huge population means the average wealth
per head is a mere fraction of that in
Japan. Living standards are considerably
lower in much of the country, particularly
in rural areas. But it could also be because
of concerns about how sensible and how
sustainable the current growth model is in
the long term, and what “real costs” are
being incurred in the dash for growth.
As an example, the city of Wuhan in central China is not well known to outsiders. It
is not as famous as Beijing or Shanghai, but
in many ways, it is more like the rest of
China than either of them. Wuhan is a
sprawling, rather unremarkable industrial
town with a population as large as the entire
country of Sweden. The biggest employer in
Wuhan is a steel mill, which employs about
90,000 people. Cutting through the middle
of Wuhan is one of China’s great rivers, the
Yangtze. Today it is hard for the residents of
Wuhan to make out the buildings on the
other side of the river. The city is shrouded
in a grey haze, which residents blame on
pollution from the region’s factories.
But it’s not just the air that is polluted.
In Wuhan, Hebei province dead fish have
plagued the Donghu Lake, where officials
say an estimated 100,000 pounds of fish
have been killed by a combination of pollution and hot weather. The foul smell of
the dead fish has seriously affected local
residents’ lives.
In the lead up to the 2008 Olympics
in China headlines around the world
proclaimed a major concern about
China’s pollution problem. Television
viewers around the globe got their first
view of life in China during the 2008
Olympics and the view was disturbing to
say the least. During the Olympics,
China shut down factories and forced
people to reduce their driving around the
city to clear up some of the city’s famously bad pollution.
How bad is the pollution
in China?
According to the World Bank, 20 cities in
the world with the worst air pollution are
located in China. China’s Ministry of Sci-
ence and Technology has estimated that
50,000 newborn babies die every year due
to the effects of air pollution. It is believed
that the air pollution level in most Chinese
cities is leading to the premature deaths of
350,000-400,000 people each year. A fur-
ther 300,000 people are believed to die
prematurely each year from exposure to
poor air indoors.
This photo taken via satellite shows the effects of air pollution in China. There’s an almost permanent layer of smog and opaque air pollution covering vast regions of China, especially along the coast. Source: NASA
28 | Coatings World
www.coatingsworld.com
May 2011
