Introduction
Throughout China’s thousands of years of history, famines have often led to rebellions and instability which in turn has led to many a dynasties downfall. Therefore, ensuring food security in China has been both a priority for Chinese leaders throughout the ages, and it remains a priority for the Chinese Communist Party today. China’s challenge is that it supports approximately 19% of the world’s population on approximately 9% of the world’s arable land and 7% of the world’s fresh water. Despite these constraints, China has met its food needs through a policy of agricultural self-sufficiency. Today, China is the world’s leading producer of rice, wheat, and soybeans, the world’s second largest producer of corn and the seventh largest producer of sorghum. Additionally, China is the world’s largest producer of pork, the third largest producer of chicken and the 10th largest producer of beef.
That said, China’s ability to maintain continued growth in agricultural output is under threat unless there is further reform in the agricultural sector. Increased urbanization, plateauing yields, water shortages, small farm sizes and uncertain property laws are all making it difficult for China to continue to increase agricultural production. China’s 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) recognizes these challenges. Investing in hybrid seed research, repairing and improving on irrigation infrastructure, reclaiming rural land that has been lost to environmental degradation, shoring food safety mechanisms, expanding agricultural mechanization, and increasing the use of agricultural technology in order to improve yields have all been stated as clear priorities. The plan also recognizes the continued need to invest in rural areas of the country, so that China’s remaining farmers can earn a reasonable living and adequately invest in their children’s future within and beyond the farm sector.
In addition to investing domestically, China is significantly increasing its investment in agriculture abroad. According to a United States Department of Agriculture 2018 report, “1,300 Chinese enterprises had overseas investments in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries valued at $26 billion in 2016. The investments include crop and livestock farming, fishing, processing, farm machinery, inputs, seeds, and logistics in over 100 countries.” These investments have primarily been focused in the regions of Southeast Asia, Russia’s Far East, Ukraine, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
China’s Agriculture under Mao Zedong
When the PRC was founded in 1949 its new leaders continued to support a policy of agricultural self-reliance. This agricultural policy was driven by Mao Zedong’s view that the post-World War II order, with its corresponding American ascendancy, was potentially aggressive and imperialistic. Under this view dependency on grain imports risked making China vulnerable to having its food needs being turned into a weapon against it. In addition, Mao wished to use his country’s limited foreign exchange resources to purchase industrial plant and equipment rather than food, aiming for rapid industrialization. Indeed, until the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), China exported grain to the Soviet Union in order to purchase plant and heavy equipment, at the expense of providing adequate per capita calories for its citizens at home.
Agriculture thus became the basis on which China’s planned economy was built. As China transitioned to a planned economy, the Communist planners began to underprice farm products relative to heavy industrial goods. This was because the planners were trying to ensure that the industrial sector produced high profits which could be plowed back into industry. To keep industrial profits high, costs had to be kept low; the most easily affected cost was labor. In order keep wages low, food needed to be cheap. Thus, farming became the key to the success of the entire Chinese planned economy. To achieve China’s goals, soon after he took power in 1949, Mao orchestrated the largest act of expropriation in world history. Approximately 200 million acres of land were taken from wealthy landowners and redistributed to nearly every peasant family in China. An estimated two million landlords lost their estates, sometimes through violence and almost never with compensation. Mao soon undercut this mass creation of private land ownership by implementing socialist policies of collective agriculture. The launch of the First Five Year Plan in 1953 saw farmers organized into cooperatives where they pooled their land and shared the proceeds. Under the collective structure, each farmer kept title to his land and was paid both labor wages and a dividend based on the value of the land contributed to the collective. After some success under the cooperative model, Mao went further. In 1958, Mao began to move farmers into communes to gain greater control of agricultural output. Mao believed that communes would generate greater farm output as it allowed an increased usage of irrigation and mechanization. As an added benefit, the surplus farm labor that would theoretically be created by collectivization could then be redeployed into the rural and urban industrial sectors. He also believed that healthcare and education for the rural citizens could be more easily delivered in a collectivized environment. Just as importantly, communes would be an effective platform for mass political indoctrination. Mao’s communes pursued a “grain first policy” in which basic crops such as rice, wheat, and corn were planted regardless of the suitability of the soil and other conditions. The shift to communes eliminated household farming, except on small family plots, and all land ownership transferred to the state.
As a result of Mao’s policies, from 1952 to 1978, China increased industrial production as a percentage of national income from 19.5% to 49.4%. Grain production rose by 86%, an average annual increase of 2.5%. However, grain production increased at a rate about equal to him population growth, meaning that average grain output per capita stayed roughly steady during this period. China also increased the production of cash crops by 16%. Up until 1960, China exported grain, peaking at 5 million tons in 1958. After the famine of the Great Leap Forward, China began to import grain, yet these imports averaged 1.6% of total consumption, meaning that China was almost completely self-sufficient in food under the planned economy.
These statistics, however, are deceptive. Much of Mao’s industrial development was inefficient. Poor economies of scale, inadequate transport, and poorly skilled labor meant that China’s huge industrial investment generally failed to effectively build upon China’s existing industrial base, although its development of human capital skills and rudimentary infrastructure did lay the foundations for broader industrialization during the Reform Era. Throughout the socialist period, Chinese consumers remained on strictly rationed diets consisting primarily of coarse grains. Most consumers were deprived of daily access to cooking oil, sugar, meat, and vegetables for extended periods. In the 1970s, despite increases in grain production, urban residents ate an average of 2,328 calories per day, while rural intake was even lower at 2,100 calories daily. Average grain output per capita remained virtually unchanged and the absolute poverty rate hovered between 30% and 40%.
The primary weakness of communes was the absence of incentives. Farmers did not keep produce from their lands, which undermined their work effort. Instead, commune members were given work points based on tasks; these points were converted to grain and cash pay-outs at the end of each crop year. Free riding and an inability to monitor agricultural labor became endemic. Output also suffered because decision-making was concentrated in the hands of collective leaders who themselves were frequently following dictates from above, stifling any prospect for innovation. The pricing during this era also did little to encourage the efficient production or allocation of goods and services. Additionally, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer were in constant short supply. Because of the hukou housing registration system (which, while more relaxed, remains in force today), farm labor had no opportunity to move from agriculture to industry as the hukou system completely restricted the mobility of China’s people. This entrapment of Chinese villagers in rural areas effectively designated them as second-class citizens.
Agriculture during the Reform Era
After 1978, a series of reforms was introduced into the rural sector to improve its economic performance. One step was to de-collectivize Chinese farmers into what was termed the Household Responsibility System, where the government leased agricultural land to households. The government then raised the prices that farmers would receive by 41% for grain and by around 50% for cash crops for any farm output farmers produced above mandatory quota deliveries. Initially, the state purchased all grain sold by farmers above quotas. Eventually, private agricultural markets were re-established. Greater freedom of choice was allowed in terms of the types of crops cultivated. Fertilizer and new high-yield seed usage became more widespread. The result was a surge in agricultural output. Grain output swelled from 304.8 million tons in 1978 to an estimated 650 million tons in 2018.This growth reflected a significant rise in crop yields as grain sown area has increased at a smaller rate than crop yields. In 1978, China had approximately 120.6 million hectares under plow; in 2017, this figure increased to approximately 135 million hectares. Overall, it is China’s stated goal to maintain cultivated land at around 124 million hectares. Rising crop yields have resulted in grain price reductions. Since 1978, maize prices decreased 33% and wheat 45%. Coupled with rising incomes, these decreases meant that grain, as a percentage of rural and urban household consumption, fell from 40% and 20% respectively in the late 1970s to about 14% and 3% in 2004. These higher yields and lower prices have resulted in more food per capita. Per capita caloric intake rose from 2328 calories per day in 1980 to an excess of 3,000 calories per capita per day by 2008.
Additionally, since 1978, China’s agricultural output became significantly more diversified. Chinese farmers have moved into labor-intensive cash crops such as aquaculture, cotton, edible oils, fruits, and vegetables. Between 1978 and 2007, for instance, crop farming went from 80% of agricultural gross value output to 50.4%, while animal husbandry and fisheries increased from 16.6% to 42.1%. Between 1990 and 2004, China’s vegetable output expanded so quickly that China added the equivalent of California’s vegetable industry every two years in, and orchards now cover over 5% of China’s farmed area, double the share of any other major agricultural nation. As a result of this diversification, the Chinese diet has come more varied. Most Chinese households consume a more varied diet adding meat, poultry, fish, eggs, a variety of vegetables and dairy produce to their diets.
Maintaining Grain Yields – Water and Pollution Challenges
Throughout this period of reform, China maintained its policy of grain independence, never importing more than 5% of its grain needs. As stated in China’s 13th Five Year ensuring basic self-sufficiency of grain and absolute security of stable food remains a clearly stated goal. That said, with 19% of the world’s population being supported by approximately 9% of its arable land, this goal remains challenging. This means that China does not have a comparative advantage in land intensive products such as grain. Moreover, China’s population will continue to rise until around 2035, meaning that China will need to increase yields in order to maintain current grain per capita levels. Furthermore, as China continues to urbanize, more of its usable land will be refashioned into cities and supporting infrastructure. Additionally, pollution, soil erosion and desertification continue to negatively impact the agricultural land that is available. As a result, it is estimated that by 2050, the total demand for arable land will outstrip supply by more than 12%.
Part of the reason that China achieved such high grain production over the last two decades was yield improvements driven by the use of new high-grade seed varieties and by massive inputs of chemical fertilizer. Yet further benefits from these inputs are beginning to diminish. In 1975, total fertilizer usage was 5.5 million tons, but this rose to 47.7 million tons by 2005. China’s per hectare fertilizer usage was second only to Japan in the 1990s. Overall, it is estimated that China uses 30% of the world’s fertilizers and pesticides on 10% of global farmland. Fertilizer saturation is such that previously good or excellent soils are cresting, hardening and becoming devoid of organic material such that further application of fertilizers is leading to diminishing crop yields as well as causing considerable environmental problems such as eutrophication and particle pollution in the air. Yield benefits from the extensive use of plastic are also plateauing. Finally, large-scale deforestation has led to soil erosion.
Water shortages and water pollution may also limit future yields unless China is able to implement significant reforms in its water management. China’s freshwater of approximately 2156 m³ per capita is less than one third of the world average. This is projected to decrease to 1875 m³ by 2033. Water shortages are expected to worsen as current water demand is still relatively low at 461 m³ per capita compared with the world average of 645 m³, but this number is projected to reach 665 m³ by 2030. Water shortages will be worse in the arid and semi-arid areas in China’s northern plain from which much of the future grain output growth will be generated. In addition to water shortages, problems with irrigation system will also stymie yield growth. During the Mao-era, irrigated area tripled. Since de-collectivization, the irrigation system has deteriorated. With the reversion to family and commercial farming, control of the irrigation system has fragmented, and it is harder to mobilize mass labor for maintenance and construction. The introduction of water fees in the 1980s was designed to encourage more efficient water usage, but the fees were not sufficiently high to have the desired effect. Water designated for agricultural usage continues to be subsidized at a far higher rate than it is for industry and household use, and raising agricultural water fees remains politically difficult. Moreover, the collection of water use data remains imperfect, thus further challenging China’s ability to effectively price water used for agricultural purposes. Going forward, increasing water charges it is likely to be an essential step to dealing with China’s water shortages.
As water becomes increasingly scarce, the agricultural sector will continue to compete with the industrial sector and with households for scant water resources. According to the Ministry of Water Resources China now uses as much as 60% of the water running in many of its rivers, including the Liao and Yellow Rivers, and as much as 90% of the Huai River. China has increasingly turned to aquifers and lakes to meet water demands no longer satisfied by rain and river water alone. Groundwater now provides potable water for nearly 70% of China’s population and irrigation for approximately 40% of its agricultural land in China’s dry northern and northwestern regions. Nationally, groundwater usage has almost doubled since 1970, and now accounts for almost 20% of China’s total water usage.
Due to an uneven distribution of water resources between the north and the south of China, aquifers are especially important in China’s north, where farmers have been relying heavily on groundwater resources to increase agricultural yields. Yet China is now draining its aquifers at an unsustainable rate. At current rates of depletion, the World Bank estimates that China’s northern aquifers could effectively run dry in as little as 30 years or less. China’s northern megacities now rely on underground water sources for two-thirds of their needs. For example, in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, aquifer levels are dropping by approximately 3 meters annually, forcing the digging of ever deeper wells. These deeper wells in turn increase both the risk of both saltwater and arsenic intruding into the water supply and likelihood of land subsidence. With aquifers and rivers suffering from overuse, lakes are also diminishing. The province of Hebei, for instance, has already lost a staggering 969 of its 1052 lakes. While China’s ‘Water Pollution Prevention & Control Action Plan’ has establish targets to restrict ground water extraction and groundwater pollution by 2020, water restriction measures have both proved unpopular and hard to enforce.
Pollution is also challenging China’s agricultural output. China’s use of coal that is high in sulfur and heavy metals to power many of its electricity plants. The pollution from these power plants combined with additional industrial and agricultural pollution contaminate both China’s soil, air, and water. In the north, for instance, the same northern provinces that accounted for 55% of China’s farmland also hold 86% of its coal reserves yet have just 16% of China’s water resources. In the south, over 50% of China’s rice is grown in provinces which account for 52% of its arsenic, 58% of its mercury and 72% of its chromium discharges.
Maintaining Future Grain Yields – Small Farms
China’s future yield growth is also hampered by the small area plowed by each farmer, averaging .65 hectares or 1.6 acres. While de-collectivization from large communal plots to small family farms initially led to a surge in output growth, the segmentation of communal plots is now proving a constraint on grain yields. It has been estimated that increasing farm sizes could increase grain output by as much as 70 million tons annually. Small farm sizes restrict growth by preventing farmers from capturing economies of scale that could be derived from greater mechanization, from the more efficient dissemination of new seed technologies and from the improved maintenance of irrigation structures. Small farms also make it more challenging for farmers to participate in modern supply chains, to offset market volatility and to adapt to climate change, Additionally, small farms tend to use fertilizers and pesticides inefficiently. Research by Nerissa Hannik found that a 1% increase in farm size was linked to a .3 and a .5% decrease in fertilizer and pesticide use per hectare, respectively. Excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides in turn pollute soil and water which in turn depresses crop yields.
Small farms drive down rural incomes. As approximately 35% of Chinese workers or about 311 million people were employed in agriculture in some form in 2017, the impact on rural incomes is significant. In 2018, the annual per capita disposable income of urban and rural households in China was 39,251 and 14,617, respectively. Reduced rural economic opportunity in turn dis-incentivizes younger and more educated workers from pursuing a career in agriculture As a result, the average age of the Chinese agricultural worker is higher than the age of Chinese workers generally and is increasingly less educated than his urban counterpart. Older, less educated farmers could cause structural stagnation in the agricultural sector. Such farmers may fail to adopt new technologies, innovate, and adapt to changing market conditions.
The fact that farmers lease – as opposed to own – their land has also worked to constrain grain yield by discouraging long-term investment and growth in land size. Individuals cannot privately own land in China but can acquire transferable land-use rights for some number of years. Currently, for example, land-use rights for residential purposes is 70 years. All farming or rural land is owned by rural collectives which distribute contract rights for plots of farmland to eligible households. The first leases issued in 1983 were for a duration of 15 years. These were renewed in 1997 for 30 years and again in 2017 for an additional 30 years. As part of its land-use contract, Chinese farmers have the right to decide which crops to plant, to keep all agricultural proceeds, and to sublease their land to others for agricultural production. Chinese farmers are prohibited from using contracted land for non-agricultural purposes, to leave their land fallow for more than two years or to legally oppose the government if it decides to acquire the property for development purposes. To help improve rural household stability, in 2003, China passed the Rural Land Contract Law. The law endeavors to improve the security of land tenure, to clarify the transfer and exchange rights of contracted land, and to permit family members to inherit land during the contracted period. Above all, the law reflects the government’s attempts to allow those staying in farming to gain access to additional cultivated land and to increase their incomes and competitiveness. It strives to encourage farmers to use the land more efficiently.
Working against government efforts to improve plot size, however is the belief by some Chinese leaders that family farming provides at least nominal proof that China is still communist as its land is not privately held, and as its land is relatively equally distributed. Many Chinese leaders also believe that agricultural land provides a social security system for its population, as every rural family is theoretically only one season away from being able to feed itself.
That said, the fact that the government no longer plays a significant role in agricultural production. Aside from restrictions on land ownership, China today has one of the least distorted domestic agricultural economies in the world. Most grains, oilseeds, and fiber crops, and all horticultural and livestock products are sold to small private traders who compete in efficient and integrated markets with minimal regulation.
Insuring Safe Food
In 2008, Chinese domestic milk and infant formula was found to have been purposely tainted with melamine, sickening 300,000 babies, and killing six. Other food scandals include contaminated pork, fake eggs, gutter oil, and counterfeit foods mislabeled as brand name or organic products. These scandals have caused many Chinese to express serious reservations about the quality of domestic food sources and to call for industry reform. The 13th Five Year Plan addressed these concerns by committing to upgrade agricultural standards and to ensure the quality and safety of all food products over the entire journey of agricultural products from farm to table.
In May 2019, the Chinese Communist Party reinvigorated this goal when China declared that it would be stepping up its enforcement of food safety legislation as part of the Communist Party’s campaign called “Staying True to Our Founding Mission”. Between June and December 2019, its increased efforts have resulted in the identification of 70,000 food safety violations, culminating in the suspension of over 2400 food manufacturers and the meting out of approximately $130 million in fines. Additionally, China is increasingly implementing technologies such as sensors, artificial intelligence, and block chain IDs to improve the traceability of food products from farm to table. Other measures include increased supervision with more random checks and the tightening of food safety standards. By 2035, it is China’s goal to have in place world-leading food safety standards and globally advanced risk control capabilities.
GMO in China
Genetically engineered or transgenic organisms, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), were first made available to US consumers in 1994. By 2014, approximately 28 countries sowed GM crops on more than 181 million hectares, equaling 13% of the world’s arable surface. GM soybeans, cotton, maize, oilseed, and rape account for approximately 82%, 68%, 30% and 25% of the total planted area for these crops, respectively. In 2015, the United States Food and Drug Administration authorized the first genetically modified animal for human consumption.
Advocates of GMO food note that such crops could help the world adopt to changing climatic conditions including drought, cold and soil salinization. Additionally, by genetically coding in natural pesticides and other disease-resistant characteristics, GMO foods also offer the opportunity to fight off pests and diseases while correspondingly lowering the use of pesticides. Crops can also be modified to increase crop yields. Among their many concerns, opponents of GMO foods note that the long-term health consequences of consuming GMO food have yet to be determined. Additionally, opponents fear that GMO plants will diminish biodiversity by contaminating wild species.
Despite the risks of GMO plants, China’s 13th Five Year Plan sets as a goal to develop a modern seed industry, including the development superior seed varieties, and cultivation breeding-promotion operations. In January 2020, the Chinese government stated that genetically modified corn, cotton, and soybean species had passed biosafety evaluations, inching the country closer to commercialization of new GMO food sources. These crops were modified to be more resilient against disease and pests. On paper, China has approved biotech cotton, papaya, tomatoes, sweet peppers, petunias, and poplar trees. However, commercialization has been allowed only for papaya and cotton.
In 2018, the global market value of GM crop seeds was $20.1 billion and is expected to grow to $30.2 billion by 2026. As one of the world’s leading countries in the research and development of agricultural biotechnology, China’s issue of bio certificates for soybeans, cotton and corn indicates its interest in capitalizing on its billions of dollars of investment in the field, including its $43 billion purchase of the Swiss pesticide giant Syngenta in 2016. Not only would China benefit from commercializing its GMO seeds to sell globally, but many studies have indicated that China would also enjoy substantial economic benefits from the cultivation of GMO food crops domestically.
The commercialization of China’s GMO technology has been hampered, however, by the Chinese public’s negative attitude toward GMO crops. As per a 2010 online survey interviewing 50,000 people, about 84% of respondents said that they feared GM foods for safety reasons. A 2018 nationwide survey found that those views had not substantially shifted with 46.7% of respondents expressing negative views of GMOs and with 14% considering GMO products to be form of bioterrorism targeting China.
The Chinese public’s disapproving views concerning GMO products likely originate from their experience of the various food scandals that have plagued the country. This adverse experience has likely also negatively impacted their views of genetically modified foods. Exacerbating their concerns has been the discovery that GMO food products have already been farmed illegally in China. In 2014, China Central Television (CCTV) tested five bags of rice from a Wuhan supermarket in Hubei province, and discovered that three of the five samples had been grown from genetically modified seeds. In the same year, illegal large-scale planting of GMO rice and corn in four provinces were reported. In 2016, it was revealed that 93% of corn from Liaoning province demonstrated traces of GMO contamination. In response, the government destroyed crops, confiscated illegal seeds, and prosecuted perpetrators.
The Chinese government is now working to change Chinese opinion regarding GMO products. Given what is at play, the stakes could not be higher. Not only has China made massive investments in the technology that it now wants to commercialize, but water shortages, climate change and its growing population will continue to place unprecedented pressure on its food supply. GMO products can help China adapt to these challenges. GMO crops should also enable China to reduce its extremely high use of fertilizers and pesticides which in turn will have positive impacts on its environment and food supply.
The Automation of Agriculture
While the percentage of the Chinese workforce involved in farming has decreased from 55% in 1991 to 18% in 2017, approximately 250 million Chinese still work as farmers. However, as China’s rural young becomes increasingly educated, and as China’s economy continues to expand, many are migrating to urban areas seeking better opportunity. As a result, approximately 60% of people working in Chinese agriculture are over 45 years compared to just 14% of farmers who are less than 35 years. This decline in farm labor is projected to increase over the coming decades even as China’s population is projected to continue to grow through 2035. Contemporaneously, China’s population is expected to become wealthier. Growing wealth correlates with a rising consumer demand for greater food variety and for more animal-based proteins. The water footprint per calorie pulses, eggs, chicken, pigs, sheep, and beef is 2.5, 2.0, 2.6, 3.6, 5.3, and 9.4 times larger than grains, respectively. This increase in water per calorie will further stress China’s polluted and limited per capita water supply.
China is answering these challenges by significantly investing in agricultural technologies including artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and automation. Not only will these technologies help improve the efficiency and sustainability of China’s agricultural market, but they also represent a big and rapidly growing global business. The market for global agricultural robots, for instance, is projected to exceed $20 billion by the end of 2025, with growth in precision agriculture as a major driver. Artificial intelligence, automation, big data, and robotics are expected to find applications in everything from herding and fish farming to planting and harvesting. Other uses include seeding, irrigation, water leak detection, fertilizing, crop weeding, spraying, crop monitoring and analysis, disease and pest identification and eradication, thinning and pruning, and tracking the growth of plants. In addition to robotics, drones are also increasingly being used to monitor crops, conduct field analysis, manage livestock, plan interrogation and crop spraying. Drones aid farmers to see the big picture of their farmland and to make educated decisions that help to maximize crop yields.
Improving agricultural sustainability is another factor motivating China’s adoption of agricultural technology. China’s farming industry has a significant carbon footprint, with Chinese farmers using 30% of the world’s fertilizers and pesticides on 9% of global farmland. In addition to developing drones and robots that can help to reduce fertilizer and pesticide needs, Chinese scientists are also turning to big data to determine best farming practices. Over 20 million farmers have since benefited from China’s big data research; it is estimated the findings have enabled farmers to increase yields while slashing fertilizer use generating total financial savings of an estimated $12 billion.
China’s Growing Presence in Agriculture Abroad
In the coming decades, China will face of an increasing divergence between demand for food and its ability to produce that food domestically. This divergence is driven by factors such as a population that will continue to grow through at least 2035, a more wealthy population that is demanding a more varied and a more meat-based diet, and limited and polluted land and water resources. As a result, China is increasingly looking to international markets to meet its food shortfalls.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2018 report, in 2016 an estimated 1,300 Chinese enterprises had made overseas agriculture, forestry, and fisheries investments in over 100 countries. These investments were valued at approximately $26 billion. The investments were placed in a variety of sectors including land purchase, land leasing, seeds, farm inputs, farm machinery, food processing, farm logistics, farm machinery, livestock farming, and fish farming. China’s National Bureau of Statistics noted that Chinese investment in foreign farming, forestry, and fishing grew fivefold from 2010 to 2016. Many of China’s agricultural investments are now made in conjunction with its China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
As has been the case in other foreign investment sectors, China’s government has supported this international investment by favorable lending, brokering deals, formulating strategic plans which support low-cost bidding, and providing Chinese agricultural investors with training and information services. China subsidizes these investments for both political and economic reasons. Economic aims include the continued growth of the Chinese economy, securing access to raw materials, the expansion of exports, helping Chinese companies garner a larger share of profits from imported commodities, creating new markets for Chinese products, enabling tariff-free access to developed markets, shifting some of Chinese domestic manufacturing and domestic agriculture overseas, providing domestic companies with international experience, food security, gaining and imparting technical and managerial experience, and exerting influence on global prices. Political objectives include the preservation of the Communist Party rule, reestablishing China’s place as a leading world power, the promotion of multi-polarity, countering US hegemony, increasing Chinese influence in multinational institutions such as United Nations and World Bank, strengthening its alliances with other countries, particularly in the Third World, preventing Taiwan independence, and projecting political influence abroad.
Future Trends
There will be several trends to watch for in the Chinese agricultural sector in the coming decades. Firstly, China will make every effort to maintain its agricultural yields and its food self-sufficiency. Despite its rapid rate of urbanization, China is committed to maintaining a baseline for cultivated land area at 124 million hectares. It is investing heavily in agricultural research to increase yields and is launching a campaign to win public support for the introduction of more GMO crops.
China is also committed to increasing the sustainability of its agriculture and the safety of its food supplies. China is investing heavily in big data, drone technologies, artificial intelligence, and automation to reduce its use of pesticides, fertilizer, and water. Upgrading antiquated and leaking irrigation networks is a high priority. China is also using technology to start tracking its food as it journeys from farm to table; therefore, when food safety breaches arise, it can more effectively follow the breach back to the source. China will also continue to improve its food safety both through increased inspections, and better safety practices and standards.
China will also carry on investing in international agricultural, livestock and aquaculture food chains. These investments will help China ensure reliable and secure overseas food resources. They will also help to increase global food production overall, therefore helping to keep in check global food prices.
Finally, as the number of Chinese working as farmers further declines over the coming decades, China will likely begin to amalgamate its millions of small farms into increasingly larger parcels. Increasing farm sizes will free labor to work in areas which will provide China a higher return on labor capital. Larger farm sizes will also increase productivity by creating more opportunity for mechanization, and by reducing demand for farm inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers.
References
The Tibet Issue
/in Politics /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
To many in the West, China’s continued rule in Tibet is often considered to be a foreign occupation, though few inside China accept this point of view. Tibet is of great psychological importance to China and to Chinese people in terms of national identity and the maintenance of Chinese national unity, as well as of enormous strategic importance with regard to China’s traditional national security and its access to water and other vital natural resources.
Geography
The Tibetan Plateau is the highest region on the planet, sometimes referred to as “the roof of the world”. With an average elevation of more than 4500 meters, it is an
The territory of Tibet is large, with the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) spanning more than 1.2 million square kilometers. Historically, though, Tibet has often included the whole of Qinghai province, as well as the western sections of Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan, making it geographically almost the size of modern day India. These areas outside of the autonomous region maintain a strong Tibetan identity today and continue to be populated by mainly ethnic Tibetans. Indeed, many of the protests that have made the news in recent years have occurred outside of the autonomous region, predominantly in Sichuan. When the Dalai Lama speaks about Tibet, he’s referring to those parts of the plateau that were historically Tibetan and are primarily populated by Tibetans. When China refers to Tibet, it is normally referring solely to the TAR.
Demographics
Despite covering such a vast area Tibet’s population is relatively small. The harsh climate has dictated sparse population throughout its history and, even with advances of modern technology, this continues to be the case. The TAR has a population of just 3 million people, though the total Tibetan population of areas that have historically been within Tibet numbers around 6 million. Such small numbers in such huge areas make Tibet one of the most sparsely populated places on the planet, a striking contrast to the thronging cities of eastern China.
Tibet remains overwhelmingly Buddhist, though the influence of Tibet’s native religion, Bon, can still be seen in some of the practices. Although the much of Tibetan monastic heritage was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, Tibet still remains home to many large and small Buddhist monasteries and temples, with Tibetans making pilgrimages at various times of the year to sites of importance. The Jokhang Temple in Lhasa is the centerpiece of Tibetan Buddhism. It attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims yearly, particularly during the winter months when some Tibetans from rural areas may walk hundreds of miles to pay homage by prostrating themselves around the perimeter.
The Tibetan Economy
China currently invests about $2.5 billion annually in the region, primarily in the form of
infrastructure projects. Farming, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery accounted for approximately 70% of the total gross output value in 2000. Because of its high altitude and mountainous conditions, the Tibetan growing season is short, and the main crops grown are barley, wheat, buckwheat, rye, potatoes and some fruits and vegetables. Sheep, cattle, goats, camels, yaks and horses are also raised within Tibet, with the yak being particularly well suited to Tibet’s harsh winter conditions. Most of the farming, animal husbandry and forestry is still done by hand or with animal labor. Increasingly, electric and hydro-power, mining, light industry and handicrafts also generating earnings for the region. Tibetan hats, jewellery, wooden items, clothing, quilts, fabrics and carpets are all important money earners, as is tourism, with most tourists staying in Lhasa, Shigatse, and the Mount Everest base camp, though the number of foreign tourists permitted to visit Tibet has been scaled back in recent years. Tibet also has large deposits of gold, copper, salt and radioactive ores, although its lack of infrastructure to date has meant that it has been difficult to extract these minerals. China’s huge investment in infrastructure should mean that mining will be a growing sector for Tibet in the future. Overall, China’s significant investment in the region has meant that many Tibetans have seen a rise in living standards. Annual per capita income, for instance, quadrupled to $1076 between 1986 and 2006, though there are claims that this benefit is felt primarily by Han Chinese migrants and not by the indigenous population. Unemployment remains high at approximately 10.3%, more than double the national urban rate.
The Historical Argument
The Tibetan empire reached its zenith around the 8th century CE with an empire that encompassed parts of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, northern India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and also parts of what are now the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Gansu and Sichuan in China. During the Tang dynasty in around 640 CE the Chinese princess Wencheng was sent to Lhasa to marry the then Tibetan emperor Songtsan Gampo. Many Chinese academics credit this as the first sign of China’s suzerainty over Tibet, though many Tibetans claim the opposite: that this was a sign of Tibet’s power and independence since the Emperor only acquiesced in sending the princess under threat of force from Tibet (a claim which is not accepted by modern Chinese historians and was not recorded in the Chinese written Tang annals). Contemporaneously, an informal treaty was signed between the two countries in which the Tibetans claim that the Chinese recognized Tibet as equal to China. By 821 a formal peace treaty was agreed and signed between Tibet and China, known as the Tang-Tibetan Alliance, and the details of this were inscribed on a stone pillar outside of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa in both Tibetan and Chinese. This pillar remains in place today.
The 13th Dalai Lama entered a rapidly changing international order when he assumed power from his regent in 1895, by which time both Tibet and the Qing were under pressure from predatory Japanese and European colonial powers. By 1890 the British were negotiating a treaty with the Qing to establish the border between Tibet and Sikkim, which the British sought to include within its Indian colony. Historically, the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim had been viewed as a vassal tributary state by Tibet, yet the Tibetans were not consulted during the treaty negotiations. Mainly as a result of fear that Russia was making incursions into Tibet in order to establish a sphere of influence, Britain invaded Tibet in 1904 and the 13th Dalai Lama fled into exile. The British invasion of Tibet refocused Qing attention on the region, which had been distracted by challenges closer to home. By December 1904, Tibetan officials left in charge by the 13th Dalai Lama, capitulated to British terms in order to secure withdrawal of troops from Lhasa. In the resulting convention between Great Britain and Tibet, Tibet accepted London’s annexation of Sikkim and agreed not to conduct for relations with foreign states, including China. Tibet also had to pay war reparations.
During this time, the thirteenth Dalai Lama was trying to get Russia to engage on Tibet’s
behalf, yet Russian help was not forthcoming. Ultimately it suited both the British and Russians that Tibet was neither an independent state nor a vassal of an enemy. London and Moscow concluded that it was in both their interests to recognize a purposely vague Chinese claim over Tibet, especially as the British realized that it would be too expensive to turn Tibet into a true British protectorate as it had done to Sikkim. As a result, some clauses of the 1904 Convention were rejected by the Foreign Office in London, and it negotiated two new treaties with the Qing and with Russia. In a 1906 treaty with the Qing, the government of Great Britain engaged not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet. The Qing undertook to prevent other foreign states from interfering with the territory or internal administration of Tibet. The British then signed a second 1907 accord with Russia in which the two states agreed to recognize the principle of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, thus effectively denying that Tibet was an independent nation. Moreover, English legal and historical documents were beginning to equate China with all the territory of the Qing empire. At the same time, as those Han Chinese that sought to end imperial rule began to think what a Chinese nation would be once the Manchus were overthrown, they too began to define their borders by those drawn by the Manchus when they took power. The Chinese became fixated on the humiliation that they were experiencing at the hands of foreign powers so the defense of Chinese borders became a matter of national pride for the Chinese people. By 1912, a year after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China, San Yatsen declared China to be a multi-ethnic state composed of Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Han and Uyghurs among others. Promoting this diverse population was one of the ways that the young republic articulated that its aim was to consolidate its country upon the larger Qing borders.
Taking advantage of the chaos during the early days of the Republic of China, in 1912 the 13th Dalai Lama proclaimed Tibet’s complete independence, and a voluntary Tibetan army drove the remaining Chinese out of the Tibet. In 1913, the Dalai Lama returned from exile after an absence of eight years. Importantly, the Tibetan government also negotiated with British India over shared borders and an agreement was signed between British India and Tibet in 1912 which ceded Tibetan territory to colonial India. This is often cited as proof that Tibet acted with genuine independence as a nation state at this time, but it is the only example of Tibet ever acting as such in the modern international system. It is worth noting that Chinese authorities were included in these negotiations and the Chinese representative even initialed the final treaty. Though this is now downplayed by Beijing due to the complications of continued disputes with India over the modern border, it does raise a serious question over the ability of Tibet to act as a genuinely sovereign nation even during this sole example of it apparently doing so. Furthermore, Britain was in breach of its own Anglo-Russian Entente, signed in 1907, in which it had agreed that all matters surrounding Tibet would be dealt with through the authorities in Peking (Beijing) and that no negotiations would be conducted with Tibetan authorities. The chaos and confusion in China after the fall of the Qing left Tibet’s status relatively unaddressed. During this period, the 13th Dalai Lama passed away. Tibet’s 14th and current Dalai Lama was born on July 6, 1935, 18 months after the death of his predecessor.
Tibet under the PRC
During the struggle against Japanese occupation and the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, it is reported that Mao Zedong pledged that the periphery regions of China, such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Outer Mongolia, would be free to decide their own future. However, upon the establishment of the PRC in 1949, this policy was repudiated (with the exception of Mongolia, whose independence was accepted by the communists probably as a favor to their allies in the Soviet Union). By 1949, the Chinese were using its radio infrastructure to broadcast into Tibet its need to peacefully liberate the country. By October 1950, the PLA had entered Tibet’s eastern regions. After initially rejecting the idea of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, the Dalai Lama signed the “17 point agreement” in 1951 after recognizing that it was not in Tibet’s interests to make an enemy of its giant neighbour against which it stood little chance of military success. The Chinese army had already inflicted defeats against Tibetan resistance and it was clear that the battle could not be won. The agreement accorded the Tibetans autonomy over their own affairs, recognized the position of the Dalai Lama and guaranteed freedom of religion in Tibet. It needs to be acknowledged that this both demonstrates that the PRC government recognized the ability of the Tibetan authorities to act on behalf of Tibet (otherwise they would not have conducted negotiations and signed an agreement with them) and also that several of the points in the agreement have been broken by the PRC authorities, in particular the promise not to interfere with the position of the Dalai Lama and the guarantee that local religion would be respected.
The Dalai Lama remained in Tibet after this agreement was signed and, according to his own account of the story, met with Mao Zedong in Beijing on more than one occasion. In March 1959, following three years of sporadic battles at the edges of Tibet between local paramilitaries and the PLA, the Dalai Lama officially repudiated the agreement citing breaches from the Chinese. What followed was an uprising from Tibetans against the increasing Chinese presence in Tibet, followed by a large military response from the Chinese and a bloody wave of repression. The Dalai Lama fled, on horseback, across the Himalaya into India where he later claimed asylum and established the ‘Tibetan government in exile’ in Dharamsala. It took a further three years to fully establish Chinese control over Tibet. The number of Tibetans killed has never been independently verified but the Tibetan government in exile claims the figure to be in excess of 86,000. It is also believed that the US was involved in inspiring the uprising by engaging in training some of the Tibetan paramilitaries, a practice that continued for several years after the uprising was crushed.
Prior to China’s ‘liberation’ or ‘occupation’ (what it is called depends on one’s own viewpoint) there is no doubt that life in Tibet was a long way from the idealistic vision of a harmonious, peace-loving, and free society that some in the West tend to paint it as. Life expectancy was just 36 and the overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate. A majority of Tibetans were hereditary serfs of varying statuses, allowing the elite – including the religious leaders – to live a luxurious life on the backs of a poor, uneducated society that was structurally condemned to remain in poverty through the following generations. In essence, this was precisely what the international communist movement sought to bring to an end. Tibet had no roads, poor sanitation, and no monetary system. Until the 1960s, there were virtually no vehicles of any kind, motorized or otherwise. Punishment for various crimes was barbaric, including amputation of limbs and eye-gouging.
The Dalai Lama has remained in exile since 1959 and has spearheaded a very public campaign for Tibetan autonomy, gaining much sympathy and support in Western countries and elsewhere, including in Japan. In 1989 another attempted uprising, marking the fortieth anniversary of Dalai’s flight from Tibet, was crushed on the orders of the then-Party Secretary of Tibet, Hu Jintao, who would later go on to become China’s president and supreme leader. During the incident around 400 Tibetans are believed to have been killed. This occurred just months before the Tiananmen Square incident but did not receive a similar level of coverage due to a lack of media presence on the plateau at the time. Later that year, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “consistent resistance to the use of violence in his people’s struggle to regain their liberty”. The award, and the celebrity endorsements that have continued to flow (the Hollywood actor Richard Gere is the most notable), have helped to keep the Dalai’s drive for “genuine autonomy” within the PRC in the headlines, at least in the West. He abandoned hopes of Tibetan statehood in 1979, though the PRC government continues to paint him as a “splittist” seeking to create a separate country, and maintains that Tibet can exist within the PRC to the chagrin of some of his followers who would prefer a cleaner separation.
The Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most important spiritual leader who has the
responsibility of identifying the reincarnated Dalai Lama after his death, was arrested shortly after being confirmed as the current Dalai’s accepted choice in 1995. Aged just six years old at the time, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was considered to be the world’s youngest political prisoner by many in the Tibetan movement. Beijing subsequently appointed their own choice of Panchen Lama, Gyancain Norbu, a somewhat difficult position for the CCP to explain given its strictly atheist constitution. Beijing’s Panchen Lama has never been accepted by the Dalai Lama and the campaign for the release of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima continues. He is reported to still be alive and living in Beijing under virtual house arrest and with an assumed identity. This complicates any future succession the Dalai Lama. Under the system in place in Tibet for more than five centuries, the Panchen Lama has the responsibility to identify the reincarnated Dalai, something he clearly will not be able to do whilst under house arrest in Beijing. Any reincarnation identified by Beijing’s hand-picked Panchen is unlikely to garner support from grassroots Tibetans and will be probably be seen as simply a puppet of the Chinese. With this in mind, the current Dalai Lama – who, while in good health, is already in his late seventies – has suggested that his reincarnation might be found outside of Tibet.
In recent times, particularly since the death of Mao and the launch of the reform era in China, there has been a drive towards economic development in Tibet. This has included some of the aspects of Chinese rule that provoke controversy among Tibetans and pro-independence groups such as increased migration of Han Chinese. Most controversial has probably been the development of a railway line that now connects the Tibetan heartland to the rest of China, making it possible to take a train from Beijing all the way to Lhasa (an extension to Shigatse will open in 2014). While this railway represents a notable engineering feat – with passes as high as 5200 meters it is the highest railway in the world – concerns over damage to Tibet’s delicate ecosystem have not been allayed. Furthermore, the massive increase in internal tourism that has accompanied the launch of the train service threatens to erode Tibet’s unique culture even further, turning important historical and religious sites into Disneyland-esque tourist stops. While it is undeniable that this has brought economic benefits to the area, with an increase in GDP per capita of around 400% during the first decade of the 21st century, an astonishing growth rate even by China’s standards, accusations that this increase does not benefit the local population abound. The truth is difficult to ascertain as the Chinese government does not release relevant statistics and may not even keep them itself.
Over the last few years there has been an upsurge in political activity and protest in the TAR and the surrounding Tibetan areas. The most high profile of these was a series of protests in Lhasa in March 2008, marking the anniversary of the 1959 uprising but also timed to gain maximum international attention in the run up to the Beijing Olympics. Riots across Lhasa left hundreds wounded and a reported 18 dead, mostly Han Chinese. The response from the Chinese authorities was initially relatively low key, though Tibetan groups in exile later reported that upwards of 1500 people were arrested, with many allegations of torture being used to extract confessions. Since 2008 security in the TAR and surrounding areas has increased, making it substantially more difficult for foreigners to visit for tourism and almost impossible for journalists or academics to investigate some of the claims being made. In 2012, a series of self-immolations made the headlines both in China and abroad, leading to the Dalai Lama to appeal for Tibetans not to resort to such measures, though Beijing is resolute in its insistence that such acts are committed at his behest.
China’s Traditional and non-Traditional Strategic Considerations
Tibet provides a buffer region between the Chinese heartland and both India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers. While neither of these two countries poses an apparent and immediate threat to China (they are normally more focused on each other) this is a consideration that any strategist would make. In particular China’s relationship with India has been problematic and the two fought a border war in 1962, and have a continued dispute over territory. A sparsely populated region such as Tibet is an ideal way to keep tensions at a minimum between two such nations. Allowing any form of independence to Tibet risks creating a kind of power vacuum that might be filled with Indian influence. From the point of view of national self-defense, no government in the world would countenance this if it did not have to.
Access to water resources will be crucial to China in the coming decades as it seeks to continue its rapid economic growth and improvement in living standards. China has less than half the per capita average of available water resources and large areas of the country suffer from serious drought on an almost annual basis. For this reason, the large rivers that flow through China are essential to the survival and prosperity of its people. Several of China’s largest and most important rivers have their sources in Tibet, including both the Yangtse and the Yellow River which, combined, provide water supplies for more than 500 million people. The Tibetan Plateau is the greatest store of fresh water outside of the North and South Poles. Although not explicitly acknowledged by the Chinese government in any discussion of the question of sovereignty over Tibet, it is clear that this remains a significant consideration for policy-makers when addressing the issue. The control of these river sources is an important advantage that no country would give up willingly, particularly one that is in such a precarious position with regard to its water supplies.
The Psychological Importance of Tibet
Knowing China’s modern history is crucial for understanding its perspective on many contemporary issues. Moreover, comprehending the Chinese interpretation of that history is the key to unlocking much of the Chinese view of the so-called “Tibet issue”. China’s view of itself as a victim of various powerful nations that took advantage of it while it was fragile, and sought to keep it weak by breaking it up, is a powerful lesson both for those in government and for the citizens of modern China. This “century of humiliation” was (in the Chinese narrative) brought to an end by the Communist victory in the civil war in 1949 but the scars remained in the form of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. What is viewed in China as the rightful “return to the motherland” of the first two went some way towards redressing this and the continued desire to “reunify” with Taiwan demonstrates its continued role. Given that nearly all Chinese start from the view that Tibet is part of China, efforts to remove it from the unity of the PRC are viewed through this lens, and foreigners who involve themselves in the issue are ordinarily seen as trying, once more, to “split” China. This is a particularly potent storyline during a period of time in which China’s power is clearly rising and fears from outside are evident.
The View from the West
Tibet is frequently presented as an almost-mythical “land of snows”, populated by peace-loving religious people who live a simple (indeed, backward) life. The mythical Shangri-La is widely believed to be in Tibet (it has officially been designated as Zhongdian in northwest Yunnan but this is purely for tourism purposes). Tibetan people are portrayed as being deeply religious and almost entirely homogenous in their devout commitment to their religion and its leading figure, the Dalai Lama, as well as to the path of peace that he passionately advocates. In many ways Western depictions of Tibet and its people are simplistic, romantic, and occasionally patronizing.
When Tibet comes into the consciousness of Westerners it is often through the activities of high profile groups such as the International Campaign for Tibet, Tibet House and Free Tibet, all of which are based in major Western cities such as New York, Brussels and Berlin. Richard Gere’s role in several of these groups has raised the profile further and reached audiences that do not ordinarily pay a great deal of attention to international political issues. The involvement of celebrities has sometimes been frivolous; the British rock band, Oasis, was denied visas to play concerts in Beijing and Shanghai in 2009 because of the involvement of Noel Gallagher, the band’s guitarist and lyricist, in a ‘Free Tibet’ concert twelve years previously despite Gallagher’s own confession that he had no recollection of the event and no interest in the movement. Condemnation of human rights abuses in Tibet frequently comes from senior figures in the US political scene as well as from independent NGOs across the Western world, lending such reports an air of credibility despite the difficulty in corroborating many of the individual stories that constitute the reports. The explanations offered by these groups for China’s continued presence and interest in Tibet focus entirely on the economic benefit that China can gain from the region. Free Tibet, for example, cites only the vast reserves of minerals and the sources of much of China’s water supply as its motivation, making China’s motives appear entirely selfish and materially-based.
The most visible manifestation of this feeling in the West came in 2008 with the protests
surrounding the Olympic torch relay, particularly in European cities such as Paris and London. Large crowds of people displayed banners and waved Tibetan flags while some attempted to extinguish the Olympic flame. This was in direct response to the reports of riots in and around the Tibetan Autonomous Region in March of that year. The riots were misreported by some parts of the media in the West (this was not helped by the Chinese authorities preventing many outlets from entering the territory) and so it is not fully understood that many of those that died were Han Chinese, killed or burned alive by Tibetan rioters. These acts, if carried out in a US domestic context, would have been labelled as terrorism. This reporting caused anger among many Chinese who cannot understand where the Western bias comes from and consider it to be simply “anti-Chinese”.
No country in the international system recognizes Tibet as an independent nation and all who have diplomatic relations with Beijing acknowledge Chinese sovereignty over the region (indeed, even those few countries that maintain diplomatic relations with Taipei instead consider it to be part of the Republic of China). The last country to fall into line and recognize Tibet formally as part of the PRC was the UK, which did so in 2008, blaming a bureaucratic oversight for not having done so previously. Even the Dalai Lama himself no longer calls for independence, but for “genuine autonomy” within the People’s Republic.
The Future of Tibet
The Tibet question is one that has shown no sign of simply going away. The Dalai Lama’s successful internationalization of the issue has made it infinitely more complex for the Chinese leadership to handle but their legitimate and rational security concerns, combined with the crucial issue of maintaining territorial integrity of the Chinese nation, mean that the Dalai’s wish for genuine autonomy is unlikely to be granted. The Chinese government, despite its intermittent negotiations with representatives of the Dalai (the last of which took place in 2008 prior to the riots), shows no intention of shifting position and appears to be playing a waiting game, apparently believing that Tibetan resistance will subside after the death of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Having captured the Panchen Lama and appointed their own, they consider themselves to be in charge of the future of that particular institution. However, the Dalai himself has raised the possibility that a future reincarnation of himself may be born outside of Tibet (previously believed impossible) which might allow for a continuance of a government in exile that maintains some level of loyalty from the Tibetan people. Furthermore, he has already announced that he intends the position to be one only of religious leader and that the head of the Tibetan government should be democratically elected. Even without this, there is no guarantee that the Chinese waiting game will pay off in the long run; there is some evidence, particularly in the wake of the 2008 protests and the recent spate of self-immolations, that Tibetan youth is becoming radicalized in the face of an apparently immovable Chinese position, and without the calming influence of their spiritual leader it is possible that further violence might erupt.
China continues to focus on the economic development of Tibet, hoping that continued
economic prosperity will help Tibetans feel more integrated into China. China has invested heavily in Tibetan roads, housing, schools and electrical grids so that it may feel the benefits of being part of China. Yet proposals that carry with them the prospect of greater prosperity, such as the proposal to extend the railway from Lhasa further into Tibet, are also viewed with suspicion by some Tibetans who fear that they are just another tool for the Chinese military to ensure control over the region is maintained. To assuage these fears, China needs to pay more attention to the legitimate complaints of Tibetans who feel that their culture and history is being destroyed. This loss cannot be compensated with the kind of economic progress that has, so far, satiated other parts of Chinese society.
References
Women in China
/in History, Society /by chinafolioIntroduction
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, promoting greater equality between men and women has been a stated goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao Zedong famously proclaimed “In China, women hold up half the sky.” By this Mao appears to have meant that, if women were treated equally to men, China could better achieve its potential by taking advantage of the full complement of its population and workforce. The CCP thus supported the promotion of equal rights in all aspects of a woman’s life, at least at a rhetorical level.
Yet, even from its earliest days pre-dating the founding of the PRC, the support of Chinese women’s rights has been less about a woman’s potential to realize herself as an individual, and more about ways to use women’s emancipation as a tool to achieve national objectives. Before the revolution, the mainly male voices which advocated changing the traditionally subservient role of Chinese women did so in the belief that educated, more capable Chinese women would better be able to raise intelligent, morally sound sons. These sons could then build a strong China that could defend itself from foreign imperialism.
Despite CCP proclamations, a long historical tradition of male dominance and patriarchal authority has been deeply embedded in China’s culture since dynastic times. The CCP’s rise to power brought radical changes to Chinese society; but this traditional male dominance in both the work and social spheres has proven difficult to overturn, despite the real progress that Chinese women have made in obtaining the right to be educated, to work, to choose whom they marry, to divorce, to own and inherit property and to participate in political affairs. On the one hand, the profound changes that economic reform has brought to China have brought unprecedented opportunities to Chinese women; for instance, China has more self-made female billionaires than any other country. On the other hand, the government’s commitment to fight women’s inequality has taken a backseat to its desire to promote economic growth. As a result, in many ways, there has been a return to traditional gender expectations which have hampered the progress of Chinese women’s emancipation.
Women Under China’s Dynasties – Confucianism and Women
China’s deep roots of discrimination against women lie within its ancient Confucian traditions. The Confucian system, whose origins lie in the 551-479 BC period, encompassed the notion of “filial piety” – that women should obey men, citizens should obey their ruler, and the young should obey the elderly. For a woman, this meant that she was expected to be absolutely dutiful to her father, husband and sons.
Confucian tenets reinforced the moral justification of this strict regulation of gender. Confucians writers believed that the base elements of universe, yin and yang, were comparable to the state of marriage between woman and man. Woman was the yielding, passive, enduring, submissive feminine yin opposite the hard, aggressive, active masculine yang. By conceptualizing the differences between man and woman as yin and yang, Chinese intellectuals cast the differences, and the social hierarchy that resulted from them, as part of the universe’s natural order. In this way, men’s dominance of women was perceived to be not a social convention, but a natural law. Confucian intellectuals believed that, while yin and yang were complementary forces, they were not strictly equal. Just as the yang force dominated the yin, Confucian scholars believed that it was right for Chinese society to be patriarchal, and that a woman’s place was naturally in the home acting in support of her husband. This was expressed in Confucianism as “Threefold Obedience” – an unmarried women must obey her father; a wife must obey her husband; a widow must obey her adult sons.
Even those women who gained influence, such as the Confucian scholar Ban Zhao (45-116 AD) who worked as a royal advisor to the Empress and as a literary scholar, helped to uphold the status quo. In her influential Lessons for Women, Ban Zhao encouraged women to modestly yield to others and to put others first. Ban Zhao said that a woman had seven virtues to master: humility, resignation, subservience, self-abasement, obedience, cleanliness, and industry.
Marriage in Dynastic Times
Traditionally in China, a woman was betrothed at a young age. Her husband was selected by her parents, then aided by a matchmaker and by senior female relatives in the family. The goal was to find a husband that would benefit the daughter’s family either socially or economically. A woman often did not meet her husband until her wedding day. Once married, a woman was sent to live with her husband’s family. Traditionally, living with her husband meant that she gave up the protection and care of her natal family. This caused a profound sense of loss – not only the loss of the relationships that had previously been her whole world, but also the loss of her previous identity and status. Effectively, she became a possession of her husband and his family. From the time of her marriage onward, she would see her own family infrequently, if at all. Once in the husband’s house, she was to submit entirely first to her husband and his male relatives, then to her mother-in-law. She worshiped her husband’s family ancestors, rather than her own. The daughter’s contribution thus primarily benefited her husband’s family and not the family of her mother and father.
A husband could take multiple wives. These wives were arranged into a hierarchy, its order determined by factors such as order of the marriages, the birth of male sons, a woman’s beauty and how much the husband liked her. Men could divorce on grounds such as barrenness, jealousy, and talkativeness, but could only do so if there was a family to which the wife could return. There were no grounds on which a woman could divorce her husband. Men could also sell women as if they were property.
A Woman’s Life in Imperial China
Both as children and adults, women were restricted almost entirely to the domestic sphere, and were mainly uneducated. In books such as the Confucian classic, Book of Rites, the importance of physically separating the world of men and women was stressed to ensure that yin did not dominate yang. Even houses were to be divided into an inner and an outer section, with the women staying in the inner part. To the extent that women were educated, their learning was for the sole purpose of helping them better educate their sons.
Women were completely dependent on men due to their lack of property and inheritance rights and to their inability to earn an income. This dependence on men created an environment where wife-beating and female infanticide was often overlooked and where a woman who bore daughters was not valued, as only men stayed in the natal family. This preference for boys was reinforced by Confucius’ teachings. Confucius’ follower, Menicus, said that the worst of the unfilial acts was to fail to have boys to continue the line of one’s ancestors.
That said, a woman in pre-modern China did have some influence, although that influence was not hers by right but delegated to her by men and circumstance. For example, besides domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning and childcare, a woman might contribute to household income by working at jobs such as spinning cloth, shucking oysters and processing tea which created real earnings that could gain her favor within the family. Moreover, her role in arranging marriages was important in building alliances that could strengthen the family fortunes. As she bore sons, a woman’s position within the family rose. She became even more powerful when she had a daughter-in-law under her control. She became most powerful in old age, particularly if she had both sons and daughter-in-laws, since she was then respected both as a producer of men and as an elder. At the imperial court, when a young emperor inherited the throne, his mother, as Empress Dowager, could exert power on his behalf until he came of age, or support him behind the scenes until he grew old enough to rebuff her influence. Chinese men nevertheless regarded a woman in power as unnatural and associated her with intrigue, manipulation, and selfishness.
The isolation a woman could feel in her husband’s home was offset in some regions by the practice of taking “sworn sisters”. In Hunan, for example, women could organize themselves into groups of seven friends -– sworn sisters -– who would then provide friendship and comfort to each other throughout their lives. The sworn sisters often developed a secret language and system of writing which enabled them to communicate safely, even when expressing discontent with their circumstances.
Foot Binding
An important symbol of a woman’s subservience was the practice of foot-binding which endured for over a thousand years. Foot-binding began in the tenth century when an emperor decreed small feet to be a most desirable aesthetic of female beauty. The custom began first with the Chinese gentry and then spread to the general population as families jockeyed to ensure that their daughters married into a family of higher class. In foot-binding, at the age of five or six, a girl would have her toes forcibly bent under the soles of her feet and bound permanently by tight cloth. Eventually the arch of the foot would break, and the tight cloth stopped the feet from growing. The ideal was to create a foot approximately 3 to 4 inches (around 8 to 10 centimeters) long by the time the girl became a woman. The deformed feet caused a woman to walk in a tentative, painful gait that Chinese men found alluring; the deformed feet were also considered to be very erotic. The impaired movement of the bound feet helped restrict a woman to her home which in turn increased her dependence on her husband.
Lisa See, in her novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, imagines poignantly what it must have been like emotionally for women trying to make their life in such a circumscribed and difficult environment:
“We women are expected to love our children as soon as they leave our bodies, but who among us has not felt disappointment at the sight of a daughter or felt the dark gloom that settles upon the mind even when holding her precious son, if he does nothing but cry and make our mother-in-law look at you as though your milk were sour? We may love our daughters with all our hearts, but we must train them through pain. We love our sons most of all, but we can never be a part of their world, the outer realm of men. We are expected to love our husbands from the day of Contracting a Kin, but we will not see their faces for another six years. We are told to love our in-laws, but we entered those families as strangers, as the lowest person in the household, just one step on the ladder above the servant. We are ordered to love and honor our husband’s ancestors, so we perform the proper duties, even if our hearts quietly call out gratitude to our natal ancestors. We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches of the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another. As happy as we are in our natal families, we all know that parting is inevitable. So, we love our families, but we understand that this love will end in the sadness of departure. All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as women in my country know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality.”
Encounters with the West Expose 19th Century China to New Ideas on Women
As the West began to encroach on China in the nineteenth century Chinese leaders and intellectuals began to search for ways to modernize and strengthen China so that it could free itself from encroachment by foreign powers. A woman’s role in society was increasingly scrutinized by intellectuals, especially those who had been exposed to western ideas. Some of these new ideas came from western missionaries working in China. The Christian missionaries taught that the way a society treated its women was indicative of its level of civilized development. Following from this idea, Chinese reformers began to think of the status of Chinese women as symbolic of all that was wrong with the country. They began to argue that improving the lot of women would be one road towards modernizing China. Educated and capable women could better run households and could better raise intelligent, morally-sound sons. These sons could then undertake the task of building a new China. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, foot binding began to be opposed as an example of China’s backward thinking and it was banned by the Republican government in 1912, although it was not fully wiped out until the 1949 Communists Revolution. It was also banned in Taiwan by the Japanese occupying administration in 1915. Most intellectuals supporting women’s emancipation at this time were men, although there were some exceptions. In 1904, for instance, women’s advocate Qiu Jin escaped from her marriage to a wealthy husband and took flight to Japan where she called on Chinese women to fight against their subservient status. Qiu Jin believed that Chinese women led a life tantamount to slavery and believed that women should be given a chance to work outside the home. With their own money, women could break free from their dependence on men and their families.
May 4th Feminist Thinkers
Re-evaluating a woman’s role in society took on renewed momentum during the May 4th Movement of 1919 in which student protests led to a larger examination of China’s society and its government. Known as the May Fourth Feminism Movement, its discourse continued to be driven by male Chinese nationalism. The movement was less about a woman’s potential to realize herself as an individual, and more about ways to change China’s society to save China from western and Japanese Imperialism. That said, during the May 4th Movement, some urban women marched with men in organized political demonstrations and, to a limited extent, engaged in public affairs.
By contrast, engagement with Western scientific discourse persuaded many Chinese male intellectuals to believe in a biological determinist approach of the understanding of gender. While not necessarily a re-play of the theories of yin and yang, biological determinism stated that gender roles were the result of biological differences between men and women. Gender hierarchy was thus natural: since women bore children, they should have the predominant responsibility for housework and the care of family members. This biological determinist understanding was reflected in attitudes and policies adopted both in the Mao and post-Mao eras.
The 1949 Communist Revolution and Marxist Theory on Women
At first, the nascent women’s movement was restricted to the cities. As a result, there began to be a growing discrepancy between how women lived in urban and in rural environments where traditional practices still held sway. It took the 1949 Communist Revolution to begin to change the lives of China’s hundreds of millions of rural women. Communism came to China with the promise of equality, not only between rich and poor and between noble and common, but also between men and women. By promoting policies such as marriage reform, the CCP hoped to gain support from rural women still trapped in traditional lifestyles. The CCP allowed women to join the Party, and by 1925, it had 100 registered women members. Some women even started serving in the People’s Liberation Army.
The emancipation of women was supported by Marxist theory. To Marxists, women were one of the classes exploited by capitalist societies. The Marxists believed that social relations and social structures were determined to a significant degree by economic institutions such as farms and factories. To achieve equality for women, Marxists argued that society must first assume ownership of the means of production by establishing a command economy with nationalized industry. The Marxists therefore took a collectivist approach to women’s emancipation where women’s liberation depended upon liberation for all. The priority for men and women was thus to work together to achieve revolution. In 1949, when Mao Zedong took power, he reconfirmed the CCP’s commitment to women’s equality by his now famous quote, “in China, women hold up half the sky.” As women made up half of China’s population, building a great socialist society would be facilitated if women were liberated to engage in productive activity.
The 1950 Marriage Law
Once in power, the CCP passed the Marriage Reform Law in 1950. Prostitution, arranged marriage, child marriage, polygamy and the use of concubines were outlawed. Chinese could marry not just for obligation but also for love. It became easier to divorce. Indeed, between 1950 and 1953, divorce rates spiked as women took advantage of the law to dissolve loveless “feudal marriages”. Contemporaneously, a huge effort was made to move women into the workforce. Many women were relocated from the countryside into the cities where they worked as textile laborers. Female literacy was promoted, and 16 million women learned to read between 1950 and 1957.
By 1953, however, the Marriage Law began to experience growing and widespread opposition from men. Between 1953 and 1958, the CCP began to backtrack on its promotion of women’s equality. Instead, collective stability was prioritized. Propaganda campaigns were launched to promote the concepts of the socialist housewife and the model mother. These campaigns re-enforced the importance of domestic duties. It became more difficult to divorce and the CCP stepped up its efforts to keep couples together.
Collectivization, The Great Leap Forward and the All-China Women’s Federation
In 1958, Mao launched agricultural collectivization in preparation for the industrial push known as the Great Leap Forward; the goal of the Great Leap Forward was to have China catch up to western levels of agricultural and steel production in five years. Agricultural collectivization grouped peasants in large communes where they lived and worked together. Collectivization changed women’s lives radically. Housework was socialized and communal dining halls fed families; childcare became a collective effort, as did washing and sewing. This freed women to move into the fields while men worked on large-scale irrigation works, industrial projects, steel making and mining.
Established in 1949, the All-China Women’s Federation (“ACWF”) was a mass organization whose main functions were to help implement CCP policy through the mobilization of women and to promote gender equality. For many in the ACWF, the Great Leap Forward represented an unprecedented opportunity to increase women’s liberation as it provided women with real work outside the home. Mao believed that China’s ability to leap forward in steel and agricultural production was dependent on its ability to move women into the fields so that men could be freed up to engage in other work.
However, the reality of CCP policies for women during the Great Leap Forward differed from the vision of women’s liberation that the CCP promised women if they were willing to enter the workforce. Despite socialized housework, women continued to be responsible for all remaining domestic work, regardless of how many hours they worked outside the home. For instance, women in the 1950s and 1960s made their family’s clothes by hand, including spinning yarn and weaving cloth. After a long day in the fields, women often spent many hours at night making clothes and doing other work on behalf of their families. This additional contribution to the family household was not valued through the allocation of work points — the system of compensation on the communes. This continued the persistent undervaluing of women’s contributions and efforts by men.
Additionally, many men did not like seeing women trained in what they considered male skills or receiving a higher level of pay. Men thus put pressure on the CCP to preserve their dominant status. As a result, not only were men given the jobs which paid the highest work points, but even when men and women performed the same work, men mostly received more work points than women. Moreover, work done by all members of the family was usually tallied as a whole. Its value was then distributed to the male head of the household at the end of each work period. Rural women thus were not able to exercise any direct control over the incomes they earned.
In the cities, men were overwhelmingly assigned to technical jobs and women to non-technical, auxiliary, and service jobs regardless of their educational levels. This gendered employment practice helped to re-establish women’s subordinate position. The difference in work opportunities was often justified by citing the differences in men and women’s biology; a woman’s weak physique was better suited to light, female-oriented work. Women were also less likely to be given work in large state-run enterprises where health, pension and housing benefits were provided. Rather, they were given jobs in the lower paying community and neighborhood-run industries that offered few benefits. Unlike rural communes, however, urban women were able to collect their own wages which did give them a greater voice in the family’s decision-making.
Nevertheless, inside the urban family the traditional patriarchal patterns persisted. Men could more easily secure housing accommodation from their work units. Single men slept in dormitories while women remained with their families until they were married. These housing policies continued the practice of men providing housing in marriage, reinforcing the idea of female dependency, and making marriage materially necessary for women. It also made women vulnerable if marital problems arose. Additionally, regardless of the hours worked outside the home, like their rural counterparts, urban women were still responsible for most of the domestic work and family care.
As the hours that women worked in and outside of the house sharply increased, the health of women – particularly rural women – began to suffer due to overwork and malnutrition, especially as the Great Leap Forward policies pushed much of the country into famine conditions. There was enormous pressure on women to overcome the physical limitations of their bodies through the sheer force of their wills. Women became liberated not by being valued in their own right, but by emulating men and by denying the realities of their own physicality. Miscarriages and prolapsed uteruses became common as women were encouraged to carry out strenuous and difficult work regardless of pregnancy or recent birth. Despite these hardships, however, many women have looked back on the Great Leap Forward years as ones in which they were freed from the isolation of the home when they could laugh and communicate all day in a shared workspace.
After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the CCP retrenched on all fronts. As steel making efforts subsided with the failure of the backyard furnaces and as new irrigation works were completed or abandoned, women were forced back into domestic roles to make room for the men in the fields. Women’s new-found emancipation was to be once again sacrificed for the good of the country.
The Cultural Revolution
The 1966-1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a social-political movement launched by Mao Zedong. Its objective was to deepen the Chinese Communist Revolution by removing bourgeois elements that were subverting Chinese society with the goal of restoring capitalism. Mao argued that these revisionist elements needed to be removed through violent struggle. He called on China’s youth to form Red Guard troops to stop the return of capitalist tendencies. In the violence that followed, millions were persecuted — suffering public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and the seizure of their property. Millennia old historical relics and artifacts were destroyed, and education was largely suspended.
For women, the Cultural Revolution brought them once again out of their homes to engage in production and politics. Women were told to prioritize their responsibilities to the collective over their responsibilities to the family. In 1970s, an anti-Confucius Campaign attacked the traditional family structure and purported to explore the causes of women’s subordination. During the Cultural Revolution, women were encouraged to engage in violence to shed submissiveness and their gentleness, qualities that Mao said were bourgeois. It was not uncommon for women to interrogate and then physically beat up “bad elements”. Women were also encouraged to enter politics, and by 1975, 24% of the National People’s Congress members were women.
Yet, as it had been in the past, the CCP’s support of women’s emancipation during the Cultural Revolution was used primarily for the purpose of advancing Communist Revolution as opposed to rectifying inequality itself. Cultural Revolution slogans such as “Now the times have changed. Men and women are the same” were cried out, however, any references to the special problems of women were denounced as bourgeois. Once again, women dressed like boys, cut their hair short and scrubbed their faces of makeup. Women were attacked if they looked too feminine, as femininity was deemed a backward element. The art, literature, films, operas, and ballets produced during the Cultural Revolution featured androgynous women proletariat heroes – farmers, workers, militant fighters, and political activists all committed to the collective cause. After having been discouraged from divorcing since 1953, women again initiated divorces in record numbers as they, and at times their husbands, tried to distance themselves from their spouses when they got into political trouble.
However, despite all the rhetoric, the chaos of Cultural Revolution prevented the implementation of any meaningful women’s liberation policies. For instance, women sent down to the country still usually only received half the work points of men. As China began to recover from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution which formally ended after the death of Mao, women once again were encouraged to take up traditional roles. The numbers of women participating in politics gradually began to drop and divorce was again frowned upon. That women have repeatedly been asked to give up newfound freedoms for the good of the nation has served to devalue women’s emancipation as a real goal.
The One Child Policy
In the early years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao considered a large population to be a positive asset, both as an aid in economic development and a resource in national security. As a result, the majority of China’s population continued the tradition of seeking to have as many sons as possible and China’s population almost doubled in less than thirty years, from just over 550 million in 1950, to just over 1 billion in 1982. In 1970, concerns regarding China’s exploding population caused Beijing to implement a voluntary birth control system supported by campaigns promoting later marriages, longer birth intervals, and fewer children; contraceptive was made widely available. As a result, China’s total fertility rate plummeted from 5.8 births per woman in 1970 to 2.7 in 1978. In September 1980, in order to reduce the birth rate further, the so-called “one-child policy” was introduced, which limited couples to having only one child in most cases.
For women, the one child policy removed the traditional pressure that they felt to keep having children to produce sufficient sons. As a result, the policy helped reduce the burden of housework that many children generated. This in term provided women with a greater bandwidth to seek work outside the home. The one-child policy has also meant that China’s tradition of equating sex with procreation shifted. While promoting family planning, the government also began distributing literature about the pleasurable aspects of marital intercourse.
That said, the one-child policy demonstrated in stark relief the continued Chinese preference for boys. Incidents of female infanticide and the abortion of female fetuses rose significantly after the implementation of the policy. The 2010 census suggested that there are about 118 males births for every 100 female births in China. By 2020, there will be 24 u according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. One ironic consequence of the policy might be the increased value of Chinese women. Female scarcity means that men have had to compete more aggressively in order to obtain a wife. Indeed, the government is beginning to acknowledge the imbalance between the sexes as a real social problem and have launched campaigns to encourage parents to value and raise daughters. These campaigns reflect the government’s fear that a future surplus of unmarried males could result in social unrest. In some areas, trafficking of women from less developed parts of Asia such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia, has started to fill some of the demand for brides.
Women and Market Opening
In December 1978, the CCP led by Deng Xiaoping began a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist market principles into the Chinese command-driven economy. The first stage included the de-collectivization of agriculture, the gradual shift away from communal living, the freedom of Chinese households to start up small-scale businesses, the freedom to buy and sell goods on their own behalf, and the opening up of the country to foreign investment. The second stage of reform, which took place during the late 1980s and 1990s, saw the privatization of many state-owned industries, the lifting of price controls, and the reduction of protectionist policies and regulations.
Market opening has, in some respects, had a negative effect on the fight for women’s equality in China. The government’s commitment to fight women’s inequality has taken a backseat to its desire to promote economic growth. This retreat from its promotion of women’s emancipation has helped encourage a return to more traditional gender expectations. The androgyny of the Cultural Revolution gave rise once again to images of women who were sweet, beautiful, and feminine. There has been a return to themes such as that of women as a gentle companion awaiting the guidance and protection of her successful husband. The Chinese male was to create China’s economic success and woman’s primary job was to support him. Yet as market opening has progressed, there has begun to be a growing number of ideals competing to define the perfect woman. Contemporary China now sees traditional culture, the legacy of Maoist socialism and global capitalism contending with each other to influence the new norms of Chinese society.
In rural areas, the de-collectivization of agriculture and the dismantling of communes initially returned women to the house where she once again took up traditional roles within the household. Women in urban areas have also been displaced from the work sphere. From the 1980s onwards, the returned youth from the countryside and privatization of state-owned industry has meant that there has been tremendous pressure on women to return home to free up work for their male counterparts. As the privatization of state-owned enterprises gained increasing speed throughout the 1990s, women were the hardest hit with the job losses; indeed, 62.8% of the people laid off were women.The non-technical, auxiliary and service departments in which women overwhelmingly worked were some of first to be dismantled when state owned enterprises were privatized. Women over 40 were made to retire while their male counterparts could continue to work until 50. Once China’s economy began to take-off after reforms were in place, men were re-hired in significant larger numbers compared with women.
Part of the reason that men fared better during the privatization of urban businesses was that they had better business connections or guanxi. One reason for this was that women were hampered by their domestic responsibilities. The extra demands that managing the household required meant that women had less time to develop the business network needed to help secure their employment. Those women who did try to develop their networks were often condemned as being “loose” or as being women who had slept their way to the top. Indeed, men in senior positions often used their status to sexually harass women, and, therefore, women frequently avoided men to evade being placed in compromised positions. Additionally, as women had the worst jobs, it meant that those connections they did succeed in making were often less powerful than those of their male counterparts. This created a self- perpetuating cycle where low-skilled work led to less powerful connections which meant they had less chance to receive promotion.
Moreover, as the implementation of a market reform progressed, Chinese companies began having an increasing need for skilled and well-educated workers. Women were again disadvantaged as they had poorer access to schooling, especially at the university level. When assessment tests began to be used in the 1980s to qualify workers for jobs and promotion, women were again in a less favorable position as their significant domestic responsibilities meant that they had less time to revise for examinations.
Party officials also preferred to lay off women because when they lost their jobs, they went home quietly where men sometimes took to the streets in protest. Party officials were heavily invested in preventing social unrest in the cities. Once women lost their jobs, they had no recourse other than to go back to relying on their families for survival.
Market reforms initially unleashed a massive exodus of rural male migrants who went to the cities in search of work, again opening a place for women to move into the fields. A 2000 census showed that 69% of all women work in farming compared with 61% of men. That said, eventually some young unmarried women joined the migrant stream, although in lesser numbers and with greater risk to their reputations and their safety. While often trapped in the lowest paying jobs with few protections, market opening has allowed women an opportunity to earn their own wages.
Trends
Chinese women have made great strides since Dynastic Times. Specifically, life for women in China today has vastly improved since the Communists took power in 1949. Above all, Chinese women are better educated, have more work and political opportunities, and by and large, are free to marry and divorce as they choose. In addition, China’s rapid economic growth has meant that washing machines, rice cookers and microwaves and other time-savings conveniences have transformed Chinese domestic life and are even widely available now in China’s less-developed provinces. The One Child Policy has also freed women from the need to have endless children. This trend toward greater personal and economic autonomy for women will continue in the coming decades. Indeed, China’s economic reform has brought unprecedented opportunities to Chinese women; China today, for instance, has more self-made female billionaires than any other country.
As a counter trend, Chinese women continue to face real limitations and inequalities. A long tradition of patriarchal authority has been deeply embedded in China’s culture since dynastic times. This male dominance continues to influence Chinese society today. A 1990’s All-China Women’s Federation survey found, for instance, that a third of both male and female Chinese respondents considered men more inherently “able” than women; and more than half agreed that a woman’s place is at home caring for her family. Most Chinese women continue to take full responsibility for the home, children, and family elders, regardless of the hours that they work or the income they earn.
This traditional patriarchal influence has flourished given the recent absence of CCP leadership on gender inequality. Since market opening, the government’s fight for women has taken a backseat to its efforts to promote economic growth. Today, women’s emancipation remains a secondary priority.
As a result, women struggle to take advantage of modern developments in employment, education, and politics, while trying to balance continuing traditional expectations about their appropriate and proper role in family and society. This continued battle with traditionalism has created a situation in which women from all walks of life can find themselves limited in what they can achieve, despite a rise in college degrees, incomes, and political influence.
References
Hydro-Power and Hydro-Hegemony: China’s Prolific Dam-Building
/in Economics /by ChinaFolioThe History of Hydro-Power in China
Before 1949, only 22 large dams existed in China. A dam study by Oregon State University concluded that since that time, the People’s Republic of China has undergone four waves of dam construction. Socialist agricultural policy between 1949 and 1960 encouraged the construction of many small and medium-sized irrigation dams. In particular, the 1958-1960 Great Leap Forward policy advocated that each of China’s 1,465 counties build at least one water conservation dam. As a result, tens of thousands of dams were built in China, mainly by peasant-led teams with limited equipment, materials, and training. During the period from 1968 to 1980, the pace of dam construction increased. Water projects grew in size and complexity and were progressively constructed for hydropower and flood control. While fewer dams were built between 1980 and 2000, those that were constructed were larger in scale and more technically difficult. The 1978 market reforms allowed China to import foreign technology, know-how and funding, enabling the building of dams that previously had been too difficult and expensive to undertake.
Government measures since 2003 have led to a decentralization of hydropower production. The State Power Corporation was disbanded, its assets were distributed and development rights on China’s main rivers were shared out. While the central government has a majority of stock in each of the companies into which the State Power Corporation was split, in general, the enterprises act quite independently. The “corporatization” of China’s hydropower sector has created a significant increase in domestic and overseas dam building as companies compete to secure existing assets and to develop new hydro-projects.
Today, China runs about half the world’s approximately 45,000 dams that are larger than 15 m in height. In total, the number of dams in China is estimated to exceed 85,000. In 2009, China’s installed hydropower was calculated to be approximately 200,000 MW, representing about 17% of China’s total electricity power. According to recent reports, of the 37 GW hydro-power capacity added worldwide in 2014, a full 22 GW, nearly 60%, was added in China alone, dwarfing developments in other nations (the five largest contributors behind China added a combined 8.7 GW). This has brought China’s hydropower capacity up to 27% of the world total. China continues to set high goals for itself, with China’s National Energy Agency planning to increase China’s hydropower capacity to approximately 380,000 MW by 2020. Huge hydropower cascades have been proposed and are being constructed on some of China’s remaining pristine river basin systems including the Lancang, (upper Mekong), the Nu (Salween) and upstream of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. It is estimated that China has relocated a total of almost 23 million citizens since 1949 to make way for its water projects.
The Three Gorges Dam
Large dams are enormous interventions into highly complex ecosystems. Their impact can be felt thousands of kilometers away and often occur many years after construction has been completed. It is impossible to anticipate and mitigate all the social and environmental impacts that such projects can cause. The Three Gorges Dam provides a good indication of the challenges that such large dams pose.
Originally conceived by Chairman Mao and supported by Zhou Enlai, the Three Gorges Dam, and its related infrastructure, is the largest water project in the world. It stretches approximately 2km across the Yangtze River, which flows 6,418 km eastward from the Tibetan glaciers through China’s southwest, central, and eastern regions before eventually emptying in the East China Sea at Shanghai. The Three Gorges Dam reaches nearly 200m in height and has created a reservoir 600km long with a storage capacity approaching 40 billion m³. Three Gorges generates approximately 22,000 MW of electricity, equivalent to the burning of 50 million tons of coal annually, compared with Hoover Dam, for instance, that has an installed capacity of only 2080 MW. It was built at an estimated cost of $27 billion, although if hidden costs are taken into account, some appraise the dam’s actual cost to be in excess of $60 billion. Hidden costs include losses incurred as a result of the reduction in commercial fishery production, the cost of landslides caused by frequent fluctuations in water levels and the further population resettlement that these landslides are likely to require, the costs of water pollution as raw sewage and fertilizer run-off collect in the Three Gorges Reservoir instead of being flushed downstream, the shrinking of the Yangtze river estuary, and the weakening of downstream dikes caused by the dam’s faster than anticipated water discharge. Besides generating emission-free energy, the Three Gorges Dam was built to control flooding, to improve water resource utilization and river navigation. Access to the major port of Chongqing, for instance, which receives 90% of its goods by water, has improved markedly even though it is located more than 600 km upstream of the dam. The Three Gorges’ lock system is one of the world’s largest and has also helped to increase the amount of cargo able to move into the river’s upper reaches.
Despite these real benefits, the Three Gorges Dam has also generated significant problems. Most important of these has been the disruption of the Yangtze’s ecosystem. When the river flowed naturally, it helped to cleanse industrial pollution. It also traditionally transported large sediment loads from the river’s upper reaches to the East China Sea. The Three Gorges Dam has significantly decreased downstream sediment transport, changing the river’s chemical balance, temperature, and flow. This in turn is impacting fish habitats. In addition to changing the river’s ecological characteristics, the dam is also blocking fish migration, impacting access to spawning grounds; it also may have contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin. Between 2003 and 2005, annual fish harvests from below the dam were 50% to 70% below previous baselines; larva and eggs levels have dropped off even more sharply. Although pollution and other factors were already causing a reduction in fish stocks before the dam was constructed, the Three Gorges accelerated the trend.
The river’s reduced silt load has also deprived downstream agricultural land and fisheries of nutrients. Additionally, because less silt is reaching the river’s mouth, approximately 980 acres of coastal wetlands are disappearing each year. This has allowed sea water to intrude further upriver, affecting coastal agricultural and drinking water. Silt buildup within the reservoir is also impacting its overall storage capacity, causing higher volumes of water to be released from the dam, stressing downstream levees.
Landslides around the Three Gorges Reservoir have also been a greater problem than was first expected. The fluctuating water levels of reservoir have weakened hundreds of miles of its slopes, triggering massive mudslides. Controlling this erosion is projected to require a further investment of $10 billion or more. In some cases, landslides have produced massive waves as high as 50 meters, causing even more damage to the reservoir’s edges.
Every large dam built in China has led to the resettlement of local people because of China’s high population density along its major rivers. Over 1.2 million people have already been resettled as a result of the Three Gorge’s construction. Originally, residents were to be shifted to higher ground nearby, given new homes and new jobs. Yet, greater than anticipated erosion and landslides made large uphill areas unsuitable for building, so the displaced were eventually resettled to 11 different provinces. In late 2007, it was announced that another 4 million people – a number equivalent to the entire population of Scotland are likely to be relocated from the Three Gorges Reservoir area in the next 10 to 15 years. Officials dispute that these are related to the reservoir’s landslides and ecological degradation, arguing instead that they are part of the national experiment to ease regional overpopulation and to provide greater opportunities for industrial development.
Many scholars are now finding that people displaced due to construction projects face the long-term risk of continued food insecurity, lack of access to good arable land, joblessness, and social marginalization. Displaced women are often more severely affected than men. Taking farmland from the host population to give to the resettled groups has also often caused tensions and conflict between the two groups. Studies indicate that early resettlement efforts at the Three Gorges have indeed led to diminished living standards for many of the displaced. Local government corruption has aggravated resettlement challenges as 12% of the resettlement funds were estimated to be embezzled; hundreds of local officials have now been imprisoned.
In addition to the social costs, many now believe that large dam reservoirs can also cause seismic events as their weight can place unsustainable pressure on local faults. The Three Gorges Dam sits on two major fault lines, and scientists have acknowledged that seismic activity has increased slightly since the reservoir first started impounding water. Earthquakes can also damage a dam’s structure. Many of the new hydro-projects outlined in 12th Five-Year Plan are to be constructed in China’s mountainous southwestern region, which is crossed by numerous active fault lines. The tectonic movement in the three parallel Rivers area of the Nu, Upper Mekong and Upper Yangtze is one of the strongest in the world, for instance, yet China is planning to erect a cascade of dams in these areas. Research in the Chinese Journal of Geology and Seismology has recommended that further study be undertaken to determine the role that dam reservoirs play in triggering quake activity.
Environmental Movement Impacts Hydro-Power in China
The Chinese government has tried to address some of the problems associated with dams by improving the legislation which regulates the industry. While not always enforced, recent legislation has required more stringent procedures for environmental and social impacts assessment. A September 2003 law, for example, obliges companies planning projects with significant environmental impacts to conduct environmental impact assessments, and to have the assessments approved by the appropriate Environmental Bureau or the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Additionally, public participation in environmental impact assessment is increasingly encouraged. 2008 legislation has laid-out basic instructions on methods for public disclosure of environmental impact assessments, when to involve the public in the environmental impact assessment process, and who should be included in public participation. Indeed, in 2004 for instance, criticism from environmentalists, the public and the international media at least temporarily halted the development of a 13-dam cascade planned for the Nu River in Yunnan province, one of China’s last free flowing rivers. Laws passed in 2006 made efforts to better protect those displaced by dam construction by setting out appropriate land compensation, requiring that displaced people be provided with a level of livelihood similar to or greater than that which they had prior to the dam being built, and that resettlement plans must include economic development strategies as opposed to simply providing one-off monetary compensation.
Damming of Trans-boundary Rivers – Hydro-Hegemony
Many of China’s new planned hydro-engineering projects are on trans-boundary rivers, including the Mekong, Salween or Nu, Brahmaputra, and Amur. On the Brahmaputra River, for instance, a series of five dams is planned to be built close to disputed territory between China and India which will impact India and Bangladesh downstream, causing concern that China may divert the Brahmaputra’s water for its own needs. Many of the planned dams on trans-boundary rivers are being designed as cascades – one dam after another – or as mega-dams – with walls of 100 meters or higher-both of which have a greater impact on a river’s ecology. One of the new dams approved for the Brahmaputra, for instance, is to be twice the size of the Three Gorges Dam and situated almost on the contested border with India. Overall, about a third of China’s geography is within an international river basin, and China shares 18 rivers with its neighbors, many of which originate in China. Indeed, the Autonomous Province of Tibet provides China with access to some of the best untapped hydropower in the world as does its Yunnan province, often termed China’s hydro-power storehouse. China is acting as “hydro-hegemon” regarding its shared rivers as it is damming without the support and partnership of its neighbors, and at times in outright opposition to their wishes. But it is not just the unilateralism of its damming on international headwaters that upsets downstream countries; it is also the opacity around which it builds and runs its dams. China does not readily share environmental or technical information with its neighbors when building the dams nor, many feel, does it give real weight in its decision making as to how its dams will impact river ecology downstream. Indeed, many of China’s international river dams will provide it with the physical ability to change the hydrogeology of the rivers it is damming, thus creating new hydro-strategic and hydro-political realities, and thus allowing it to dictate the status quo of water allocation. By controlling large parts of Asia’s water tap, in an area where per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average, China is acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbors.
Yet, China considers developing large-scale hydropower to be critical to meeting its future energy needs and thus its national security. The Chinese government has thus worked to keep these resources under its control, and has been unwilling to sign any comprehensive water sharing agreement with downstream riparian nations or to join any river basin associations such as the Mekong River Commission, which was established in 1995 “to promote and coordinate sustainable management and development of water and related resources for the countries’ mutual benefit and the people’s well-being.” It is also one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Watercourses which lays down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses. Additionally, China has been reticent to share information on water levels and flows with its downstream neighbors once its dams are operational. China is now impounding water for the large reservoir behind the Xiaowan dam on the upper Mekong, for instance, which some believe exacerbated 2010 drought conditions downstream. Only after the drought became severe, and China came under significant pressure from the Mekong River Commission, did it start to provide information on daily water flows from its dam cascade.
China has tried to offset complaints and the potential creation of anti-Chinese alliances by its downstream neighbors by using trade and development incentives – developing the Southeast Asian electricity grid and building sewage and road infrastructure in Cambodia as examples – to weaken their ability to challenge China’s dam-building activities, it also engages in a public discourse that not only advocates the importance of hydropower to its national security but emphasizes exclusively the benefits of the dams without considering how they will disrupt downstream ecosystems and water access. Specifically, it talks about flood control, reduction of Chinese CO2 emissions, and the benefits of improved navigation and water flow during the dry season. In many cases, it is also helping to fund and construct dams downriver in places such as Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Their own independent construction of dams with Chinese financing has weakened downstream riparian neighbors’ ability to protest the ecological destruction that China’s upstream dams are causing.
The Lancang Cascade
The Lancang Cascade is an example of China’s dam building on trans-boundary water. In total, China has built eleven dams on Upper Mekong (called Lancang in China). The Mekong River flows 4,800 km from the Tibetan plateau, across China’s Yunnan province, through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, before pouring into the South China Sea. The Lancang comprises only 16% of the Mekong’s total discharge as measured in the delta, yet it accounts for 100% of the flow at the Laos border, 45% of Cambodia’s average flow in the dry season, and originates 50% of the river’s total sediment. The upper basin is characterized by deep gorges, with more than 80% of the drop in elevation occurring in Yunnan province. Indeed, Yunnan and Laos have the greatest hydropower potential in the basin. The lower basin is characterized by plains and deltas which support large-scale irrigation, fishing, and transportation. The Mekong is vital to the food, water supplies and transportation of over 70 million inhabitants in the region. An estimated 8 out of 10 people within the basin depend on the Mekong River for subsistence, either in terms of fish catch or agriculture, with at least 50% of Cambodia’s animal protein consumption coming from Mekong fish and the Mekong Delta supplying waters for more than 50% of the agricultural component of Vietnam’s GDP.
The Lancang cascade is part of China’s “Develop the West” program. Initial plans for the Lancang cascade were developed in the 1980s, before Yunnan opened to foreign trade, and when China’s political relations with its lower Mekong neighbors were not as robust as they are today. China espouses that the Lancang cascade will benefit its lower riparian neighbors by providing flood control in the wet season, increasing water supply in the dry season, improving irrigation and navigation, and reducing overall carbon emissions.
Yet, as seen with the Three Gorges Dam, large hydro-power projects change the hydrology of a river. Of key concern for the Mekong is whether the dams will negatively impact the hydrological dynamics of the Mekong’s “flood pulse” resulting from the river’s seasonal flooding triggered by the annual monsoons. Diminishing the flood pulse could result in declines in biodiversity and volumes of fisheries by altering spawning and migration cues could affect its transfer of nutrients and could limit the drift of eggs larvae and juveniles to the floodplain habitats. It could also impact rice harvests as 80% of rice production in the lower basin depends on water, silt, and nutrients from Mekong flooding. It might also cause increased salinization as seasonal flooding flushes delta areas, constraining sea water intrusion. The countries downstream are also concerned that the effective powering of their own dams will be dependent on China to discharge enough water. Impacts to water levels and fisheries have already been recorded in the lower Mekong basin which is one of the world’s biggest sources of fish. Indeed, as water levels reached 50-year lows in 2010 in the Mekong River Basin, China’s dam building along the upper Mekong was blamed as a significant contributor to the drought.
More recently, a 2020 study conducted by Eyes on Earth Inc. with funding by the US State Department’s Lower Mekong Initiative reported that the 11 Chinese dams on the upper portion of the Mekong River captured almost all the river’s flow in 2019, blocking it from reaching communities and ecoystems downstream in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. The study gathered its data both through physical river gauges, and by analyzing 28 years of satellite data. This analysis illustrated that China’s portion of the Mekong saw above average snow melt and rainfall in 2019. Over the same timeframe, water levels downstream on the Mekong near the Thai-Lao border where often approximately 3 m below normal. It is estimated that 11 dams hold as much water as the Chesapeake Bay in the United States, and over the last 30 years, China’s Mekong dams have held back more water than they have released. The study argued that this water compounding has contributed to a record-breaking drought that still plagues the region and puts in jeopardy the food supplies and livelihoods of the 70 million people who rely in the river. It is hoped that this study will provide Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand with data with which it can more effectively negotiate with the Chinese regarding their dam and water management.
By compounding water at such levels, and concurrently causing drought in downstream countries, China is demonstrating that it views the water originating on Chinese soil as a sovereign resource rather than a shared resource. Some Chinese stakeholders have expressed the opinion that water originating in China should be for Chinese use first before any is released downstream. There is also fear that China’s compounded water may be transferred for domestic uses instead of eventually being released downstream. Although they have not been executed, China does have long standing plans to redirect approximately 200,000,000,000 m³ of water annually from the upstream sections of six rivers in southwestern China including the Lancang/Mekong, the Yarlung Zangbo/Brahmaputra, the Salween/Nu to the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. These plans may become more enticing as Himalayan glaciers rapidly melt. It may be China’s point of view that it wants to capture this water runoff for future domestic use before it leaves Chinese territory.
Building Dams Abroad
In addition to damming trans-boundary rivers, China has also stepped up its dam building internationally. As China has absorbed and copied complex hydro-engineering technology initially supplied by the West during the 1980s and 1990s, it is now able to export its own domestically produced turbines, generators and other hydro-equipment to countries abroad, along with its dam building expertise. These exports are supported by a set of schemes known as the “Going Out” strategy introduced in 2001. This strategy encourages investments, exports and subcontracting in overseas engineering projects. Specifically, the government has aided China’s hydro-engineering companies with country-specific research, financial subsidies, and cheap credit. These advantages have helped Chinese companies to position themselves as low-cost competitors. This cost advantage has also been aided by the fact that Chinese construction companies often import cheap, highly productive labor from home to staff all or at least part of their workforce. Their extensive hydro-engineering experience has also allowed them to gain real efficiencies not shared by their competitors. As a result, in 2012, it was estimated that China was involved in more than 300 dam projects in 66 different countries, including the construction of 19 of the world’s 24 largest hydropower stations.
It is not uncommon for these international hydro-engineering projects to help support Chinese strategic interests. Because of its relative isolation from international markets until the early 1980s, China has been late to develop international sources of raw materials, particularly oil, timber and mineral resources. Yet, its position as “the world’s factory” has meant that its demand for natural resources has significantly increased over recent decades. As a result, China has implemented a strategy of retrieving resource deposits which had not heretofore been developed because they have been deemed insignificant in size, geographically remote or politically risky. In many cases, accessing these raw materials has obliged China to invest in secondary infrastructure such as pipelines, roads, railways, dams, power plants and transmission lines. For instance, the Belinga Dam in Gabon is being constructed by China to power a Chinese-built and financed iron ore mine whose output is destined almost exclusively for China’s construction industry. The dam is located in the Invindo National Park and was planned by China with no public environmental impact statement. Myanmar recently decided to halt the massive China-backed the Myitsone Dam project, which has been opposed by green groups and opposition parties because of its significant environmental and social impacts. The dam was to generate some 6000 MW of power, most of which was to be exported to China, while creating a reservoir the size of Singapore with the depth of nearly a 70-story building, displacing tens of thousands of people.
China’s flurry of rapid international dam building has been driven in large part by its ability to self-finance its projects. This has allowed it to fast-track projects that the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, for instance, have been less quick to consider because of their environmental and social risks. China’s Exim Bank, the official export credit agency of the Chinese government, has delivered vital funding for many controversial large dams, including the Merowe Dam in Sudan, which resulted in a ruinous deterioration of living conditions among displaced people. The state-owned China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation, the China Development Bank, and the China-Africa Development Fund are all also increasingly involved in financing energy projects overseas. In some cases, hydro-engineering companies provide their own financing to their international customers. Sino Hydro, for example, a large state-owned company involved in at least 42 major dam projects, often invests in many of the projects it builds as does China’s International Water and Electric Corporation, China’s National Heavy Machinery Corporation and China Southern Power Grid. For the period 2010 to 2012, Sino Hydro directed over $1 billion towards dam-building and related projects in Zambia. In 2014, the total value of contracted projects in Africa was estimated at $70.8 billion. This self-financing has put increased pressure on Western financial institutions and construction companies to also circumvent internationally recognized – but unenforced – social and environmental standards when designing and building infrastructure abroad, so that they can compete with Chinese banks and construction companies.
China remains wary of Western-dominated environmental norms circumscribing its investment and construction activities abroad. China does not accept any country imposing on it their values, social systems or ideology, nor, as stated in its ‘principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country’, does it feel that it should impose its value systems on other countries. China has also defended its approach to overseas investments by insisting that developing countries should not operate at the same standards as developed nations; developed countries also polluted first and then cleaned up after as its economy and technology developed. China has argued that it is unwilling to impose environmental policies on foreign countries which might slow their growth.
Yet, recently there is some evidence that China’s leaders have started to reassess the long-term costs that can come with a no-strings-attached approached to construction overseas; reckless practices, in some cases, have prevented Chinese companies from growing business internationally. The ecological destruction that some of China’s dams have wrought have aggravated anti-Chinese sentiment at several sites in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For instance, in 2006 violent protests broke out at the $2 billion dollar Merowe Dam in Sudan resulting in three dead and dozens injured. Ultimately 15,000 people were displaced, often forcibly, by the reservoir. Protests renewed in 2011 when 1000 people staged a sit-in to protests the government’s failure to compensate them as promised.
China’s frequent policy of employing a Chinese workforce to build dams and other projects abroad reinforces the perception that it is engaged in exploitative practices. To counter this criticism, in 2006, the China’s State Council issued nine principles which should guide the work of firms working abroad. These principles included safeguarding environmental protection, protecting the livelihoods of local communities and peoples, obeying host laws and regulations, and employing local workers in a friendly and fair manner. The principles, while lacking specificity as to who should regulate overseas construction companies, and as to what domestic regulatory tools should be applied to Chinese companies operating overseas, do indicate the Chinese leadership’s desire to avoid future high-profile disasters such as those occurring around the Merowe dam in Sudan. However, without specific regulatory control or penalties for breach of standards, these principles remain mostly theoretical. Some Chinese companies have begun to establish their own environmental policies; China’s Exim Bank and China’s Development Bank, for example, both have environmental policies which are to guide their lending practices, but again these policies lack detail, and do not appear to be well enforced.
Trends
At present, 3,700 dams with greater than 1 MW capacity are currently planned (83%) or under construction (17%). These projects are spread across several continents, but focused mainly in Brazil, Argentina, Central Africa, and China. Even if all these dams were constructed and realized their anticipated electric output, China would remain the world’s hydropower hegemon with an annual potential of nearly 1.8 million GWh (gigawatt-hours). While China’s position in the hydroelectric field may not be challenged in the coming years, its share within that sector is expected to diminish from 31% of world hydropower produced to around 25%.
China prioritizes the continued development of China’s hydro-power capacity to maintain its lead in production. Indeed, China’s National Energy Agency plans to increase China’s installed hydropower from approximately 200,000 MW to 380,000 MW by 2020. While greater efforts will certainly be made to better resettle those displaced by dams in the coming decades, environmental concerns regarding the impacts of China’s large hydro-engineering projects are unlikely to stop their future construction, particularly given the corporatization and increasing power of China’s hydro-power industry.
The speed of China’s dam-building has helped many of its projects, both domestic and national, bypass international environmental standards and impact studies. Though hydropower is not an exceptionally high-emission source of energy in the long run, it has been shown to be rather carbon-intensive during initial phases. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that short-term emissions from damming and dam-related activity might be ten times the emissions that could have been saved if governments reduced fossil fuel usage via other means. The short run emissions are largely a result of the large reservoirs that form behind newly constructed dams. As these young bodies of water undergo various hydrological changes, they often emit larger quantities of greenhouse gases.
Over many years, however, total hydropower-associated emissions are nearly 30 times lower than coal, which is currently China’s most dominant energy source. In 2013, coal accounted for 73.8% of China’s total 5,396 TWh generated, while hydropower ranked second with a 16.9% energy share. Despite the prevalence of coal as an energy source, coal usage decreased 1.2% through October 2014, and this trend is likely to continue as northern China feels the strain of dwindling local water sources. Coal mining and processing requires an extraordinary amount of water that China can no longer afford to divert, given the drinking water demand of its citizens in northern urban centers like Beijing and Tianjin. If anything, the decline of coal will lead to an increase in the dominance of hydropower, which is already well-established in China. Dams may well supplant coal entirely and become the primary source of Chinese energy.
In July 2014, China reaffirmed its commitment to pursue further hydroelectric projects on the Jinsha River (the upper Yangtze), Yalong River, Dadu River, and the Lancang Cascade. It will also continue to aggressively pursue the international dam market, both to meet its own energy needs abroad and to create renewable, clean energy infrastructure for other countries. China’s commitment to Africa remains steadfast, with water conservancy and electric power as two of four key focus areas (the other two being communications and construction of ports, bridges, and railways). With these developments and even more plans in place, China is quickly becoming the largest, most experienced and most competitive dam builder in the world.
References
China’s Challenging Environment
/in Economics, Society /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
The state of Chinese environment today must be placed in the context of the extraordinary development that it has accomplished and of the continuing challenges it will face in the upcoming decades. Since 1981, China has lifted approximately 500 million people out of absolute poverty, an unprecedented achievement. Yet, in 2008, 172 million Chinese citizens still lived on less than $1.25 a day and about 400 million earned less than $2 a day. China’s population continues to grow, and is expected to peak at 1.4-1.5 billion people by 2030. Inequality in China has increased significantly both within the population, between rural and urban residents, and between different regions within the country. Those Chinese moving into the middle classes are demanding a better diet, modern housing, and the consumer goods which have long been common in the West.
China has raised the per capita income and standard of living of its citizens by providing an export-led, average GDP growth rate of over 8% over the last several decades. Much of that growth was fuelled by high- sulphur coal, with lax environmental regulation. The result has been a massive degradation of China’s environment. In 2006, China surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. An estimated 70% of China’s rivers and lakes are currently contaminated, and 300 million Chinese people drink tainted water.
In part, China has achieved its unparalleled economic growth since the launch of its 1980 market reform through a policy of greater decentralization. The central government today has less of an ability to impose absolute control over provinces than it had previously. Environmental law has also been slow to develop and has not been aggressively enforced. Moreover, China’s “Century of Humiliation” has caused it to be protective of its sovereignty, and suspicious of foreigners and their environmental agenda. Indeed, China has opposed the monitoring of its greenhouse gas emissions as it views this as excessive intervention in its internal affairs. Partly as a result, China has not been transparent about environmental data. Its citizens, even its scientists, and the international community often lack the information needed to understand the full impact of China’s development on Chinese and international eco-systems. The basis of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy has also shifted during the last three decades. Though it cannot ignore issues that threaten social stability, CCP power is now more dependent on its ability to continually deliver improving living standards than it was previously.
This has led China to follow a “grow now, clean-up later” approach to development. In international negotiations, China has vigorously opposed any binding, monitored agreement to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases, although more recently it has pledged voluntarily to improve its own energy efficiency relative to economic output. Until recently, China’s calculation has been that short-term mitigation is more costly to the regime than adapting to a changing climate later, particularly given development’s immediate financial, political and social benefits. China’s 12th Five Year Plan seems to marks a shift in this attitude. Unlike previous plans, climate change and energy are featured prominently, and a strong emphasis is placed on targeting a more sustainable average annual GDP growth of 7%. The 12th Five Year Plan also adopts as binding domestic law the voluntary climate pledges China first made before the Copenhagen 2009 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More recently, in a joint announcement with President Obama in November 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a target of peaking carbon dioxide emissions around 2030 with a goal of reaching that target earlier, and an intention of increasing the share of energy coming non-fossil fuel sources to 20% by 2030.
That said, China’s 11th Five Year Plan also called for a slower average GDP growth rate of 7.5%, which China significantly exceeded. Ambitious local officials often consider Five Year Plan objectives as targets to be exceeded. GDP growth is a way for provincial officials to compete with rival regions and get promoted. Indeed, historically the performance evaluation system of government officials in China stresses the economic indexes while ignoring environmental protection indexes. This incentivizes local officials to prioritize GDP growth. As environmental protection can hamper GDP growth, environmental protection indexes have previously only constituted a small part of performance evaluation. After the 11th National People’s Congress in March 2011, Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged this when he noted that GDP-oriented criteria for evaluating performance and government officials was an obstacle to achieving the environmental goals laid out in China’s 12th Five Year Plan. As a result, the central government would work toward adopting new performance evaluation criteria for local governments they gave more weight to the efficiency of economic growth, environmental protection and living standards improvements. Yet it will remain difficult to deter business leaders and officials who are profiting handsomely from rapid development.
Ultimately, many factors will influence China’s environmental policies in coming decades, not all of which are under central government control. Factors which encourage sustained pollution include: the continued need to provide economic growth to ensure political and social stability; the difficulty in implementing national environmental policies at the regional level; the ineffectiveness of MEP (China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection); and general corruption. Factors which are acting to protect the environment include the increasing recognition by Beijing of China’s limited bio-capacity, the increasingly vocal demands of its citizens to protect the environment, China’s significant investments in green technologies, and China’s opportunity to lead the world in green markets. It is still unclear which combination of factors will ultimately have the greatest influence on China’s short, medium and long-term environmental policies, or the state of its environment. That said, there is an undeniable trend toward recognizing the importance of environmental protection in China.
The State of China’s Environment
China’s environmental statistics are grim. In 2009, for instance, China surpassed the US to become the world’s largest energy user. While China’s average per capita emissions remain below those of the US, they have overtaken the global average, and are rising rapidly. Despite efforts by China to improve its energy efficiency, its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels rose by almost 80% during the past decade. The Chinese government recently conceded that only 3 of its 74 major cities met national air quality standards during 2013. Indeed, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area had an annual average levels of PM2.5 – tiny pollutants smaller than 2.5 microns – at 106 micrograms per cubic meter, more than 10 times the World Health Organization’s safety level of 10.
This pollution is affecting countries worldwide, and not just because of the consequences of global warming. An analysis of air in places as disparate as San Francisco and Kyoto found chemical signatures of coal-fired Chinese power plants, smelters and chemical factories. Additionally, China’s water is also both in short supply and highly polluted. Growing urbanization is increasing both China’s air and water pollution and exacerbating its water scarcity since urban dwellers consume three times more water and energy than do rural residents. Moreover, an estimated 70% of China’s rivers and lakes are now polluted. In 2009, 57% of the 7 monitored river basins had pollution levels of I-III, suitable for drinking, swimming, household use, and able to support aquatic life. 24% of the water in China’s rivers had levels of IV-V, water unfit for swimming, but suitable for industrial purpose. 19% had V+, meaning that the water is considered useless, unfit for industry or agriculture. 23% of China’s key lakes and reservoirs had water grades of I-III, 42% IV-V and 35% V+. 2.3% of groundwater in 8 regions was rated I-II, 23.9% was graded III, and 73.8% ranked IV-V.
Stresses to China’s environment will continue to grow in the future. By 2030, three quarters of the 11 gigaton projected increase in energy-related global CO2 emissions is expected to be generated by China. By 2030, an estimated 390 million vehicles are projected to fill China’s roads, an almost 3 fold increase from today. Urban floor space will need to double to accommodate the approximately 350 million additional people moving into cities. At the same time, an expanding number of Chinese will rise into the middle classes, increasing demands on the environment further. Even with its aggressive development of alternative fuels, by 2030, it is still estimated that China will need to burn almost 200 million more tons of coal than in 2005 to provide sufficient heating and electricity for its new urban citizens. Indeed, overall coal-based power generation capacity is projected to triple between 2005 and 2030. Proper desulfurization of coal plants will require sizable capital investments and extensive regulatory monitoring. Urbanization and rising living standards will also increase demand for greater varieties of food. China will need to control desertification, overgrazing, the overuse of fertilizers, and over-logging in order to preserve the productivity of its arable lands. Moreover, managing the growing amount of urban waste will be a major challenge.
China’s Position on International Climate Negotiations
Yet, despite pollution levels which are increasingly having consequences for both China and the world, China aggressively defends its right to develop and thus pollute. In 2007, China’s National Development and Resources Commission reiterated China’s past position that “developed countries should take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as providing financial and technical support to developing countries. The first and overriding priorities of developing countries are sustainable development and poverty eradication.” In other words, as a developing country, China must give priority to economic development over environmental protection. Domestic environmental issues take precedence over global concerns. As developed countries are responsible for the large part of historical degradation, they must limit their emissions first, and pay for and transfer technology to developing states to address their environmental problems. These payments are not loans but compensation for the developed world’s historical environmental damage. Developed countries must also take a lead in the reduction of greenhouse gases, and the implementation of signed agreements. The sovereignty of the country’s national resources must be respected. There should be no linking of aid or the implementation of sanctions to any formal agreement to change environmental practices. Environmental considerations should not be used as a reason to interfere in the international affairs of a developing country, or as a reason to impose trade barriers.
China has expanded its position in recent years by noting that population control is one of the most successful strategies to curb emissions. China argues that given its effective population control since 1970, China should be given credit for this key mitigation effort. Additionally, as China has four times more people than the US, China should have a higher emissions quota. China has also advanced the argument that having a modest but dignified level of well-being – which some reason to be about $7500 annually – is a basic human right which takes priority over environmental concerns. China argues that those below this development should be exempt from any requirement to pay for climate policy which indeed includes a large part of its citizens. China contrast this argument with the fact that the richest 20% of the world use over 75% of global resources and emit 51% of global CO2 emissions to maintain their way of life. The Chinese also point out that the ownership and responsibility for emissions is a nuanced discussion; approximately 33% of China’s domestic 2005 CO2 emissions, for example, resulted from the production of exports, raising the question as to whether consumers also bear responsibility for these emissions because of their purchasing decisions.
Increasingly, China has set forth voluntary, non-binding, and non-verifiable emission reduction targets as it did before Copenhagen, when it stated that it would “endeavour to lower its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45% by 2020 compared with the 2005 level; decrease its share of non-fossil fuels and primary energy consumption to about 15% by 2020; increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares, and forest stock by 1.3 billion m³ by 2020 from the 2005 levels.” Likely, China’s willingness to put forward these targets was because they were consistent with policies China was already adopting nationally. Indeed, China has many domestic policies related to climate change – to increase energy efficiency and to use more alternative energy, for example – yet these policies are often driven by objectives such as increased energy security, enhancing technological innovation and arresting desertification instead of outright greenhouse gas mitigation.
The Cost of Environmental Degradation to China
Despite its negotiating position in the international community, domestically, China recognizes that environmental protection is a pressing issue. In 2007, the World Bank assessed that China’s combined health and non-health cost of outdoor air and water pollution to be $100 billion annually conservatively estimated, or 5.8% of the country’s GDP. Four of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China. The World Bank calculated that up to 400,000 people in China die each year from outdoor air pollution, 30,000 from indoor air pollution, and 60,000 from water pollution. An estimated 40% of all the global deaths linked to air pollution occur in China. This is reflected in greater rates of lung cancer and respiratory system problems. China’s water is also producing higher rates of various health abnormalities including liver and stomach cancer, stunted growth, miscarriages and birth defects. Polluted water is also exacerbating China’s severe water scarcity problems. It is conservatively estimated that urban water scarcity costs China about $14 billion annually in lost industrial output, and rural water scarcity generates an additional $24 billion in annual costs. In 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture related that almost 20% of agricultural and poultry products in major industrial and mining districts are irrigated with contaminated water. On China’s current trajectory, the health costs of air and water pollution could triple by as early as 2020, particularly as China’s population begins to age more rapidly.
Moreover, China’s 2011 “Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change” estimated that global warming will significantly impact China in the coming decades. In particular, the report predicted that China’s grain output could fall by between as much as 20% by 2050, putting greater pressure on food prices, and threatening China’s food security. The report also forecasted that global warming would lead to severe imbalances in China’s water resources within each year, and across the years. By 2050, eight of China’s provinces and provincial status cities could face severe water shortages (meaning less than 500 m³ per resident), and another 10 could face less dire chronic shortages. Additionally, since the 1950s, over 82% of Chinese glaciers which feed many of China’s major rivers have been in a state of retreat. With the report predicting that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 4.6°C above the 1961-1990 average, this rate of glacial retreat will increase. The report also estimated that sea levels will rise between 10 to 15 cm in the next 30 years, pressing up against China’s big coastal cities and export zones, making them more vulnerable to typhoons and flood tides unless China invests heavily in new coastal embankments.
Social unrest is also an increasing consequence of environmental degradation. The Chinese government received 750,000 environment-related complaints in 2008, a number that has increased approximately 30 percent annually since 2002. This environment-related social unrest risks threatening central authority. Moreover, it is estimated that by 2025 between 30 and 40 million more people may need to relocate due to environmental degradation. The environmental migrants are on top of the high numbers of Chinese citizens slated to be relocated as the result of China’s aggressive dam building.
Challenges to Implementing Environmental Policy in China
Yet while China recognizes the danger of its increasingly stressed bio-capacity, implementing effective environmental policy remains difficult. Perhaps the greatest challenge to implementing effective environmental policy in China is the sheer number of Chinese citizens still well within poverty levels, and the inequality of wealth distribution throughout the country. Until poverty and inequality eradication have been generally achieved, economic growth will be prioritized. Wu Shunze, Deputy Director General of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning noted this when he stated that China estimates its industrialization will be completed by 2030, that its use of resources and energy will peak between 2020 and 2030, and that between 2030 and 2050, China will then begin to see a greater shift toward a service-driven economy, and begin to repair environmental damage. China thus anticipates that until 2030, the relationship between the economy and the environment will be “in contradiction”, and will only become preliminarily “harmonious” by 2030.
Until then, China will look for win-win solutions where its environmental policies improve energy security, reduce production costs, promote job creation, and provide it with technological advantage in the world markets without impeding development at home. China’s belief in its ability to “clean-up later” is founded not just on western experience, but on its millennia old tendency to control and shape nature – uprooting forests, redirecting rivers, filling in swampland, building dams and dykes. Successive Chinese dynastic and now Communist governments have long pursued domination over ecological resources.
China’s growing focus on inequality is an increasingly key factor in its environmental discourse as inequality is potentially an existential threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. As opposed to always approaching China as if it were monolithic, international engagement with China about the environment needs to be across multiple levels. What might be expected of China’s increasingly wealthy urban coasts can be an unreasonable demand for China’s poor western areas. Similarly, it is difficult for Beijing to set uniform, national environmental policy. Internal pollution mitigation will require strategies that address challenges at the global, regional, intraregional, city, small town and village levels. In 2009, President Hu articulated this by arguing that China’s wealthier eastern regions must take the first major step toward emissions mitigation, while poor western regions continue to catch up economically.
Since 1980, China has nevertheless implemented a flurry of environmental regulation. Decentralization after the 1980 market reform means that Beijing’s has increasingly imperfect control over its local governments. This exacerbates the environment’s “Tragedy of the Commons” principle. The problem of discharge into China’s rivers is illustrative. To enhance their competitiveness, each locality has an incentive for its factory to discharge its waste as cheaply (often illegally) as possible, with each factory’s waste seemingly inconsequential in relation to the river as a whole. Ultimately, the accumulation of its and other factories’ waste devastates the river. This effect is compounded by the fact that pollution fines are low and that natural resources are undervalued. Additionally, those most affected by river pollution do not always speak out against pollution when their livelihoods are dependent on the offending industry. While farmers, for instance, might suffer lower crop yields, sick animals, and deteriorating health because of polluted water, their income can nevertheless be reliant on the polluting factory which may be providing family members with jobs, investing in local infrastructure and purchasing farm produce, which in itself might be contaminated.
The ineffectiveness of local environmental protection bureaus compounds the problem. Numerous Chinese agencies are responsible for overseeing environmental protection depending on the pollution problem. These ministries often compete for international and domestic environmental funding. Their poor coordination and delineation of public duties creates conflicts of interest, especially at the local level. Nationally, responsibility for environmental protection in China rests primarily with the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) formerly the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). While elevation to a cabinet level ministry has enhanced its power, MEP still remains a relatively weak voice within China’s government. Historically, environmental funding has been low. China’s Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) monitor environmental conditions at the local level. Despite MEP supervision and the bureaus seemingly large manpower – China’s roughly 2500 EPBs employ some 60,000 people – in general, the EPBs report to local governments for budget and resource support. This gives the local government leverage to protect local interests. A chronic lack of funding also hampers enforcement. Bureaus often have insufficient staff and cars for inspections. Factories are aware of these constraints and use this to their advantage by, for instance, discharging at night. Even when bureaus launch campaigns to close or sanction problematic companies, the companies often relapse into violation or reopen once the campaigns quieten down. Also, fines often cannot be applied to companies across administrative boundaries. Counties and cities have often shifted polluting enterprises near the border with downstream counties, so river discharge is carried quickly into the next province. Pollution fines also partly fund EPB activities. This can lead to perverse incentives where a bureau can encourage the persistence of pollution problems in order to pay its wages.
Courts are also often ineffective and enforcing environmental law. While China has an increasing level of environmental legislation, public awareness of environmental law remains poor. Given the poor availability of environmental data, when cases are brought to court, it is difficult for victims to provide conclusive evidence. Additionally, many polluting companies pay relatively significant levels of local taxes. As most courts are funded and staffed by local governments, there is an incentive to interfere with court proceedings in order to protect polluting companies and the taxes which flow from them. As a result, many environmental court cases are thrown out on the basis of flimsy reasoning.
Corruption is also a factor in China’s environmental degradation. In China, corruption can be seen as bribery and cronyism when developing environmental policy and when promoting harmful environmental practices, embezzlement of environmental funding, and bribery during environmental inspections and issuing of permits. Environmental corruption can also be connected to organized crime, particularly in mineral, timber and wildlife trafficking.
Trends
As the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy now rests in large part on its ability to provide a rising standard of living for its citizens, China will continue to need strong economic growth to raise its approximately 400 million citizens still living on $2 or less per day out of poverty, and provide them with a “modest dignified level of well-being”. In addition, growing inequality throughout the country is placing greater pressure on CCP leadership to provide opportunity for those regions, mainly in the west, that significantly lagged behind wealthier east coast provinces. While China increasingly speaks of the importance of sustainable development, and although it is increasingly investing in green technologies, it is unlikely that these technologies can come online rapidly enough to offset all the pollution that will be emitted as China works to provide a reasonable standard of living for the bottom third of its population. Additionally, China is racing against the problem of a rapidly aging population, trying not to grow old before it grows rich and before the competitive advantage of its huge inexpensive workforce begins to dissipate.
Given the challenges of China’s decentralization, and the pressures of poverty, inequality and a rapidly aging population, what is most likely is that China will continue to be the world’s largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation for at least the next two decades. Yet within this high greenhouse gas emission model, there will be an increasing trend toward bringing on line a rapidly growing level of alternative fuels, green technologies and pro-environmental protection policies such as environmental taxes and cap-and-trade pilot programs. Indeed, by the end of 2030, it is possible that China will be a world leader in many of the green technologies that will be most impactful on protecting our global environment going forward.
In international climate change negotiations, China will continue to refuse to be constrained by internationally imposed targets which can be monitored by outside countries. Yet, China’s growing implementation of environmental technologies at home will allow it to be a much more constructive player in international negotiations in the future. Increasingly, China is likely to hold up its environmental accomplishments at home as an example to other countries; for example, by 2015, China is expected to lead the world in installed hydro, solar, wind, and nuclear capacity. Thus, China’s future in the field of environmental protection will be, paradoxically, both world-leading but also internationally uncooperative.
Rising Income Inequality in China: A Price Worth Paying?
/in Economics, Society /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
China, a country of continental scale, has experienced inequality in many shapes and forms throughout its 4000-year history. Part of this inequality is regional; attributable to China’s sheer size and the diversity of its geography. Lack of water, arable soil, and good links to transport networks significantly affect an area’s ability to prosper. Areas that suffered from such deficiencies in China 1000 years ago tend to be the same areas that struggle with limited resources today. For instance, China’s southeast, with its abundantwater resources and excellent access to international markets, continues to be one of the wealthiest parts of modern China. China’s western plateaus, sparsely inhabited, with poor arable land and water resources, limited transport and infrastructure systems, remain poorer areas of the country today.
Inequality during the Mao Era
During the Mao era, the Chinese government set income equality across China as an important goal, although it was never fully achieved. Topographical advantage remained determinative, even in the face of economic policies aimed at reducing it. The CCP enforced a hukou family register system, which eliminated the ability of China’s citizens to move about the country, limiting them to the area in which they were born and their family registered. What this meant in practice was that those born in regions that lacked resources, or those born in the countryside, had relatively less wealth than those born in more resource-rich regions or in urban areas. Thus inequality during the Mao era was principally between urban and rural areas, as opposed to between individuals in the same area. Nevertheless, high ranking party officials did enjoy more relative wealth than those who were not part of the Communist Party, yet the lack of consumer goods and isolation from the international economy meant there were not many opportunities for even high-ranking party officials to have conspicuous consumer advantages over rank-and-file citizens. In fact, until the Reform era brought more consumer goods to China, most Chinese citizens merely strived for the four “must-haves”: a bike, a watch, a radio, and a sewing machine.
Inequality in the Reform Era
In 1978, this all began to change with the implementation of the Dengist reforms. Deng explicitly declared that some should be allowed to ”get rich first”, with the implicit understanding that others can get rich later. This was a significant alteration in policy; for a communist government to accept, and even encourage, societal inequality was certainly groundbreaking. As China began to make the transition from planned- to market- economy – a journey that has, by no means, been completed – income inequality increased in measure with its transition towards capitalism. However, the early years of the reforms, at the beginning of the 1980s, were marked by a fall in overall inequality, driven by the loosening of restrictions on rural areas selling their excess produce for profit. This allowed those rural producers of food to close the income gap with their urban counterparts. Chinese official statistics struggle to provide an accurate picture of Chinese incomes today; the wealthy often under report their earnings and the very poor can be underrepresented as their geographical isolation and high illiteracy rates can make them difficult to track. Yet even those official figures that can be produced, which may try to disguise large disparities, have shown income disparity to be increasing. China’s Gini coefficient – the most commonly used measure of inequality under which an entirely equal society would have a coefficient of 0 and one that is entirely unequal would register as 1 – stands today at 0.47. This is considerably above both the World Bank’s ‘critical threshold’ of 0.4 and the US Gini of 0.41, and shows signs of reaching the extreme levels that plague Latin America. This statistic becomes even more alarming when viewed against the levels of inequality at the outset of the economic reforms: in 1980 the Gini coefficient was 0.28. In essence, inequality has risen in China by over 50% in thirty years. While this is in line with the Dengist policy of ‘letting some get rich first’, it is evident that continued increases on anything approaching this scale over the next thirty years would cause difficulties for the CCP both in terms of potential social unrest, something that is already a growing problem, and of its ability to undermine the CCP’s legitimacy base. The CCP has begun to recognize this rhetorically as well as in policy with speeches from Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao peppered with references to the need to address income divisions.
Regional Inequality
Today, the biggest discrepancy of incomes can be seen between regions. China began its capitalist experimentation in the Pearl Delta region of Guangdong province, where its workers sewed piecework for Hong Kong textile manufacturers. As more and more of China’s GDP began to be generated by international trade, this and other industries spread northwards along its coast. Consequently, China’s east coast is now its most developed area, with income levels at purchasing power parity (PPP) approaching those of countries such as Saudi Arabia or Singapore.
In the first 12 years of economic reform, growth in China’s interior regions was driven by a re-introduction of private markets in the agricultural sector, as well as increased productivity during the ‘green revolution’. This increased productivity allowed peasants to move into rural industry, such as the manufacturing of farming equipment, further driving rural GDP and income growth. Although this did initially cause the income gap between urban and rural areas to fall in the early 1980s, geographical inequality has since been rising and shows little sign of reaching a plateau.
When it comes to inequality between coastal provinces and their poorer inland neighbors, differences in income have been rising ever since the start of the reform era, as the coastal east has benefited from China’s export driven economic growth. Apart from the obvious geographic advantages for trade, coastal provinces have benefited from government initiatives such as favorable tax and financing regimes. As a result, through much of the 1990s, coastal growth rates were three percentage points higher than those of inland regions and China’s coastal provinces remain more affluent than its interior regions. There is, however, some evidence that the phenomenon of coastal GDP growth outpacing the interior is starting to change, as rising wages in coastal areas and the consequent reduction in international competitiveness, has driven some industries inward in search of lower costs. One notable example is Foxconn, the giant consumer electronics manufacturer that produces goods for companies such as Apple and Sony, which has relocated part of its production line to the interior. That said, China’s interior western provinces still have a long way to go. In 2011 Guizhou, China’s poorest province, had a GDP per capita of 16,000 RMB (approx. $2,400), while Tianjin’s was 84,000 RMB (approx. $13,000). The three provincial-level cities in the east – Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai – have the largest incomes per capita by some distance, each with a per capita GDP of in excess of 80,000 RMB, while Tibet, Gansu, Yunnan and Guizhou – all in the far west of the country – are all under a quarter of this total.
Although huge differences in income between regions evidently remain, the central government has shown an increased interest in resolving this inequality. In 1999, President Jiang Zemin announced the “Develop the West Program”. As well as addressing ecological and security concerns, the “Develop the West Program” was intended to stimulate development in China’s least prosperous provinces and to soften the blow to China’s interior as China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. This policy has had reasonable success; in particular, it has encouraged significant infrastructural investment in China’s western provinces. However, though it may have slowed down the rate of increasing inequality between east and west, the pattern has continued throughout this time, leaving those in the west relatively poorer than they ever have been.
Getting Rich First?
Within any one region, individual income inequality is also now evident. Economic development tends to lead to income inequality in every society and China has been no exception. In June 2012 it was reported that the number of dollar-millionaires in China had reached 1.4 million, while the number of billionaires has been placed at between 100 and 600, second only to the US; at the same time there are still 400 million Chinese who live on less than $2 a day, and around 172 million on less than $1.25. Many workers have seen great returns on their education and skill levels; those with higher levels of education, experience, and skills were rewarded with increased incomes. Some were well positioned during privatizations, having party and other connections which allowed them to win contracts or acquire state assets at significantly reduced prices. Studies show that CCP membership is positively correlated with income. A report in 2009 said that around 90% of China’s billionaires are so-called “princelings”, the sons or daughters of leading Communist Party cadres. China does, however, have a long history of entrepreneurship and many Chinese have embraced this tradition. Some were just plain lucky, had a good idea, or were in the right place at the right time. Zhang Yin, for example, rose from humble roots to become China’s first female billionaire. She earned her fortune by buying scrap paper from the US, importing it to China where she turned it into cardboard before selling it back to US manufacturers.
Gender Inequality
Ethnic Inequality
Another group that has consistently been at China’s lower income levels is China’s ethnic minorities. Part of this inequality may be caused by the fact that most Chinese minorities live in the western fringes of the country which often suffer from water scarcity, short growing seasons, and difficult access to transportation systems and international markets. The minority populations living in these areas often suffer from lower wages and living standards than those who have made their way to the east and the gap between Han and ethnic minorities can, to some extent, be explained in these geographical terms. Still, it is also true that the average Chinese ethnic minority suffers at least some discrimination regardless of where location, and often does not have the same opportunities as the average Han Chinese.
Inequality at what cost?
China has tolerated its growing inequality in order to achieve the rapid rates of economic growth that is has experienced since the 1980s. The CCP’s fear is that once economic growth starts to slow, which grows more likely given the continuing financial and economic challenges of the west, then the unequal distribution of wealth at various levels will cause major social unrest. The Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989 was partly caused by high levels of income inequality and in reaction to high levels of inflation that were squeezing the living standards of the poorest in China. Beijing is wary of the possibility of the reoccurrence of such an event, especially given the recent events taking place in the Middle East in what has come to be known as the ‘Arab Spring’, itself partly driven by dissatisfaction with levels of inequality. Additionally, as the poorest provinces in China are generally those with the highest percentage of ethnic minorities, China fears that their social unrest may exacerbate feelings of resentment towards Beijing and stoke ethnic tensions within society. Violence directed towards Han Chinese has already occurred in several parts of Chin, notably among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, the Tibetans in Lhasa, and the Hui in Henan.
Chinese intellectuals today debate whether economic growth at all costs should be tolerated. Many propose a more “socialist” or European model of social development, where the state shares some of the responsibility for ensuring that all its citizens reach a basic level of economic prosperity. This prosperity would be significantly aided by the re-creation of China’s health and pension systems, which were often commune-based and largely dismantled when China privatized many of its state-owned industries. Developing its national healthcare and pension systems would also help China shift its economy from being largely export driven to being one that relies on much greater domestic demand. Currently, the average Chinese citizen saves aggressively in anticipation of future healthcare and pension costs that will need to be self-funded. A first attempt at providing a very basic social security was launched in 1999 with China’s creation of the Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Scheme (Dibao) designed to aid those most in need in the form of a very basic welfare package. The income limit for becoming eligible to this however is incredibly low. In urban areas, the average level is just over 200 RMB ($30) per month, while for rural areas it is below 100 RMB ($15) per month.
Future Trends
The persistence of inequality in China today is a thorn in the side of the CCP. Having largely moved away from its communist ideological base, the CCP’s legitimacy is largely based on nationalism and the promise of economic prosperity. China is faced with the double challenge of not only ensuring that its economy continues to grow, but of trying to see that its wealth is shared out as equally as possible. The potential for friction in society – and the threat that might pose to the CCP – is implicitly acknowledged in Hu Jintao’s drive for a ‘harmonious society’, the principle tenet of his ideological musings. It is important to note that despite the rise in relative inequality, the absolute living standards for almost every single Chinese person have increased since the economic reforms were implemented. Since the reform era began, China has lifted around 400 million people out of absolute poverty, an achievement unmatched anywhere in the world and throughout human history. This should not be underestimated even as the problem of relative wealth disparity is, correctly, addressed as a pressing issue.
It is of course impossible for any nation to be completely equal and most developed countries have their own problems with unequal distribution of wealth. China, with its vast size, enormous population, and varied geography, will always struggle with inequality. Inequality persists throughout China. While it is true that the west is poorer than the east, there are pockets of abject poverty even in the richest provinces and rich parts in the poorest areas. From the Communist Party’s perspective, its key task is to prevent income inequality from rising to such levels that widespread social unrest threatens its control of power. As China’s wealth grows, and as it invests large parts of its enormous surplus within its own borders, more government initiatives are expected to be designed to develop the prosperity of provinces and sectors of society that lag behind the rest. Nevertheless, in the short term, income inequality will continue to increase as China’s rapid economic development lifts its population from poverty at varying rates. The mammoth task for the CCP will be to ensure that inequality doesn’t rise at a faster rate than GDP growth. While the living standards of the majority are being raised it is likely that increases in inequality will not prove perilous for the authority of the CCP, especially as much of this inequality is between areas that are thousands of miles apart. The next 30 years will prove very difficult for China to maintain the balance between consistent economic growth and raising the living standards of those at the very bottom of the income ladder, although this can be managed as long as China continues to move towards a domestic demand-led, and not export-driven, economy.
Taiwan: Strait Talking
/in Politics /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
More than sixty years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists fled to the island, Taiwan remains at the core of domestic and foreign policy decisions for Beijing. Despite enjoying de facto independence, having never been directly ruled by the CCP, Taiwan is considered by Beijing to be an inalienable part of its territory and the goal of ‘reunification’ is one of its highest priorities. This is resisted in Taiwan where most people favor retention of the status quo; that is, neither a declaration of de jure independence – a move that would almost certainly provoke an angry reaction from the mainland – nor a move to accept CCP rule over the island. The issue is a sensitive one in China at both the political and societal levels and any suggestion of support for an independent Taiwan ordinarily sparks heated responses from China, which accuses its protagonists of trying to ‘split’ China. It is a complex, emotional, and seemingly intractable problem.
Chinese Annexation and Japanese Colonialism
Taiwan was formerly known as Formosa in the West
Known as the island of Formosa in its past, Taiwan’s history over the past two hundred years has been complex. The largest island of the Formosa island chain located off the southeastern coast of mainland China, it was originally the home of aborigines and the occasional Chinese migrant, refugee, and pirate. Neither Western nor Asian powers showed any sincere interest in acquiring the island until the late seventeenth century, when China brought Taiwan under its authority in order to quell pirates using the island as a base of operations. China largely left the island untouched until the Qing Dynasty was forced to cede the island to Japan after its loss in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5. Qing subjects were given a two-year grace period to sell their property and move to mainland China if they so wished, but very few Taiwanese saw this as feasible and most remained under Japanese rule. An 1895 effort by pro-Qing Taiwanese officials to challenge impending Japanese rule was quickly put down by Japanese forces.
During Japan’s fifty-year control of Taiwan, the occupying government imposed harsh rule on the island, showing no tolerance of dissent, and limiting lucrative jobs and business contracts to Japanese living on the island. Aboriginals and Chinese were treated as second-class citizens. Despite this harsh rule, the Japanese helped to develop Taiwan’s economy and brought with them technology that was unseen on the Chinese mainland. They also helped to enlarge Taiwan’s railroad and other transportation networks, built a widespread sanitation system, and developed the public school system. Rice and sugarcane production also increased greatly under Japanese occupation. Thus, by the end of the World War II the island of Taiwan was much better off than mainland China. That it was largely saved from the ravages of the Japanese occupation that were meted out on the mainland certainly helped in this, but it is an uncomfortable truth for those on both sides of the strait that Taiwan owed its position of relative economic strength to its former occupiers.
The Republic of China
Japanese rule over Taiwan came to an end after they surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II in 1945. At this time the approximately 300,000 Japanese living in Taiwan were repatriated back to Japan. After Japan’s surrender Taiwan once again fell formally under Chinese rule, which was by this time under by the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT), with China now formally called the Republic of China (ROC). Celebration of the island’s return to Chinese rule was short lived. Tension soon built between the locals on the island and their new government. The source of this tension was two-fold. Firstly the KMT government questioned Taiwanese loyalties after their having been subject to fifty years of Japanese rule. The KMT thus continued Japan’s policy of treating the Taiwanese as second-class citizens. Secondly, as the KMT was fighting a civil war with the Communists in China, they took every resource available on the island to support their war efforts.
These tensions culminated in the 228 Massacre of 1947, so called because it occurred on February 28th. What started off as police harassing an old woman who was peddling cigarettes turned into island-wide riots in which local residents attacked mainland immigrants and their property. KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan governor Chen Yi responded by bringing in military reinforcements to restore order to the island. The result was the execution of as many as 4,000 Taiwanese. The 228 Massacre was the start of the nearly four-decade White Terror in which the KMT established a dictatorship over the island and suppressed any organized dissent.
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Monument in modern day Taipei
In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to flee to Taiwan after Mao Zedong and the Communists took control over all of mainland China and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Eventually, 2 million people, most of them soldiers, KMT party members, intellectuals and business elite where evacuated to Taiwan. These refugees brought with them many national Chinese art treasures, as well as gold in foreign currency reserves. Most people on the island believed this would be the end of the KMT as Mao amassed an invasion force in the Chinese province of Fujian, directly across the Taiwan Strait from the island. In addition, the US, the KMT’s largest provider of funds and material, announced it would take no further steps to support Chiang in his fight against the Communists. It appeared that it was simply a matter of time before the PRC would gain control of the island.
The situation changed quickly in 1950, however, when communist North Korean soldiers crossed the attacked the US ally South Korea. US President Harry Truman, fearing communist attempts to take over all of Asia, reversed his policy on Taiwan and sent the US Naval Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to protect the island from Chinese invasion. This led to a political and military stalemate that is still basically in effect today. Because of the Cold War, most Western nations and the United Nations regarded Taiwan’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of China until the 1970s, when the most nations began switching their recognition to the PRC, a response to a thaw in relations with the US that saw it achieve mutual diplomatic recognition by 1978. Initially, Taiwan held the seat on the United Nations Security Council under its formal name of the Republic of China, recognized as the sole legitimate government of all of China. In November 1971, the seat was transferred to the PRC, since which time Taiwan has had no formal representation at the UN despite some sporadic attempts to achieve this.
Taiwan’s accelerated economic growth since World War II has transformed it from a largely agrarian island into an industrialized, developed society. The IMF categorizes it as an ‘advanced’ economy, and the World Bank considers it to be a ‘high income’ economy. One of the strengths of its economy is its advanced technology industry, which plays a significant role in the global economy. Although most of this manufacturing is now outsourced to mainland China, Taiwanese companies still control the production of a large portion of the world’s consumer electronics.
Political Reform
The Sun Yat-sen Memorial in Taipei
Chiang Kai-shek died in April 1975, just over a year before the death of his old foe, Mao Zedong. Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, took over. The younger Chiang slowly instituted political reform, allowing more native Taiwanese to enter into the bureaucracy and tolerating limited dissent. One example of the latter was the Tangwai. While the KMT did not allow any opposition parties to develop before 1987, it did allow for candidates to run for office independently. Thus some independent activists and politicians founded the Tangwai. The Tangwai, whose name literally translates as “outside the party”, was a loose coalition of people whose main commonality was opposition to the KMT’s dictatorship. The KMT did occasionally persecute its members, namely in response to a 1979 protest held in the southern port city of Kaohsiung. Nevertheless, KMT leaders largely tolerated the organization.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the island’s first enduring opposition party, was founded in 1986, a year before such parties officially became legal. The DPP’s makeup was similar to that of the Tangwai in that members were united predominantly in their opposition to the KMT. In fact, the DPP was made up largely of former KMT members. However, within a few years of its founding, the party had established itself as a pro-Taiwanese independence party that promoted a Taiwanese cultural and national identity.
Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988 and was replaced by his hand-picked successor Lee Teng-hui, the first native Taiwanese to become ROC president and KMT chairman. Lee continued with Chiang Ching-kuo’s reforms, working within the KMT and with activists to open up more government positions to competitive election. For example, the National Assembly and Legislative Yuan, the government’s two legislative bodies, had their first general elections in the early 1990s, and Taipei, the island’s capital, had its first competitive mayoral elections in 1994, which was won by the DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian.
Taiwan’s current president is the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou
Taiwan’s democratic reforms continued through the early 1990s and culminated with the island’s first ever direct presidential election, held in 1996. Interestingly, in a world where dictatorial parties tend to get punished in free elections, the KMT’s Lee Teng-hui won what was widely considered to be a fair election. China reacted angrily to the possibility of elections in Taiwan and engaged in military exercises in the Taiwan Strait in a naked attempt to intimidate politicians and voters on the island. The move backfired as it led to the US intervening by sending its aircraft carrier into the area as a warning to the Chinese. The move also appeared to harden both the determination to democratize as well as the opposition to any suggestion of ‘reunification’ with the mainland. Four years later, taking advantage of a split KMT ticket, DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian was elected and succeeded Lee, becoming the first non-KMT president of Taiwan and marking the first change in government brought about by democratic elections anywhere in the Chinese speaking world.
Despite grand hopes that the new ruling party brought with them into office, Chen’s eight years as president were largely disappointing. There were many causes of this disappointment. For example, Chen came to power during a global economic downturn. As Taiwan has an export-based economy, the slump in demand significantly harmed many Taiwanese livelihoods. Additionally, China refused to deal with Chen, declaring him to be a Taiwanese separatist with whom they could not deal. While economic ties between the two sides continued to strengthen, political ties significantly worsened. Another problem lay in people’s expectations of Chen himself. Chen, as president, actually had relatively little power to keep his campaign promises. The power his predecessors enjoyed were largely due to martial law and other temporary revisions the government put in place during the KMT’s dictatorship. As the country instituted democratic reform, many of these presidential powers were taken away and given back to the legislature, where the writers of the constitution originally allocated them. This left Chen mostly powerless to enact some of the reforms he promised. Lastly, many in Chen’s administration, and ultimately Chen himself, were accused of corruption. After Chen’s terms as president ended, he was indicted on charges of bribery and is now in prison serving a 19 year sentence, though he maintains that the trial was politically motivated.
The teahouses of Jiufen
The KMT took back the presidency in 2008 with the election of Ma Ying-jeou, showing the resilience of this once dictatorial party. Ma has moved to improve relations with the mainland, recognizing the futility of antagonizing Beijing and the enormous potential of cross-straits trade, though he has always stopped short of advocating imminent reunification. The KMT remains rhetorically committed to the goal of reunifying with the mainland, though insists that this cannot be under the rule of the CCP. Though this had previously been an unacceptable stance to Beijing it has become the lesser of two evils in contrast to the pro-independence stance taken by many in the DPP. Ma was re-elected in January 2012 with more than 51% of the vote on an impressive turnout of over 74%.
Relations with China
Taiwan’s army is focused almost entirely on one possible aggressor
Despite having a mature and stable government, a thriving economy, and an active civil society, Taiwan’s status in the international community remains in limbo. The reason for this is the position of China. Beijing insistence that Taiwan is a part of China that must eventually come under Beijing’s rule, whether peacefully or by force, remains a stumbling block for Taiwan in many of its dealings with the international community. Though Taiwan has never made a formal declaration of independence, partly because of the KMT’s stance that Taiwan is part of one China but also because of the fear of serious reprisals from Beijing if it did so, Taiwan maintains its de facto independence. In other words, Taiwan is independent for all practical means and purposes. It maintains set geographical boundaries, a government to rule over lands within those boundaries and this government and its state are recognized by its population. The international realm is not so clear. Other states do recognize Taiwan’s passport but most do no conduct formal bilateral relations with the island, although many maintain links in an unofficial capacity. There are 23 states that maintain diplomatic relations with Taipei instead of Beijing, a reduction from 71 in 1969, the most significant among them being Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and the Vatican. A practice of the PRC and Taiwan competing for diplomatic recognition among states seems to have come to an end; according to a document released by Wikileaks, Panama made moves to switch its recognition to the Beijing but was asked to remain with Taipei in order not to cause diplomatic embarrassment at a time when cross-straits relations were improving. Taiwan is therefore not able to enjoy de jure independence, which means it is not independent according to law. This means that Taiwan cannot join many international organizations that require statehood for membership. These organizations include the UN and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Additionally, when joining in other international events and organizations, Taiwan must join under some alternate name, such as its official Olympic title of Chinese Taipei.
The US continues to supply F16s to Taiwan, despite objections from China
The status of Taiwan cannot be ignored in any aspect of China’s international relations; it is impossible for any state in the international system to have diplomatic relations with Beijing without recognizing the PRC’s sovereignty over the island. This is especially pronounced in the relationship with the US, and in almost every high level political meeting it is incumbent on the representatives of the US to reiterate their support for the “one-China policy”. However, there is a nuance to this acceptance by the US in that it explicitly opposes any actions or statements that would “unilaterally alter Taiwan’s status”. This applies to both Taiwan and the PRC, meaning that Taiwan has an insurance policy in its relationship with the US that ought to deter China from making the first move in any conflict. The special relationship that exists between the US and Taiwan is at the root of this sensitivity, but it is more serious than a linguistic exercise in diplomacy. The US has, on several occasions, demonstrated its willingness to defend Taiwan should it be subject to an unprovoked attack from the PRC. This was evidenced in the 1996 deployment of warships to the Taiwan Strait in response to PRC missile testing in the region. Additionally, the US has continued to meet its legal obligation to provide Taiwan with defensive arms which provokes strongly worded protests from Beijing on each occasion. Since 1990, according to a US Congressional report, Taiwan has requested major purchases in every calendar year except for 2006 and 2009. One of the most recent purchases, agreed in January 2010, included 114 PAC-3 defense missiles and 60 Black Hawk helicopters in a deal worth almost $6.4 billion; one of the largest ever agreed. In September 2011, the US reached a decision to refurbish Taiwan’s fleet of F-16s, fitting them with AESA radars (a form of stealth technology) but stopping short of approving the sale of new planes, but going far enough to anger China. While there are now some calls among American academics to rethink this alliance, it is unlikely to alter in the near future. The involvement of the US seems to assure that the future will be one of an easy maintenance of the status quo. While far from a perfect a solution, this is probably the best option for all concerned.
China Airlines, Taiwan’s national carrier, now flies direct to the mainland
The period of Chen Shui-bian’s presidency was certainly a low point in cross-straits relations, but the recovery since Ma’s election in 2008 has been impressive and encouraging. Political gestures have been important in this process, most notably the historic visit to the mainland by then-chairman of the KMT, Lien Chan, in 2008. Following Lien’s trip Beijing relaxed rules on Taiwan residents visiting the mainland and on mainlanders visiting Taiwan. The result was a dramatic increase in grassroots exchanges across the strait, with up to 3000 mainland tourists visiting the island every day. Direct flights were permanently established in the same year as Lien’s visit and have expanded consistently ever since, with a total of 558 weekly direct flights between the island and one of 41 cities on the mainland. Taiwanese investment in the mainland is thought to be greater than from any other territory, though the exact figures are obscured by a tendency for the investment to be channeled through tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands. More than one million Taiwan residents – around 5% of the population – now live on the mainland.
Future Trends
Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world for a time
While maintaining such an unconventional status within the international arena does present some symbolic challenges for the Taiwanese, the situation across the Strait right now remains stable and even mutually-beneficial for both sides. By some measurements, Taiwan is the number one source of FDI into China, providing valuable capital and knowledge from Taiwan’s world-class IT industries. In turn, these economic ties have allowed Taiwanese companies to remain cost-effective even as the island has shifted away from a labor-intensive to a knowledge-intensive economy. These economic ties have also gone some way in tempering Beijing’s saber rattling towards the island. One example of this was seen in 1996 when local officials in Fujian province, an important destination for Taiwanese capital, encouraged Beijing to show restraint during missile tests in the Strait, lest they scare off investors from the island. While CCP leaders say that economic factors would not deter an attack on the island if warranted, the prospect of the flight of Taiwanese capital from China certainly raises the potential cost for any Chinese action.
Although most states in the world continue to pay lip service to China’s ‘one China’ policy, they also maintain informal relations with Taiwan in their day-to-day affairs, particularly in the economic sphere. The US, in particular the US Congress, is Taiwan’s most ardent and powerful supporter. The involvement of the US and the potential for a conflict between to the world’s two greatest powers means that the cost of China acting unilaterally with regard to Taiwan is high, though the complexities of the forces competing for influence in China over this issue mean that it cannot entirely be ruled out. Oddly, one of the most potent sources of political tension in the region – the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands – has provided an opportunity for improved relations between China and Taiwan, since both share a rhetorical position on the matter. Nevertheless, the most likely future path for Taiwan and its relationship with the mainland is one of an uneasy maintenance of the status quo; it is in neither side’s interests to act unilaterally and the scope for common ground is too narrow to allow an agreement to be reached in the foreseeable future. Taiwan will not gain the independence that some of its people seek, but it is unlikely to be swallowed whole by China any time soon.
Water in China: A Thirsty Country
/in Economics, Society /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
China faces severe water shortages. Its current water per capita is one quarter of the world average, yet its overall per capita usage is still low by international standards, but this will increase over the coming decades. The water that China does have is often badly polluted and is inefficiently used. Moreover, China’s water is unequally distributed with the Yangtze River basin and areas to the south enjoying 84% of China’s naturally available water compared with just 16% in China’s north.
China’s water scarcity will challenge its future economic expansion. Already, agriculture, industry and China’s growing cities all compete for scarce water resources, as do China’s different regions. Decades-old economic priorities such as food self-sufficiency will be increasingly difficult to maintain because water used in industrial output creates more economic value than it does in agriculture. Water scarcity also creates domestic unrest. Increasing illness caused by polluted water is driving up healthcare costs and generating more internal dissent. In 2009, the Chinese government acknowledged that 90,000 “mass incidents” (a euphemism for protests) occurred, many of which were sparked by environmental and water degradation.
Population and its Impact on the Hydrological Cycle
Right from China’s earliest dynasties great attention was paid to agricultural productivity. The Chinese bureaucracy mobilized the Chinese masses to construct irrigation systems and to clear land. This created an agriculture-population feedback loop. Increased agricultural productivity led to a rise in population, requiring further hydro-engineering and agricultural innovation to maintain China’s swelling numbers. In an agrarian society, large families of many sons offered rural parents security both in terms of providing labor for farming and care in old age. In this way, China has remained the world’s most populous country for thousands of years. China is still the world’s most populous country today. In 2019, China’s population was approximately 1.434 billion people. By 2035, China’s population is expected to peak at 1.461 billion people. By 2050 and 2100, China’s population will reduce to 1.402 billion and 1.064 billion, respectively.
China’s large population today has risen in part because of a significant population surge between 1950 and 1980. During the period, China’s population grew from 554 million to just over 1 billion people. In order to feed its enormous and rapidly growing population, Mao mobilized its masses to create new agricultural and grazing land through the clearing of forests, the filling of lakes, the draining of swamps and wetlands, and the creation of large irrigation projects. While placing more agricultural land under plow and significantly expanding its irrigation networks, this significant transformation of China’s natural environment into an agricultural environment has impacted China’s hydrological cycle. When land is cleared of plant life through unsustainable farming and grazing methods, the local hydrological cycle is disrupted, and desiccation – the drying out of the environment – occurs. Instead of catching precipitation in the region and allowing rain to repeatedly return to the area hrough the process of evapotranspiration, deforestation, over-grazing and over-farming causes surface water to run immediately into streams instead of permeating the soil. In the north and northwest of China, it has been estimated that the average annual precipitation has decreased by one third between the 1950s and the 1980s; overall China has 350 billion m³ less water than it had at the start of the century equivalent to the amount of water that flows through the mouth of the Mississippi River in nine months.
China’s Significant Desertification
Approximately 28%, around 2.5 million km², of China’s land is desert or suffering desertification. China’s deserts have expanded significantly over the last six decades. China’s Environmental Protection Agency reported, for instance, that the Gobi Desert grew by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999. Overall, China’s semi-arid regions have increased 33% during 1994–2008 compared to 1948–62, and its deserts continue to expand at an estimated rate of 1,300 square miles a year. In addition to topographical and geographical conditions, factors driving China’s desertification include over-cultivation, overgrazing, pollution, wind erosion, water erosion, salinization of soils through over-irrigation, over-cutting firewood, water misuse, and industry and mining-related land destruction.
The cost of desertification is real. It is estimated that China loses approximately $6.8 billion annually from its growing deserts and arid lands. Desertification leads to depreciated land values, food insecurity resulting from reduced crop yields, heightened healthcare issues, and increased costs resulting from land protection efforts. Desertification and deforestation have also caused sediment levels to significantly increase in all of China’s river systems due to severe soil erosion. Greater soil levels in river water can impact the functioning of China’s many hydropower systems.
To fight China’s desertification, China unveiled the Great Green Wall program. Launched in 1978 and targeted to continue until 2050, the program’s objective is to plant a shelterbelt of trees across the northwest rim of China skirting the Gobi Desert. The Great Green Wall is expected to be 4,480 km long and 560-1460 km wide. To date, an estimated 66 billion trees have been planted.
However, this massive reforestation program has been controversial. Much of the shelterbelt area, except for areas to the east, is not highly suitable to forest growth. Trying to plant trees in ecosystems not suited to forest can diminish biodiversity, reduce water recharge, and cause a loss of soil quality and moisture. Additionally, China has tended toward the planting of a single species of trees over large areas. In Ningxia, for example, 70% of the trees planted were poplar and willow. Monocultures tend to be more vulnerable to disease. In 2000, for instance, one billion poplar trees were lost to disease, wiping out 20 years of planting effort. Additionally, monocultures do not increase biodiversity as they are not appropriate either for plants and animals normally found in the native, dry-land ecosystems or for the animals and plants that might want to migrate to newly forested ecosystems.
Another disadvantage of planting trees on grasslands is that they tend to absorb large amounts of groundwater. In Minqin, an area in north-western China, studies have shown that groundwater levels dropped by 12–19 metres since the advent of the project. As these trees absorb water levels, shallower-rooting native shrubs and grasses can die off. When this occurs, the soil on the forest floor is susceptible to wind erosion, the very challenge that the trees were planted to thwart. As evidence of this risk, sand storms from wind erosion have become more frequent despite China’s herculean tree-planting efforts. Fifty years ago, dust storms plagued China about once every seven or eight years; now they occur annually.
Given the challenges of the Great Green Wall, there is growing realization shrubs and grasses native to the region may be much more effective in restoring degraded dry lands and holding sand in place. As a result, there has been some movement toward replacing the planting of trees with the sowing of native flora.
Water Scarcity
Overall, China is an extremely arid country. As China’s population has swelled over the millennia, its per capita water has decreased. China now has an estimated 2,029 m3 of water per capita per annum, one quarter the world’s average. This per capita water figure is projected to decrease to 1,875 m³ by 2033. This water scarcity is exacerbated by China’s uneven water distribution. China’s precipitation patterns are heavily affected by the East Asian monsoonal climate. Its mountainous geography impedes and drains the monsoonal rains as they move from the southeast into the northwest of the continent. On average, southern China – including the Yangtze River basin and areas to its south – has approximately 80% of China’s water, yet the area supports 54% of its population, 35% of its arable land, and 55% of its GDP Conversely, northern China collected only 20% of China’s water to maintain 46% of the population, 65% of the arable land and 45% of its GDP. In some northern areas, strains on water resources are even worse. Beijing’s and Tianjin’s Hai River basin, for instance, receives approximately 1.5% of China’s water to support 10% of its population and 11% of its arable land. Moreover, 47% of total industrial output is fabricated in China driest 11 provinces including: Beijing, Gansu, Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Ningxia and Shandong. These 11 water-parched provinces account for just 7% of China’s total water resources but produce 36% of China’s agricultural production and 43% of total GDP while supporting 38% of the population.
Approximately 400 of China’s cities currently face water shortages, and over 300 million people drink water contaminated with pollutants including arsenic, excessive fluoride, toxins from untreated factory wastewater, agricultural chemicals, leaching landfill waste and human sewage. Moreover, China’s per capita water footprint is growing. China will not only have more people competing for its finite water resources in the coming decades, but each person will individually demand more water. Today, China’s overall water footprint per capita is still about half that of the US but is expected to grow by between 40% and 50% by 2030. Factors such as higher living standards, increasing urbanization and further industrialization are driving water demand. China’s rising wealth has meant, for instance, that its citizens are eating substantially more meat. The production of one kilogram of beef requires 600 liters of water compared with the 100 liters required for a kilogram of wheat. This shift in diet can be seen in China’s food footprint numbers. In 1961, China used 260 m³ of water per capita to grow food; by 2003 this figure had more than trebled to 860 m³.
Agricultural, Urbanization, Industrialization, Water Wastage
Currently, 62% of China’s water is used for agriculture, a sector which is responsible for approximately 13% of the country’s GDP. About 50% of China’s farmland requires irrigation, more than double the world average. Nearly 75% of total grain production and over 90% of China’s cash crops are sown on irrigated farms. According to China Water Risk, irrigation water usage was approximately 340 billion m3 in 2013, equal to the average annual flow from China’s Pearl River, China’s third longest river. Yet agriculture water usage remains extremely inefficient, with an estimated 45% of agricultural water lost before it even reaches crops. By contrast, water used for industrial output is 70 times more productive in terms of financial value than that used in wheat production.
That said, the water productivity of Chinese industry is also low by international standards. The industrial added value per 10,000 yuan of water consumption is about 50 m³ compared to 7-9 m³ in developed countries. Additionally, the industrial water recycling rate is less than 50% compared to 85% in developed countries. Overall, China’s overall water productivity – calculated by dividing GDP by annual total water withdrawal – remains low: $15 in 2015 compared with $318 for the UK, $115 for Singapore, $103 for Germany, $67 for Japan, and $36 for the United States.
China’s growing urbanization is also requiring more water per capita. 70% of Chinese citizens are projected to be living in cities by 2030, up from 59% today. This is significant because urban dwellers consume three times as much water and energy as rural residents. Between 2000 and 2020, for instance, the World Bank estimated that China’s urban water consumption increased by 60% as its urbanization rate rose from 36% in 2000 to 57% in 2020. Moreover, more urban dwellers will require more electricity. Currently, it is estimated that 59% of China’s primary energy consumed was powered by coal. Coal requires more water to produce them all other energy sources. Moreover, over half of China’s coal deposits are found in its north, the Chinese region which suffers from the most water scarcity. Coal mining, processing, combustion, and coal-to-chemical industries are the country’s second largest water consumer after agriculture. Therefore, consuming more coal to produce more electricity will put additional stress China’s limited water resources. Finally, China’s urban water distribution networks are particularly leaky. In 2002, an investigation of 408 cities conducted by the Ministry of Construction found that urban water supplies lost an average of 22% of their total water flow.
Water Pollution
Despite China’s efforts over the last three decades, water pollution has spread from the coastal to inland areas and from the surface to underground water resources. An estimated 70% of China’s rivers and lakes are now polluted. In 2009, 57% of the 7 monitored river basins had pollution levels of I-III, suitable for drinking, swimming, household use, and able to support aquatic life. 24% of China’s rivers had levels of IV-V, water unfit for swimming, but suitable for industrial purpose. 19% had V+, meaning that the water is considered useless, unfit for industry or agriculture and unsafe for human contact even after treatment. 23% of China’s key lakes and reservoirs had water grades of I-III, 42% IV-V and 35% V+. 2.3% of groundwater in 8 regions was rated I-II, 23.9% was graded III, and 73.8% ranked IV-V.
Causes of water pollution include the disposal of industrial chemicals and waste, agricultural waste, and residential wastewater. Of these pollution sources, approximately 70% of the water pollution nationwide comes from agriculture, particularly runoff from fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste. For millennia, China’s farmers produced agriculture through “organic” farming methods. Farmers collected every bit of organic waste to ferment for fertilizer. Nothing was wasted, and even human waste, or “night soil”, went into “honey buckets” to transport to the fields. Every winter and spring farmers dredged nearby rivers and canals to add sediment to the fertilizer. Particularly in the south, dense grass at the water’s edge was added to pig fodder, which, after being digested by the pigs, produced manure, and helped keep the rivers and lakes clear from vegetation. The entire process of recycling was labor-intensive but efficient. The rivers and lakes remained relatively clean despite thousands of years of intensive farming.
Yet, since 1978, fertilizer applications in China have increased fivefold. In general, animal and human feces are no longer collected for fertilizer, and instead are discharged untreated into rivers.
In addition to causing pollution, fertilizer runoff is also raising the instances of eutrophication. Although blooms of aquatic biomass are spurred by a variety of factors including nutrients, light, temperature, water flow, turbidity, zooplankton grazing and toxic substances, the main factor contributing to the growth of algae is the supply of nutrients. Chemical fertilizer runoff has significantly accelerated eutrophication of many of China’s lakes such as Dian Chi in Yunnan Province, Chao Hu in Anhui Province and Tai Hu in Hubei Province where algae blooms absorb a significant portion of the lake’s oxygen, choking off fish and other aquatic life. Large algae blooms also broke out right before the 2008 Olympics, forcing Beijing to launch a massive emergency clean-up to ensure the sailing events could go ahead as scheduled in Qingdao, in Shandong.
In addition to pollution caused from fertilizer and pesticide runoff, rural areas also contribute to contamination by poor wastewater management. According to the 2017 China Statistical Yearbook, for instance, while nearly 95% of municipal wastewater generated by urban residents was treated, this number dropped to 25% for rural residents. Additionally, small-scale rural enterprises have less rigorous environmental monitoring, but frequently engage in all manner of heavily polluting production, such as the operation of paper mills, tanneries, and breweries. Pollution from the small-scale rural enterprises is aggravated by the fact that they are more likely to use outdated equipment and have less resources to spend on pollution abatement.
About 80% of China’s 7500 most polluting factories are located on rivers, lakes, or in heavily populated areas. While occurring less frequently than in the past, these factories have been known to release untreated waste and chemicals into China’s waters either intentionally or by accident. Example of this is the 2012 cadmium spill in Guangxi which polluted an approximately 100 km stretch of the Longjiang River at a level of more than five times the official limit, contaminating water supplies for Liuzhou, a city of 3.2 million people. Cadmium is poisonous and can cause cancer. Another example is the 2020 Heilongjiang province spillage of 2.53 million cubic meters of water containing molybdenum ore waste into the local river system. The spill contaminated water for 110 km southwest of the mining site, where the chemical oxygen demand reading (DOC) – a measure of water quality – was 5.7 times higher than standard levels.
China’s factories also release dangerous airborne pollutants that are absorbed into groundwater or contaminate rivers by way of urban runoff. Some of the most harmful are categorized as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and an estimated 90% of water located in sources near Chinese cities is now dangerously polluted because of their presence.
Economic and Health Cost of Water Pollution
China has also seen a rise in cancer rates. Contemporaneously with the rise in pollution levels in China’s lakes and rivers, digestive tract cancers including stomach, liver and esophagus have also risen and are now responsible for approximately 36.4% of cancer-related deaths in China compared to less than 5% of total cancer deaths in either the US or the UK. Additionally, there have also been incidents of contaminated river water from industrial activities leading to outbreaks of cancer concentrated in some villages. These villages have become colloquially known as Aizheng Cun, which literally translates as “Cancer Village.”
Flooding – Yellow River and Yangtze River
Not only are desertification and deforestation exacerbating China’s water scarcity, they are also aggravating China’s flooding challenges. The Chinese Minister of Water Resources, Chen Lei estimated in 2007 that China has lost 2% of national GDP annually to flooding since 1990 and a recent study placed the total costs of floods from 2000 to 2012 at 105 billion RMB annually (US $17 billion). Flooding has challenged Chinese rulers for millennia. From 602 BCE to 1938 AD it is estimated that major collapses of Yellow River dikes occurred once every two or three years. Then, every hundred years or so, the river would change its course. Many of the resulting floods were some of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded. For millennia, the Chinese constructed dikes along the lower reaches of the Yellow River trying to contain its torrents, yet constant ecological destruction along the upper reaches increased erosion which intensified river silting. The silting raised the riverbed above the countryside. This “suspended” river greatly increased flood damage when the river inevitably breached its dikes. After 1949, the CCP built almost 3000 dams on the Yellow River, and heavily reinforced its levees and embankments. These hydro-engineering projects involved the equivalent of 500 million workdays and 1.4 billion m³ of reinforced concrete – enough to build 13 Great Walls. Yet many of the Yellow River’s dams have fallen short of physical and economic targets, and have resulted in huge losses of forest lands, wildlife habitat and aquatic biodiversity. Global warming has also increased evaporation at many of the dam sites.
Similarly, parts of the Yangtze River have flooded continually for millennia. Yet, as deforestation and reclamation of land has increased, floods have become more frequent and more destructive. The CCP attempted to solve the flooding by increasing the height of 3,600 km of embankments and more than 30,000 km of levies. The work required more than 4 billion m³ of dirt and stone, or enough material to put a wall around the globe three times. Yet these raised structures could not offset the loss of water absorption capacity caused by the rapid deforestation and agricultural land reclamation that occurred during the same period. As a result, the Yangtze experienced a series of significant floods in 1980, 1981, 1983, 1991 and 1996. Then in June 1998, China suffered one of its worst floods in 40 years, leaving 3,700 people dead, 15 million homeless and causing $26 billion of economic damages. The reinforced embankments and levees proved largely ineffective, with approximately 9,000 of them collapsing. As well as providing hydropower and improved navigation, the controversial Three Gorges Dam was built in large part to control the Yangtze’s flooding, although many scientists believe that the Yangtze is still vulnerable. Additionally, after the 1998 flood, China began to place greater importance on the role of ecology in flood prevention and has begun an extensive campaign of reforestation and forest preservation.
Drought
Because of the variability of the monsoonal rains and other factors, like flooding, drought has plagued the country for millennia. Yet desiccation, reduced precipitation and rising temperatures in many areas have made China’s droughts more frequent with longer durations extending over greater areas than at any previous time. For instance, research has shown that since 1980, severe droughts in China’s northeast have increased in frequency, severity, and duration. Between 1960 and 1980, acute droughts struck approximately once a decade. From 1980 onwards, droughts have occurred with greater frequency: in 1981, 1986, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2005-2007, 2010, 2017-2018, 2019, 2020. China’s southwest to northeast belt was the area most affected by drought. Regions most impacted include Inner Mongolia, Hunan, Yunnan, Hubei, Jilin, Anhui, Sichuan, Liaoning, Guizhou, and Shandong.
Although difficult to pinpoint specifically, it is estimated that China lost $7 billion annually due to the economic cost of drought between 1984 in 2017. If global warming continues apace, these economic losses could increase to between $47 billion annually if temperatures rise an additional 1.5°C to $84 billion if global warming drives temperatures above 2°C. China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades. This self-sufficiency camouflages the fact that China produces one-sixth of the world’s wheat output and one-fifth of global corn. China is thus enormously important to the world’s food supply. If drought significantly disrupted China’s food production on a large-scale, it could significantly impact world food prices. The risk is real. In every year since 2005, drought has challenged China’s grain crops, and the government has been forced to spend billions of dollars digging wells and cloud seeding to encourage rain. In 2010-201, northern China suffered its worst drought in 60 years, impacting most of China’s wheat producing regions. At its peak, it is estimated that 36% of China’s northern wheat fields were affected, and that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million livestock suffered from a lack of water. The water shortages also affected around 161 million people, with an economic cost estimated at $2.8 billion. In 2017, China’s Inner Mongolia region experienced a severe drought which affected 120,000 people and 500,000 livestock and 16 million acres of pastureland. It is estimated that the drought caused economic losses of approximately $780 million. In 2019, China’s Hebei province experienced a serious drought which impacted almost 800,000 ha of cropland and left 15,700 people and ,3000 domestic animals with diminished access to drinking water.
Drought has not been restricted to China’s drier north. In western Sichuan, for example, rapid deforestation caused Sichuan’s forest cover to fall from 3.6 million hectares in in 1985 to 2.34 million hectares in 1995 which has led to decreased precipitation. In the 1950s, serious droughts hit Sichuan about once every three years. In the 1960s, this became once every two years and by the 1980s, drought troubled Sichuan counties annually. In 2010, more than 20 million people in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Chongqing were left without adequate drinking water and a 2011 Sichuan drought affected almost 8 million people. Looking at drought conditions in Guangxi province specifically, records show that from 1618 to 1943, major droughts hit the region once every 33 years. From 1946 to 1972, the interval fell to every six years, and in the 1980s, it fell to every two years. There were four major droughts in the three-year period from 1989 to 1991. Since 2000, drought has plagued Guangxi annually. In 2004, for instance, 1100 Guangxi reservoirs went dry, and hydropower generation was cut dramatically. In 2007, one million residents in Guangxi and 250,000 in neighboring Guangdong faced water shortages during the worst regional drought in more than 50 years. In 2009, Guangxi, which produces 60% of China’s sugar cane, had a 10% drop in its production due to drought conditions. In 2010, 12 of the 14 cities in Guangxi were affected by water shortages. As another example, in 2019, Anhui Province, was plagued by the worst drought it had experienced in 50 years. Rainfall was at only 40% of normal levels. The neighboring provinces of Hubei, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Zhejian were also significantly impacted.
Climate Change
How climate change will impact China’s water scarcity is still being studied. A study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that drought related losses caused China approximately $7 billion annually between 1984 in 2017. If temperatures were to rise 1.5°C, these losses could grow to $47 billion annually. Above 2°C, drought losses could rise as high as $84 billion annually. Overall, however, a clear understanding of the impact of climate change on China’s water resources and agriculture is not definitive. Most scientists agree that more work is needed on regional climate simulations-especially simulations of precipitation-to better understand how a warming environment will impact everything from crops to diseases to future per capita water resources. (Piao, 2010)
What is definitive is that global warming is having an undeniable effect on the Tibetan Plateau. Like the Arctic and Antarctic, the Tibetan plateau is warming three times faster than the global average at .3°C per decade. In Tibet’s case, this accelerated warming is driven significantly by its Tibet’s high elevation which averages 4,500 meters. The plateau holds the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic, an estimated 14.5% of the global total including 46,000 glaciers. The plateau is also the source of 10 of the world’s largest rivers including the Yangtze, Yellow, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Indus Rivers which in turn provide water to over 1.6 billion people. An estimated 80% of Tibet’s glaciers are now melting more quickly than originally thought. Many Chinese scientists believe that one-third of the glacial area in Tibet will disappear by 2050, and half will disappear by 2100.
Greater melting rates will have several effects. Melting glaciers often create glacial lakes dammed by unstable moraines. These moraine dams can unexpectedly burst, causing catastrophic flooding. Greater glacial melt water in the short term will increase river runoff. In the long term, as glaciers diminish or disappear, the resulting depletion of meltwater runoff is likely to deplete the year-round viability of Tibetan originating rivers, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people downstream.
Power Outages
China’s water scarcity has also resulted in lower water levels of many of China’s major river systems. For instance, Chinese researchers have discovered that the volume of water entering the Yangtze River at its source on the Tibetan plateau has dropped by 15% over the last four decades. Similarly, a study regarding Yellow River water found that runoff has runoff decreased significantly between 1956 and 2009. Moreover, a 2013 study conducted by China’s Ministry of Water not only corroborated that the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers are experiencing declining water levels, but also found that approximately 28,000 of China’s original 50,000 rivers have now disappeared. Part of the reason for the disappearing rivers has been attributed to improved mapping techniques; however, the fact that rivers are disappearing has been validated by other studies. Other rivers, especially in the north, have become seasonal rivers flowing most strongly during the spring melts.
Diminishing flow levels in China’s rivers mean that the country will be challenged by power outages due to inadequate flow through its hydropower dams. Hydropower accounts for approximately 22% of China’s total installed capacity. It is estimated that the lack of water to run hydropower dams has cut hydroelectric power production by 20% and China may be forced to burn 1 million more metric tons of coal a week to cover the shortfall.
Trends
Serious water scarcity looms in China’s future. This scarcity is likely to increase competition between Chinese regions, between sectors of the economy and between urban and rural residents. It will also raise tensions between the government and parts of society that lack access to adequate, clean water sources. Moreover, the Tibetan Plateau is a source of rivers that reach 16 downstream countries including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. China’s damming, polluting, and use of international rivers is likely to increase tensions with these countries as populations in downstream riparian countries grow, and as these economies continue to develop and urbanize. Many of these countries, especially India, are already facing their own severe water crisis, which will only be exacerbated if China diverts river water that needs to be shared internationally.
Additionally, China’s water contamination risks exporting China’s pollution and water-borne disease to its neighbors downstream. This water pollution is exacerbated by rapid glacial melting. Glaciers capture atmospheric pollution; dangerous pesticides such as DDT and pollutants such as perfluoroalkyl acids are increasingly coursing downstream in meltwater and collecting in sediments and in the food chain.
Political relations could be further stressed if water shortages cause mass migrations of people. In fact, some analysts suggest that the so-called “oil wars” of the 20th century could be replaced by “water wars” in the 21st. Over the last 30 years, China’s Mekong dams, alone, have held back more water than they have released. There is some argument that, in anticipation of the fact that Tibet’s glaciers will likely be rapidly depleted in the next 80 years, China is compounding glacier melt for its future needs.
China’s immediate water solution is to use water more conservatively, and to improve pollution control. Historically, China has solved growing water demands through the construction of massive hydro-engineering projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion Project. In the future, China will increasingly need to solve its water deficit through ecological conservation, pollution management, more efficient water usage, and a redistribution of economic output by raising the price of water to reflect its scarcity and true economic value.
References
China’s Geography: The Physical Story
/in Economics, Society /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
With a total area of nearly 9,600,000 square kilometers, China’s landmass is slightly smaller than that of Europe. It stretches about 5,000 km from east to west, and about 5,500 km from north to south. China has land borders with 14 nations including Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam.
Mountains, hills, and highlands cover about 66 percent of the nation’s territory. China’s surface slopes down in steps, starting from the Tibet plateau at 4000 m. China’s second geographical step averages 1-2000m and includes the Mongolia, Loess, and the Yunnan-Guizhou plateaus, and the Tarim, Junggar and Sichuan Basins. The third step, with an average elevation of 500- 1000 m, begins roughly at the edge of the Greater Hinggan, Taihang, Wushan and Xuefeng mountain ranges, and continues east to the coast.
Descending these geographical steps, China’s major river systems wind their way from west to east. Its largest river systems include the Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze River in central China, and the Pearl River in the south, all of which flow from the higher plateaus to the eastern Oceans. Along China’s east runs a 14,500 km coast.
Much as any other nation, the development and the history of the Chinese civilization have been profoundly influenced by its geographical setting. As early as 400,000 BCE, cave dwellers lived in China. Beginning in approximately 8000 BCE, people in north and central China began domesticating animals and growing food, especially millet in the Yellow River valley of the north and rice in the Yangtze River valley to the south. A warming climate aided agricultural innovation. The surplus food production allowed more populous and complex societies to evolve. By 5000 to 4000 BCE Neolithic settlements were scattered throughout China. By 2000 BCE these village settlements saw people begin to specialize in different kinds of productive occupations. By 2200 BCE, China’s first dynasty was formed. By 1500 BCE, the Han Chinese had developed a sophisticated civilization with character writing, bronze technology, the world’s most productive agriculture, walled cities and towns, and a powerful, national army.
Once China was established, it mountains, deserts, empty steppe lands and uninviting coast provided natural barriers that helped China to maintain remarkable continuity in language, cultural values, and social and political institutions, making China the world’s longest continuing civilization. China has historically been an inward looking country, content to develop within the confines of its vast continent. That said, it has also been shaped by a continual stream of outside influences, such as the arrival of Buddhism from India, the periodic invasion by Mongols from the north, and the trade of goods, most famously along the commerce networks of the renowned Silk Road.
China’s Western Lands
The western land of China is characterized by high plateaus and multiple mountain ranges which are broken by vast basins and deserts. This land is arid and cold, and suffers from constant drought. The lack of water has limited the number of people living in the region. Only 6% of China’s total population lives in the western half of the country.
Most of China’s mountains, including its five main mountain ranges, trend west-east. In southwestern China, the Himalayas and the Kunlun Mountains enclose the Tibet Plateau, which encompasses most of Tibet Autonomous Region. The Tibet Plateau with an area of 2.5 million kilometers, is China’s highest and largest plateau, about four times the size of France. Mount Everest is part of the Himalayan range and is located on the China-Nepal border. The Gangdise range parallels the Himalayas to its north. The Tien range crosses between the massive Tarim Basin to the south and the Junggar Basin to the north. Rich deposits of coal, oil, and metallic ores lie in the Tien Shan area. Between these two basins lies Turpan Pendi, which at 154 m below sea level, is the lowest point in China and the second lowest place in the world after the Dead Sea.
To the north of the Tibetan Plateau lies the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, which stretch from the extreme northwest eastwards through Mongolia. The Gobi is the largest desert in Asia, covering parts of northern and northwestern China and Mongolia. The Gobi was part of the Mongol Empire and was traversed in part by the ancient Silk Roads. It is a cold desert for much of the year, and it is not uncommon to see frost on its dunes. Northeast of the Gobi, the Heilongjiang or Black Dragon River flows for 3,101 kilometers.
South of the Gobi lies the Inner Mongolian Plateau, an average of 1,000 m above sea level. The Yin mountain range, averaging elevations of 1,400 m, extends east-west through the plateau’s center. To its south is the largest loess plateau in the world, covering 600,000 km. Loess is a yellowish soil originating from the Inner Mongolian deserts. The soil is carried easily on the wind, and through the centuries, it has choked the Yellow River with silt. The Loess sand also plagues Beijing and its surrounding areas with dust storms, which turn the sky yellowish-gray and force people indoors or into protective gear. A March 2011 sandstorm, for instance, affected about 250 million people over an 808,000 sq. km area. China is planting thousands of acres of vegetation to stop spreading desertification, but the work will take decades to finish.
Along an arc that roughly outlines the southern edge of Inner Mongolia, the Great Wall of China extends approximately 8850 km, including 6260 km of actual wall, as well as trenches and natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers. The wall was built to protect the northern borders of the Chinese empire against invasions by various nomadic tribes.
Eastern China
The eastern part of China is divided north-south by the Qinling Mountains, an extension of the Kunlun Mountains. This boundary is both physiographic and cultural. To its north flows the Yellow River, travelling through the North China Plain to the Yellow Sea. Home of Beijing, the Yellow River basin is called the “Cradle of Chinese Civilization.” It was the most prosperous region of early China, and has been the center of Chinese expansion and influence since ancient times. The North China Plain is vulnerable both to flooding and earthquakes. Over the last 3000-4000 years, the Yellow River has flooded over 1500 times often with catastrophic effect. For example in 1931, the flooding of the Yellow River, in combination with the Yangtze and Huai rivers, is estimated to have caused between 1 and 4 million deaths.
South of the Qinling mountain range are the heavily populated and exceedingly developed lower and middle plains of the Yangtze River and, on its western reaches, the Sichuan Basin. Crossing 6,300 km through the heart of the country, the Yangtze is China’s longest and most important waterway. It is navigable over much of its length, and has a vast hydroelectric potential. The Three Gorges Dam, for instance, spans the Yangtze at the town of Sandouping in Hubei province. Connecting the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers is the 1776 km long Grand Canal, one of the greatest engineering projects in China, and the longest artificial river in the world. Constructed between the 5th century BC and the 7th century AD, it is the only major Chinese waterway running from north to south.
Second only to the Qinling range as an internal boundary is the Nanling mountains, the southernmost of the east-west mountain ranges. South of the Nanling mountains is the Pearl River and its many tributaries which all flow into the Pearl River Delta. The Pearl River – used as a catchment term to refer to the watersheds of the Xi, Bei, and Dong (West, North and East) Rivers – is China’s third longest river after the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers and second largest by volume after the Yangtze. The Pearl River takes its name from all the Pearl colored shells which lie at the bottom of the river in the section which flows through the city of Guangzhou.
West of the mountains of the Pearl River, the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau rises in two steps toward the mountain regions of the eastern Tibet Plateau. In Yunnan province, the plateau averages 2000m is characterized mountain peaks as high as 3700 m. In the Guizhou range, the plateau averages 1200 m in height, and is characterized by rolling hills, deep river-carved gorges and mountains marked with geological faults. Karsts – distinctive geological features caused by water eroding the limestone underlying the plateau- dominate the landscape. Such karst features include sinkholes, caves and natural bridges, and large underwater aquifers. The Yunnan-Guizhou plateau is the source of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers.
In spite of the 14,500 km coastline fringed with offshore islands, China has traditionally oriented itself not toward the sea but inland, developing as an imperial power whose center lay in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River on the northern plains. The southern part of the coast is rugged and mountainous so that its good harbors provide poor access to the inland regions. The north coast is low and swampy. The Yellow, East China, and South China Seas are all part of the larger Pacific Ocean.
Arable Land
Because of the mountainous and arid nature of its geography, only about 15% of China’s total land area is suitable for farming, almost all of which is under plow. The lack of and the nature of its arable land has also led to one of the most labor-intensive agricultural systems in the world. Farming in the arid north along the Yellow River has required much coordinated effort, both to create irrigation systems and to build dykes to prevent the Yellow River from constantly flooding. Similarly, in the south, rice cultivation has always been extremely labor-demanding. From creating the clay-bottomed rice plots that trap water, to laying the muddy ground into which the pre-grown rice shoots are planted, to the intricate fertilization and pest removal that each shoot requires, to the rapid harvest of the ripe rice and quick re-planting to ensure two and sometimes three crops per year, wet rice production in the south is one of the most labor intensive crops in the world. Rice cultivation is also one of the most efficient in the numbers of people it can sustain. In fact, for much of its history, China has been one of the most populous countries of the world.
It has been argued that the demands of China’s irrigation, water and agricultural management have caused the Chinese to be a collective minded rather than individualistic people. What is true is that the Chinese have historically shown a great ability to organize its people to undertake tasks on a large scale such as the building of roads, dams, canals and defensive walls as well as the large scale production of iron and porcelain. It has also been argued that the nature of rice agriculture has caused China to develop a tradition and culture of hard work which is manifest in China’s work ethic today. What is indeed true is that the Chinese rice farmer works significantly more hours per year than a farmer sowing other crops such as wheat and corn.
China’s most important food crops are rice and wheat. Due to its high water and warmth requirements, most of China’s rice crops are planted in the south. This region also produces tea, sugarcane, and the mulberry leaves which feed the silkworms. Wheat is the chief crop of the north. Other northern crops include millet, maize, kaoliang (sorghum) and soya beans. In a few areas, cotton and peanuts are grown. Cattle, sheep, and horse ranching are limited to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Ranching is rare in China proper because there are not the wide open plains necessary to maintain large herds. The optimal use of land is for cultivation of crops and animal husbandry, and most farmers keep chickens, ducks and pigs. This land constraint explains why there is a large-co-habitation between foul, swine and people in China, and why it has proved to be an effective breeding ground for such viruses as SARS and Swine flu.
China is currently losing arable land due to desertification and rapid urbanization. Currently, approximately 400 million people live in towns and cities, and China now has over 160 cities with populations greater than 1 million people, the largest being Shanghai and Beijing. By 2050, China expects 1.1 billion of its citizens to be in urban settings.
Climate
China’s climate is as varied as its topography. China’s climates range from the cold-temperate north to the tropical south, with subarctic-like temperatures in the Himalayan Mountains. In the winter, there is little rain or snow anywhere in China. In the summer, the warming land draws tropical sea air saturated with moisture into southern China. As the air encounters mountains and cooler inland air masses, rains fall plentifully in southern China. As the summer monsoon moves northwest, it brings less rain, meaning that overall China’s north is dry and its south is verdant. In bad years, the monsoons are too weak to cross into the Yellow River Valley, and become stuck over the central mountain belts, causing drought in the north and flooding in the south. In 2011, for instance, large floods in Southern China killed 132 people and displaced 800,000.
Nevertheless, overall, China is an arid country and is facing an increasingly severe water crisis. In 1997, for instance, the downstream stretches of the Yellow River ran dry for 226 days. In a project reminiscent of the Grand Canal, China has plans to build a vast new aqueduct – the South-North Water Diversion Project – which will divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year from the Yangtze River to satisfy the water needs of the North China Plain. The project has been likened to diverting water from the Mississippi River in the United States to meet the water requirements of Boston, Washington and New York and is projected to cost $62 billion, twice the cost of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project.
People
Around 1.3 billion people, or approximately a fifth of the world’s population, live in China. The Han Chinese, the native Chinese-speaking people, comprise approximately 90% of the population. 55 different ethnic groups, including the Uighurs, Mongols, and Tibetans account for the remaining 10%. China has seven large language groups each of which contain hundreds of dialects. Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect, is China’s common language, and can be spoken by most Chinese people who have completed primary education.
Although the Communist regime has discouraged the practice of religion, temples and pagodas are found in most Chinese cities. For millennia, Chinese life has been influenced by the teachings of Confucianism, China’s major belief system. Buddhism and Taoism are also significant religions in China, and Islam is practiced by many of China’s ethnic minorities.
China’s Geography Today
The geography of China today has been altered over thousands of years by human habitation. The cleverness that enabled the Chinese to to support a population that exceeded 100 million people as early as the 12th century has extracted a real ecological toll on the country. One of the great tests facing China today is whether it can protect its natural resources during its current rapid development.
At the heart of this challenge is China’s scarcity of water. With 20% of the world’s population, but only 7% of global water resources, China faces severe water challenges. Mainland China has a per capita share of water of 2700 m³ per day, or one quarter of the world’s average. Moreover, the area south of the Yangtze River, which accounts for only 37% of China’s physical land, has 81% of China’s total water supply, while the 63% of land north of the Yangtze has only 19% of China’s water. Northern water demand is depleting underground aquifers. Drilling deeper to gain new water access has caused naturally occurring arsenic pockets to be reached, increasing the presence of arsenic in some water supplies. The World Bank predicts that by as early 2020, there may well be as many as 30 million environmental refugees within China due to lack of water and desertification.
The fresh water that China does have is often heavily polluted. 90% of the city’s groundwater and 75% of rivers and lakes are contaminated, and it is estimated that 700 million people drink polluted water daily. Water pollution occurs from industrial and municipal emissions, pesticides and fertilizers, and acid rain. Additionally, industrial pollution incidents, such as Songhua River toxic chemical spill in November 2005, have become more common.
The diversion to China of more of the water resources of major trans boundary rivers such as the Brahmaputra River and the Mekong River, risks being an increasing source of tension between China and countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, India and Bangladesh. For instance, China has built two dams on the Mekong, and has plans to build three more, inciting anger in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. In the book Tibet’s Waters Will Save China, Chinese ex-officials have looked at ways for China to keep more of the Brahmaputra River to meet China’s growing water needs.
Another water related issue is China’s rapid building of dams to capture its hydro-electrical potential. Projects such as the Three Gorges Dam have not only raised environmental concerns as ecosystems are disrupted, but they have caused increased social unrest as millions of people are uprooted, sometimes without fair compensation. Environmental and social concerns around dam building will remain key points of debate in China in the near future.
There is a high correlation between the fertility and resources of its various areas and the wealth of its populace. Most of the wealthiest Chinese live in China’s southeast, where water is abundant, where as many as two to three rice crops can be harvested each year, and where easy access to export markets caused the region to lead China’s re-integration into the global economy. Similarly, the east coast of China is wealthier than its hinterland as it has better access to global trade. The poorest Chinese live in the arid north-west where deserts, mountains, and high-elevation plateaus prevail. Increasing inequality, caused in no small part by China’s geographical diversity, is an important concern for Communist party leaders. Growing social discontent at the increasing difference of wealth between regions and between people is a real risk to the Communist Party’s control of power.
Tectonically, China remains one of the most active seismic regions of the world. The country has a long history of being hit by deadly earthquakes. The largest earthquake occurred in 1556, where it was estimated that over 800,000 people died. Since 2005, China has experienced four deadly earthquakes in 2011, 2010, 2008 and 2005. According to official figures, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed over 69,000 people, and left almost 5 million people homeless. These earthquakes will continue to generate debate not only about Chinese construction standards and Chinese compliance with building codes, but also about the quality of China’s public health care system. Many of the 2008 Sichuan victims, for instance, had little or no health insurance, and poor access to healthcare facilities.
Flooding will also remain an issue for China. The summer monsoon draws tropical sea air saturated with moisture into southern China. In bad years, the summer monsoons become stuck over China’s central mountain belts and fail to reach the Yellow River Valley, causing drought in the north and flooding in the south. In 2011 it was estimated that floods caused $1.2 billion in losses, disrupted the lives of approximately 5.7 million people and damaged or destroyed more than 7000 homes. Areas most vulnerable to flooding include Zhejiang, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guizhou.
From Indifference to Engagement to Dominance? China and International Organizations
/in Politics /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, its strategy with regard to involvement in international organizations has undergone a complete U-turn. As political and economic international organizations such as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions developed in the years after WWII, the PRC remained skeptical and suspicious of becoming entrapped in a framework set by external, Western, and ordinarily capitalist powers. Instead, it pursued a policy of non-engagement in multilateral institutions, with very few exceptions. Those it did involve itself with, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, evidenced attempts by China to disassociate itself from the superpower struggle between the US and the Soviet Union. Although this was partly driven by the politics of the Cold War that determined so much of international relations at that time, it also reflected the mistrust felt in China towards such institutions, rooted in the historical sense of injustice felt at its treatment by the League of Nations, which failed completely to arrest the invasion of China by Japan, a League member.
China began to rethink its engagement in international organizations after the success of its economic reform program launched in 1978. As an increasing percentage of its GDP became generated through international trade, and its status as an international power began to rise, China came to determine that engagement with international organizations would be useful in resolving trade disputes, gaining access to markets, promoting its perspectives on the international stage, and assuring established powers that its rise would be peaceful and would happen within the existing international framework. Today, China is not only a member of virtually all relevant international organizations, but it is also a key actor in many of them.
United Nations
Since the creation of the UN in the aftermath of World War II, one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council has been reserved for China. This seat was initially occupied by the Republic of China in Taiwan that was recognized as the government of all of China by most Western powers from 1949-1971. The People’s Republic of China, therefore, had no representation within the UN. This changed in 1971 when a UN General Assembly vote recognized the PRC as the legal government of China, effectively transferring all UN powers to the PRC, including Taiwan’s permanent seat on the Security Council and the veto that comes with it. This was an important step in the gradual global recognition, by international powers, that the PRC was the legitimate government of China. The ROC in Taiwan was expelled from the UN as it was no longer recognized as a state, and has never been readmitted, despite sporadic attempts from within Taiwan for it to be recognized. Thus, its membership in the UN had the immediate effect of facilitating the promotion of the PRC’s ‘one China’ policy, which ensured Taiwanwould never be officially recognized as separate from the PRC.
In its early years in the UN, China was relatively passive in its behavior, ordinarily abstaining in votes on peacekeeping operations (PKOs) and never participating in the operations themselves. During the 1971-1978 period, China voted in favor of roughly 40% of the resolutions that passed. This gradually began to change after 1978 with China increasing the number of motions it put forward. This more participative and assertive behavior continued in the 1990s, particularly from the first Gulf War onwards, when China not only began to vote in favor of peace keeping operations, PKOs, but actually became involved in the operations directly. By 2008, China was contributing approximately 2500 troops to UN PKOs, a similar number to France and significantly more than the US. The record since the turn of the millennium shows that more than 95% of resolutions that pass in the UNSC receive the support of China. This demonstrates both a shift in the behavior of China itself, which has become much more willing to take an active role in the process of international governance, as well as in the attitude of other UNSC members, who have come to see China’s support, as opposed to its passivity, as crucial to the perceived legitimacy of any UN action.
China has positioned itself within the UN as something of a voice for developing nations and frequently counts on the support of these countries in votes in the General Assembly (where the veto it wields on the Security Council cannot be used). This has been particularly useful in avoiding censure over human rights abuses. As by far the largest member of the G77 group of developing nations, China is able to use its influence both to secure support from, and to advance the interests of, a significant bloc of the UN’s membership. Although this makes it a major player in the General Assembly, the most powerful body of the UN remains the Security Council where it continues to have to work with the other permanent members.
China is not only involved in the Security Council and General Assembly, but is also active in most other UN organizations through which it continues to pursue its core national objectives. For instance, even during the 2003 SARS and 2006 Avian Flu epidemics, China maintained its stance of blockingTaiwan’s participation in the World Health Organization, on the grounds that statehood is required for membership and the PRC is the sole legitimate government of China with Taiwan as part of China’s territory. Such an intransigent position was criticized both in Taiwan and by health experts in the organization with some suggesting that lives were lost as a result, though there are no credible statistics to support this claim. What this episode clearly demonstrated was China’s “red line” with regard to its position on Taiwan and the position of strength it now occupies in the UN structure through which it can pursue its objectives.
World Trade Organization
After protracted negotiations China finally gained membership of the WTO on December 11th 2001, a full fifteen years after it originally applied to join, symbolically three weeks before Taiwan – under the name “Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei)” – also accessed. It should be noted that the WTO is an organization that does not require statehood for membership and Hong Kong has been a member since the organization’s inception in 1995. China’s leadership during the long negotiations went to great lengths to ensure China gained its place. Both Jiang Zemin and the then Premier Zhu Rongji invested enormous personal political capital in the process and Zhu, in particular, came under fire for the level of concessions made in order to be eligible for entry, particularly with regard to a commitment that China would open its telecommunications industry to foreign competition. The perception, both within China and among some analysts abroad, was that the requirements for Chinese admission were greater than those asked of other countries. In particular the decision not to bestow “Market Economy” status on China seems to have been politically motivated: the requirements that were laid out for China to achieve this status have been demonstrated by the Financial Times, a respected UK newspaper, to be so stringent as to rule out any member of the WTO from passing the test. The result of this apparently un-passable test is that when China is accused of breaches of WTO rules, the arbitration process measures the validity of such claims against other countries’ economic indices. For example, when China is accused of ‘dumping’ – selling goods into another economic area at below the price they are produced– it is not China’s own labor and raw material costs that are used to determine if this is the case. On occasion, Malaysia has been used despite wages in that country being significantly higher than in China.
Despite popular perceptions of China as a country engaging in unfair practices in global trade, particularly within regard to its apparent currency manipulation and the practice of ‘dumping’, its early years in the WTO were remarkably non-confrontational. In fact, no cases were brought against China in its first two years of membership, and China itself did not bring a case against another member until as recently as 2009. In those cases that have been bought against China, all of which have been by the EU or the US, it has struggled at times to defend itself, winning just one of the dispute cases that have gone through to completion. China also seems to have followed a similar pattern in its behavior in the WTO as it did in the UN, in that it spent its first few years learning how to operate within the WTO system, before attempting to become a major player. China’s increased activity over the last 2 or 3 years, during which time it has gone from bringing no cases against other members to averaging 3 per year (all of which have been against either the US or the EU) is evidence of this. Recently, despite the structural disadvantage that China faces by not being a “market economy”, it has had some success. For example, in 2009 China successfully brought a case against the US to end the ban on its poultry exports that had been in place since the Avian Flu epidemic. Similarly, in 2010 the WTO ruled that the EU’s anti-dumping measures on Chinese sales of fasteners were unfair and too broadly applied. Despite these victories, China’s success rate in successfully resolving WTO disputes remains below the average for the organization.
World Bank and International Monetary Fund
Along with the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which later became the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF made up the key international financial institutions that came into being in the post-World War II era. China has officially been a member of both the World Bank and the IMF since their founding, although just as with the UN, responsibility for these positions was with the Republic of China on Taiwan until 1980, when the PRC took over control. As with the UN, Taiwan has since been denied participation in both organizations. The PRC has called upon the IMF for financial assistance on only two occasions, both of which occurred during the early period of its post-1978 economic reform and restructuring program, and both loans have since been repaid in full. In recent years, as China’s international standing has continued to grow, China has pushed hard for greater influence for itself and other developing nations within both organizations. It has had only limited success to date. It currently holds 96,000 votes in the IMF, equivalent to 3.81% of the total, making it the sixth largest behind the US (16.76%), Japan (6.24%), Germany (5.81%), France (4.29%) and the UK (4.29%). These figures represent an increase in the voting share for China that came into force in 2008. However, under IMF voting rules, a total of 15% is required to veto any proposal, meaning that the US alone, or a combination of any four of the other G7 countries without the US, has this power. China is a long way from achieving such privilege. By increasing its agreed contribution to the budget of the IMF, China has (along with other developing nations) successfully campaigned for further reform. Thus, another shift in the make-up of these shares has been agreed in principle, but not yet implemented. Although China’s position is likely to improve as a result of these reforms, it is not clear how the final figures will appear once this agreement has been ratified, but a review is currently ongoing and this is expected to be completed in 2013. Voting in the World Bank system is more complex, as it is divided into several organizations, each of which has its own voting allocation. Despite recent reform and reallocation in favor of several developing countries that saw China as the largest beneficiary, China still remains a relatively small player. Since its foundation, the president of the World Bank has always been a US citizen. Similarly, the recent election of Christine Lagarde as the president of the IMF continued the pattern of Western Europeans heading that institution. Still, the appointment of Justin Yifu Lin, a Taiwanese-born citizen of the PRC, as Chief Economist at the World Bank represents a breakthrough of sorts. The domination of Western, developed nations in both of these organizations, however, is likely to continue for some time to come, despite the damage to reputations done by the financial crisis of 2008, a source of some resentment from within China.
G20
The G20, established in 1999 in recognition of the need to involve some of the larger developing nations in summits similar to those held by the G7 or G8, consists of 19 countries plus the EU. Since its inception, it has grown in significance, in no small part because of the inclusion of China, along with other major developing forces in global political and economic circles such as India and Brazil. These countries have pushed hard to make the G20 summit that takes place annually the premier event for global economic discussions and, consequently, to limit the importance of the G7 and G8 summits. While there has been some resistance to this, particularly from Japan which treasures its role in the G7 as a surrogate for its yearned-for but out-of-reach permanent place on the UN Security Council, the growing economic clout of China has meant this is, increasingly, the reality. Sideline summits have also given China a tremendous opportunity to promote symbols of its increased power on the world stage and one of the annual events of the G20 is the so-called G2 meeting that involves only China and the US. The existence of the G20, as opposed to an expanded G8, indicates China’s unwillingness to be enmeshed into yet another existent structure dominated by Western powers and, instead, to create a new system that incorporates other countries with potentially similar goals to its own, with whom it can form powerful alliances to overcome Western dominance.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Until very recently the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) received little attention in the West, but it has been a significant part of the PRC’s foreign policy since the mid 1990s. Formed as grouping of five countries – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan – at a meeting in Shanghai in 1996, its initial objective was to foster greater military trust between central Asian neighbors. After its inception the group began to meet annually and became dubbed ‘the Shanghai Five’. The addition of Uzbekistan and a more formalized structure to the grouping saw it renamed as the SCO in 2001. Since then, several states in the region have expressed an interest in joining a group which has been mooted as an Asian rival to NATO – though this language is never used by the countries involved. Those expressing serious interest in joining the SCO include Pakistan and Iran who, along with India, Mongolia and Afghanistan, have observer status. In 2012, Turkey was granted ‘Dialogue Partner’ status, becoming the first NATO country to have official ties with the organization.
The SCO has expanded military cooperation between its member states to levels that could not have been achieved without it. Annual joint practice operations in various fields of conflict have increased to include a total of more than 5000 participants from all six member states. The majority of these come from the two largest militaries in the group – China and Russia – and the closer military and strategic ties between these two states is one of the most significant outcomes of the SCO’s development. However, the most important potential impact of the SCO is the creation of a multilateral framework of military alliances that does not include any Western power, and which has China as its assumed leader. Clearly China and Russia are the lynchpins of this organization, but the enthusiasm of the other four members, as well as the level of interest from Pakistan and Iran, makes the SCO a potentially significant actor in future international relations.
Future Trends
China’s policies on International Organizations are unrecognizable from those that were pursued prior to the Reform Era. China now seeks engagement and involvement, as its many international organization memberships and its active participation within the organizations testify. However, as a relative latecomer to virtually all organizations, China has a structural disadvantage in that it has to learn how to play by the rules that have already been set by others, which are not always to its advantage. While it has had some success promoting its objectives within these pre-existing power structures, being hampered by Western-originated frameworks remains a continued source of frustration for the Chinese leadership. China has tried to address this frustration by creating alliances with developing nations within the organizations to give it greater negotiating power. The instigation of the SCO and the promotion of the G20 are examples of how China can combat this, by instigating new institutions which place itself at the heart. It is also used its rising economic and political power to gain greater leverage in the international organizations, as when it demonstrated a willingness to increase financial contributions to the World Bank and the IMF in exchange for a greater share of the voting rights.
To date, China’s increased involvement in International Organizations has, for the most part, been consistent with its proclaimed world view: that of respect for sovereignty, non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations, opposition to hegemony or unilateralism, and the promotion of multilateralism. As China’s own stake in global political, economic, and security affairs continues to grow, it will be interesting to watch how firmly it can stick to such principles. There are already signs that it is willing to compromise on the reality of non-interference, even if the rhetoric continues unabated. China has, however, been utterly uncompromising in its insistence that any organization that requires statehood for membership must exclude Taiwan. Thus, Taiwan has been progressively and near-comprehensively marginalized in the international arena, allowed to participate in only limited ways in limited organizations. Despite numerous attempts to rejoin the UN, Taiwan will not, under any name, be able to do so. This represents a clear example of how China has used its involvement in international organizations to achieve one of its key domestic and foreign policy objectives.
Agriculture and Food Security: A Long-Term Priority
/in Economics, Society /by ChinaFolioIntroduction
Throughout China’s thousands of years of history, famines have often led to rebellions and instability which in turn has led to many a dynasties downfall. Therefore, ensuring food security in China has been both a priority for Chinese leaders throughout the ages, and it remains a priority for the Chinese Communist Party today. China’s challenge is that it supports approximately 19% of the world’s population on approximately 9% of the world’s arable land and 7% of the world’s fresh water. Despite these constraints, China has met its food needs through a policy of agricultural self-sufficiency. Today, China is the world’s leading producer of rice, wheat, and soybeans, the world’s second largest producer of corn and the seventh largest producer of sorghum. Additionally, China is the world’s largest producer of pork, the third largest producer of chicken and the 10th largest producer of beef.
That said, China’s ability to maintain continued growth in agricultural output is under threat unless there is further reform in the agricultural sector. Increased urbanization, plateauing yields, water shortages, small farm sizes and uncertain property laws are all making it difficult for China to continue to increase agricultural production. China’s 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) recognizes these challenges. Investing in hybrid seed research, repairing and improving on irrigation infrastructure, reclaiming rural land that has been lost to environmental degradation, shoring food safety mechanisms, expanding agricultural mechanization, and increasing the use of agricultural technology in order to improve yields have all been stated as clear priorities. The plan also recognizes the continued need to invest in rural areas of the country, so that China’s remaining farmers can earn a reasonable living and adequately invest in their children’s future within and beyond the farm sector.
In addition to investing domestically, China is significantly increasing its investment in agriculture abroad. According to a United States Department of Agriculture 2018 report, “1,300 Chinese enterprises had overseas investments in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries valued at $26 billion in 2016. The investments include crop and livestock farming, fishing, processing, farm machinery, inputs, seeds, and logistics in over 100 countries.” These investments have primarily been focused in the regions of Southeast Asia, Russia’s Far East, Ukraine, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
China’s Agriculture under Mao Zedong
When the PRC was founded in 1949 its new leaders continued to support a policy of agricultural self-reliance. This agricultural policy was driven by Mao Zedong’s view that the post-World War II order, with its corresponding American ascendancy, was potentially aggressive and imperialistic. Under this view dependency on grain imports risked making China vulnerable to having its food needs being turned into a weapon against it. In addition, Mao wished to use his country’s limited foreign exchange resources to purchase industrial plant and equipment rather than food, aiming for rapid industrialization. Indeed, until the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), China exported grain to the Soviet Union in order to purchase plant and heavy equipment, at the expense of providing adequate per capita calories for its citizens at home.
Agriculture thus became the basis on which China’s planned economy was built. As China transitioned to a planned economy, the Communist planners began to underprice farm products relative to heavy industrial goods. This was because the planners were trying to ensure that the industrial sector produced high profits which could be plowed back into industry. To keep industrial profits high, costs had to be kept low; the most easily affected cost was labor. In order keep wages low, food needed to be cheap. Thus, farming became the key to the success of the entire Chinese planned economy. To achieve China’s goals, soon after he took power in 1949, Mao orchestrated the largest act of expropriation in world history. Approximately 200 million acres of land were taken from wealthy landowners and redistributed to nearly every peasant family in China. An estimated two million landlords lost their estates, sometimes through violence and almost never with compensation. Mao soon undercut this mass creation of private land ownership by implementing socialist policies of collective agriculture. The launch of the First Five Year Plan in 1953 saw farmers organized into cooperatives where they pooled their land and shared the proceeds. Under the collective structure, each farmer kept title to his land and was paid both labor wages and a dividend based on the value of the land contributed to the collective. After some success under the cooperative model, Mao went further. In 1958, Mao began to move farmers into communes to gain greater control of agricultural output. Mao believed that communes would generate greater farm output as it allowed an increased usage of irrigation and mechanization. As an added benefit, the surplus farm labor that would theoretically be created by collectivization could then be redeployed into the rural and urban industrial sectors. He also believed that healthcare and education for the rural citizens could be more easily delivered in a collectivized environment. Just as importantly, communes would be an effective platform for mass political indoctrination. Mao’s communes pursued a “grain first policy” in which basic crops such as rice, wheat, and corn were planted regardless of the suitability of the soil and other conditions. The shift to communes eliminated household farming, except on small family plots, and all land ownership transferred to the state.
As a result of Mao’s policies, from 1952 to 1978, China increased industrial production as a percentage of national income from 19.5% to 49.4%. Grain production rose by 86%, an average annual increase of 2.5%. However, grain production increased at a rate about equal to him population growth, meaning that average grain output per capita stayed roughly steady during this period. China also increased the production of cash crops by 16%. Up until 1960, China exported grain, peaking at 5 million tons in 1958. After the famine of the Great Leap Forward, China began to import grain, yet these imports averaged 1.6% of total consumption, meaning that China was almost completely self-sufficient in food under the planned economy.
These statistics, however, are deceptive. Much of Mao’s industrial development was inefficient. Poor economies of scale, inadequate transport, and poorly skilled labor meant that China’s huge industrial investment generally failed to effectively build upon China’s existing industrial base, although its development of human capital skills and rudimentary infrastructure did lay the foundations for broader industrialization during the Reform Era. Throughout the socialist period, Chinese consumers remained on strictly rationed diets consisting primarily of coarse grains. Most consumers were deprived of daily access to cooking oil, sugar, meat, and vegetables for extended periods. In the 1970s, despite increases in grain production, urban residents ate an average of 2,328 calories per day, while rural intake was even lower at 2,100 calories daily. Average grain output per capita remained virtually unchanged and the absolute poverty rate hovered between 30% and 40%.
The primary weakness of communes was the absence of incentives. Farmers did not keep produce from their lands, which undermined their work effort. Instead, commune members were given work points based on tasks; these points were converted to grain and cash pay-outs at the end of each crop year. Free riding and an inability to monitor agricultural labor became endemic. Output also suffered because decision-making was concentrated in the hands of collective leaders who themselves were frequently following dictates from above, stifling any prospect for innovation. The pricing during this era also did little to encourage the efficient production or allocation of goods and services. Additionally, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer were in constant short supply. Because of the hukou housing registration system (which, while more relaxed, remains in force today), farm labor had no opportunity to move from agriculture to industry as the hukou system completely restricted the mobility of China’s people. This entrapment of Chinese villagers in rural areas effectively designated them as second-class citizens.
Agriculture during the Reform Era
After 1978, a series of reforms was introduced into the rural sector to improve its economic performance. One step was to de-collectivize Chinese farmers into what was termed the Household Responsibility System, where the government leased agricultural land to households. The government then raised the prices that farmers would receive by 41% for grain and by around 50% for cash crops for any farm output farmers produced above mandatory quota deliveries. Initially, the state purchased all grain sold by farmers above quotas. Eventually, private agricultural markets were re-established. Greater freedom of choice was allowed in terms of the types of crops cultivated. Fertilizer and new high-yield seed usage became more widespread. The result was a surge in agricultural output. Grain output swelled from 304.8 million tons in 1978 to an estimated 650 million tons in 2018.This growth reflected a significant rise in crop yields as grain sown area has increased at a smaller rate than crop yields. In 1978, China had approximately 120.6 million hectares under plow; in 2017, this figure increased to approximately 135 million hectares. Overall, it is China’s stated goal to maintain cultivated land at around 124 million hectares. Rising crop yields have resulted in grain price reductions. Since 1978, maize prices decreased 33% and wheat 45%. Coupled with rising incomes, these decreases meant that grain, as a percentage of rural and urban household consumption, fell from 40% and 20% respectively in the late 1970s to about 14% and 3% in 2004. These higher yields and lower prices have resulted in more food per capita. Per capita caloric intake rose from 2328 calories per day in 1980 to an excess of 3,000 calories per capita per day by 2008.
Additionally, since 1978, China’s agricultural output became significantly more diversified. Chinese farmers have moved into labor-intensive cash crops such as aquaculture, cotton, edible oils, fruits, and vegetables. Between 1978 and 2007, for instance, crop farming went from 80% of agricultural gross value output to 50.4%, while animal husbandry and fisheries increased from 16.6% to 42.1%. Between 1990 and 2004, China’s vegetable output expanded so quickly that China added the equivalent of California’s vegetable industry every two years in, and orchards now cover over 5% of China’s farmed area, double the share of any other major agricultural nation. As a result of this diversification, the Chinese diet has come more varied. Most Chinese households consume a more varied diet adding meat, poultry, fish, eggs, a variety of vegetables and dairy produce to their diets.
Maintaining Grain Yields – Water and Pollution Challenges
Throughout this period of reform, China maintained its policy of grain independence, never importing more than 5% of its grain needs. As stated in China’s 13th Five Year ensuring basic self-sufficiency of grain and absolute security of stable food remains a clearly stated goal. That said, with 19% of the world’s population being supported by approximately 9% of its arable land, this goal remains challenging. This means that China does not have a comparative advantage in land intensive products such as grain. Moreover, China’s population will continue to rise until around 2035, meaning that China will need to increase yields in order to maintain current grain per capita levels. Furthermore, as China continues to urbanize, more of its usable land will be refashioned into cities and supporting infrastructure. Additionally, pollution, soil erosion and desertification continue to negatively impact the agricultural land that is available. As a result, it is estimated that by 2050, the total demand for arable land will outstrip supply by more than 12%.
Part of the reason that China achieved such high grain production over the last two decades was yield improvements driven by the use of new high-grade seed varieties and by massive inputs of chemical fertilizer. Yet further benefits from these inputs are beginning to diminish. In 1975, total fertilizer usage was 5.5 million tons, but this rose to 47.7 million tons by 2005. China’s per hectare fertilizer usage was second only to Japan in the 1990s. Overall, it is estimated that China uses 30% of the world’s fertilizers and pesticides on 10% of global farmland. Fertilizer saturation is such that previously good or excellent soils are cresting, hardening and becoming devoid of organic material such that further application of fertilizers is leading to diminishing crop yields as well as causing considerable environmental problems such as eutrophication and particle pollution in the air. Yield benefits from the extensive use of plastic are also plateauing. Finally, large-scale deforestation has led to soil erosion.
Water shortages and water pollution may also limit future yields unless China is able to implement significant reforms in its water management. China’s freshwater of approximately 2156 m³ per capita is less than one third of the world average. This is projected to decrease to 1875 m³ by 2033. Water shortages are expected to worsen as current water demand is still relatively low at 461 m³ per capita compared with the world average of 645 m³, but this number is projected to reach 665 m³ by 2030. Water shortages will be worse in the arid and semi-arid areas in China’s northern plain from which much of the future grain output growth will be generated. In addition to water shortages, problems with irrigation system will also stymie yield growth. During the Mao-era, irrigated area tripled. Since de-collectivization, the irrigation system has deteriorated. With the reversion to family and commercial farming, control of the irrigation system has fragmented, and it is harder to mobilize mass labor for maintenance and construction. The introduction of water fees in the 1980s was designed to encourage more efficient water usage, but the fees were not sufficiently high to have the desired effect. Water designated for agricultural usage continues to be subsidized at a far higher rate than it is for industry and household use, and raising agricultural water fees remains politically difficult. Moreover, the collection of water use data remains imperfect, thus further challenging China’s ability to effectively price water used for agricultural purposes. Going forward, increasing water charges it is likely to be an essential step to dealing with China’s water shortages.
As water becomes increasingly scarce, the agricultural sector will continue to compete with the industrial sector and with households for scant water resources. According to the Ministry of Water Resources China now uses as much as 60% of the water running in many of its rivers, including the Liao and Yellow Rivers, and as much as 90% of the Huai River. China has increasingly turned to aquifers and lakes to meet water demands no longer satisfied by rain and river water alone. Groundwater now provides potable water for nearly 70% of China’s population and irrigation for approximately 40% of its agricultural land in China’s dry northern and northwestern regions. Nationally, groundwater usage has almost doubled since 1970, and now accounts for almost 20% of China’s total water usage.
Due to an uneven distribution of water resources between the north and the south of China, aquifers are especially important in China’s north, where farmers have been relying heavily on groundwater resources to increase agricultural yields. Yet China is now draining its aquifers at an unsustainable rate. At current rates of depletion, the World Bank estimates that China’s northern aquifers could effectively run dry in as little as 30 years or less. China’s northern megacities now rely on underground water sources for two-thirds of their needs. For example, in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, aquifer levels are dropping by approximately 3 meters annually, forcing the digging of ever deeper wells. These deeper wells in turn increase both the risk of both saltwater and arsenic intruding into the water supply and likelihood of land subsidence. With aquifers and rivers suffering from overuse, lakes are also diminishing. The province of Hebei, for instance, has already lost a staggering 969 of its 1052 lakes. While China’s ‘Water Pollution Prevention & Control Action Plan’ has establish targets to restrict ground water extraction and groundwater pollution by 2020, water restriction measures have both proved unpopular and hard to enforce.
Pollution is also challenging China’s agricultural output. China’s use of coal that is high in sulfur and heavy metals to power many of its electricity plants. The pollution from these power plants combined with additional industrial and agricultural pollution contaminate both China’s soil, air, and water. In the north, for instance, the same northern provinces that accounted for 55% of China’s farmland also hold 86% of its coal reserves yet have just 16% of China’s water resources. In the south, over 50% of China’s rice is grown in provinces which account for 52% of its arsenic, 58% of its mercury and 72% of its chromium discharges.
Maintaining Future Grain Yields – Small Farms
China’s future yield growth is also hampered by the small area plowed by each farmer, averaging .65 hectares or 1.6 acres. While de-collectivization from large communal plots to small family farms initially led to a surge in output growth, the segmentation of communal plots is now proving a constraint on grain yields. It has been estimated that increasing farm sizes could increase grain output by as much as 70 million tons annually. Small farm sizes restrict growth by preventing farmers from capturing economies of scale that could be derived from greater mechanization, from the more efficient dissemination of new seed technologies and from the improved maintenance of irrigation structures. Small farms also make it more challenging for farmers to participate in modern supply chains, to offset market volatility and to adapt to climate change, Additionally, small farms tend to use fertilizers and pesticides inefficiently. Research by Nerissa Hannik found that a 1% increase in farm size was linked to a .3 and a .5% decrease in fertilizer and pesticide use per hectare, respectively. Excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides in turn pollute soil and water which in turn depresses crop yields.
Small farms drive down rural incomes. As approximately 35% of Chinese workers or about 311 million people were employed in agriculture in some form in 2017, the impact on rural incomes is significant. In 2018, the annual per capita disposable income of urban and rural households in China was 39,251 and 14,617, respectively. Reduced rural economic opportunity in turn dis-incentivizes younger and more educated workers from pursuing a career in agriculture As a result, the average age of the Chinese agricultural worker is higher than the age of Chinese workers generally and is increasingly less educated than his urban counterpart. Older, less educated farmers could cause structural stagnation in the agricultural sector. Such farmers may fail to adopt new technologies, innovate, and adapt to changing market conditions.
The fact that farmers lease – as opposed to own – their land has also worked to constrain grain yield by discouraging long-term investment and growth in land size. Individuals cannot privately own land in China but can acquire transferable land-use rights for some number of years. Currently, for example, land-use rights for residential purposes is 70 years. All farming or rural land is owned by rural collectives which distribute contract rights for plots of farmland to eligible households. The first leases issued in 1983 were for a duration of 15 years. These were renewed in 1997 for 30 years and again in 2017 for an additional 30 years. As part of its land-use contract, Chinese farmers have the right to decide which crops to plant, to keep all agricultural proceeds, and to sublease their land to others for agricultural production. Chinese farmers are prohibited from using contracted land for non-agricultural purposes, to leave their land fallow for more than two years or to legally oppose the government if it decides to acquire the property for development purposes. To help improve rural household stability, in 2003, China passed the Rural Land Contract Law. The law endeavors to improve the security of land tenure, to clarify the transfer and exchange rights of contracted land, and to permit family members to inherit land during the contracted period. Above all, the law reflects the government’s attempts to allow those staying in farming to gain access to additional cultivated land and to increase their incomes and competitiveness. It strives to encourage farmers to use the land more efficiently.
Working against government efforts to improve plot size, however is the belief by some Chinese leaders that family farming provides at least nominal proof that China is still communist as its land is not privately held, and as its land is relatively equally distributed. Many Chinese leaders also believe that agricultural land provides a social security system for its population, as every rural family is theoretically only one season away from being able to feed itself.
That said, the fact that the government no longer plays a significant role in agricultural production. Aside from restrictions on land ownership, China today has one of the least distorted domestic agricultural economies in the world. Most grains, oilseeds, and fiber crops, and all horticultural and livestock products are sold to small private traders who compete in efficient and integrated markets with minimal regulation.
Insuring Safe Food
In 2008, Chinese domestic milk and infant formula was found to have been purposely tainted with melamine, sickening 300,000 babies, and killing six. Other food scandals include contaminated pork, fake eggs, gutter oil, and counterfeit foods mislabeled as brand name or organic products. These scandals have caused many Chinese to express serious reservations about the quality of domestic food sources and to call for industry reform. The 13th Five Year Plan addressed these concerns by committing to upgrade agricultural standards and to ensure the quality and safety of all food products over the entire journey of agricultural products from farm to table.
In May 2019, the Chinese Communist Party reinvigorated this goal when China declared that it would be stepping up its enforcement of food safety legislation as part of the Communist Party’s campaign called “Staying True to Our Founding Mission”. Between June and December 2019, its increased efforts have resulted in the identification of 70,000 food safety violations, culminating in the suspension of over 2400 food manufacturers and the meting out of approximately $130 million in fines. Additionally, China is increasingly implementing technologies such as sensors, artificial intelligence, and block chain IDs to improve the traceability of food products from farm to table. Other measures include increased supervision with more random checks and the tightening of food safety standards. By 2035, it is China’s goal to have in place world-leading food safety standards and globally advanced risk control capabilities.
GMO in China
Genetically engineered or transgenic organisms, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), were first made available to US consumers in 1994. By 2014, approximately 28 countries sowed GM crops on more than 181 million hectares, equaling 13% of the world’s arable surface. GM soybeans, cotton, maize, oilseed, and rape account for approximately 82%, 68%, 30% and 25% of the total planted area for these crops, respectively. In 2015, the United States Food and Drug Administration authorized the first genetically modified animal for human consumption.
Advocates of GMO food note that such crops could help the world adopt to changing climatic conditions including drought, cold and soil salinization. Additionally, by genetically coding in natural pesticides and other disease-resistant characteristics, GMO foods also offer the opportunity to fight off pests and diseases while correspondingly lowering the use of pesticides. Crops can also be modified to increase crop yields. Among their many concerns, opponents of GMO foods note that the long-term health consequences of consuming GMO food have yet to be determined. Additionally, opponents fear that GMO plants will diminish biodiversity by contaminating wild species.
Despite the risks of GMO plants, China’s 13th Five Year Plan sets as a goal to develop a modern seed industry, including the development superior seed varieties, and cultivation breeding-promotion operations. In January 2020, the Chinese government stated that genetically modified corn, cotton, and soybean species had passed biosafety evaluations, inching the country closer to commercialization of new GMO food sources. These crops were modified to be more resilient against disease and pests. On paper, China has approved biotech cotton, papaya, tomatoes, sweet peppers, petunias, and poplar trees. However, commercialization has been allowed only for papaya and cotton.
In 2018, the global market value of GM crop seeds was $20.1 billion and is expected to grow to $30.2 billion by 2026. As one of the world’s leading countries in the research and development of agricultural biotechnology, China’s issue of bio certificates for soybeans, cotton and corn indicates its interest in capitalizing on its billions of dollars of investment in the field, including its $43 billion purchase of the Swiss pesticide giant Syngenta in 2016. Not only would China benefit from commercializing its GMO seeds to sell globally, but many studies have indicated that China would also enjoy substantial economic benefits from the cultivation of GMO food crops domestically.
The commercialization of China’s GMO technology has been hampered, however, by the Chinese public’s negative attitude toward GMO crops. As per a 2010 online survey interviewing 50,000 people, about 84% of respondents said that they feared GM foods for safety reasons. A 2018 nationwide survey found that those views had not substantially shifted with 46.7% of respondents expressing negative views of GMOs and with 14% considering GMO products to be form of bioterrorism targeting China.
The Chinese public’s disapproving views concerning GMO products likely originate from their experience of the various food scandals that have plagued the country. This adverse experience has likely also negatively impacted their views of genetically modified foods. Exacerbating their concerns has been the discovery that GMO food products have already been farmed illegally in China. In 2014, China Central Television (CCTV) tested five bags of rice from a Wuhan supermarket in Hubei province, and discovered that three of the five samples had been grown from genetically modified seeds. In the same year, illegal large-scale planting of GMO rice and corn in four provinces were reported. In 2016, it was revealed that 93% of corn from Liaoning province demonstrated traces of GMO contamination. In response, the government destroyed crops, confiscated illegal seeds, and prosecuted perpetrators.
The Chinese government is now working to change Chinese opinion regarding GMO products. Given what is at play, the stakes could not be higher. Not only has China made massive investments in the technology that it now wants to commercialize, but water shortages, climate change and its growing population will continue to place unprecedented pressure on its food supply. GMO products can help China adapt to these challenges. GMO crops should also enable China to reduce its extremely high use of fertilizers and pesticides which in turn will have positive impacts on its environment and food supply.
The Automation of Agriculture
While the percentage of the Chinese workforce involved in farming has decreased from 55% in 1991 to 18% in 2017, approximately 250 million Chinese still work as farmers. However, as China’s rural young becomes increasingly educated, and as China’s economy continues to expand, many are migrating to urban areas seeking better opportunity. As a result, approximately 60% of people working in Chinese agriculture are over 45 years compared to just 14% of farmers who are less than 35 years. This decline in farm labor is projected to increase over the coming decades even as China’s population is projected to continue to grow through 2035. Contemporaneously, China’s population is expected to become wealthier. Growing wealth correlates with a rising consumer demand for greater food variety and for more animal-based proteins. The water footprint per calorie pulses, eggs, chicken, pigs, sheep, and beef is 2.5, 2.0, 2.6, 3.6, 5.3, and 9.4 times larger than grains, respectively. This increase in water per calorie will further stress China’s polluted and limited per capita water supply.
Improving agricultural sustainability is another factor motivating China’s adoption of agricultural technology. China’s farming industry has a significant carbon footprint, with Chinese farmers using 30% of the world’s fertilizers and pesticides on 9% of global farmland. In addition to developing drones and robots that can help to reduce fertilizer and pesticide needs, Chinese scientists are also turning to big data to determine best farming practices. Over 20 million farmers have since benefited from China’s big data research; it is estimated the findings have enabled farmers to increase yields while slashing fertilizer use generating total financial savings of an estimated $12 billion.
China’s Growing Presence in Agriculture Abroad
According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2018 report, in 2016 an estimated 1,300 Chinese enterprises had made overseas agriculture, forestry, and fisheries investments in over 100 countries. These investments were valued at approximately $26 billion. The investments were placed in a variety of sectors including land purchase, land leasing, seeds, farm inputs, farm machinery, food processing, farm logistics, farm machinery, livestock farming, and fish farming. China’s National Bureau of Statistics noted that Chinese investment in foreign farming, forestry, and fishing grew fivefold from 2010 to 2016. Many of China’s agricultural investments are now made in conjunction with its China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
As has been the case in other foreign investment sectors, China’s government has supported this international investment by favorable lending, brokering deals, formulating strategic plans which support low-cost bidding, and providing Chinese agricultural investors with training and information services. China subsidizes these investments for both political and economic reasons. Economic aims include the continued growth of the Chinese economy, securing access to raw materials, the expansion of exports, helping Chinese companies garner a larger share of profits from imported commodities, creating new markets for Chinese products, enabling tariff-free access to developed markets, shifting some of Chinese domestic manufacturing and domestic agriculture overseas, providing domestic companies with international experience, food security, gaining and imparting technical and managerial experience, and exerting influence on global prices. Political objectives include the preservation of the Communist Party rule, reestablishing China’s place as a leading world power, the promotion of multi-polarity, countering US hegemony, increasing Chinese influence in multinational institutions such as United Nations and World Bank, strengthening its alliances with other countries, particularly in the Third World, preventing Taiwan independence, and projecting political influence abroad.
Future Trends
There will be several trends to watch for in the Chinese agricultural sector in the coming decades. Firstly, China will make every effort to maintain its agricultural yields and its food self-sufficiency. Despite its rapid rate of urbanization, China is committed to maintaining a baseline for cultivated land area at 124 million hectares. It is investing heavily in agricultural research to increase yields and is launching a campaign to win public support for the introduction of more GMO crops.
China is also committed to increasing the sustainability of its agriculture and the safety of its food supplies. China is investing heavily in big data, drone technologies, artificial intelligence, and automation to reduce its use of pesticides, fertilizer, and water. Upgrading antiquated and leaking irrigation networks is a high priority. China is also using technology to start tracking its food as it journeys from farm to table; therefore, when food safety breaches arise, it can more effectively follow the breach back to the source. China will also continue to improve its food safety both through increased inspections, and better safety practices and standards.
China will also carry on investing in international agricultural, livestock and aquaculture food chains. These investments will help China ensure reliable and secure overseas food resources. They will also help to increase global food production overall, therefore helping to keep in check global food prices.
Finally, as the number of Chinese working as farmers further declines over the coming decades, China will likely begin to amalgamate its millions of small farms into increasingly larger parcels. Increasing farm sizes will free labor to work in areas which will provide China a higher return on labor capital. Larger farm sizes will also increase productivity by creating more opportunity for mechanization, and by reducing demand for farm inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers.
References