As I'm currently reading a detective book set in modern
China, this factual look at the developing nation seems
like a good backdrop. THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHEMICALS is
written by a team which last took a look at the issue of
smog, something well known to inhabitants of Beijing.
William Kelly and Chip Jacobs were previously writing about
Los Angeles - was there a connection?
Kelly and Jacobs found that China gobbles up more coal each
year than the rest of the world put together. Becoming
wealthier, its people are driving more cars than before,
while industries ignore the lax environmental regulations.
The factories of China thrive not just on home market, but
on low-priced export goods. The poisonous air which drops
acid rainfall onto a third of China daily, moves in high-
altitudes and along with dust, drifts over the Pacific to
fall on American coastal cities. So the US may have
exported the manufacturing jobs, but it imports both the
goods and increasingly, the pollution. Water and food are
also polluted; China's biggest cause of death today is
cancers, with manufacturing villages in the provinces
devastated by related illnesses. China is the globe's
largest producer of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that
fuels climate change.
The authors observe that China's population is harshly
punished for breaking the status quo, but desperate workers
with dying families have been rebelling in large numbers.
The newly capitalist factory owners and local officials are
profiting just as such people did in other countries during
the 19th and 20th centuries. Linfen, a coalfield town
sitting in a basin among mountains, joined 16 Chinese
cities on the World Bank's "twenty most polluted towns in
the world" list; its citizens over 30 came down with various
forms of cancers while people over 55 died at ten times
China's national average rate and the birth defect rate is
the planet's highest. For how long can the profits and
repressions be justified ask Kelly and Jacobs.
In THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHEMICALS Burbank is shown as
engaged in cleanups from its own lost manufacturing days.
Even while Western nations are shown signing the Kyoto
Protocol on the environment, with Chinese officials coming
to LA to learn about dealing with smog, China is pushing
harder to become the biggest industrialised nation on Earth.
The facts of this book were generally part of my awareness
already, but the hard new figures, the personal
investigations of ruined lives and the callous destruction
of both humanity and nature hit a reader hard. My personal
suggestion is that we should not buy consumer goods without
understanding the chain of production, sales and recycling;
we should contact manufacturers through their social media
pages, letters and newspapers and ask them to investigate
pollution and unsafe work practices in any factory suspected
of these practices. Ultimately the consumer is the one
fuelling demand, and providing the profits.
With a respectful look at China's history, from coal-fired
manufacturing during Europe's Dark Ages, moving through
Mao's collective movement and ensuing famines to today's
development, the scope of the book is large. THE PEOPLE'S
REPUBLIC OF CHEMICALS by William Kelly and Chip Jacobs is
well written and very readable, and I recommend it to
anyone learning about world trade and geopolitics. I'll be
interested to read their award-winning "Smogtown".
Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown
with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperling a warming planet.
Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every
day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down
ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America.
In vivid, gonzo prose blending first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma,
Kelly and Jacobs describe China’s ancient love affair with coal, Bill Clinton’s blunders cutting
free-trade deals enabling the U.S. to "export" manufacturing emissions to Asia in a shift that
pilloried the West's middle class, Communist Party manipulation of eco-statistics, the horror of
"Cancer Villages," the deception of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and spellbinding “peasant revolts”
against cancer-spreading plants involving thousands in mostly censored melees. Ending with China’s
monumental coal-bases decried by climatologists as a global warming dagger, The People's Republic of
Chemicals names names and stresses humans over bloodless numbers in a classic sure to ruffle
feathers as an indictment of money as the real green that not even Al Gore can deny.
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