As China’s economy continues to grow, it is crucial to look at the root causes for this surge: the drive of the average Chinese individual, This is a powerful motivation which will continue to bolster China’s economy as it has done in the past. But as cities continue to grow, so does pollution, which has the potential to become a severe limiting factor to the otherwise exponential growth of the Chinese economy. Migrant worker Wu Dongmei is one of the 150 million individuals whose current lifestyles reflect the changing China, as it moves further away from total communist economics and the Mao era. She is one of the many who has migrated thousands of miles away from small Chinese villages to larger “boomtown” cities. Wu now works in a new clothing factory in Shenzen and sends money home to her family. The newly arrived workers populate this city, now the epitome of capitalism. Just as the western world was affected by its industrial revolution, China’s growing industrial economy is influencing mass urbanization. Only 20 years ago, Shenzen was a small fishing town in southern China, but today, as strict Maoist economic policies are forgotten, rural people are streaming in to this booming industrial city. Wu’s new life is similar to those of millions of others who have fled impoverished rural areas to migrate to the growing factories that supply the world. Although the work is hard, the pay supplies such necessities as food, schooling, and rent. During the communist era, such necessities were provided and schooling and medicine supplied (nothing close to the ideal situation that it sounds like, however). Today, one has the possibility for economic success, so workers are motivated to work hard and long. The average Chinese citizen now wants the life of a well-to-do Westerner, and with hard work, that is now possible. There is no longer hope in the farmlands, so people stream to the cities for the prospect of success. The problem which the Chinese government will soon face is that these cities will not be able to hold so many migrants as the result of intense urbanization. The workers continue to come for hope of a better life, and more will come. The Chinese like the feeling of money in their pockets, which was once unheard of during the Communist era, but as the country advances to a new economic era, and they will work for it. Chinese district officials have tried to hide and deny the problems, but they can no longer ignore the two dangerous chemical spills currently plaguing the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Officials were forced to take emergency safety measures to protect water supplies for millions of people which were threatened by the two spills in both the northern and southern regions. This has not been the first spill which officials have tried to conceal. About a month ago, major benzene spills into the Shangua River, which were initially ignored, contaminated water supplies in Harbin, shutting off water for the city’s 3.8 million residences. But these spills cause more then just inconvenience. The country’s staggeringly high rate of polluted bodies of water (over 70%) has, unsurprisingly, caused numerous health issues and left about 360 million rural inhabitants without safe drinking water. These spills are dangerous and cannot be taken lightly. The nearly weekly occurrences of health emergencies, similar to these spills, are reflections of the negative effects of China’s fast growing industrial economy. Chinese district officials, such as Jiang Yimin, head of the provincial environmental protection bureau, have been taking action to publicly deny the dangers. Hiding these problems will only worsen the situation and allow pollution levels to worsen. Health departments need to confront these issues by fixing the source of the problems: the factories and refineries. As the rate of industrial activities grows so must the intensity to which factories are regulated. The combination of growing industrial activity, pollution, and population levels will soon become a limiting factor in China’s exponential growth rate.
