User:Noizemare/Sustainability in China

Sustainability in China

Sustainability in China has been an increasingly critical issue for the State Party since 2000. In Northeast China, special “resource-based” cities have been designated since 2003 and by 2013, 262 cities have been added to the list. A resource-based city “refers to those cities where the local economy and leading industries which mostly depend on the exploitation and primary processing of local natural resources.” These resource-based cities have been at the center of China’s sustainability plan, in effort to combat the unique size and clustering of the population. With the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) leader Xi Jinping’s international cooperation approach, an enormous amount of pressure has been put on the development of China’s connections with the rest of the world. As a result, several key evaluations and policies have been implemented to maintain and preserve the country’s economic, social, and environmental sustainability while it continues to meet the consumption demands of its people and maintain the longevity of its resources.

Background

Since China’s reform at the end of the 1970’s, its rapid growth and Gross Domestic Product has maintained an extraordinary steady rise. Massive foreign direct investment (FDI) resulted in an intense industrialization and abandonment of the rural life for billions of Chinese people, who flocked to city centers as domestic economic migrants in search of low-wage production labour offered by the injected FDI. While the CCP attempted to alleviate pressure brought on by a swelling population through its infamous “One Child Policy”, the growth in population created an enormous demand on energy and other population sustainability needs.

The rapid industrialization caused by the continued FDIs pouring in from abroad also created a demand on the energy and construction resources. In China, the main source of energy production comes from coal, with 66% of the total energy consumption as of 2013 being coal. While being both the world’s largest coal producer, the consumption demands from both the industrialization and swift population increase meant that China was also the leading importer. Other natural resources are consumed by China’s demands at a frightening rate, including oil, natural gas, and petroleum. Its efforts to obtain even more resources to support its economy and its people has seen China seek new investments abroad to alleviate its importation costs and supplement the demand.

The expansion of the industrialization of China has also had implications to its transportation industries, requiring the development of better sustainable transportation for citizens and its export goods. In 2013, the CCP under Xi Jinping unveiled its “One Belt, One Road” (later renamed to “Belt and Road” in 2016) initiative intended to connect China’s Western provinces and its Eastern neighbors. Meanwhile, public transportation, such as trains, continue to be a source of environmental degradation challenges for China.

Population Sustainability

Family Planning

In 1979, the Chinese Communist Party implemented, with some exceptions, a controversial “One Child Policy,” intended to control the increasingly unmanageable population rise. This policy meant that families were limited, going forward, to having one child. Exceptions included rural ethnic communities, where the efforts to sustain their populations allowed them to have two children. Since then, the policy was adapted into a “Two Child Policy” in 2013, where families were allowed to have two children when the first child was a girl, and in 2018, considerations have been made for the abolition of the population control policies completely. While for decades, the population in China has seen a steady rise, it has finally come to a plateau, with concerns of a population decline leading to a rapidly aging population.

While population control in China slowly reached its plateau, it also saw a rapid decline in poverty rates. By 2018, the World Bank estimated that less than 1% of the population was living in extreme poverty. This is a major contrast to the 88% estimated in 1981, just one year after it partnered with the World Bank and began reforms to tackle the issue. While extreme poverty has been largely eliminated in China, the phenomenon of rural to urban migration in search of economically sustainable personal employment has led to the ballooning of China’s urban cities.

Rural to Urban Migration

Although census definitions of “urban” has varied from survey to survey, China’s records reflected a swift change in its population distribution, with an enormous amount of its people moving from rural locations to urban centers and recording 124 cities with over 1 million people. With its rapid economic development being driven by the need for a cheap labour force, the waves of rural to urban migrants swelled the urban city centers in search of economic opportunities found in factory work. While the overall resource consumption remains high, evidence from the Chongqing province suggests that the effect of the rural-to-urban migration phenomenon in China has helped in reducing the environmental degradation in rural areas, especially within households which have migrating members by increasing capital and assets and reducing dependency on immediate natural resources for personal sustainability.

Aging Population

As a result of the family planning policies, China is now in a dilemma in facing an aging population. Projections of the population changes in each policy showed that a rapidly aging population is inevitable.

Economic Sustainability

Initiating an open door policy through economic reform in 1979, China’s economic growth since “has driven and been fuelled by a large energy requirement.” In developing countries like China, the expansion and growth of the economy comes at the “expense of excessive depletion and degradation of the environment.” With coal being the leading natural resource used in China, the development of a heavily industrialized urban Eastern China has had a heavy cost on the local environment. Special “resource based” cities were designated as areas in need of great improvement in their environmental impact and as a result, the cities Shanghai and Beijing have both reached acceptable levels of sustainability, with hopes of improving the sustainability of all other 260 resource based cities. Additionally, the CCP requires corporations to adhere to a set of standards that reduce “health and environmental costs due to economic growth.” However, only a select few corporations have made effort to publish their sustainability reports and make significant efforts at achieving the standard, although improvement is on the rise.

While China’s economic prominence has led to a party promoted cooperation approach, the development of the “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative has seen an already energy inefficient and stressed transportation method become more expansive and critical to the CCP’s domestic and international narrative. Currently the OBOR initiative aims to better link China’s Western provinces to the rest and create a quicker trade route over land and towards Europe in effort to eliminate its dependency on sea routes as a main method of transporting its goods. According to studies, the environment sustainability of railway transportation is much better in the Eastern areas compared to the rest, noting that the efficiency is largely attributed to the engineering and construction design and the inefficiency of coal use as a power source. This included the inefficient route planning that led to unnecessary waste of resources. To that end, the rapid expansion of China’s economic growth and connectivity has meant that the depletion of nonrenewable resources was needed, leading to the environmentally unsustainable development of railways and transport.

Environmental Sustainability

Atmospheric pollution is driven by China’s coal dependency, with 72.5% of its CO2 emissions in 2010 coming from coal alone. Although China is not the worst perpetrator of pollution per capita, its population size and density makes it top of the list in pure amount of natural environment pollutants, making finding energy alternatives to sustain its economic development all the more crucial. Its energy needs, however, meant that it imports large amounts of natural resources and at the same time it is a large exporter of them. In the same respect, the demands on its rapid growth and industrialization means that it is a large source of wastes due to production.

As of 2017, China’s 12th “Five-Year Plan” included improving energy efficiency and reduction of output pollution. However, while it has made strides to improve its environmental footprint, the CCP must find better solutions to its energy demands if it hopes to succeed in developing an entirely sustainable nation. While it had emerged from a the 20th century as a global economic leader, it had to pull itself out of vast poverty that it suffered during the first half of the century, which resulted in the swift overexploitation of its natural resources as it developed through FDI and industry growths, a common consequence of persistent poverty. In China’s rural areas, poverty often still persists, leading to a less sustainable environment overall. Although it has focused on the sustainability of its resource based cities, eliminating mass amounts of unnecessary pollution and resource depletion, the overall sustainability of China’s enormous lands needs to improve through the development and planning stages to the every day energy needs of its people in both urban and rural communities if it expects to survive on its on its own means.

Global Sustainability

China-Africa Cooperation

In 2018, the China-Africa cooperation initiative announced eight new initiatives in pursuit of “win-win” common development projects. While China’s investments in Africa are vast, many critics warn of a “neo-colonial” intention through debt trapping, but China’s response has been to announce a “no-strings attached” policy on its money lending in Africa. With its enormous need for natural resources, many have also accused China of seeking to deplete Africa of its natural resources, a common theme among past investors. Instead, China seeks to link its Africa narrative to the OBOR initiative which would see Africa become a key partner in the linking of nations and their opportunities through mutual cooperation.

Other websites

• https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/china-is-going-green-here-s-how/