population is likely to reach 1.5 ?1.6 billion people in the middle of the Twenty-First century.
China began developing a family planning policy in 1970. The implementation of family planning policy begins during 1970s, strengthen by orders and policies of 1979 ?81, in 1984 farmers a change in policy : farmers are allowed to have two children and creates more relaxed family policy adopted for national minorities. In late 1980s policy implementation of family planning policy was strengthened. With the development of the market economy, “government administrative intervention?in family planning became less effective and so family planning was integrated with other government program to create incentives in housing and farming land allocation to families who follow family planning regulations. Chinese studies found that better educated women had fewer but better educated children. [Note: See the Embassy Beijing report PRC Family Planning: The Market Weakens Controls But Strengthens Voluntary Limits for more information. End note.]
Failure to report the birth of girls and sex selective abortions on the basis of ultrasound examinations of pregnant women put China’s male/female sex ratio at birth to 113:100, eight points above the normal range. China will enter the Twenty-First century will more poorly educated people than any other country. China since the 1980s has been spending about 2 ?3 percent of GNP on education ?just half the average developing country level of 4.1 percent. Some Chinese educators criticize Chinese education as merely test preparation or education to become an official and not really suitable for China’s needs. [pp. 99 ?108]
Lester Brown wrote that “a serious food shortage will bring a premature end to rapid Chinese economic growth.?Chinese experts see the same problems as Lester Brown, director of the Worldwatch Institute [http://www.worldwatch.org], but do not expect that the problem will become as acute as Brown anticipates and see measures that China can adopt to solve the problem. Brown predicts that by 2030 increased population and changes in the food consumption pattern (more meat) will per capita grain requirements to 500 kg per person and total demand to 956 million tons. Chinese government experts and experts predict per capita consumption in the 400 ?500 kg per capita range and total grain requirements in the 640 million to 720 million ton range owing to shift towards a more typical Asia/Japanese rather than Euro-American dietary pattern.
Lester Brown predicts that industrialization will cut cropland in half; Chinese experts say that opening new land to cultivation and increased multiple cropping means that the decline will not be large as Brown predicts. Increasing the Chinese multiple cropping index by one percent boosts effective arable land by one million hectares, say Chinese experts.
Lester Brown predicts increasingly serious water shortages for China. Chinese experts agree on the seriousness of the water shortage to the extent that 80 million farmers are short of drinking water. Yet the Chinese experts see very large potential gains possible in water conservation by improving the highly inefficient use of irrigation water by Chinese agriculture.
Lester Brown argues that large productivity increases for Chinese agriculture should not be anticipated. Chinese experts say that the contribution of science and technology to agricultural production is just half what it is in Western countries. They say that there are still many agricultural techniques such as improved varieties and combating pests that are still far from being full utilized in China.
Lester Brown points out the serious effects of air and water pollution and poor irrigation on Chinese agriculture. Chinese experts agree, pointing to the 95 percent of China’s solid waste that is dumped untreated into China’s rivers and the six million hectares of Chinese cropland that is already polluted. Eighty-eight percent of Chinese rivers are already polluted, say Chinese experts. Brown predicts a large (369 million tons or 57 percent) shortfall in Chinese agricultural production in the year 2030.
Chinese experts also predict that Chinese grain requirements will exceed production but say that the gap will be much smaller than what Brown predicts. Chinese experts say that agricultural production will be determined by government policy and the response of Chinese farmers to that policy and to markets. [Translator’s note: see U.S. Embassy Beijing EST section web page reports Chinese Food Security: Debate Over Brown Highlights Insecurities and Chinese Critics Confront Lester Brown on Lester Brown’s arguments and Chinese food supply concerns. Frequently recurring debates on China’s food sufficiency problem are often referred to as responses to Lester Brown.] [pp. 109 ?114]
Mass movements such as the movement to criticize Malthus’s population theory, the exaggeration of the capacity of human willpower to transform nature (in the Great Leap Forward, the movement for everyone to make steel, the People’s Communes) caused damage to the environment. Misguided, unscientific policies, such as overemphasizing “food is the main thing?and suppressing non-collectivized agriculture, expanding arable land at any cost, creating fields on mountainsides, transforming pastureland into farmland, and reclaiming land from lakes, resulted in severe ecological damage.
After the Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s that killed tens of millions of people, the main focus of government policy was to build agriculture. Despite many of the uneconomic projects pushed in the movement “Agriculture Study Dachai?movement, important improvements in agricultural infrastructure such as water projects, flattening land and terracing fields were accomplished. Between 1965 and 1977, China’s arable land doubled, irrigated land increased by one-third and chemical fertilizer use tripled. Improved varieties of rice, maize and wheat brought the Green Revolution to China. With the beginning of reform in 1978, agricultural development increased rapidly. The use of chemical fertilizer tripled between 1978 and 1990. Yet environmental problems and agricultural disasters became more frequent during the 1980s. This may be partially due to the increased water, fertilizer and pesticide inputs required by Green Revolution varieties. [p. 114 - 117]
During the 1970s, China entered the chemical fertilizer age. By 1991, Chinese farmers were using three times as much fertilizer per hectare as American farmers. China’s environmental problems are to some extent the result of its intensive agriculture since China must support 22 percent of the world’s population on 8 percent of its arable land.
[Translator’s note: With the 40 percent upward revaluation of China’s arable land, this 8 percent estimate was raised to 10 percent. See PRC Arable Land Jumps Forty Percent on the U.S. Embassy Beijing EST web page. End note]
For each ton of grain production, 53 kg of soil were lost in central Sichuan, 140 kg in Gansu and 107 kg in Shaanxi Province. [p. 119] Heavy fertilizer use caused water pollution. Increased water use made the water table decline. Sixty five percent of China’s nitrate fertilizer is made by burning coal. Air pollution is one of its byproducts. Nutrient pollution of lakes and streams has also become a serious problem.
Many areas such as Korea and Taiwan switched from agriculture subsidizing industry to state subsidies to agriculture when per capita agricultural production reached USD 400. When China hit that level in 1991, not only was there no switch to agricultural subsidies, but the amount of capital extracted from farmers continued to increase, thereby limiting growth in farm incomes. Now that Chinese food prices are approaching international levels, there is less room to increase prices. [pp. 117 ?118]
During 1990 ?1995, China’s industrial waste water pollution declined but because of the rise in residential pollution sources, overall water pollution became more serious and affected a larger area. Eighty-six percent of China’s rivers exceeded pollution standards. Industrial waste water treatment increased to 70 percent but 70 percent of Chinese cities had no sewage treatment plant. Beijing and Shenyang are among the world’s most polluted cities. [p. 125]
[Translator’s note: In a new study sponsored by the World Resources Institute (http://www.wri.org), Beijing and Shanghai don’t make the top world’s ten although nine of the top ten cities on the WRI list are Chinese. What appears on the top ten to some extent depends upon which cities are looked at: the big Chinese cities of Lanzhou, Chongqing and Hehaote have considerably worse pollution than Beijing and Shenyang but for some reason were not on earlier international pollution comparison charts. Sewage fees are not common in China so financing sewage plants (and their operation once built) has been difficult. End note]
Sulfur dioxide pollution increased and acid rain now falls on thirty percent of Chinese territory. A large part [Translators note: 75 percent] of China’s energy supply comes from coal, much of it high sulfur coal. Exhaust gases output climbed as the number of Chinese motor vehicles climbs by ten percent annually. [p. 125] Annual industrial solid waste output amounts to 6.64 billion tons. Five percent of this is hazardous waste. Urban waste amounts to 146 million tons and increases by 10 percent annually. Chinese per capita water resources come to 2316 cubic meters or one-fourth the world average. Six to twelve million hectares of land are short of irrigation water each year because of shortages and 80 million north China farmers don’t have enough drinking water. Three hundred Chinese cities are short of water. Excessive ground water use has made the water table decline in some areas. Chinese water resources are unevenly distributed. Sixty-four percent of China’s arable land but only 19 percent of its water resources are north of the Huai River. [p. 126] [Note: More information is available at Summary, Comments on Can the Environment Wait? Priorities for East Asia, A 1997 World Bank Report End note.]
China has one of the world’s most serious soil erosion problems. Desertification already affects 8 percent of Chinese territory and threatens the livelihood of 170 million people. About 2100 square kilometers of land are lost to desertification each year. Soil erosion is a serious problem on the Yellow River, the Yangzi, Songhuajiang, Huai and other rivers. Silting raises the bed of the Yellow River by 10 centimeters each year.
Overpopulation leads to cultivation of unsuitable land and overcutting of forest lands. China has a relatively low forest cover and just one-sixth the world average on a per capita basis. Biodiversity is threatened by habitat loss including loss of virgin forest and grasslands, inappropriate pesticide use and encroachment on wetlands. In the mid 1980s some experts calculated that China loses 5 ?10 percent of GNP each year to environmental damage. Various studies have come up with widely varying estimates of the cost of pollution and the relative importance of various kinds of pollution in China. [pp. 127 ?128]
“Pollution in the larger cities is being brought under control, but it is rapidly spreading to the rapidly growing medium and small cities, and into the countryside, where pollution is getting worse. The township and village enterprises may well become the main source of pollution in China. Perhaps one day Beijing, Shenyang and other large Chinese cities will no longer be among the most polluted cities in the world, but by then pollution sources will have spread far and wide throughout the country. This kind of pollution situation may be even worse than what we have today.?(p. 132)
[Comment: Much less information is available about rural pollution in China than about urban pollution. This is beginning to change. A Chinese government survey of the township and village enterprises that concluded in 1997 indicates that the township and village enterprises produce about half of China’s GDP and half of its pollution. Many provincial environmental situation reports [Huanjing Zhuangkuang Gonggao] last year included for the first time data for the township and village enterprises. Indoor air pollution (from burning coal for cooking and heating indoors, which is often much higher than outdoor air pollution), may result in an air pollution problem in rural China fully as serious as in its cities. See the report PRC Air Pollution: How Bad is It? on the U.S. Embassy Beijing EST section webpage. End comment.]
China has deep ecological deterioration problems (such as soil erosion, declining soil fertility, and water problems) that will likely take several decades and the mobilization of society to stop and reverse. This kind of problem is deeper and more difficult than the urban air pollution and industrial pollution problem that Japan was able to reverse in about a decade starting from the 1970s. [p. 133]
As a consequence of rapid industrial growth, China is already the world’s second largest CO2 emitter and will likely become the largest soon. And “greenhouse gases, chiefly CO2, despite uncertainties in present knowledge are generally considered to be the principal cause of global warming.?Global warming will have serious consequences for China, especially for Chinese agriculture. At a recent international meeting, a Chinese delegate said, “on a per capita basis, Chinese carbon dioxide emissions are still much lower than those of the developed countries.?The developed countries reply, “China’s energy efficiency is just one-half the world average.?A Chinese response would be, “We are a poor country and can’t afford the massive investment in clean technology and must continue using fuels that cause a lot of pollution.?To which a foreign professor said, “What do you mean you don’t have the money?? The professor mentioned China’s rapid economic growth, its trade surplus with the United States and the hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese capital invested overseas. This foreign professor concluded, “You are just not interested in improving the environment!?[p. 134]
Carbon monoxide emissions are a big hidden problem that very likely will have a big effect on the future of the Chinese environment. At Kyoto, the Chinese delegation stressed that in the spirit of the Berlin Conference, it opposed the efforts of the developed countries to persuade the developing countries to take on new responsibilities. The leader of the Chinese delegation, Chen Yaobang, said that until China reaches the ranks of the middle-ranking industrialized countries, it cannot take on any responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It can only seek to slow increases in greenhouse gas emissions by: (1) limiting its population, (2) energy conservation, (3) developing renewable energy resources, (3) planting forests.
“At the December 1997 Kyoto Conference, China was asked to make voluntary commitments to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and China may well get more pressure (and perhaps one day even face an economic embargoes) stemming from this matter than other countries. Changing our position from a passive to an active one might well give China more influence in these matters. We can’t expect that the developed countries will understand the determination to modernize and hopes for the future of a country on the rise to becoming a great power. As we have already discussed, this world doesn’t leave the weak much room to maneuver. And not all the calls to keep the world clean come from a magnanimous spirit. We have to stay alert to these questions and understand them properly. [pp. 134 ?135]
Environmental protection in China has slowed ecological deterioration so that the environmental deterioration from waste water, air pollution and other causes has been slower than China’s economic growth rate. Between 1987 and 1995, 2.7 billion RMB [8.3 RMB equals 1 USD] in pollution fees had been assessed to polluters under the principal “The polluter pays?[shei wuran, shei zhili]. Since 1988, the state has established 120,000 pollution remediation projects. Laws to protect the air, water, and ocean were made and over 200,000 people were directly involved in environmental protection work.
The decades-long project to plant three northern forest belts beginning in 1978 protects the soil. The forests cut the number of windy days in the Beijing-Tianjin region by fifty percent. During 1998 logging was forbidden in most state-owned forests and plans to cut wood production by 40 percent by the year 2000. Energy conservation regulations in 1985 has led to the replacement of some inefficient plants and a steady decline in Chinese energy consumption per unit GDP.
Environmental protection began with the first environmental conference convened by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1973 after the Stockholm Conference. During the 1970s, China’s environmental policies were formulated and implemented. This included requirements that environmental controls should be designed, built and put into operation simultaneously with the plant itself. A pollution fee collection system for excess wastewater and sulfur dioxide emissions was established. Proceeds from the fees go to environmental protection including environmental impact statement preparation; and that environmental impact statements should be made before the approval of a project. The 1978 PRC Constitution included a provision that “The State protects the environment and natural resources?and environmental work entered the legal code with the 1979 draft law on environmental protection.
“In 1983, environmental protection was affirmed as a fundamental state policy. “Prevention is primary. Combining prevention and environmental remediation is the basic policy?[yufang wei zhu, fangzhi jiehe] This includes including environmental protection considerations in overall economic and social planning as well as in urban development plans; environmental protection systems planned, built and put into operation at the same time as the plant; environmental impact statements; and preventing new pollution sources from appearing.?/P>
Over twenty years of environmental protection in China have improved the state’s capacity to control pollution, increased the rate of treatment of polluted water, air and wastes, and increased the proportion of enterprises that meet environmental protection standards. Much of this involved the upgrading and replacement of low efficiency boilers. This effort has meant that industrial pollution rates have actually declined considerably when compared with economic growth. Environmental progress has also been made by increasing the capacity to treat urban water and wastewater, widening the use of coal gas, and the increasing the size of the area now served by central heating plants.
China made important gains in energy efficiency. In 1980, China needed to burn 13.0 tons of coal equivalent energy to produce 10,000 RMB unit of GNP. By 1988, this figure had fallen to 9.8 tons. Energy consumption in high energy consuming products had fallen by two-thirds. Important gains in rural use of methane gas and solar energy were realized. China’s fifteen year Trans-Century Green Plan, begun in 1995, includes in its first five year segment 1591 projects and an investment of 188.8 billion RMB. [pp. 135 ?140]
END OF PART I OF SUMMARY TRANSLATION