In my recent diary on cultural differences in interpreting disasters, I mentioned how the traditional Chinese worldview would interpret a natural disaster as a reflection of an imbalance in society and especially a leadership out of touch with both the balance of nature and the welfare of the people.  With this still in the back of my mind, I ran across Tempers Flare in China, which is the cover story this week in Chemical and Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.  The article is a good summary of recent political unrest in China over environmental degradation, also reported in the Western press in stories such as this, this, and this.

According to official statistics, there were 74,000 protests in China last year, as compared to 10,000 in 1993.  The most common cause for the current round of protests is environmental degradation and eviction of peasants from their lands for development (factories or construction of dams).

(More below the fold)

The concerns are well-founded, and the problems are well documented (see, for example, Mark Hertsgaard’s 1999 book Earth Odyssey or Elizabeth Economy’s 2004 book, The River Runs Black).  

The problem results from a combination of factors – vaguely worded environmental laws, localized enforcement open to corruption, and the competing interest of meeting economic development goals for the nation:

Chinese national environmental laws are vague and open to interpretation by local officials. Citizens who wish to sue polluters thus face considerable difficulty in showing that they have a case.

An additional problem is the decentralization of Chinese environmental watchdogs. China’s top environmental authority, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), lacks power. And it’s not clear that SEPA will be able to increase its influence in the near future.

SEPA has little authority over the thousands–11,000 in all, according to Economy–of environmental protection bureaus at the provincial, municipal, township, and village levels in China. While these agencies theoretically uphold national standards, they tend to operate in ways that best suit the local government they are attached to. They are aided by the vagueness of national regulations.

This results in a situation like the casinos in Inspector Renault’s Casablanca.  When the local agency needs some cash, they can visit a facility and be “shocked, shocked” that polluting is going on, collect a fee, and go home.  The effluents run clean when national officials come to town, but the next day the river runs black again, as C&EN notes.

In Western countries, concerned citizens might turn to the press or environmental groups, but these outlets are restricted in China and thus are of limited help.  In fact, the government doesn’t necessary mind a low level of environmental protest, as it allows them to see where the problems are worst and SEPA needs to clamp down on local non-enforcement.  However, this is a balancing act in Beijing requiring continual fine tuning – they desire the pot to simmer, but not come to a boil.

In part, this results from the inevitable tension between the ideology of the Communist government, which views natural resources in a purely operative manner – as a tool with no inherent rights or value in itself – with the Taoist cultural tradition of China.  The latter denies the separation between the human, the natural, and the divine, and sees them all as manifestations of the force behind the operation of the universe, the Tao.  Human rights oppression and environmental degradation are both seen as against the natural order of the universe and an offense against the divine.

This is clearly expressed, for example, in the anti-Chinese Communist propaganda of the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” published by the Epoch Times.  While extreme in much of its characterization of the Communist regime and its policies, it is interesting that one of the grounds that it uses to condemn the regime is that in placing itself above nature in the manner espoused by the last several hundred years of mainstream Western culture, the government has committed what in the West we would call a sacrilege.  In doing so, it forfeits its right to govern, and political opposition to the regime is morally justified (the emotional tone is almost that of Pat Robertson railing against secular humanism and moral decadence in America):

In the last hundred years, the sudden invasion by the communist specter has created a force against nature and humanity, causing limitless agony and tragedy. It has also pushed civilization to the brink of destruction. Having committed all sorts of atrocities that violate the Tao and oppose heaven and the earth, it has become an extremely malevolent force against the universe…

The CCP [Chinese Communist Party], however…  promotes “battling with heaven and fighting with the earth.” It has plundered the earth’s resources at will. In the end, it will inevitably be punished by heaven, the earth and the law of nature…  

The communist movement is destined to fail since it violates the law of the universe and runs counter to heaven. Such an anti-universe force will surely be punished by the heaven’s will and divine spirits…

The vast universe carries with it the irrefutable will of heaven, which can also be called the will of the divine, or the law and force of nature. Humanity will have a future only if it respects heaven’s will, follows the course of nature, observes the law of the universe, and loves all beings under heaven.

This is the more active version of the worldview discussed in my last diary – in that case, the people would (passively) observe that natural disasters reflected a regime that had lost the “Mandate of Heaven;” in this case we see the same worldview at work, but in a more active form – a government that oppressed the people and destroyed the balance of nature is “an anti-universe force” that deserves both scorn and opposition.  By operating in opposition to the Tao the regime is also bringing about its own downfall – 74,000 protests in a year are a natural manifestation of the world and its people attempting to restore a regime more in balance with nature, or in Western terms, every act of hubris calls forth its own nemesis.

Besides as an interesting look at another culture and a general concern about our fellow humans, why should this story be of interest to us in the USA?  For one thing, it serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen if environmental policies like those espoused by the Bush administration are allowed to come to fruition:  weakened enforcement of environmental laws at the local level, as states are pitted against one another for industrial jobs.  In both China and the USA, lack of accountability by government officials to the general public opens the door to lax environmental enforcement and corruption.  

This cyber-journey to the Far East also provides an interesting mirror in which we can see the invisible assumptions of our culture that surround everything we do, like a fish who is unaware that it is surrounded by water: What are the factors that cause political unrest here versus in China?  It is only in the last generation that environmental degradation would lead to wide protest, while human rights have led to protests back at least as far as Spartacus.  Our economic system considers environmental damage as an invisible externality, of no consequence in accounting for the things that matter – this is why economists cheerily predict that the recent hurricanes will have only a minor – or even a net positive (!) – impact on the economy.  Traditional Chinese philosophy provides one look at how a more balanced approach to these two vital concerns (human freedom and a harmonious relationship with nature) might play out in our modern world.

 Whether it is possible to ensure the survival of our advanced global culture while maintaining the dichotomy between man and nature is seriously in doubt, given the many problems facing us that arise from the coming collapse of things we’ve taken for granted: a stable, relatively benign climate (compared to other eras in planetary history), seas that produce abundant fish that are healthy to eat, additional land over the next mountain for our burgeoning families, fertile cropland that produces sufficient food, forests whose long-term management need not be a factor in our economic calculus.  That we are faced with an increasing number of new diseases is a direct reflection of our strained relationship with our environment:  overcrowded conditions, encroaching into previously wild lands, and slovenly waste-disposal practices all contribute to the conditions that make the jump of disease organisms to a new host – us – increasingly likely.  

Ending Republican government is only the first small change we’re going to have to make to establish our society on a more environmentally sustainable footing.  But, as the Tao Te Ching says, “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”  

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