I. China has increasingly serious pressures on its resources, environment and ecology

China has achieved remarkable achievements since its launch of reform and opening up, with economic development like a high-speed train. From the beginning of reform and opening up in 1978 to 2015,a period of just 38 years, China’s total economy grew from US$149.54 billion to US$11 trillion, an increase of nearly 74 times. Its global ranking of economic aggregate rose from just tenth in the world to second only to the United States.1 The duration and pace of China’s rapid economic growth surpassed Japan and the Asian “four dragons”2 in their economic take-off period, creating a new miracle in the history of human economic development.

Figure 1-1: Economic annual growth rate of the world’s major economies (%)

Although China has made great achievements in economic development, it still faces many challenges in the future. China has a large population, relatively insufficient resources, and a fragile ecological environment. Since 1978, China has been in the process of accelerated industrialization and urbanization, but its economic growth is based fundamentally on an extensive development model of high input, high consumption and high pollution. In developed countries, environmental problems emerged incrementally over a hundred years, but these have appeared en masse in China’s 30-plus years of rapid development, creating a particularly marked contradiction between economic development and resources, the environment and ecology.

In recent years, alongside the rapid development of the economy, the Chinese government has taken many environmental protection measures. These include: control of total discharge of pollutants, addressing key areas and watershed pollution; also, implementation of ecological and environmental protection projects such as natural forest protection, returning farmland to grassland, returning farmland to forest, and protection and construction of nature reserves. While maintaining the rapid growth of the national economy, the total emissions of major pollutants did not increase in parallel, so the trend of intensified pollution has been initially controlled, and ecological protection and construction have also been strengthened. However, the environmental situation facing China is still a grave one: environmental pollution continues in some regions, and the trend of environmental deterioration in the nation has not been fundamentally curbed. In particular, a significant gap persists between improvement in environmental quality and what people wish for.

Resources are ever more constrained. In China’s rapid industrialization process, resource consumption has grown rapidly. In terms of total volume, China is a “resource power,” in the world’s front ranks for the rich variety and volume of some important resources. But seen from per capita share of resources, China is a “small country of resources,”with per capita volume of main resources lower than the world average. China’s total cultivated area ranks fourth in the world, but its per capita arable land is 1.52 mu (0.1 hectare), less than half the world’s per capita level. China’s forest coverage is well below the global average of 31 percent, and its per capita forest area is only 23% of the world’s per capita level. Although her total strategic resources rank in the forefront of the world, China’s per capita possession of petroleum, natural gas, iron ore and fresh water are only 7 percent, 55 percent, 17 percent and 28 percent respectively of the world average; even per capita possession of coal, China’s richest resource, is only 67 percent of the world average.

With the rapid development of China’s economy and society, our consumption demand for coal, oil and other fossil energy increased rapidly. In 1993, China, formerly an oil-exporting country, became a net importer of oil. China’s imports of crude oil in 2015 reached 334 million tons, with its external dependence exceeding 60 percent, accounting for 12 percent of the world’s trade in oil.3 China’s cumulative coal imports reached a total of 204 million tons in 2015, and its imports reached the highest level in history, ranking first in the world, and exceeding by nearly 100 million tons the second largest importer, Japan. China’s energy mix of rich coal, lean oil and little gas determines China’s energy consumption pattern as coal-based. In 2015, the share of coal in China’s energy consumption structure reached 64 percent, much higher than the world average of 30 percent, and its total consumption of 3,965 million tons accounts for half of the world’s coal consumption.4 Huge consumption of coal and other fossil energy has seriously polluted China’s atmosphere and water resources, bringing haze, acid rain, greenhouse effect and ozone layer damage and other environmental disasters. As well as being poorly endowed in resources, China is not very efficient in how it uses resources, which further exacerbates resource constraints on its economic and social development. In 2015, China’s total economic output accounted for 13 percent of the world total, but its energy consumption accounted for nearly 20 percent of the world total and its consumption of cement, steel, alumina, refined copper, etc. accounted for more than half of the world total. China’s consumption of resources per unit of output value is huge: the consumption of copper, aluminium, lead, zinc, and tin totals 40.7 kilograms per US$10,000, 5.7 times that of the United States and 2.8 times that of India.

Environmental pollution is still very serious. China’s severe environmental pressure is inseparable from China’s development stage and mode of economic development. In the early days of the People’s Republic of China when China had just started industrialization, since the population was relatively small and the scale of production not large, environmental problems were mostly localized environmental pollution, so that the contradiction between economic development and environmental protection was not prominent. Since 1978 when reform and opening up was adopted, with rapid industrialization and urbanization, pollution has become increasingly serious. It was in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, where economic development has been most rapid, that we first encountered the challenges of heavy metal pollution, water safety, garbage encirclement and other environmental problems of industrialization. Subsequently, with the central and western regions of China taking on the high-energy-consumption, high-pollution industries from the eastern region, watershed pollution, excessive industrial emissions and other phenomena became common. Compared with eastern China, the eco-environment in the central and western regions is more fragile, and their environmental management ability is weaker, the level of their science and technology and management is quite backward, leading a more serious environmental pollution situation. As China’s environmental pollution problems have increased in terms of geography and severity, our pollution hazards have become greater too, as has the difficulty in managing them. At present, one outstanding manifestation of China’s environmental pollution is air pollution, and the frequency of smoggy weather in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and in some cities of the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta regions. In the 2011 air quality database published by the World Health Organization, China’s city with the best air quality is Haikou [on Hainan Island], but it ranked only No. 830 in the world. China’s water environment also presents a complex picture of watershed pollution; of the ten biggest watershed tributaries, all are subject to varying degrees of pollution, except for the Pearl River tributaries, and lake eutrophication has also grown rapidly. In the 1970s, about 5 percent of lakes were eutrophic but this proportion rose to around 35 percent in the 1980s, and the lakes in eastern China were almost all eutrophic by the 1990s. China has a widely sung folk song, Beautiful Taihu Lake, that contains the universally loved lines, “Taihu Lake, the beautiful, whose beauty lies in the Taihu water.” However, due to long-term drainage of industrial waste water and domestic sewage directly into Taihu Lake, its water quality has become so intensely eutrophic that blue-green algae bred in huge numbers, and their decomposition led to serious pollution of the lake water. In 2007, a general drinking water crisis in Wuxi City seriously affected the daily lives of local residents due to the water quality deterioration caused by algae in Taihu Lake, the lake being the source of Wuxi’s tap water. Microscopic algae symbolize the environmental problems faced by China, the price of rapid economic growth at the expense of the environment. Since 2007, the Chinese government has invested heavily in the control of Taihu Lake pollution. But, so far, control of water pollution of Taihu Lake has not been fundamentally effective, although the water quality in the lake has improved obviously.

Water pollution caused by algae in Taihu Lake.

The trend of ecological deterioration has not been effectively curbed. Compared with environmental pollution, the impact of ecological deterioration in China is even more serious and far-reaching. In recent years, soil erosion, land desertification, grassland degradation, wetland shrinking, snow line shift, glacier melting, sea level rise and marine natural shoreline reduction have resulted in reduced biodiversity and frequent ecological disasters, seriously constraining China’s economic and social sustainable development. In 2014, of China’s 2,591 counties, the area of counties with “A” and “B” eco-environment quality accounted for 45.1 percent of China’s land area, mainly distributed in the region south of the Qinling Mountains and Huaihe River, in addition to Greater and Lesser Khingan Mountains and Changbai Mountains in northeastern China; the area of counties with “C” eco-environment quality accounted for 24.3 percent, mainly distributed in the North China Plain, the middle and western Northeast Plain, middle Inner Mongolia, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau; “D” and “E” counties accounted for 30.6 percent, mainly in western Inner Mongolia, middle and western Gansu, western Tibet, and most of Xinjiang. 5 Impacted by the weakening, degradation and loss of forests, wetlands, coral reefs and other ecosystems, global biodiversity is under catastrophic threat.

China has adopted a number of positive policies and measures to curb and slow down some environmental pollution and ecological damage, but the ecological environment has deteriorated because of the serious environmental pollution and ecological damage caused by high input, high consumption, high emissions and unsustainable development mode. The overall trend has not been fundamentally reversed. The environmental problems that emerged in phases and were gradually tackled in an industrialization process spread over two hundred years in developed countries have been concentrated in the three decades of rapid development in China. Its highly concentrated and composite nature aggravates the difficulty and complexity of governing resources and ecological environment in China.