China's boom and doom

China now produces tons of cheap clothes, electronics and raw materials -- and dizzying amounts of pollution beginning to taint the globe.

By Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner

Read more: Environment, China, Politics, Pollution, News, Oil, Global Warming, electricity

Photo: China Newsphoto

Dead fish lie in a section of the Songhua River in Jilin, northeast China's Jilin province, November 22, 2005.

Feb. 12, 2007 | The cloud of dirt was hard to make out from the ground, but from six miles up, the scientists could see the gigantic mass of ozone, dust and soot with the naked eye. In a specially outfitted aircraft taking off from Munich airport, they surveyed the brownish haze stretching from Germany all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

These kinds of clouds float above Europe for most of the year, and they've traveled far to get there. By analyzing the makeup of particles in this cloud, European scientists were able to identify its origin. "There was a whole bunch from China in there," says Andreas Stohl, 38, of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.

Some 7,500 miles to the west, Steven Cliff is slowly winding his way up Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco in his RV. The 36-year-old researcher has installed a complex instrument to measure the air that crosses the Pacific from Asia and reaches the West Coast.

Days like this are ideal for taking these measurements. San Francisco is shrouded in cool fog, but on top of the mountain there's warm sunshine. Indeed, these are ideal conditions for surveying air currents untainted by local influences. But Cliff is alarmed by his instrument's readings -- soot particles have colored the device's filter "blacker than we've ever seen it," he says.

Back in a lab at the University of California at Davis, Cliff and his colleagues analyze the origins of the air pollution with the help of x-rays. According to their chemical signature, most have come from coal-fired Chinese power plants, Chinese smelters and chemical factories, and from the tailpipes of countless Chinese diesel-powered cars and trucks.

On the other side of the Pacific, in Yokohama, Japan, climate change researcher Hajime Akimoto places three photos of the Earth next to each other. They show in red where concentrations of nitrogen dioxide are especially high. The picture from 1996 shows the area between Beijing and Shanghai as a loose group of reddish spots, but one from 2005 completely covers that part of China in bright red.

Winds are blowing ever-greater amounts of pollution from China into Japan, leading many Japanese to complain about irritated eyes and throats. Last year, for the first time, two cities issued official warnings about the health dangers caused by Japan's neighbor across the sea.

China has become a global environmental problem. Initially, it was only the economists who were shocked by how the country was changing the world with its cheap clothes, televisions and washing machines. But now climate researchers are concerned about another Chinese export -- the pollution it is spreading across the planet. The massive nation is already the world's second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States.

And particularly in North America and Europe, awe over China's booming economy and its ability to produce cheap goods for the entire world is now often giving way to a critical question: Can the planet handle China's growing damage to the environment?

China's economy is booming -- with an annual growth rate of more than 10 percent. But the more the country's population of 1.3 billion strives to raise itself out of poverty with a mostly antiquated industrial base -- and the cheaper the Chinese goods the world's consumers buy -- the higher the price the world will pay for China's economic miracle.

The Chinese are no longer simply destroying their own environment. Just as trade is global these days, so too is the threat against nature.

The connection isn't always apparent at first glance. For example, what does the spreading desert of Inner Mongolia -- a massive autonomous region in northern China -- have to do with the comfy cashmere sweaters that shoppers are snapping up for next to nothing in cities from Berlin to Boston? For years, Chinese herders in the region let millions of goats graze until the grass was gone, roots and all. Then the soil simply blew away and the desert began to expand at an alarming rate. Since the early 1980s, China's grasslands have shrunk each year by some 15,000 square kilometers -- an area the size of Connecticut.

And now in the midst of a deadly drought, the sand dunes move ever closer to the small village Chaogetu Hure. Inch by inch, seemingly unstoppable, the dunes claim everything in their path, as if they want to bury the government's costly efforts to plant trees, build fences, corral goats and resettle local inhabitants.

Abbot Lao Didarjie is being forced to watch the walls of the house opposite his Zhao Huasi temple slowly disappear under the sand. Out of fear for the house of worship, he's raised an alarm with six different authorities. "The temple was built by the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century," says the religious leader. "It should be saved for the coming generations."

Only a few miles away, on the edge of Luanjingtan, the farmer Xu Changqin inspects a few meager green stalks of wheat. The local peasants worked hard to plant their fields, but last May a sandstorm covered them over. "The grassland is getting smaller. The fertile grounds are disappearing," says Xu, explaining how growing numbers of people are moving away to seek more hospitable places to live.

The fine sand from the farmer's homeland blows all the way to California and Europe. It's mixed in with ash and other dangerous particles from industries in China's Inner Mongolia region, which is home to countless factories, chemical works and power plants.

Along the Huang (Yellow) River in the city of Shizuishan, in the Ningxia region adjacent to Inner Mongolia, the extent of the pollution becomes obvious. Swaths of gray-black clouds blot out the sun to make the perfect setting for a Hollywood film about the end of the world. Two power plants belch ash into an artificial lake separated from the nearby river only by a thin dam. The wind blows the ash upward to start it on its journey around the globe.

Next page: The country is home to 16 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities