The ministry identified programs supporting renewable power, including wind and solar, in California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and California that violate World Trade Organization policies and trade treaties, according to a preliminary finding on the agency’s website today.

The finding comes a week after the U.S. Commerce Department announced tariffs as high as 250 percent on Chinese solar cells and is the latest salvo in a renewable-energy trade dispute, according to Theodore O’Neill, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities Inc. in New York.

“It’s a long, slow escalation of trade and currency wars as we race to the bottom,” O’Neill said today in an interview.
Chinese solar companies have criticized Commerce’s preliminary decision May 18 that they improperly benefit from government subsidies and sell solar cells below cost. At least four U.S. solar manufacturers filed for bankruptcy in the past year.

MarketWatch has more on the background of the dispute:

The U.S. Commerce Department last week announced a preliminary decision to impose 31% tariffs on several of China’s largest solar-panel companies that it had found guilty of dumping.

The Chinese government blasted the U.S. decision as “protectionist” and “unreasonable,” saying it provoked trade friction and would hurt both Chinese and U.S. companies as well as the clean energy sector.

The Ministry of Commerce didn’t say Thursday how it might respond to the U.S. trade violations it had uncovered.

Four Chinese solar companies plan to hold a news conference later Thursday to respond to the U.S. Commerce Department’s decision on tariffs, which followed U.S. antisubsidy tariffs of 3% to 5% on Chinese solar companies in March.

Read more about renewable energy in China, cooperation with the U.S. over environmental issues, and about U.S. trade with China, via CDT.

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Post tags: clean energy, renewable energy, U.S trade, U.S. environment
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An environmental researcher by trade, Ma spent years chronicling China’s ecological catastrophes. Some of what he witnessed was inexorable and slow, like the graying of the Beijing sky; last December, the World Health Organization ranked Beijing 1,035th, out of 1,100 international cities, in air quality. Other results of his country’s unfettered growth were horrific, like the massive flooding of the Yangtze in 1998, after years of deforestation and soil erosion. Eventually, he decided that merely telling the story was not enough. “As a media person, you look to expose the problem,” he says, “but you can’t stop there-—people are looking for answers.”

Ma founded the not-for-profit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) in 2006. Since then, more than anyone else in China, Ma has channeled the power of the Internet and the optimism of China’s younger generation into a force for environmental change. Working with a devoted national network of young volunteers, Ma and his nine full-time staffers have compiled an open-source online database of water, air, and hazardous-waste pollution records—-in the country that generates the world’s highest emissions. Those records are damning: Over five years, IPE volunteers have helped hunt down some 97,000 records of factories operating in violation of China’s green laws. And those efforts lead to change.

“When I look at China’s environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money,” he says. “It’s lack of motivation. The motivation should come from regulatory enforcement, but enforcement is weak and environmental litigation is near to impossible. So there’s an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of motivation.” Ma has become expert at using his database to create that motivation, especially when it comes to helping global companies police their suppliers.

Read more about Ma Jun and about environmental activism in China, via CDT. See also our special section on the Environment.

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Post tags: corporate responsibility, environmental activism, Ma Jun, pollution
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Though some critics argue the Chinese government has been too slow to act, research, public concern and some hefty bills ($35 billion in Shanghai alone in the last 40 years), has sparked some momentum. Recently, the state council approved China’s Land Subsidence Prevention Project, a countrywide initiative to prevent land subsidence. Likewise, Beijing, which has descended more than a foot in the past decade, has also made an effort to reduce underground water extraction, with plans to close 800 water extraction wells in 2012, according to the Beijing Water Authority. By 2014, the city hopes to halt underground water extraction in urban areas altogether as part of the North-South Water Diversion Project. The project expects to bring 3 billion cubic feet of water supply to Beijing from the Yangtze River. This would not only satisfy one-third of the city’s total water demand, but would also cut the extraction of underground water in half.

But Li, who worked at the Chinese Academy of Science for 15 years, says such programs will not be enough. “It’s hard to quantify how much this might help, but the question is, is that a problem solved? The answer is no. The problem lies in the early issue with urbanization,” he says. Scientists expect the regulations to help curb the consumption of underground water supplies, but there a few things the government has less control over, such as global warming. As the land degradation and excessive guzzling of ground water continues, environmentalists predict waters surrounding Shanghai to rise 9 to 27 inches by 2050 as a result of melting ice caps.

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Post tags: Beijing, construction, Shanghai, south-to-north water diversion project, urban development, water conservancy, water crisis, water shortage, Yangtze River
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Last year 438 rhinos, nearly all of them of the white (meaning wide-lipped) species, were known to have been illegally killed in South Africa, their horns often hacked off while they were still alive. That compares with an annual average of just 15 before 2008. This year more than 200 have already been poached, an average of 50 a month, with the year’s final tally expected to top 600. If that trend continues, more rhinos will be being poached than born by 2016, sending the world’s population into a decline that could be irreversible. Around 20,000 of the surviving white rhinos on earth live in South Africa ….

Long prized in South-East Asia for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac vim, rhino horn is now being peddled as a cure for cancer too. With growing wealth in China and Vietnam unaccompanied by growing wisdom, demand seems insatiable. The horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as finger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight of cocaine or gold—a proven aphrodisiac.

Other animals are also vulnerable: the Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Thai police had seized two tiger carcasses thought to be bound for China. But with interception rates low—around 10% for internationally trafficked ivory, according to Interpol—measures to cut off supply must be accompanied by efforts to reduce demand. In the case of elephants, this can involve challenging the widespread myth that tusks drop out naturally and harmlessly. At Rectified.name, Karlis Rokpelnis, an ethnoecology PhD candidate at Beijing’s Minzu University, suggests hard research, however unprofitable, into the supposed medicinal properties of rhino horn and other exotic ingredients. Rokpelnis also draws on recent stories of human baby flesh pills reportedly seized by South Korean customs, and the theme of cannibalism in historical ethnic smears and Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’.

While the current media and online furor could — and probably should — be dismissed as one of the many rumors and otherworldly accusations floating around the Internet, it does point to a striking failure of science as it relates to traditional Chinese medicine. How to separate the quackery from the possible, particularly in regards to practices which so abominable as to be nearly unbelievable, but also debunking medical myths involving the use of ingredients — such as bear bile, rhino horn, and tiger portions — which do great harm to biodiversity and the protection of endangered species ….

While the moral impact of a middle-aged man spending prolifically on concoctions to enhance his amorous life seems benign (as long as he stays away from the damn rhinos!), what to make of the 2007 half a year prison term to Guangdong parents who stole another couple’s deceased child to make a healing soup for their sickly child …?

If sound qualitative data of the clinical results of using rare animal species as medicine would be available, this could be used as a way of addressing demand for them directly. After all, who would buy tiger bone liquor if its benefits for sexual potency were shown to be non-existent?

At least one reason might remain. From the BBC’s legendary 2006 report on a Beijing penis restaurant, on a $5,700 tiger penis dish:

“So what does it taste like?” I ask.

“Oh, the same as all the others,” she says blithely.

And does it have any particular potency? “No. People just like to order tiger to show off how much money they have.”

(As Lijia Zhang noted last year in a Guardian opinion piece on the “racist” Western fascination with strange Chinese eating habits, the restaurant’s menu “is not something that runs deep in Chinese culture – there are only two penis restaurants in China, and both belong to the same owner.”)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animal protection, elephant poaching, elephants, ivory trade, tigers, traditional medicine
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Huang said he learned the good news from his company’s agent in Reykjavik at midnight Friday. He assured China Daily that he will sign a deal in mid-June but “the details of the term will need further negotiation”.

Huang said he believes that, during the whole process, he has played a positive role in telling his personal story of turning from a government employee to a successful private business owner during the 30 years of the country’s reform and opening up. He worked for a Party department and the Ministry of Construction in the 1980s but quit in the early 1990s when many officials turned to business during the economic boom.

“I’m accompanied by a handful of successful businessmen like me. The West knows little about the transformation. My story helps them to better understand China and what’s happening here,” he said.

The long-term lease agreement likely assuages fears in Iceland that an outright purchase would help China gain a foothold in the Artic region for energy resources and shipping, and paves the way for Huang to open a resort on the land within the next five years.

Separately, AFP reports that the sale of a bankrupt New Zealand dairy farm to a Chinese firm has prompted fears of a foreign land grab:

After a review process lasting more than 12 months, the government last month approved the sale of the 16-property Crafar Farms group to China’s Shanghai Pengxin in a deal reportedly worth NZ$210 million ($170 million).

On the face of it, the sale was a minor component of the burgeoning NZ$10 billion a year trade relationship between China and New Zealand, which in 2008 became the first developed nation to sign a free trade agreement with Beijing.

But the approval sparked intense controversy in the farm-reliant country, the world biggest exporter of dairy products, with Prime Minister John Key’s conservative government accused of selling out to foreign interests.

The main opposition Labour Party labelled the decision “a massive kick in the guts” for New Zealand farmers, while Winston Peters of the populist New Zealand First Party branded it “economic betrayal”.

“The whole sales process has been a shonky, jack-up job between Prime Minister John Key, his ministers, and the communist government of China,” Peters said.

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Post tags: foreign investment, iceland, land grab, land purchase, New Zealand
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The country’s top leaders have made provisions for both increasing overall coal production and easing the coal-transportation bottleneck. The most recent Five-Year Plan, the central government’s primary planning document, calls for significantly increasing coal production, which will be achieved by developing and expanding 14 large “coal-industry bases” across western China; these bases will include facilities for coal mining, petrochemical processing, and coal-fired power plants ….

Yet, in expanding coal-industry bases in west China, one crucial challenge has so far received far less attention than it deserves: Coal-based industries are massively water-intensive (in fact, coal mining, coal-based power generation, and petrochemical processing together account for more than one-fifth of China’s total water usage). And much of western China is already short on water — think Gobi desert and camels, as opposed to Pearl River Delta rice paddies. “The west of China is an environmentally fragile area,” says Professor Wang Xiujun, who conducts research on climate and precipitation jointly for the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography and the University of Maryland. “There’s not much water to spare.”

See also Economic Observer (via CDT) on problems with the south’s inter-province electricity trade last year, after water and coal shortages in Guizhou forced power rationing in the industrial Pearl River Delta.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coal mining, coal power, electricity, Five-Year Plan, pearl river delta, power grid, water shortage, western provinces
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China’s water issues are particularly acute. The country’s water supply is smaller than that of the U.S., yet it must meet the needs of a population nearly five times as large. Industrialization has taken its toll on this already limited resource. Industrial and biological pollution has contaminated almost 90 percent of the underground water in Chinese cities. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one out of four (300 million) Chinese do not have daily access to clean water, and that one out of two (700 million) are forced to consume water below WHO standards. High population density, a poor ratio of available water to demand, and regional imbalances in available water supplies are serious challenges for China in managing its usable water supply. Frequent floods ravage cities in the south and east, and droughts are a regular occurrence in the north and west.

[...]In its 12^th Five-Year Plan which began in 2011, China will shift its environmental focus to water. From 2011 to 2015, the country will spend a total of $536 billion on water purification and waste water treatment plants, irrigation systems, and flood control projects. Currently, only 50 percent of urban sewage is treated. By 2015, the government intends to add 42 million tons of daily sewage treatment capacity to increase its urban waste water treatment rate to 85 percent.

[...]Implementation of the water-related programs called for in the 12^th Five-Year Plan has already begun. In 2011, the first year of the plan, total spending on water resources management increased significantly to RMB 345.2 billion ($54.6 billion). In addition to water treatment and recycling, China has already initiated programs to limit the loss of human life and property damage caused by flash floods. At the end of last year, RMB 3.8 billion ($603 million) was earmarked to subsidize flash-flood forecasting projects in 1,100 counties throughout the country. It is expected that the number of counties will be increased to 1,800 and that $1.8 billion will be spent on flash-flood forecasting programs by 2013.

Within a political culture that has prized economic growth above almost anything else for most of the last three decades, getting local leaders to accommodate slower growth by tabling water-intensive industrial and power-generation plans will be easier said than done.

Even if China were today able to simply turn on a dime, the question of whether it would be too late ominously hangs over the entire issue of the country’s water shortage. Elizabeth Economy, a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, is one of the pre-eminent scholars on China’s environmental and water scarcity challenges.

She testified at the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in January that, relative to China’s water supply problems, “a number of factors, such as corruption, lack of human and financial resources, and a weak policy environment have often undermined fulfillment of Beijing’s goals. A preference for large projects also hampers effective planning.” She went on to state “None of these policies-taken alone or collectively-has been sufficient to address the challenge at hand.”

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Post tags: drought, water crisis, water shortage
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When I arrived in China in 2003, I believed I had the best job in the world, working for my favourite newspaper in the biggest nation at arguably the most dramatic phase of transformation in its history. I still clearly recall my first few weeks and months here. Like many newcomers, I delighted at discoveries of Chinese literature and Daoist philosophy, Beijing parks, the edgy eccentricity of Dashanzi and the Chinese language, though I never managed to master it.

That was a thrilling time – as Beijing prepared for The Olympics and a new leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao held out the prospect of change. My mantra in those early years was that in China “nothing is certain, so everything is possible”.

This was true for the environment, which was horrible. I very quickly came to the conclusion that the situation was so appalling in China that this was the country most likely to make a change for the better. I told journalist friends at the time of my hopes for a green revolution here but they were more focused on politics and hopes for reform.

But when I look back at the past nine years, the environment and the economy have been bigger drivers of change. It has been a remarkable period. Let me just give you a few numbers to hammer home the point: in the past nine years, China’s GDP has quadrupled; incomes have risen three-fold and car ownership five-fold; coal consumption has more than doubled and carbon-dioxide emissions have followed suit to become easily the biggest in the world.

Watts is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump, which explores the relationship between China’s economic growth and its massive ecological challenges. Read more by and about Jonathan Watts via CDT, including a podcast interview we conducted with him in 2006. Read more about China’s ecological challenges in CDT’s special Environment section.

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Post tags: air pollution, environmental activism, foreign correspondents, jonathan watts, sustainable development, water pollution
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In a hot, concrete hut filled with acetylene fumes, an elderly Mongolian miner struggles to contain her excitement as she plucks a sizzling inch-long nugget of gold from a grubby cooling pot and raises it to the light.

Khorloo, 65, and her sons spent the day scrutinizing half a dozen CCTV screens as workers at the Bornuur gold processing plant whittled 1.2 metric metric tonnes of ore down to 123 grams of pure gold that could earn the family as much as $6,000 ….

“It took us a week to dig this out,” Khorloo said, holding the nugget. “But we dug for three years to reach the vein.”

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts took a broader view of the “Minegolian” resource boom in an article and video report last November, examining the balance between its colossal potential economic benefits and its heavy social and environmental impact.

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Post tags: coal mining, Gobi, gold rush, jonathan watts, mining industry, mongolia, resources
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Twenty years ago this month, the Chinese government, amid great controversy but with the blessing of a Canadian government report, authorized construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

The critics said the dam would be an environmental and economic nightmare that would flood millions of people off their land, induce landslides and earthquakes, cripple navigation and produce unaffordable electricity.

Twenty years later, the critics have been proven right on all counts. The arguments in favour of the dam were always thin gruel, without scientific depth or credibility, repeated ad nauseam in the form of propaganda, while the arguments against the dam were extensive and detailed and, as we now know, accurate.

About one year ago, Beijing officially acknowledged the negative social and environmental impact of the project. So far, over a million people have been forced to relocate as the waters of the Yangtze consumed their homes and farmland, and more may soon be forced to move due to related geological changes. The Washington Post reports:

Another 100,000 people may have to move away from China’s Three Gorges Dam due to the risk of disastrous landslides and bank collapses around the reservoir of the world’s biggest hydroelectric facility, state media said Wednesday.

The Ministry of Land Resources says the number of landslides and other disasters has increased 70 percent since the water level in the $23 billion showcase project rose to its maximum level in 2010.

Some 1.4 million people already have been resettled due to the huge project on the Yangtze River. Authorities may move another 100,000 people in the next three to five years to minimize the risk of casualties from such threats, Liu Yuan, a ministry official, told China National Radio in a report posted on a government website and carried by state newspapers.

The BBC has more on how the the immense project has impacted the Yangtze watershed and its local population:

Mr Liu said the authorities would try to stabilise 355 locations around the dam where rockfalls and landslides had already happened.

Another 5,386 hazardous sites were being monitored.

The water in the huge reservoir rises and falls depending on the season, making the banks unstable, the BBC’s Michael Bristow in Beijing reports.

The banks have already collapsed in hundreds of places, our correspondent says.

[...]Construction started in 1994 and was completed in 2006, with the reservoir reaching its full height two years ago after submerging 13 cities, 140 towns and 1,350 villages.

While language is speculative concerning the estimated 100,000 person relocation over the next 3-5 years, for 20,000 of those people, the move is imminent. From China Daily:

About 20,000 people from a county in Central China’s Hubei province will be relocated in 2012 due to the risk of disastrous landslides around the Three Gorges Dam, local authorities said Wednesday.

The 20,000 people account for one-fifth of the population of Dongba county, located in the Enshi Tujia and Miao autonomous prefecture. The relocation process is under way, said Zhao Wenxing from the county’s relocation headquarters.

Schools and hospitals that are in harm’s way will be among the first buildings to be evacuated, Zhao said.

A total of 550 million yuan ($87.3 million) will be used to fund the relocation project, Zhao said.

The county is prone to landslides and cave-ins, prompting local authorities to launch the relocation project to avoid casualties, Zhao said.

Environmental advocacy group Probe International has posted a translation of the China National Radio report cited in the BBC and Washington Post pieces.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: relocation, Three Gorges Dam, Yangtze River
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