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“Next week, China’s National People’s Congress, which is now meeting in Beijing, will formally adopt the country’s next five-year plan. The document will define the country’s vision for the next half-decade, including an increasingly desperate balancing act between economic growth and environmental protection. At least 200 million Chinese will join the urban middle class by the end of this decade, and the government sees continued rapid growth as the best recipe for the preservation of social stability. But at the same time, the country bursts at the ecological seams. Lush forests have given way to dust bowls and industrial wastelands. Plant and animal species are going extinct at a rapid pace. Millions of people are being displaced from lands that can no longer sustain them. Birth defects — likely related to exposure to polluted air, water, or food — in some places reach 20 times the global average.
At first glance, the next five-year plan (or what has so far been shared with the public) appears to be the greenest in China’s history. On Feb. 27, Premier Wen Jiabao emphasized the new priorities in a well-publicized Internet chat session: “We can no longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid development and reckless construction…. These will only lead to overcapacity in production, increased pressure on environmental resources, and unsustainable economic growth.” The five-year plan’s expected provisions include targets and financing to promote the rapid expansion of alternative energy, and tighter limits for toxic pollutants, among other measures.
The new plan comes in the wake of notable environmental reforms that Beijing has adopted in the last few years. At the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Chinese government committed to reducing the carbon intensity of China’s economy, even though its greenhouse gas emissions per capita are much lower than those of industrialized countries.”
Read more: Foreign Policy
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