Isabel Hilton on China's Environmental Crisis

When did you first become aware of China’s impact on the environment?

When I first arrived in China in 1973 there was a total of around 20 foreign students in the country. Now, of course, there are thousands, but at that time China had been closed and was very hard to get into – we were the first group allowed back into China since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. It was a very strange and different country.

I’ve been going back to China for more than 30 years now, and in that time China has had its industrial revolution and things have become steadily more polluted. When I lived in China in the 70s there were blue skies in the winter. Beijing in particular was famous for blue skies because they have a very dry winter, and so if you didn’t have a sandstorm you would see these lovely blue skies, very sunny and dry, if very cold. By the late 80s that had begun to disappear and they now haven’t really seen blue skies since the 90s. So it became visibly, steadily more polluted.

Having watched the world’s biggest industrial revolution happen, it does make you think about our models of industrial and economic development and the cost of them. And about how unsustainable they are. So, with climate change it’s now become an extremely urgent issue.

It wasn’t until I had read the opening chapters of Elizabeth Economy’s The River Runs Black, that I realised the scale of the problems and quite how visible these changes in the natural environment have been.

It is dramatic. I remember many years ago having to walk across a wooden bridge at Lo Wu to leave China, and all around were paddy fields and farms. And now if you go anywhere in that part of the world, apart from the fact that there are now very large cities, it is all covered with smog. And the rivers do run black. They do smell. It’s an environmental disaster.

Hong Kong, which used to be pretty clear, is now affected by the smog from Guangzhou. People just get used to it. But if I think back to how it was when I first saw it, it’s really quite extraordinary.

Elizabeth Economy suggests that this has become a problem because the Chinese government is devolving too much power, trusting other people to take charge of the environmental situation. Do you agree?

Well, the first thing to think about is that if you see photographs of, say, Leeds, in the 1890s, or if you look at what Monet painted at Westminster Bridge – if you look at what he was painting and if you look at these photos – you realise that they look very like parts of China now. Every industrial revolution has done this.

So China’s no different, although the scale is extraordinarily large, and China is in many ways a very fragile environment. Although it’s a very big country it has a very big population, and only certain parts of the country can really sustain a dense population. Everything to the west is pretty much desert, the north is pretty arid, so you’ve got a very heavy pressure on resources.

And with this industrial model, as our industrial revolution was, it’s a very carbon-intensive, get-rich-quick, clean-up-later kind of model. They just haven’t got to the clean-up bit yet. The problem is that they don’t have as much headroom as the Western industrial revolutions did when they began.

Firstly, in terms of carbon emissions there’s no headroom at all, whereas when the British industrial revolution began no one knew about it. And the problem is, we’ve been putting out carbon now for 200 years and there’s no room for any more.

So in terms of China’s carbon-intensive development, it is potentially catastrophic for everybody.

It is true that we also had this very intense, polluting development, and we are still cleaning up. We’ve exported all our heavy industry to the developing world. So China is at the stage of polluting heavily, and I don’t know if they quite realise how expensive and difficult the clean-up is going to be.

Several of the books that you’ve recommended seem to lay much of the blame for the current state of the environment at the feet of Mao, and his time in power. Judith Shapiro’s book, Mao’s War Against Nature, for example, ties Mao’s abuse of the people to the abuse of nature. Do you think she has a point?

Yes, she does, and have a look at Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants. The environmental history of China is a very interesting one, and there is this mythology that Chinese peasants are somehow in tune with nature. But if you read Elvin you realise that in China there has actually been 2,000 years of unsustainable development and environmental degradation.

It essentially comes from the model of a highly centralised state and its need to accumulate surplus wealth – and certainly under the old imperial system this was produced by the peasants. In fact, it was also the surpluses produced by the peasants that were used for a rapid industrialisation under Mao. And Mao’s of course was a particularly catastrophic period, both for the people and for the environment.

Mao believed the theories of Lysenko: that man is in charge of nature; that nature is there to be exploited and that anything at all can be achieved with the right political attitude and a scientific approach.