China Attempting to Hide Pollution, Water Crisis

The news that Chinese officials are planning to freeze construction in Beijing, even on projects relating to the Olympics, in an effort to clear the city’s dense pollution in time for the Games in August is in keeping with a disturbing trend.↵An article in today’s New York Times outlines the measures being taken by the authorities in Beijing to achieve what they are comically guaranteeing will be a “green games” in one of the most polluted cities in the world. ↵

↵↵This construction-freeze, accompanied by a shutdown of certain chemical plants and a reduction in coal emissions, is no doubt an effort to stem widespread concern among athletes about the air quality in the Olympic city, concern that has led at least one very high profile athlete, Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie, to say that he will not run the marathon in Beijing. Gebrselassie is the current world record holder in the marathon. He is also asthmatic. ↵

↵↵The approach that the powers-that-be in Beijing are taking to their pollution problem sounds remarkably like the approach they are taking to their water problem, an approach detailed by Dai Qing in a telling New York Review of Books piece last November titled Thirsty Dragon at the Olympics. Qing describes China’s fresh-water crisis that forces Beijing farmers to subsist on small water allocations and leaves the city with no potable water in its faucets. Despite this crisis, however, the Olympic park will feature a variety of “water follies” as Qing describes them:↵

↵↵⇥These include the vast lake that will surround the titanium, egg-shaped National Grand Theater next to the Great Hall of the People, just off Tiananmen Square, as well as the largest fountain in the world at the Shunyi ‘Water Heaven.’ The Shunyi water park has been built on the dried-out remains of the Chaobai River - no irony intended...”↵↵For the duration of the Olympics, special pipes will bring potable water to Beijing for the first time ever, a luxury that will cease immediately after the Closing Ceremony. And now we have news of a similar plan to deal with the city’s raging pollution problem, another shameless sleight of hand to create a mirage of normalcy for two weeks in August.↵