What has Chinas economic boom done to the environment?
China’s economy has grown tenfold since 1978, and its focus on economic development at breakneck speed has led to widespread environmental degradation. “China has gone through an industrialization in the past twenty years that many developing countries needed one hundred years to complete,” said Pan Yue, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in a 2007 report in Germany’s Spiegel. Yue was then the deputy director of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), which became the MEP in March 2008. But Elizabeth C. Economy, a CFR senior fellow and expert on China’s environment, says the argument that China is experiencing the same growing pains as any other industrialized nation “fundamentally mischaracterizes” the issue. The “scale and scope of pollution far outpaces what occurred in the United States and Europe” during their industrial revolutions, she says. Moreover, China’s environmental woes have hurt its economy. The damage to the ecosys
