China is the workshop of the world. But it is becoming the rubbish tip too
Even larger potential shifts are in store for the auto industry, analysts say. China's car-centred model of development has been a mainstay of economic growth in recent years, with all the world's big car companies investing or promising to invest in large production facilities. The spin-off benefits from burgeoning car sales have been enormous. Each car requires several thousand parts, hundreds - if not thousands - of suppliers, roads, car parks, driving schools, petrol stations and other service industries. But several officials and academics are now questioning the wisdom behind this frenzy.
Not only are exhaust fumes adding to an already heavy plume of pollution but roads, car parks and other crucial infrastructure are also eating away at scarce agricultural land. "Every million cars added to the fleet requires the paving of 20,000 hectares of land. If that was crop land it means that grain production would fall by 80,000 tonnes," says Lester Brown, director of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.
It is uncertain how the debate over the development of China's vehicle industry will evolve. But the anti-car lobby is gaining ground as cars clog the arteries of large cities, pollute the air, help to drive down grain output and, in the longer term, impinge on the political imperative of main-taining food security (see below).
In spite of higher costs, it appears likely that pressure on foreign vehicle manufacturers to start making hybrid (petrol and electric) cars in China will intensify and, in the longer term, a transport system run on hydrogen is a distinct possibility. A research team led by scientists at Tsinghua University has succeeded in making a hydrogen-powered bus that is due for trial runs on Beijing streets soon.
China's environmental challenges are so daunting, says Mr Brown, that Beijing could be forced into leading the world in the use of clean fuels and other forms of sustainable development.
But all this comes at a cost, as do the numerous other planned moves to promote savings of energy and resources by raising the price of petrol, water, electricity, coal and other inputs over time, experts say. Taxes will need to be raised to pay for the roll-out of environmentally friendly infrastructure, resulting, for instance, in an estimated 60 per cent rise in taxes on diesel and petrol by 2020, according to the Beijing Green City Environmental Energy Research Institute, a think-tank.
In many ways, such costs represent the repayment of an "environmental deficit" incurred during the past 20 years of break-neck industrialisation. Assessing with any precision the net impact on China's manufacturing competitiveness from financing this environmental deficit is not currently possible but many observers say the costs would be considerable.
"On the one hand China is the workshop of the world. On the other it is becoming the rubbish tip of the world," says one Chinese environmentalist. Officials say China's environmental degeneration is a global problem and the job of paying for its rehabilitation should be borne partly by developed nations. f that happened, it would take time. A more immediate challenge facing Beijing is how to curb the behaviour of the country's worst offenders: local governments.
"We can see a lot of local authorities that are sacrificing their natural resources in order to expand production and, craving scale and worshipping foreign [investors], they engage in image projects and politically motivated developments," says Qu Geping, former head of the environmental protection committee of China's legislature. "The outlook of many local officials is very different from the tenet of scientific development. If their outlook cannot be changed, you would have to be worried that we cannot implement the concept of scientific development."
The problem with local governments is systemic. The performance of local leaders is judged according to how much GDP growth they oversee, how many jobs they help create and how many visible achievements - such as building industrial parks or fine new office blocks - they make.
Environmental protection is often seen as an unwelcome cost. If the local SEPA bureau reminds them of their responsibilities or tells them they have broken environmental laws, local bosses can easily overrule them; both law courts and government bureaux at the city and county levels are, in practice, subordinate to local chiefs.
An increasing number of analysts, therefore, see the task of bringing local authorities into line as primarily a political challenge. Mr Pan of the State Environmental Protection Agency advocates a system of "public hearings" that would solicit the opinions of experts, company executives and environmentalists before significant projects are undertaken.
He adds that environmental laws need to be enforced, which would intensify the pressure on Beijing to create a genuine rule of law to replace the current system of administration by the fiat of Communist party officials. "In the past 20 years or more, how many officials have received the sanction of the law because of polluting nature?" asks Mr Pan. Such ideals, if achieved, would supply considerable impetus to the process of democratisation under way in China. But introducing such checks and balances implies the erosion of official power and is therefore fiercely resisted by local governments.
Herein lies the uncertainty hovering over China's environmental future: without reform to the political system, it may be difficult to alleviate the crisis. But political reform has been virtually moribund since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing. Several small experiments have taken place but implementation of an efficient system to balance the power of a single ruling party appears to be a long way off.
Most of Beijing's current leaders were in their late teens or early 20s when China was convulsed by the terrible famine that is estimated to have killed about 30m people.
Those memories from the late 1950s and early 1960s have left deep scars on the national psyche. The questions, therefore, of whether China can feed itself and whether the food supply of 1.3bn people is secure are of visceral importance to the government of President Hu Jintao.
Over the past 25 years of free-market reforms, China has been able comfortably to feed itself. But break-neck industrialisation, rising demand and dwindling water resources have combined to raise the prospect that China is on the brink of becoming a big net importer of food.
"China has been covering the shortfall in its grain production over the past five years by drawing down its once vast stocks of grain," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and an authority on Chinese agriculture. "But the stocks can't be drawn down much more. Then China will have to turn to the world market and, indeed, for wheat we know that China has already bought 9m tonnes in the past several months.
"I expect that within the next year it will be buying rice and corn as well. We are probably looking at a year or two from now China importing maybe 30m, 40m, 50m tonnes of grain - more than any other country by far," Mr Brown says.
Looming relative food insecurity is so sensitive a subject that Chinese officials are reluctant to deal with it in public. But in private one senior official says falling water tables, drying rivers and polluted water sources are taking their toll on the productivity of China's fields.
In addition the amount of land available for grain is slipping fast. The annual movement to cities of between 10m to 20m Chinese, the vast expansion of industrial parkland, sprawling networks of new roads and railways and other construction have reduced farmland by 6.7m hectares since 1996 to a total of 123.4m hectares by the end of last year.
That decline resulted in a fall in the production of wheat, maize, rice and other food grains from 512m tonnes in 1998 to 431m tonnes last year. This year a rebound in grain prices has encouraged farmers and a better harvest is expected for the first time in five years.
But, according to Chen Xiwen, deputy director of the office of the Financial Work Leading Group, the deficit in grain production compared with demand this year will be about 37.5m tonnes. The level of grain reserves is kept secret, so it is unclear how much of that shortfall will come out of the reserves and how much will be imported.
The main grain expected to be imported is wheat, which in China is grown mostly in the north east, an area where consistent over-pumping from aquifers has contributed to a precipitous decline in the water available for agriculture. A photograph in the Chinese media this week showed the cracked, dry bed of the Songhua river, the main waterway in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang.
In the longer term, there appears little doubt that China will become a big importer. By 2030, it will have a population of 1.6bn people and will need about 640m-720m tonnes of grain a year - 200m tonnes up from today. Hybrid breeding programmes are under way to increase yields but their success is uncertain.
If such technology only partially succeeds in narrowing the shortfall, China's environmental crisis, mixed with its burgeoning population and dwindling land, will have resulted in a vast food dependency on foreign sources. That is not a prospect that Beijing's leaders relish, but ultimately it will insinuate a layer of vulnerability into the body politic of Asia's rising power.
环境危机向中国挑战（下）
分析师认为，中国的汽车业甚至在酝酿更大的转变。中国以汽车为中心的发展模式已成为近年来经济发展的中流砥柱，全球所有大型汽车公司都在中国投资，或承诺大规模投资生产设施。由迅速增长的汽车销售所带来的附带利益非常庞大。每辆汽车都需要好几千个零部件、几百家供应商(如果不是几千家的话)、道路、停车场、驾驶学校、加油站和其它相关服务业。但目前许多官员和学术界人士质疑说，这种狂热的趋势是否明智。
不仅本已严重污染的空气中增加了汽车尾气，道路、停车场和其它重要基础设施也在吞噬稀缺的农业用地。总部位于华盛顿的地球政策研究所(Earth Policy Institute)所长莱斯特?布朗(Lester Brown)说：“每增加100万辆汽车，就要用两万公顷的土地来铺设道路。如果那是农田，就意味着粮食生产将减少8万吨。”
中国汽车业发展的争论将如何发展，目前尚不可知。但反汽车的游说力量正在发展壮大，因为汽车堵塞了大城市的交通动脉，污染了空气，在一定程度上导致了粮食产量的下滑，而且长期而言，也对保持粮食安全的政治原则构成冲击。
虽然使用混合燃料（汽油和电力）的汽车成本较高，不过看上去，要外国汽车厂商在中国生产这类汽车的压力可能会加大。而且从长期看，很可能出现以氢为燃料的交通系统。清华大学科学家领导的一个研究小组已成功研制出一辆氢动力客车，不久将在北京街头试运行。
布朗先生说，中国的环境挑战极为严峻，在使用清洁燃料和其它可持续发展形式方面，中国政府可能将被迫领导全球潮流。
但是，专家们说，这一切都得付出代价，其它许多计划措施也是如此。这些措施将通过逐渐提高汽油、水、电力、煤炭以及其它能源的价格，促进能源和资源的节省。有必要的话，还将通过提高税收，为环保型基础设施的推广提供资金。例如，据智囊机构――北京绿色城市环境能源研究所估计，到2020年，对柴油和汽油的征税预计要提高60%。
从很多方面说，这些代价都意味着弥补一种“环境赤字”，这种赤字是在过去20年的快速工业化过程中产生的。为环境赤字提供资金将给中国制造业的竞争力带来冲击，而要对冲击的实际结果作任何精确评估，目前还不可能，但很多观察家表示，代价将相当巨大。
中国一位环保人士说：“一方面，中国是全球工厂；另一方面，它正成为全球的垃圾场。”官员们表示，中国的环境恶化是个全球问题，发达国家应该分担为恢复环境健康所需的资金。即便如此，那也需要时间。中国政府所面临的最紧迫的挑战是――如何遏制在环境问题上最严重的犯规者：地方政府的行为。
中国人大环境保护委员会前主任曲格平表示：“我们可以发现，许多当地政府为扩大生产，以牺牲自然资源为代价，并追求规模，崇拜外国（投资者），同时搞形象工程以及受政治动机驱使的开发项目。许多地方官员的见解与科学发展的原则有很大差异。如果不改变他们的观点，你就不得不担心，我们无法实施科学发展的观念。”
地方政府的问题是制度性的。评定地方领导人业绩的标准是，他们取得了多少GDP增长、帮助创造了多少就业机会，取得了多少看得见摸得着的成绩，比如工业园区的或漂亮的新办公大楼的建设等。
环境保护经常被看作是不受欢迎的成本负担。如果当地的环保局提醒他们所应承担的责任，或者说他们已违反了环保法，地方政府的首脑们可以轻而易举地驳回环保局的意见；县市一级的法院和政府部门实际上都隶属地方领导人的管辖。
因此，越来越多的分析人士认为，制约地方政府的行为是一项重要的政治挑战。国家环保总局的潘岳倡议成立一个“公共听证”制度，在实施重大项目之前，听取专家、企业管理人员和环保人士的意见。
他还补充说，必须加强环保法的执法力度，这将对中国政府产生更大的压力，以建立真正的法治，取代目前由党的官员发号施令的行政制度。潘先生问道：“过去20多年里，究竟有多少官员因污染自然环境而受到法律制裁呢？”如果这些理想得以实现的话，将为中国正在推进的民主化进程提供极大的动力。但是，推出这类权力制衡机制，意味着对官员权力的削弱，因而受到地方政府的竭力抵制。
中国环境问题的前景并不明朗：如果不进行政治体制改革，可能就很难减轻环境危机。在1989年北京民主示威遭受打击后，政治改革几乎已经不复存在。虽然中国已进行了几次小型试验，但是距离一种有效体制的实施，以及对单一执政党的权力平衡，似乎还很为遥远。
