Environmental Crisis in China

Environmental Crisis in China

Air Pollution

Many foreign press and reports are alarming Chinese that China’s air pollution is at dangerously high level, article naming as “Beijing air pollution at dangerously high levels”, or “If you think China’s air is bad..”. One of the articles, a Chinese interviewed that he is not able to see tall buildings across the street caused by the serious smog (Associated Press, 2014).

The main source of the air pollutions is brought by the heavy industries since industry became the key of China’s economy. Many major cities have large iron, steel mills, and chemical manufacturing plants located in their cities as a result of governmental policy to serve basis of the local and regional economy, and to provide employment. Pollution from a transportation sector, residential heating, power plants, heavy industry located in urban areas all started with industrial policies predating from the post 1978 reform (Ho and Nielson, 2007, p.3). For the sake of economic development, environment, air in this case, has been long sacrificed in most major cities in China. Honrby supports this explanation considering how , air crisis, smog, has occurred mainly caused by industrial pollution, and excessive coal burning (2014).

In addition to the heavy industries, the rising numbers of motor vehicles has worsen the air pollution by reason of how traffic exhaust has become an important environmental issue in China (Wang, Zeng, Chen, 2009). Sousanis explains the situation of the motor vehicle market explosion in China; playing a major role in the overall vehicle population growth in 2010, and now China hold the world’s second largest vehicle population (2011). The increasing motor vehicle is very dangerous because many ch...

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... case study (2012), there had been improving cases in Guizhou and Hunan provinces as both rankings fell down by four positions with the matter of acid rain. The provincial government started the campaign of investing in the project of building New Big Power Units where they clearly upgraded their energy structure by lowering the outdated capacity by the end of 2009 (Zhang and Chang, 2012). Authors (Zhang and Chang) also depict that both provincial governments constructed a resource saving and environmental friendly society in the Eleventh Five- Year Plan period to reduce the sulfur dioxide level (2012). As described, a few changes and efforts had been made in recent years to improve the knowledge of acid rain and related negative effects in China; however, a great need is still required for better monitoring of the environmental situation in many provinces in China.