Photo Gallery Trading Pollution for Prosperity
"I hope the day will come when all you can see from Tiananmen Gate is a forest of tall chimneys belching out clouds of smoke," Mao Zedong said in 1949, as he gazed out at Tiananmen Square. That dream has become a reality -- and a nightmare. China covers 70 percent of its energy needs with coal, consuming about as much as all other countries combined.
In the winter of 2013, the beaming city of the 2008 Summer Olympics has looked like the setting for a film about the apocalypse. In early January, the air quality index for fine particle pollution rose to the absurd value of about 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter and, on the last day of February, the value was above 500, or more than 20 times the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In Beijing, the capital of the country whose economic success has amazed the world for the last 30 years, the myriad smells and tastes of growth often include a burning odor and an unpleasant aftertaste. For weeks, 600 million people have been living under a layer of smog covering an area of 1.3 million square kilometers (about 500,000 square miles).
Such smog is familiar to many who live in cities whose population is growing by hundreds of thousands a year and whose officials are running out of places to dump garbage. Here, smog covers the downtown area of Zhushan County, in central China's Hubei Province.
About 750,000 people die as a result of air pollution in China each year. Many of the country's rivers are so polluted that authorities do not permit residents to even touch the water, not to mention use it to irrigate fields.
Fruit and grain grown in the country's contaminated and over-fertilized soil contains massive amounts of pollutants. They also unsettle consumers in the West, who now buy a large share of their tomatoes, apples and other food products from China. Here, downtown China in mid-January 2013.
No political event or corruption scandal of the recent past has received as much public attention as this winter's environmental catastrophe. Chinese bloggers are on a rampage, and even the most loyal government newspapers are examining every aspect of the crisis and attacking those responsible for conditions in China with unprecedented ferocity. The fury over toxic air, food and drinking water marks a political turning point.
China has become the world's largest CO2 polluter, emitting close to 10 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas each year.
Recent air-quality measurements show just how drastic and widespread the smog situation is in China.
On Tuesday, China's National People's Congress convened. It is intended as a coronation ceremony of sorts for the new president and his premier -- Xi Jinping (center), 59, named head of the Communist Party in November, and economist Li Keqiang, 57.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping: The burden of their projects is overwhelming. The new leadership wants to transform China from a partially agrarian and industrial country into a high-tech and service nation. At the same time, it intends to boost affluence and promote urbanization in order to come to grips with the country's wealth disparity and population growth. If they achieve all of these goals, Xi and Li will leave behind a different China.
Xi and Li now seem to have recognized just how serious the polution problem is. Indeed, China's environmental policy has developed into a question of national security -- not because the government is particularly farsighted, but because its power is on the line.
