It’s all the rage these days on the other side of the aisle to complain about burdensome regulation, particularly of the environmental variety. Gosh, our small-government friends say, if only we were more like China. They really know how to grow an economy. They’ve really got their head screwed on straight when it comes to regulation.
On a chilly evening early last month, a mob of more than 200 people gathered in this tiny eastern China village at the entrance to the Zhejiang Haijiu Battery Factory, a maker of lead-acid batteries for motorcycles and electric bikes….
News had spread that workers and villagers had been poisoned by lead emissions from the factory, which had operated for six years despite flagrant environmental violations. But the truth was even worse: 233 adults and 99 children were ultimately found to have concentrations of lead in their blood, up to seven times the level deemed safe by the Chinese government.
One of them was 3-year-old Han Tiantian, who lived just across the road from the plant. Her father, Han Zongyuan, a factory worker, said he learned in March that she had absorbed enough lead to irreversibly diminish her intellectual capacity and harm her nervous system….
In the past two and a half years, thousands of workers, villagers and children in at least 9 of mainland China’s 31 province-level regions have been found to be suffering from toxic levels of lead exposure, mostly caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters. The cases underscore a pattern of government neglect seen in industry after industry as China strives for headlong growth with only embryonic safeguards.
Chasing the political dividends of economic development, local officials regularly overlook environmental contamination, worker safety and dangers to public health until forced to confront them by episodes like the Haijiu factory riot.
It’s really a question of what kind of country you want to live in. You want unconstrained economic development, regardless of the human cost? That’s pretty much what’s going on in China. There are winners in a system like that, but there are most definitely losers too.
A remarkable photographer named Lu Guang won an award in 2009 for a series of photographs called “Pollution in China.” Here are some examples (there are more at the link). Me, I want a country where this is not allowed to happen.
michaelbate says
And also Scott Brown’s.
To paraphrase the Bible (and a line in “Night of the Hunter”):
By their votes shall ye know them.
stomv says
They’re poisoning their own people and their own resources. They will not be able to maintain their economic [or possibly military] growth with a nation full of sick and disabled citizens, with unsanitary water, filthy air, and land unsuitable for agriculture thanks to the expanding Gobi, chemical dumping, and more.
I don’t like this kind of an example of rhetoric because it’s awfully hard to pin this kind of result on a GOP politician; even if they want to get rid of the regulation they won’t acknowledge this kind of a result, and moderates know damn well that we’re just not going to get rid of the EPA (or Dept of Ed, DOE, etc). So it just comes off as hyperbole.
centralmassdad says
In a developing country, where everyone is dirt poor and subsistence level agriculture is the occupation of a significant portion of the population, economic development takes precedence in practice over environmental protection, platitudes notwithstanding.
Widespread concern about situations such as this– sufficient to result in actual regulation– comes only after living standards come up a ways, and there is something like a middle class.
It was the same in the West.