‘Toxic Politics’ Review: Can Xi Jinping Clean House?

The unparalleled growth of China under a communist regime that was until recently almost entirely indifferent to the consequences of pollution has brought about an environmental disaster that, despite some competition from India, has no counterpart anywhere in the world. Prodded by local journalists, civic organizations and unrest as pollution’s impact on public health has grown, China’s government has over the past decade begun to take pollution seriously. By some measures it has made progress. But as Mr. Huang shows, cleaning up China will test the Communist Party to its limits. 

China’s pollution problem results from the intersection of three forces: the rapid rise of its manufacturing economy; a central leadership that has long favored economic growth over competing policy goals like reducing pollution; and a system of governance that creates perverse incentives for local officials and limits the ability of local residents to control decisions that affect their lives. In recent years that picture has begun to change: China’s central authorities want the country to shift from industries like steel and cement toward services and tech, and they worry increasingly about the social, political and economic costs of pollution. But coordinating local governance in such a vast country is as difficult as ever.
It is hard to overstate the problems of air, water and soil pollution in China. With much of the country arid or mountainous or both, population and industry are concentrated in coastal regions and the great Yellow and Yangtze river basins. The densely populated Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, or BTH, sits on 2% of China’s landmass, holds half of China’s blast furnaces and produces one fourth of all the steel made in the world. In 2011, attempting to evade central-government instructions to reduce steel capacity, Hebei officials concealed 50 million tons of steel production—more than the total output of Germany.

China’s dash for growth also led authorities to promote TVEs—township and village enterprises—to create jobs beyond urban areas. These enterprises, regulated lightly if at all by local officials with a stake in their success, have engaged in activities ranging from mining and smelting to manufacturing. For more than 30 years, the TVEs spewed poisonous industrial waste into rivers, the soil and the air. Today about 500 places in China are identified as “cancer villages,” where clusters of cancers seem related to soil and water pollution. China’s historically low levels of cancer are rising dramatically, with lung-cancer deaths rising by 465% between 1973 and 2013.

Air pollution is the most visible and widely publicized hazard in China—the number of private automobiles rose to 194.5 million in 2016 from 5.5 million in 1990. But water and ground pollution may present more difficulties in the long run. Lead, cadmium and mercury are widely found in the soil. In 2002, when pollution levels were much lower than they are now, the Ministry of Agriculture found that 28.4% of rice samples had unsafe concentrations of lead, and 10.3% had unsafe levels of cadmium. With an estimated 12 million tons of grains contaminated each year, cadmium contamination in rice has led many Chinese consumers to switch to imported rice. Of the one billion tons of garbage produced annually in China, less than 20% is properly disposed, with the rest dumped illegally “in unofficial landfills and heaps,” as Mr. Huang writes, leaking dangerous chemicals into water and soil.
At these levels, pollution is more than an annoyance. It’s thought to be a major cause of declining sperm quality among Chinese men, with infertility among couples rising from 3% in 1990 to between 12.5% and 15% in 2018. A 2017 study found that people living in the more heavily polluted north of China lived on average 3.1 fewer years than those in the south. Rising levels of smog are related to falling IQ and worker productivity as well, according to Mr. Huang. The World Bank and Chinese researchers estimate the total cost of pollution between 2000 and 2010 at nearly 10% of GDP.

Fears of the health effects of pollution make foreign executives reluctant to accept work assignments in China. Those fears are also causing a talent drain as Chinese professionals emigrate in growing numbers. Citing education and the environment as the main reasons driving their decision, 56% of Chinese millionaires in a survey cited by Mr. Huang said that they either were considering a move overseas or had already left. Pollution also contributes to civil unrest, with a rising number of environmental protests leading to violence.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, takes the issue more seriously than his predecessors did, Mr. Huang reports, but the results have been mixed. Campaigns to reduce measures of air quality, or to enforce directives in specific localities, have had some success. But a close look at the data, the author contends, indicates that China may still be losing ground as local officials respond to conflicting incentives. Calling the environmental crisis “the Achilles heel of modern China,” Mr. Huang warns that the failure to manage the pollution problem will degrade China’s economic performance in years to come. The resulting internal unrest, he thinks, could “prompt the state to act more aggressively overseas to whip up nationalist sentiment and deflect domestic criticism in an attempt to shore up its political legitimacy.”

Is Mr. Huang’s pessimism overdone? Maybe, but anybody who wants to understand contemporary China and its place in the world would do well to consult his book.  

Mr. Mead, who teaches foreign affairs at Bard College, is the Global View columnist at the Journal.