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SOCIAL CHANGES IN CHINA. Since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. In 2005, building at a frenetic pace, the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.
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Since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. In 2005, building at a frenetic pace, the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.
The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching the world for energy and natural resources: it needs raw materials to build new cities, and the energy to power them, driving up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage.
China's heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world's 10 most-polluted cities.
Tiny airborne particles have drifted just north of San Francisco from coal-fired power plants, smelters, dust storms and diesel trucks in China and other Asian countries.
From the Wall Street Journal, 9/4/02: Economic problems are the biggest challenge. From 1996 to 2000, state-sector restructuring led to the lay-offs of 48 million people – equal to the population of Korea.
China is home to an estimated 100,000,000 unemployed. To put that in perspective, the US economy employs 115,000,000!
Cities are trying to absorb rural laborers leaving unprofitable farms – a throng estimated at 150 million. “Reforms are good for some people but not for us,” says Ma Tao, who, with his wife, was laid off from a state-owned factory.
The spread of social unrest is a serious threat to the (communist) party’s grip on power in the future: “Disgruntled Chinese citizens, especially the newly unemployed, join the Falun Gong (a religious group, though persecuted, which has advocated religious freedom throughout the 1990s) as a ‘symbol of protest’.” Author Gordon G. Chang
The government says it has thoroughly cleaned the areas to be submerged. But environmentalists say the residue of industrial sites and toilets will further contaminate an already polluted waterway. “They have cleared the garbage mounds less than five years old. Those older than 5 years old are simply buried underneath.”
In Zhongbaodao, a village near Yichang in the Yangtze River Valley, archaeologists have revealed more than 200 ancient tombs filled with pottery, porcelain, stoneware, and polished tools dating back at least 7,000 years! They also unearthed a 3,000-year-old kiln from the Shang Dynasty. At countless other sites along the river, scores of treasures have emerged.PBS.org
The inhabited part of China is roughly half as large as the inhabited part of the US, yet it supports five times as many people. This is made possible only by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and floodplains.
One’s picture of a big empty landscape is mirrored statistically in the estimate that six sevenths of the population must live on the one third of the land that is cultivable.
