Moving factories upsteam leads to environmental costs

When the government relocates the backward industry upstream along the nation's main rivers, it seems to forget the environmental costs of doing so.

President Xi Jinping urged Guangdong to upgrade and relocate its industries earlier this year, saying: "We should study how to invite 'new birds', while not forgetting to tell where the 'old birds' go."

The "old birds" naturally fly to places having cheaper labor, land and resources, if not weaker environmental supervision.

The middle and upper reaches of Yangtze and Pearl Rivers, two largest in China, seem the destinations for the "old birds" proposed by the government with their easy accessibility by waterways.

Premier Li Keqiang unexpectedly vowed to promote the regional integration along the Yangtze River in his April visit to Chongqing, the largest city in Yangtze's upper reach, and construct a Yangtze River economic belt.

Compared with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration plan unveiled earlier this year, a compelling choice to ease the capital's population and environmental burdens, the scale of the Yangtze River economic belt, which involves 600 million people, 40 percent of China's economy and 20 percent of the national land, it is by no means an impromptu plan but a long-term key national development strategy that Li and his government must have been thinking about.

Yet, only a big river is not enough to integrate such a vast area, governed by 11 provincial authorities and dozens of city governments. Li is sober in pointing out the governments should let the market play a decisive role in allocating resources and industries along the golden waterway to promote "the orderly shift of industries and urbanization."

Routinely, he mentioned governments of various levels should bear in mind the importance of environmental protection while implementing the strategy, at the end of his inspiring speech in Chongqing.

The spokesman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the main economic plan maker, trumpeted the integration along rivers as a good development model for the country this week in Beijing, before saying that: "We are still studying intensively with the other ministries on how to turn the thoughts into fruits."

The following plot is predictable. The city governments along the river will be busy in drafting proposals to compete for the central government's special funds and "green lights" to entitle them to mete out bolder preferential policies to attract "old birds" from the river's richer delta region of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai.

Working his way up from Hennan and Liaoning to the central government, Li must be familiar with the working style and procedures of local governments after such a big national development strategy fell on their heads directly from the premier.

But he has not provided a new concrete suggestion for local governors on how to coordinate with each other in the integration, or any strict environmental protection measures, despite his repeated emphasis on the two subjects.

Local protectionism and blinded government stimulus for some already over-capacity industries among city-level governments makes the cooperation among provincial authorities a thing hard to practice. And leaving the environmental task to local governments, in effect, means an acquiescence that "you can develop first and clean up later".

The fundamental question is whether China can afford serious pollution in the upper reaches of its main rivers.

The average personal gross domestic product in Shanghai, at the Yangtze's mouth to East China Sea, is five times that of Guizhou in the upper reach of the Yangtze. Behind the income gap is the differentiated tolerance for environmental pollutions of local governments. Economic growth is the main reason for local officials' promotion.

Such an ambitious regional collaboration may finally downsize to a round of intensive infrastructure constructions at first and then a city-to-city industrial transfer, both of which bring up local economic growth overnight. And that's exactly what is happening in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei in their integration.

Moving Beijing's polluting industries to Hebei before the 2008 Beijing Olympic does not make Beijing's air clean. Snapping a photo of blue sky on sunny days with a mobile phone and sharing the photos in social media has become an instinct of Beijingers. The smoggy air shrouding the city for nearly half of the time throughout the year makes it an uninhabitable place, according to World Health Organization standards.

China has experienced two large-scale industrial relocations since the early 1980s. The labor-intensive industries moved from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta from the mid 1980s to late 1990s.

When the capital-intensive industries of chemical, cement, papermaking and iron and steel took root in the two small deltas, the garment workshops and shoemakers moved along the two rivers to the inland areas, such as Anhui and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions, respectively.

After the two deltas switched to electronics, telecommunications, and service sectors, the polluting factories moved to Anhui and Guangxi and farther inland to Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei.

The less-developed recipients are happy with the arrivals of investment, and the affluent coastal cities are content that the "old birds" empty the place for "new birds." Local people were satisfied at first because of the well-paid jobs. But they gradually found, in the absence of responsible environmental watchdogs, the damages incurred by the pollution coming with the factories far outweighs their gains.

"Cancer villages," which saw many villagers die of cancer, appear collectively in suburban areas in inland China from the late 1990s with the industrial shift.

The pollution of air, water and soil spawns malcontents from the increasingly environmentally-conscious locals, who find the Environmental Protection Law toothless.

Moving westward becomes the solution for many polluting enterprises.

United Laboratories, a penicillin raw-material producer founded in 1990 in Hong Kong, moved from Hong Kong to Zhuhai of Guangdong in 1994, to Chengdu and Pengzhou of Sichuan in 2003, and to Bayanur in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in 2007.

The environmental protection departments of various levels have openly criticized its serious pollution and demanded that it suspend production nine times in the past decade. But the bad records do not stop it from becoming the world largest penicillin raw-material producer today.

Guangxi is another example of an industrial relocation destination in the middle reach of Xijiang River, as the backyard for Guangdong.

With one fifth of its 50 million people working in its neighbor, Guangxi's economy is only one fifth the size of Guangdong. Propelled by Peng Qinghua, the Guangxi governor who had worked as the central government's liaison office director in Hong Kong before, Guangxi proposed to build a Xijiang River economic belt two years ago to attract investments from the Pearl River Delta, which had not yet been approved by the central authority.

Xijiang is in the upper reach of the Pearl River and connects Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. The river can help carry the coal from Guizhou, phosphorus from Yunnan, aluminum from Guangxi, to Guangdong.

Yet, so far, papermaking, plywood, cement and garment factories are the main gifts Guangxi gets from its neighbors, apart from some mining and non-ferrous metal smelting industries mostly owned by Guangdong bosses in its mountainous areas that have operated without caring for their pollution, for nearly two decades.

Indonesian paper-making firms introduced eucalyptus urophylla to Guangxi, which is believed by Chinese botanists to be an invasive plant robbing the soil's nutrients and water from the other plants. It is banned in Yunnan and Hainan.

Two companies from Taiwan and Hong Kong produce 200 million tons of cement each year from the limestone obtained from cutting into local mountains in Guigang, a small city bordering Guangdong in east Guangxi. The smoggy air there is almost comparable to Shijiazhuang or Hebei, the main recipient of Beijing's factories.

Guigang also produces 18 percent of the world's down feather, in nearly 130 down processing factories, which consume water and electricity in large amounts. These factories were moved from Xiaoshan of Zhejiang to Guangdong in late 1990s and to Guangxi after 2005.

Before the Chinese government shows more respect to the environment than the economy, the integration development, especially along the two main rivers, probably means another round of polluting industries' invasion to the poor inland and shift of pollutants from the east coast to the more ecologically weak west.

liyang@chinadaily.com.cn