Industrial Pollution in China. ppt
The GISP deals with industrial and transportational pollution in China this week. My review reflects upon the part on industrial pollution. Before this week, most of the readings and lectures have been focusing on general topics of China, from the political system to economic development and to relevant international relations. Therefore, we have acquired some knowledge about the basic setting in China.
From this week and onward, we will spend more time looking at China's environmental issues more specifically. So it is important that we keep on reflecting the readings to general topics and themes we were discussing about few weeks ago. It is on this standard that we select the readings for this week. There are a lot of statistics about industrial pollutions in China, but memorizing these numbers are not our first priority. Instead, a comprehensive understanding about the issue and its practical significance is our goal.
The first section of the powerpoint is a revisit on China's geography. Industrial pollutions (if we do not carbon emission at this moment) in China has specific geographical trend that is closely related to China's overall geography. The book we read about coal mining in China focuses on Shanxi Province, the Pannsylvania/West Virginia of China. A map that shows the distribution of coal reserves in China can clearly show why it is the case. Notice that China has a huge amount of coal reserve in the west, so the coal mining in Shanxi will eventually migrate to the west in the near future. The situation for oil and natural gas is kind of similar even though China's gross reserve for them are not high. This geographical trend will yield policy implications.
Another important message to get from these maps is the highly uneven distribution of natural resources over China. That means huge amount of transportation is required by the energy sectors. A massive amount of railroads (as well as other infrastructure) need to be built in the remote west. The papers we read talk a lot about the increase of vehicles within cities, but it should not be neglected that China is building miles and miles of railroads and highways that reach the remote and mountainous areas.
The second topic of the powerpoint is on rural industry in China. The bulletin points in the slides well summarize important arguments made in Wang's paper. That paper is very good because it reflects a number of big themes we talked at the beginning of the semester, and it shows how those themes are actually played out in a real, specific setting. What should be highlighted is the complicated relationship between local government, town-village enterprises, and the environmental protection agencies, and how this relationship is to some extent a unique character of China's transitional economy. The huge importance of guanxi, personal networks, in making local decisions is almost something that is sometimes neglected by foreign scholars who have limited knowledge about the cultural setting in China.
To end with, thanks a lot for Timmons' great guest lecture on China's role on mitigating global climate change and updates on recent international climate negotiations. His lecture is a perfect link between our discussion last week on international relations to this week's topic on industrial pollutions. One question that is really worth thinking about is the potential influence of international actors on China in the local level.
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