China temporarily shuts down thousands of factories in pollution crackdown
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They created the Thousand Talents program for promising and distinguished researchers, Chinese or otherwise, to work and stay in the country with salary comparable to the West, in nominal terms, and many extra privileges. [1]
Pollution is a major concern among those who are interested and this gives additional urgency to the government.
Basically, they understand very well that top talents are essential for developing advanced technologies they need, and they are pushing very hard to develop native talents and attract promising ones from other countries. This is the Singapore playbook that has propelled their two universities into major institutions in engineering and other fields within a few decades. (Engineering programs in both Singaporean universities are now ranked in the top 10 or 20 in the world. Also, both Tsinghua and Beijing are ranked in the world's top 10 in AI publications recently, but they plan for more universities to move up in more fields.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch...
Because companies around the world are now aware of the fact that Chinese government steals technologies. Also, Chinese government is too late trying to get talents back.
Most of the laowais (expats) that were in Guangzhou, that were in technology, have left in recent years. The only foreigners left are africans trying to eek out a living and English teachers who can't make it anywhere else. You can imagine the reasons why: poisonous air that will give you cancer, poisonous food that will give you cancer, dirty water that will give you cancer, horrendous traffic (and everyone driving around honking and disregarding rules), bad mannered locals (imagine jackhammering at 4am, spitting, elbowing, cutting in lines), censorship, foreigners getting arrested without a reason, expensive rent (compared to quality), no way to be connected to the western internet without VPN (and recently, VPN have been failing as well), no way to talk to families overseas. And this is in the top province in China. Imagine tier 88 or even tier 2 cities. (shudder)
There's no reason to be in China other than to make money, then get the hell out. And that seems to be even harder now with the economy stagnating and everyone blowing bubbles into the real estate.
Thank god I got out of China. Many already have.
But the food is great, so there's that.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094/...
"..the Social Credit System will focus on four areas: "honesty in government affairs" (政务诚信), "commercial integrity" (商务诚信), "societal integrity" (社会诚信), and "judicial credibility" (司法公信). Media coverage has thus far focused mostly on the rating of individual citizens (which falls under "societal integrity"). However, the Chinese government‘s plans go beyond that and also include plans for credit scores for all businesses operating in China."
China's Debt to ratio is a staggering 833%
http://www.baldingsworld.com/2017/10/23/everything-we-think-...
Why China Lost About $3.8 Trillion To Capital Flight In The Last Decade
(FDI was only 1.3T over the same decade, leading to a massive loss)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insideasia/2017/02/22/china-cap...
So no money.....and recently it prevented South Korean companies from withdrawing assets from China. Now companies around the world knows. Who's gonna invest in China now?
http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/news/national/19352-e...
First, NET FDI (foreign direct investment) into China was 1.3 trillion USD over the last decade, not nominal: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?locat....
FDI is a pretty imperfect measure for a short period of time. If a Chinese company buys foreign assets, say mines in Africa or forests in South America, that counts as a net outflow. In the long run though, those investments may well pay off handsomely. For a rapidly developing country with a high savings rate, there's no inherent reason why Chinese companies investing abroad should be an indication of doom for China.
As someone who regularly does business with Chinese companies, it has been my experience that it has never been harder to remove currency from China. It is true that capital controls have become increasingly tight.
Edit:
Additionally, given the regulatory difficulties of foreign companies investing in China, it's not surprising that outflows of investment by Chinese companies outsize incoming foreign investment into China.
Davos 2017 - China's Pivot to World Markets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8HsNfQIZQs
Davos 2017 - Strategic Update: The Future of Energy
Funny, that.
The semi communist system actually makes China quite stable. In the west if the mortgage holders can't repay the bank kind of goes bust, in China the government would just lend it more money. Well... I guess the west bails out too but more so in China I think.
Its because they offer opportunity that people flock there. And China has 1.3 billion to deal with, this will challenge any government to an extent that cannot be underestimated or brushed aside.
It's apple and oranges. People then didn't have technologies to choose like we do, didn't realise the impact of pollution, nor did things on the scale we are today.
Its cherry picking the bits the want for an economic advantage. If countries want to use the 'they polluted before' argument then they should go back to steam trains and gas lighting etc. Otherwise maybe the west will say look at what they did to get economic growth, now its our turn...
Sorry for the rant but I find this such a poor excuse. All countries should be held to better standards. We seem to forget a key component of capitalism is for the government to create a level playing field. And ability to pollute (or not) the enviroment should be a global tenant for all who engage in the open market.
China, India, Indonesia, etc "catching up" is a great goal to work towards but not at the cost of ecosystem collapse and permanently wreaking the oceans.
Same issues. I think that will be with any country aiming for a very high rate of growth. Rapid progress is often chaotic.
Sure they moved up in number of publications, but as with so many things in China, what's with the quality of this research? Only a few days ago we had a post here on fraud in China scientific work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15473719
Interesting. When I toured several companies in Singapore, including Google, most of the staff were from Europe or the States. If Singaporeans are indeed doing well in their own schools, my guess is many are still leaving to work elsewhere. I frequently attended programming meetups where about 90% of the attendees were non-Singaporean.
But then, most of the Singaporeans I've known were quite happy to live and work in a Western country; I lived there briefly and was frequently asked by locals, "why would you want to live here, it's so small."
Regarding pollution, it was actually Singapore's air pollution that caused me to leave. I think I'm not alone with that sentiment.
Because of such authoritarian attitudes in society, Singaporeans are raised to be subservient and fearful of authority (whether they know it or not). This means no creativity - the prevailing mentality in Singapore is "don't try to be clever - do what the authorities say and you won't go wrong", sort of like the local version of nobody gets fired for buying IBM. this is the reason why there is no innovation coming out of singapore despite the govt trying to offer all sorts of grants and schemes to "support local entrepreneurs" - because singaporeans have been psychologically beaten to subservience and are crippled when it comes to thinking out of the box because they have been conditioned by society to believe when you fail, you will be ridiculed and mocked and maybe even punished.
Sometimes in public policy it seems like we forget that we evolved to care about right and wrong for our own survival.
And yes, there are contentious topics which reasonable people can disagree on, but many are essentially the people vs special interest groups (pollution, healthcare, military expansion, etc)
PS: If it were SimCity, tear up roads, bulldoze industrial areas and build some parks. Sadly, PRC often does exactly that. :'( It was insane to see this empty new highway in Shanghai c. 2002 that had hedges, trees and flowers all the way down its length to the horizon. Oh, and a shiny, brand-new airport.
That said, I'm sure the draw of the idea of living in their native culture is strong.
I have lived in China for 1.5 years in 2005, 2010 and returning a lot now and I have travelled pretty much everywhere in the country, in my humble opinion, China is on a very interesting path that will make it hard for the US and EU to compete in a variety of sectors. We shall see. https://www.nimonik.com and http://www.envitool.com are the companies in question.
I live in SH and run a professional services company. At the margin, does seem attempts are being made.
Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA Weisisheng Consulting vfulco[@]weisisheng.cn
They have crackdowned before, many times actually, but without real continuous enforcement of rules, factory owners are caught in a horrible prisoners dilemma given how hyper competitive production is (if your competitor cheats and you don't, you'll be out of business quickly). In this case, political reform is directly related to the environment.
Here are the rules for Diesel fuel in China.[1] The official standard for sulfur has been been slowly lowered from 0.2% to 10 ppm, but enforcement is weak. There's a weaker standard for "nonroad Diesel" for tractors and such. It's observed that at night, when the blue trucks roll into Shenzhen, the pollution level goes way up, because they're using "nonroad Diesel".
The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of the US.
It's not that hard to enforce this, because there aren't that many refineries. China has only 75 refineries. The US has about 125. Not that many places need to be inspected.
Already done (knowledge only due to personal interest), but it only applies within 200 miles of shore. It's also the IMO (International Maritime Organization, a UN agency) rather than the EPA. Currently the limit on open waters is at 35,000 ppm (3.5%), which will tighten to 5000 ppm in January of 2020.
Sulfur aerosols are just as bad as NOx and create just as much smog. They also turn into acid rain. They have a noted anti-geenhouse effect, but again... acid rain.
It should also be noted that there is basically zero technical or economic justification for sulfur pollution. It requires no significant inputs: a catalytic step that results in hydrogen sulfide, then a regenerating amine reaction (effectively solvent distillation), and finally the hydrogen sulfide is burnt (as in energy-producing) to produce elemental sulfur, which is sold. This is how the majority of sulfur is made.
So in that sense nothing has really changed at all.
As a counter example, we can say China can't possibly enforce things like seat belt or drunk driving without political reform but those are largely non-problems now because they were easy politically costless solutions.
The problem is here is prioritization/will rather than mechanism/implementation since China likely believes the environment is a problem with a known solution and wants to milk dirty production for a new more years.
Gorbachev wanted to follow the simultaneous political and economic reform route and that definitely didn't turn out well for anyone.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/china-hastens-th...)
In the context of the USA, could just be that republicans (the anti-climate change prevention party) are simply speaking to their conservative values in some way and want the USA to remain coal-powered with gasoline cars. All change is bad change?
Another less tenable theory is that typically conservatives/republicans cater to religious groups, and a tenant of christianity is the only thing that matters on earth is your own works - earth is irrelevant in the face of eternal paradise. I don't buy this one as much but it's fun to chew on.
I do feel very strongly though that not taking climate change seriously represents a fundamental inability to comprehend the term "long term investment."
However, I'd argue that it's more wide-ranging deficit than simply long-term thinking. I'd argue that it's about empathy deficits, all around - not just with in regards to the future.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/self-con...
In summary, people don’t give religion enough thought to let it influence their actions WRT climate change, except out of convenience.
Or perhaps the senator would fall under my “convenience” clause, dunno.
The US has seen its CO2 emissions consistently falling for years, while generating ever greater economic output from its falling CO2 emissions output, a trend that is set to continue regardless of what the White House does.
The US is presently a leader at reducing its CO2 output and CO2 output per unit of economic growth. Its CO2 emissions from energy production is at a 26 year low, a time when the economy was half its present size in real terms.
Per capita CO2 emissions in the US have declined by nearly 30% since their peak, per the Department of Energy. They're back to where they were in 1960. The trend-line is persistently down.
Several major economies of Europe are seeing similar aggressive trends in general CO2 emissions and per capita emissions.
China's CO2 emissions are still rapidly increasingly by contrast. They have no plans to actually reduce CO2 emissions, their plan is to maybe slow the increase in the next two decades. They also have no plans to reduce their extreme consumption of coal, rather they plan to try to have more renewable energy as a share. Currently China is producing at least 2x the CO2 output of the US with growing CO2 emissions, while the US has an economy 60% larger with a trend of falling CO2 emissions (set to continue as natural gas & renewables replace coal).
It's often said that the blame should be on the developed world because they're outsourcing pollution to China. At this point that's blatantly incorrect. China has made a choice about how it manufactures, to keep its costs artificially low so as to remain competitive. The US has doubled its substantial manufacturing output in roughly 30 years, without any corresponding output spike in CO2. China is cutting environmental corners, because if they don't the cost of their manufacturing would go up significantly.
"Leader at reducing its output": Down is easier when you're standing on a mountian instead of at sea level.
"Per capital...": US per capita output is still higher than China's.
It really is a matter of how you look at it, and which timespans you observe.
Looking at the same data you could come to vastly different conclusions:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...
No it's not. China is producing 2x the CO2 of the US, while the US has an economy 60% larger. China's emissions are still rapidly climbing and are set to continue to do so.
> The current downward trend is just a blip in the general trend across all recorded data since ~1900
So you're predicting that the US is going to dramatically reverse course and begin producing a lot more energy with coal, soon? That's the only way the US CO2 decline trend is going to reverse course and consistently move higher. You must also be predicting that the US is going to entirely skip the inbound electric car change-over. As it looks now, the US is seeing the slow death of coal, with increasing electricity from natural gas and renewables, while simultaneously the US is about to adopt electric cars (like much of the developed world). Would you mind supporting your counter premise with some kind of data?
> US per capita output is still higher than China's.
It should be. US GDP per capita is five to six times that of China. China's CO2 output is 2x that of the US. That means the US is radically more efficient than China when it comes to economic output vs CO2 output.
China's CO2 output has been climbing rapidly the last five and ten years. The US added $4 trillion to its economy while reducing its CO2 output. China is such an immense polluter when it comes to CO2, that within perhaps just 15 years that per capita CO2 imbalance will decline to near zero - with the US still possessing 3x to 4x the GDP per capita of China.
And "per capita" still places the US solidly at the top of global polluters.
"per GDP" is an useless metric to me. You don't get to have more of the pie just because you managed to figure out how to get fatter eating it.
At the moment, if we are viewing people as a resource, in terms of economic production per individual, they are.
That aside, I agree with you in general, but the point can also be made that It is not fair to compare the US and China per capita because in theory China is still a developing country, and only when the standards of living are similar between the two countries would the comparison be fair.
This assumes that improving standard of living is more important to China than controlling emissions though.
Per capita is only meaningful without international trade.
Not true. They have been stopping most coal plants that were in the planning stage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environme...
Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people, and the relatively educated American public is not OK with the government taking drastic steps very quickly. For better or for worse, the Chinese government can move extremely quickly because they essentially answer to no one; if the government wants to raze a neighborhood for something, they do it. If they want to build a road, they move whatever's in the way and build it. In some ways it's incredibly efficient. But that's something the US government is not optimized for, and I'm personally glad for that.
The Chinese have a saying for this: the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.
Xi actually comes predominantly from the reformer branch of the Chinese political house. I think his biggest challenge is that his precedessors grew China too quickly.
I patently disagree with this opinion. Between lobbyist money and "news" agencies blatantly lying to groups of people not educated enough to fact check what they're hearing on the news, the government very much does NOT reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of a handful of extremely wealthy people, and large corporations seeking profits at the expense of *.
If Americans didn't want lobbyists or dishonest news, they would vote to ban lobbyists and not watch the dishonest news. But they choose to keep those things in a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop.
You realize that's actually a provable thing, right? That it's significantly harder to break that cycle when it's introduced at a young age because it forces children to remove their parents from the pedestal they're naturally placed on.
You say that as though you think it's just something people make up, when there's actual provable science behind it.
No, pollution means something going into the environment that causes harm, and in the amounts being emitted. That is how every environmentalist I have ever heard of defines it.
But I bet you already knew that. You know, when someone uses bad arguments, I tend to assume it is because they lack good ones, and they lack good ones because the idea they are arguing for is mistaken.
No, not one in a thousand environmentalists believes that. You know, flat-out lies may work with the sort of people you identify with, but not people who know the truth.
Not sure where you got that idea when I said CO2 is a problem. I guess this topic is too charged with emotion to discus reasonably.
But I am still saying that the claim that any significant proportion of environmentalists think the human race is evil and should all be killed is simply false. Do you want to defend it?
"I think many people join the "climate change denial" crowd too push back against the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" environmentalist crowd."
Not completely obvious from this statement, but what I meant to convey was that the people who are committed and serious about "climate change denial" are people who believe many/most environmentalists are in the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" crowd. Not really sure about that, as I don't know any committed deniers well enough to have an honest conversation, but it doesn't seem unlikely.
Hey, I started out being strongly critical, and now we agree. Rational discourse does work, at least some of the time.
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/06/electric-car-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/climate/china-energy-comp...
Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries
That being said, just because the pollution is manufactured overseas doesn't mean the USA won't eventually breathe, drink or eat it. The USA might have cleaned up its own backyard but that doesn't mean net pollution from US consumption is down.
But when the factories left America for China, so did their smokestacks. For all intents and purposes America outsourced it's pollution problems.
Yet no one talks about that? Why do you think that is?
p.s. Regardless of China's billion+, the USA still out consumes them.
He knows Xi. Well. Read that book.
https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superp...
They did the same thing during the Olympics. Afterwards, though -- same old same old...
That said, this doesn't seem to be a localized shutdown, of the kind we saw during the Olympics or G20 summit. I know of a number of Chinese factories in industries ranging from finished wood products to consumer electronics that have been shutdown nationwide for "environmental audits".
What's the next country down in the environmental/cheap labor race to the bottom? Is India about to see huge manufacturing growth?
That being said, it's a shame that the US is having difficulty demonstrating the upsides of democracy and capitalism on this front.
EPA Bans PCB Manufacture; Phases Out Uses
EPA press release - April 19, 1979
https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/epa-bans-pcb-manufactur...
As I understand it, it's actually very feasible to apply a carbon filter to the smokestack of a factory itself.
One advantage of democracy is that there is a mechanism for peaceful transition of power if the current leadership isn't working. Without this, a country has to resort to armed rebellion.
China has historically legitimized armed popular rebellion with the concept of the "mandate of heaven". When an armed popular rebellion topples a dynasty, the previous dynasty is said to have lost its mandate of heaven and the successful rebel leader is said to have gained it. This is why China has historically had dynastic cycles. Democracy is a possible solution for escaping the cycle of often disastrous and very bloody armed rebellions.
I would go so far as to say that the peaceful transition of power is the defining advantage of democracy.
1. High standards of living that alter the risk-reward ratio for making a political change
2. The rise of Corporations - these days, people view the government as a bureaucratic, slow, and useless entity with decent, but low pay. People aspire to work and move up the ranks in private corporations. The role of the government has been greatly reduced in the ordinary lives of citizens. That means the necessity of making a grand political change is just not as important as it was historically.
Talking abut...efficiency. Can we guess some many lawsuits will be filed in courts against this? I'm guessing, zero. Must have been illegal all the time, but tolerated, until it wasn't.
That being said, the changes can be felt on the ground level. Public dialog is changing about climate change.
Also, your entire comment history is just pro-China comments. Why is that the only topic you think is worth discussing on the site?
1) solve a real problem with pollution in its own country. Pretty sure its "image" or even the Paris treaty is secondary to that.
2) By pushing for renewable power in its own country, it's essentially funding its own renewable energy industry, which could end-up way ahead of everyone else in the long-term, in both prices and technology.
So it's not about the image, it's about getting ahead through renewable energy and for their elites not having to breathe coal day in and day out in China's largest cities.
Especially since they don't even have a Godzilla protecting the shore line.