Chinese Government Censors World Bank Pollution Report

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Under pressure from Beijing government ministries, the World Bank has cut by roughly one third a new report chronicling the widespread cost of pollution in China, according to the Financial Times. The 151-page report, based on an epidemiological model used by the World Health Organization (WHO), had concluded that some 750,000 people die prematurely each year in China due to extremely poor air and water quality. It also observed that the areas with the highest per capita exposure to dirty air and water were almost all in China’s northern provinces. In addition, the report had asserted that China’s rural poor were “at a substantially higher risk from surface water pollution than the non-poor.”

An adviser to the study said Chinese officials told the Bank it could not publish the selected information because it was deemed too sensitive and could cause “social unrest.” In recent years, China has experienced a rising number of protests provoked by local environmental degradation as well as increasing emissions from factories that have polluted nearby farmland or water supplies. The World Bank released a statement on July 3 that the cuts to the China pollution report had not yet been finalized

By some measures, the pollution loads of Chinese cities have improved in recent years. The Bank attributes this to a combination of modernizing industrial structures and the implementation of pollution control policies. The introduction of more energy-efficient technologies has served to gradually decrease ambient concentrations of particulate matter (PM) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) over the last 25 years. Measures that combine command-and-control rules with economic and voluntary measures have contributed substantially to leveling off or even reducing pollution loads, particularly in certain targeted industrial sectors.

Even so, Chinese cities are considered among the most polluted in the world. According to government reports, more than 70 percent of China’s waterways and 90 percent of its groundwater are contaminated by pollution. But the biggest killer is air pollution. Only 1 percent of China’s urban residents live in cities with PM concentrations below 40 micrograms per cubic meter of air, double the WHO’s recommended level.

Despite purging information from the World Bank report, the Chinese government continues to publicize efforts to curb the country’s massive pollution problem. On July 3, Beijing declared that one million cars would be removed from the city’s polluted and congested streets this summer in an effort to diffuse heavy smog that persists despite the upcoming Olympic Games. And on July 5, the Chinese government announced renewed plans to “bar bank loans to companies that violate environmental laws.” The move aims to reverse the practice many businesses currently follow of paying pollution fines and bribing local officials rather than updating equipment with more environmentally sound models.

China Watch is a joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI) and is supported by the blue moon fund.