Article #1: China’s Environmental Crisis
China's environmental crisis is one of the most pressing challenges to emerge from the country's rapid
industrialization. Its economic rise, which has averaged around 10 percent annual growth for the past decade, has
come at the expense of its environment and public health. As the world's largest source of carbon emissions, China is
responsible for a third of the planet's greenhouse gas output and has sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted
cities. Life expectancy in the north has decreased by 5.5 years due to air pollution, and severe water contamination
and scarcity have compounded land deterioration problems. Environmental degradation cost the country roughly 9
percent of its gross national income in 2008, according to the World Bank, threatening to undermine the country's
growth and exhausting public patience with the government's pace of reform. It has also bruised China's international standing as the country expands its
global influence, and endangered its stability as the ruling party faces increasing media scrutiny and public discontent.
The legacy of modernization characterized by Deng Xiaoping's reforms remains at the heart of China's environmental struggles today. China's modernization
has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created a booming middle class. In some ways, the country's trajectory of industrialization is not unlike
those of other modernizing nations, such as Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. But experts point to the nation's staggering size and pace of its
growth, noting that its environmental effect on the world is far greater than that of any other single country. "It's on a scale and speed the world has never
known," says Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
How Bad Is It?
In January 2013, Beijing experienced a prolonged bout of smog so severe that citizens dubbed it "airpocalypse"; the
concentration of hazardous particles was forty times the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Coal
has been the main culprit in the degradation of air quality. China is the world's largest coal producer and accounts
for almost half of global consumption. It provides around 70 percent of China's energy needs. However, emissions
levels from coal plants alone in 2011 potentially contributed to a quarter of a million premature deaths that year,
according to a Greenpeace analysis.
In March 2013, Shanghai came under scrutiny when roughly 16,000 dead pigs were discovered floating through the
Huangpu River. Lack of waste removal and proper processing has exacerbated the problem; almost 90 percent of
underground water in cities and 70 percent of China's rivers and lakes are now polluted. Combined with negligent farming practices, the water crisis has
turned China's arable land into desert, which today claims around 27.5 percent of China's total land mass.
Article #2: Chinese Villagers Attack Polluting Factory
BEIJING (AP) — Villagers in southwestern China infuriated by a factory that was polluting the environment
smashed its offices and equipment, and later clashed with police, underscoring the potential for such concerns
to trigger violent unrest. Three villagers reached by phone said they had grown increasingly angry over a local
metalwork factory that had been coughing up black smoke and discharging polluted wastewater into the rural
area.
When the factory's boss refused to meet with villagers last week, they smashed cars, equipment, offices and
dormitories, said Nong Dingting and Huang Liangzheng, two of the villagers. "We have been living with the factory for 14 years, and we live
in dust almost every day and can't sell our rice and other farm products," Huang said. "We need to live."
Police were ordering villagers who took part in the clashes to surrender, Xinhua said. Huang said he was on his way to the police station.
"Yes, I am one of those people they are looking for and I have nothing to fear," Huang said.
Environmental protests are on the rise in China, with the public becoming increasingly critical of the fouling of the country's air, soil and
waterways by decades of rapid development. Pollution concerns resonate well among Chinese, and such unrest poses a serious political
challenge to the Communist Party. Anger over the party's response, or lack thereof, to environmental woes can easily fuel wider
dissatisfaction with corruption and a lack of official accountability. Most protests have taken place along China's developed coastal region,
reflecting the area's heavy pollution from industry as well as the wealthier citizenry's rising demands. But the latest unrest was in rural
Yunnan, highlighting the spread of environmental concerns further inland.
Article #3: China: Broken Dreams
Despite the country's rapid economic growth, many young Chinese are growing disillusioned as they struggle to find jobs.
Many young Chinese are losing faith in China's economic miracle.
Although the nation's economy has expanded to more than $7 trillion and is poised to overtake the US in the next decade as the world's largest,
fewer Chinese feel they are sharing in the prosperity. A sense of disillusionment is spreading, particularly among the post-1980 generation, who
are well-educated and mobile but still struggle to find profitable jobs.
Signs that the economy is slowing only add to the malaise. The Chinese government predicts the economy will grow by 7.5 per cent in 2012,
down from 9.2 per cent last year, which would be the slowest growth rate since 1990. Economists say this could mean the loss of two million
jobs.
At the same time a record number of new graduates are looking for work. Some 25 million Chinese will be on the job hunt this year. Even those
who find work are frequently disappointed. Surveys show that young Chinese office workers in big cities are widely unhappy. Most complain of
a feeling of insecurity.
After two decades of economic reform, per person income has risen 13 times, and average salaries in major cities
are on par with those in many developed countries. The post-Deng generation, the first to come of age in this era of
opportunity, has been raised on a belief that if one can do well in school, graduate from a good university and work
hard on his or her career, one can enjoy a measure of success.
Instead, many find themselves squeezed by skyrocketing housing costs, rising prices for basic necessities and
family pressures. As a large percentage of the post-80s generation are only children, they alone will be expected to
provide for their parents and older relatives.
As many as three million young Chinese professionals toil in slum-like
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conditions in cramped housing on the outskirts of big cities. They are known as 'ant tribes,' a term coined
by scholar Lian Si, China's foremost researcher on post-80s graduates. "They share every similarity with ants," writes Lian. "They live in
colonies in cramped areas. They're intelligent and hardworking, yet anonymous and underpaid."
Li Zhirui from China's northeast is one of them. Home is an eight square metre space outside Beijing that costs
500 Chinese yuan per month, a quarter of his salary. He dreams of one day buying an apartment, but with
average real estate prices in the capital soaring to more than 20,000 yuan per square metre, he could be in for
a very long wait.
He has already lost his fiancée, who dumped him when he refused to buy a second-hand car and an
engagement ring.
The experiences of Li and other 'ant tribes' resonate strongly with young Chinese and have spawned a popular
song and a TV series called Struggle of the Ant Tribe.
Leading Chinese sociologist Guo Yuhua calls this phenomenon of young Chinese "escaping and returning" an
example of widespread disappointment that is spreading across China. She says people are bitter when they see their social status languishing
in contrast to the "rise of a great and powerful nation".
"People are discovering that society's resources and opportunities are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. People in the middle
and lower strata of society are becoming increasingly marginalized and are finding that improving their
lives is getting harder," she says.
Article #4: China's Gender Gap Leaves Millions of Single Men
The skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as
a widening age gap between partners.
More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in
2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major
factor. "Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," where the
cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said. Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the
skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a
widening age gap between partners, according to Global Times.
The study said the key contributing factors to the phenomenon included the nation's one-child policy,
which restricts the number of children citizens may have, as well as an insufficient social security
retirement system. The situation influenced people to seek male offspring, who are preferred for their greater earning potential as adults
and thus their ability to care for their elderly parents.
The report said the study urged the government to relax the so-called "one-child" policy and study the possibility of encouraging
"cross-country marriages." China first implemented its population control policy in 1979, generally limiting families to one child, with some
exceptions for rural farmers, ethnic minorities and other groups. It has said the policy has averted 400 million births. Researchers said the
gender imbalance problem cropped up in the late 1980s when the use of ultrasound technology became more prevalent. This allowed
women to easily determine the sex of their fetuses, leading to an increased number of sex-selective abortions.
Article 5: Are Ethnic Tensions On The Rise In China?
A ChinaFile Conversation (Opinion)
On December 31, President Xi Jinping appeared on CCTV and extended his “New Year’s wishes to
Chinese of all ethnic groups.” On Jan. 15, Beijing officials detained Ilham Tohti, a leading Uighur
economist and subsequently accused him of “separatist offenses”; a fresh report shows arrests of Uighurs
for “endangering state security” in Xinjiang rose sharply last year; and the number of Tibetans who have
taken their own lives in public protest against Chinese rule has recently surpassed 120 since February
2009. —The Editors
James Palmer: (opinion)
At least when it comes to the Uighur, the situation is certainly getting worse. A Uighur friend messaged my partner last week, and she wished
him a “happy new year.” “Not my New Year, thanks,” he wrote sourly. Like an increasing number of Uighur even in Beijing, he maintains a
puritan distance from Chinese culture; he refuses to eat Chinese food, to speak Chinese unless absolutely necessary, or to have Chinese
friends.
To be Uighur, at least, is to be constantly confronted by the Chinese state. It’s to be told that your traditional meetings are forbidden, that your
history is not your own, that your intellectuals are terrorist sympathizers, to have the veil forcibly ripped from your face, and to be made to
keep the time of a capital 2,000 miles away. It intrudes even into small things; Uighur names are too long to fit onto Chinese ID cards, for
instance, and so end up being written in butchered Sinified versions.
Tibetans and Uighur have their own long-standing sense of national identity. (So do the Mongolians, but they also have a
nation of their own—which China did all it could to prevent happening, but which bleeds off most of the anger.) For the
Tibetans and Uighurs, the Chinese are invaders and colonizers, and always will be.
The only way to begin to resolve this would be for the Chinese state to acknowledge its own imperialism, to cease the
colonial project and the attempt to obliterate independent histories, and to allow genuine cultural and political autonomy.
But those ideas are utterly anathema, both institutionally and ideologically, in today’s China.
Ordinary Chinese conceive of themselves only as victims of imperialism, never as its perpetuators, and they deeply resent the idea that they
might be the villains of this story. After all, aren’t they bringing civilization and modernity? (Like the British did to India, or the Japanese to
Korea …) It’s not an impossible moral breakthrough for people to make—I remember one teenage girl coming back from a Tibetan visit and
remarking “No wonder they hate us, there are police everywhere”—but to do so means going against everything they’ve been told since they
were children.
Xinjiang has obviously only got worse over the last year. But one crucial threshold hasn’t been crossed: the violence has targeted symbols of
the state like police stations, not the Han population as a whole. We saw what happened in 2009 when tensions exploded into inter-communal
killings; I fear the outcome if that became the norm, rather than a horrific exception.