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Pan Hu's avatar

These are gross exaggerations not of the extent of China's ecological problems, but of their implications for centralized authoritarian rule. China fundamentally cannot solve its environmental crisis because its central leadership lacks the actual presence on the ground in local and provincial communities to execute national directives. When a clash occurs between local economic development targets and central environmental ones, the former almost always wins. The situation has only gradually improved in the second half of Xi's decade long tenure to date, but this is more the natural consequence of growing incomes and evolving individual consumer lifestyles. The CCP Central Committee sets environmental directives in the full knowledge that most local and provincial party administrations will fail to meet them - because it knows that shifting priority from GDP growth to ecological preservation is an all-of-society cultural change that takes decades to realize. In the meantime, paradoxically, better environmental protection requires more centralized dictatorship, not less: in practice it means taking authority away from local Party magnates and oligarchs who were installed to meet economic development targets that still haven't been revoked, but which increasingly must be balanced with social and environmental needs. The net result being: if you're looking for Xi Jinping (or whichever central authoritarian figure) to be weakened by environmental degradation, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's just the opposite: the degradation is evidence that they didn't have much effective centralized bureaucratic power to begin with - or even if they did, deliberately turned a blind eye to local abuses because they quietly understood why it was happening (i.e. why it was necessary). If and when the environment is actually taken seriously for a change, it would be an increase in actual authority of the Central Committee Politburo and its paramount Standing Committee - not a decrease. China simply works exactly the opposite to Western intuition on individual rights: the choice is not between individual rights and all-powerful dictatorship, but between local autocrats and central ones.

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Jed's avatar

Two things stand out here. 

The inability of centrally planned(or in 'escobarian esperanto oxymoronism') - - centrally planned 'market-directed!)societies to address matters of fundamental importance/

The complete adherence of supposedly "wisdom of the east" - inheritor/promulagor CCP to 'made in the west' ideological systems - Marxian/freemasonic madness in this case. Complete FAILURE to apply any "wisdom of the east" anywhere has resulted in the mess described herein. 

When F.H. King wrote his famous tome - FARMERS OF FORTY CENTURIES, he laid down the gospel of soil management which the 'east' had successfully followed to keep it's populace fed and healthy for aeons. It was ignored, of course, in the west, and them chickens will be home to roost mighty soon - as the wheels finally fall off of the 'ammonium nitrate' culture wheich was used instead... and the good times end with a bang! 

In Sinoville, the substitution of 'western scientific' agriculture for 'home-grown' solutions will be even more dramatic. They will literally drown in their own poop. King described the longstanding practice of processing human waste back into valuable top dressing for soils which had no 'livestock' fertilizer component such as Europe enjoyed. It was a safe and viable system - and used in conjunction with traditional Chinese medicine, kept folks healthy n whole. 

All gone. TCM is almost forgotten in it's homeland -where antibiotics now add to the breakdown caused by mod/ag. 

"The customs and practices of these Farthest East people regarding their manufacture of fertilizers in the form of earth composts for their fields, and their use of altered subsoils which have served in their kangs, village walls and dwellings, are all instances where they profoundly shorten the time required in the field to affect the necessary chemical, physical and biological reactions which produce from them plant food substances. Not only do they thus increase their time assets, but they add, in effect, to their land area by producing these changes outside their fields, at the same time giving their crops the immediately active soil products." KING - FFC 

Everywhere you go in this tired ol (modern)world - subgenius at work!

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