Environment
09.19.14Here’s How This Giant Chinese Forest Disappeared
In early August, Greenpeace China’s forest campaigner Wu Hao wrote a piece in the environmental section of the newspaper Southern Weekly about China’s astonishing rate of deforestation. He posted dramatic before and after satellite images of forests...
Caixin Media
09.16.14Grappling with Ammonia in China’s Haze
Chicken farmers and auto designers follow different career paths, but soon both may be changing how they do their jobs as part of a campaign to clean up China's polluted air.Emissions from poultry waste and auto engines alike can contain...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.15.14China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet
Rolling Stone
If the world's biggest polluter doesn't radically reduce the amount of coal it burns, nothing anyone does to stabilize the climate will matter.
Environment
09.10.14The Dark Side of the Boom
from chinadialogue
Just over a year ago, in July 2013, a report published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put the health impacts of air pollution in China into an unusually clear framework: residents of south China, the report said...
The China Africa Project
09.08.14Cameroon’s Illegal Timber Finds a Market in China
Cameroon’s rain forests are rapidly vanishing due to widespread corruption, according to a new report from Greenpeace Africa. The environmental activist group alleges that much of the illegally-harvested timber from Cameroon ends up in China where...
Reports
09.07.14Pollution and Health in China: Confronting the Human Crisis
chinadialogue
Anyone who lives in north China understands that the air quality that they endure is potentially hazardous. There are other environmental hazards to health that have been less obvious or less widely understood, but that emerge in patterns of illness...
Environment
09.04.14Alibaba Founder Shoots Himself in the Foot with UK Hunting Trip
from chinadialogue
Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce platform Alibaba and chairman of The Nature Conservancy’s China Program, has drawn hostile fire from environmentalists after a British newspaper recently reported he hunted stags in Scotland in 2012. What’s more, Ma...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.02.14Mongolia's ‘Rebalance’ Towards Russia and China
Deutsche Welle
In a bid to boost its ailing economy, Mongolia is refocusing its foreign policy on its traditional partners Russia and China. But experts warn Ulan Bator runs the risk of becoming increasingly dependent.
Viewpoint
08.28.14China’s Nicaraguan Canal
While Nicaragua was once a central concern—indeed, almost an obsession—of Washington, as Sandinistas and Contras seemed to be battling for the soul of the Western Hemisphere, in more recent times our small and quite impoverished country has slipped...
ChinaFile Recommends
08.27.14China Considering $16 Billion for Electric-Vehicle Chargers
Bloomberg
Increased state funding would be a tailwind for carmakers coping with consumer concerns over the price, reliability and convenience of electric vehicles.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.26.14Could Beijing be the Healthiest City in China?
Quartz
Beijing, despite its reputation for dangerous levels of air pollution, choking traffic, and food scandals, is the healthiest city in China.
Environment
08.21.14Who Will Feed China’s Pigs?
from chinadialogue
He's been called China’s richest chicken farmer, but Liu Yonghao has come a long way from his days breeding birds in rural Sichuan province.As the billionaire founder of the New Hope Group, China’s largest producer of animal feed, Liu’s rise...
ChinaFile Recommends
08.20.14Can China Save Africa's Elephants?
Bloomberg
Poaching has not only reduced elephant populations, but it has also become unsustainable. The problem, beyond how many elephants are being killed, is the lack of surviving males in their prime years.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.18.14Can Enigmatic Chinese Businessman Complete Nicaraguan Canal?
International Business Times
As Nicaragua granted a 50-year concession to a new development authority that would build a canal through the country, President Daniel Ortega celebrated a moment that would cement “total and complete independence.”
ChinaFile Recommends
08.17.14China’s Carbon Plans: Secrecy and Oversupply Darken Outlook
Reuters
The world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases risks repeating mistakes made in carbon trading in Europe by flooding its pilot markets with free permits.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.14.14China Tells Citizens to Walk, Bike, and Snitch in “United Struggle” to Breathe Easier
Quartz
The environmental ministry has published a set of guidelines for citizens, which encourage them not only to reduce their personal environmental imprint, but to also turn in polluting and wasteful neighbors.
Environment
08.13.14Can a Pollution-Tracking App Kickstart Transparency?
from chinadialogue
It seems counter-intuitive that publicly available data needs grassroots activists to make it accessible. Yet, in a sea of regulations and information, official environmental information can be difficult to parse.The risk of information overload...
Environment
08.07.14What to Do About China’s Polluted Farmland?
While the extent of China's soil pollution crisis is becoming clearer, the consensus on what to do next is still lacking.The results of the state soil survey earlier this year were damning: 16.1% of sampling points nationwide were in breach of...
Books
08.06.14China’s Second Continent
An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa—a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages—Howard French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China’s economic, political, and human presence across the African continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts’.French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. —Knopf {chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
08.06.14In China, Shark Fin Soup Is So 2010
Wall Street Journal
A WildAid study found that sales among shark fin vendors in the southern city of Guangzhou declined 82% in the past two years, while wholesale prices fell 57% and retail prices dropped 47%.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.05.14China Will Ban All Coal Use In Beijing By 2020
Business Insider
Beijing’s Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau posted the plan on its website Monday, saying the city would instead prioritize electricity and natural gas for heating.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.04.14Strong Quake in China Topples Thousands of Homes, Kills at Least 367
Associated Press
A strong earthquake in southern China's Yunnan province toppled thousands of homes on Sunday, killing at least 367 people and injuring more than 1,881.
ChinaFile Recommends
08.03.14Strong Quake in China Topples Thousands of Homes, Kills At Least 367
Los Angeles Times
The magnitude-6.1 quake struck at 4:30 p.m. at a depth of 6 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Its epicenter was in Longtoushan township, 14 miles southwest of the city of Zhaotong, the Ludian county seat.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.28.14China Needs to Import More Food to Ease Water, Energy Shortages
Reuters
China should boost imports of food so it can dedicate more of its scarce water supplies to energy production, especially in arid but coal-rich regions like Xinjiang and Ningxia
Environment
07.23.14Moving a Mountain, of Trash
from chinadialogue
On July 1, tough new standards for pollution from waste incinerators came into effect. The move is an attempt to end the conflict between communities across China and the nearby rubbish-burning plants they believe threaten their health and house...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.18.14China's Support of Latin America 'Doesn't Come for Free'
Deutsche Welle
After the BRICS summit and a visit to Brazil, China's President Xi Jinping is embarking on a tour of Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba in a bid to boost ties and gain clout in the region.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.18.14Super Typhoon Rammasun Bears Down on Southern China
CNN
Downgraded as it passed over the Philippines, the storm has gained strength again over the South China Sea and is now battering Hainan, with its inner eye wall hugging the island's coast.
Environment
07.17.14The Legacy of Hunan’s Polluted Soils
from chinadialogue
This is the second of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and three.Cao Fushe spent much of 2013...
Environment
07.17.14China Faces Long Battle to Clean Polluted Soil
from chinadialogue
This is the third of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and two.Luo Jinzhi is 52 and lives in...
Books
07.15.14The Forbidden Game
In China, just because something is banned, doesn't mean it can't boom. Statistically, zero percent of the Chinese population plays golf, still known as the "rich man’s game" and considered taboo. Yet China is in the midst of a golf boom—hundreds of new courses have opened in the past decade, despite it being illegal for anyone to build them. Award-winning journalist Dan Washburn charts a vivid path through this contradictory country by following the lives of three men intimately involved in China's bizarre golf scene. We meet Zhou, a peasant turned golf pro who discovered the game when he won a job as a security guard at one of the new, exclusive clubs and who sees himself entering the emerging Chinese middle class as a result; Wang, a lychee farmer whose life is turned upside down when a massive, top-secret golf resort moves in next door to his tiny village; and Martin, a Western executive maneuvering through China’s byzantine and highly political business environment, ever watchful for Beijing's "golf police." The Forbidden Game is a rich and arresting portrait of the world’s newest superpower and three different paths to the new Chinese Dream. —Oneworld Publications {chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
07.13.14China Requires 30% of State Cars Use Alternative Energy
Bloomberg
China is mandating that electric cars make up at least 30 percent of government vehicle purchases by 2016, the latest measure to fight pollution and cut energy use after exempting the autos from a purchase tax.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.10.14PM2.5 Index Reduced in Beijing
Shanghai Daily
Beijing's average PM2.5 index of 91.6 micrograms per cubic meter in first half of 2014 represents an 11.2 percent year-on-year decrease.
Environment
07.10.14U.S.-China Climate Cooperation More Crucial Than Ever
from chinadialogue
As the governments of the United States and China meet in Beijing this week for the Sixth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), one area worth watching closely is clean energy and climate change cooperation. While this topic may...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.09.14As China Gets Fatter, World Bank Calls for Health Care Reform
Wall Street Journal
As China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and grown increasingly wealthy, its people are suffering from many lifestyle diseases endemic to developed countries.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.08.14Coca-Cola Offers Expats China Pollution Hazard Pay
Australian Financial Review
American beverage giant Coca-Cola is offering a hefty “environmental hardship allowance” to its China-based expatriate employees, as foreign companies struggle to attract and retain staff with many people scared off by chronic pollution.
Environment
07.03.14The Victims of China’s Soil Pollution Crisis
from chinadialogue
This is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts two and three.When Zhang Junwei’s uncle died...
Environment
06.27.14Germany’s Renewables Paradox a Warning Sign for China
from chinadialogue
From the hay field behind his house, Gunter Jurischka points out the solar panels glittering from the town’s rooftops and the towering wind turbines spinning lazily on the horizon.Thanks to Germany’s now famous Energiewende (or “energy transition”)...
Environment
06.19.14What China Should Say at the U.N. Climate Change Summit
from chinadialogue
With a little more than 100 days to go, countries are gearing up for Ban Ki-moon’s New York climate summit, the first climate convention of world leaders since Copenhagen and a meeting that aims to catalyze new commitments and mobilize political...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.17.14China’s Answer To Its Poverty Of Space: Moving Mountains
Forbes
Chongqing, Shiyan, Yichang, Lanzhou and Yan’an. All belong to the “Yellow” China, a parched region tormented by a complicated geography that severely limits almost all human activities, such as farming, communications, construction or industry.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.17.14To Bolster Its Claims, China Plants Islands in Disputed Waters
New York Times
China has been moving sand onto reefs and shoals to add several new islands to the Spratly archipelago, in what foreign officials say is a new effort to expand the Chinese footprint in the South China Sea.
Environment
06.12.14The Dead Swans of Dongting Lake
from chinadialogue
I’ve lost track of how many nights I spent traveling to Dongting Lake, a large, shallow lake in Hunan province, central China, famed for being the origin of dragon-boat racing.In mid-January 2013 I met the Yueyang River Porpoise Conservation Society...
Conversation
06.11.14Is a Declining U.S. Good for China?
Zha Daojiong:Talk of a U.S. decline is back in vogue. This time, China features more (if not most) prominently in a natural follow-up question: Which country is going to benefit? My answer: certainly not China.Arguably, the first round of “U.S.-in-...
Sinica Podcast
06.06.14Rice, Wheat, and Air Filters
from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, we're delighted to be joined by Thomas Talhelm, Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of a recent paper proposing a fascinating connection between rice and wheat-growing communities, and...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.05.14China Admits to Failures Over Air Quality
USA Today
Only three cities, or 4.1%, of the 74 major Chinese cities subject to air quality standards met the national standard for good air quality in 2013.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.04.14Scientists Warn Against China’s Plan to Flatten Over 700 Mountains
Guardian
Environmental consequences of removing hills to create more land for cities not considered, academics say in Nature paper.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.03.14China Follows USA With Emissions Pledge
USA Today
One day after the United States said it would slash carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30% below 2005 levels, China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said it would set an absolute cap on its emissions by 2016.
ChinaFile Recommends
05.28.14Why Scrapping 6 Million Cars is Not Going to End China’s Pollution Problem
Washington Post
While studies have shown some success from these measures, the fact that this bigger ban is being proposed is perhaps a sign it wasn't enough.
Video
05.28.14Staying Afloat
In “Staying Afloat: Life on a Disappearing Lake,” Chinese filmmakers Lynn Zhang and Shirley Han Ying train their camera on the people who have been both perpetrators and victims of Lake Baiyangdian’s decline in water supply. They show us not just...
Environment
05.23.14Killing Pika Won’t Save Tibetan Grasslands
from chinadialogue
A pest extermination campaign is under way on western China’s Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. But experts say there is no scientific basis for the killing of the pika, a small rabbit-like mammal, and warn that the campaign may throw the ecosystem further...
Books
05.22.14Age of Ambition
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth?Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail. —Farrar, Straus, and Giroux {chop}
Environment
05.21.14Infographic: China’s Pig Footprint
from chinadialogue
Meat invariably means pig in China, with pork accounting for 65% of the meat consumed in the country.And after last year's high-profile takeover of the U.S. pig giant Smithfield by Shuanghui International, since renamed the WH Group, the...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.14.14China Inc. Moves Factory Floor to Africa
Wall Street Journal
Faced with rising labor costs at home and negative perceptions about their employment practices in Africa, Chinese companies are setting up new factories on the continent and hiring more Africans.
Caixin Media
05.13.14China Comes to Grips with Poisons Underfoot
Pollution that is easily perceptible in China's rivers and urban air has gotten a lot of attention in recent years.Now a less obvious environmental concern with equally serious repercussions—soil contamination—is getting the attention it...
Conversation
05.07.14How is China Doing in Africa?
On his current weeklong tour of Ethiopia, Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya, Premier Li Keqiang announced a new $12 billion aid package intended to address China’s “growing pains” in Africa. China is by turns lauded for bringing development to the...
Environment
05.07.14Why China Will Fight for a Global Climate Deal Next Year
from chinadialogue
China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and so the world will pay close attention to its stance at next year’s climate negotiations in Paris, as well as to the kinds of actions it takes to tackle climate change post-2020...
Environment
04.30.14China’s Environmental Law Good on Paper
from chinadialogue
China’s environmental protection law, which stirred great controversy during its amendment process, has finally been passed. The updated law makes significant progress in the area of public interest litigation and strengthens the legislative tools...
ChinaFile Recommends
04.29.14China Gives Teeth, Finally, to Beijing’s New ‘War on Pollution’
Businessweek
The new environmental protection law—approved April 24 by China’s National People’s Congress—differs significantly from the previous one, especially on enforcement.
Sinica Podcast
04.25.14Trash Talk with Adam Minter
from Sinica Podcast
Anyone living in China doubtless has a sense of the unholy number of people who seem to be involved in the trash trade here, and who will ferret away everything from your cardboard boxes to plastic bottles faster than you can unpack them or consume...
Environment
04.24.14Almost One-Fifth of China’s Arable Land is Polluted
from chinadialogue
Almost one-fifth of China’s arable land is polluted to various degrees, according to a national soil quality report on April 17.The report, based on seven-years’ worth of tests on 6.3 million square kilometers (2.4 million square miles) of land,...
ChinaFile Recommends
04.23.14Tesla CEO Makes Smooth Drive into China
Forbes
Tesla’s China launch, accompanied by a well-crafted publicity blitz, could help the company sell up to 5,000 cars in the market this year.