Opinion / Zou Hanru
Children come before GDP growth
By Zou Hanru (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-04-28 06:41
A growing number of parents sensed that something had gone wrong in their
impoverished town of Ganhetan in Northwest China's Qinghai Province. But
none had any idea of exactly what it was.
Fears deepened after their children began complaining of periodic stomach
aches, poor appetite and repeated flu attacks. Alarmingly, some even
exhibited slow reflexes.
What a middle school headmaster told them next only added to their
anxiety: Many of their children had been atypically hyperactive recently,
resulting in poor performance in school.
Distraught and perplexed, the parents decided it was time to start
searching for an answer. They took their children, more than 100
altogether, to the best and most well-equipped hospital in the provincial
capital of Xining. The kids underwent medical tests to find out what was
wrong with them.
But the parents were not prepared for what followed, when blood tests
revealed the cause of their children's illness: Lead poisoning. All of
them.
The CCTV news probe that followed revealed that the children were born
and raised in a town that is now home to a cluster of lead-smelting
factories, none of them equipped with proper, if any, pollution treatment
facilities. So poisonous were the gas emissions that workers had to wear
surgical and gas masks to protect them.
Media exposure prompted the local government to conduct tests on 919
children aged under 12 to determine the level of lead in their blood. The
results were startling, with only 31 children showing normal lead levels
(0 to 99 micrograms in a litre of whole blood). The rest were either
immoderately exposed or outright poisoned.
A highly toxic substance, lead poses a greater danger to children than to
adults. Their faster rate of metabolism prompts them to breathe faster,
making it easier for lead to creep in. Children also tend to play and
breathe closer to the ground where lead dust concentrates. They are also
prone to put their hands in their mouths and take in lead.
Lead exposure can produce a wide range of illnesses such as abdominal
pain, vomiting, loss of hearing and kidney damage. But perhaps the most
damaging feature of lead poisoning is that even a very low level of
exposure could result in reduced IQ and learning disabilities.
For a developing country like China, striving to drive its economy more
on inspiration than perspiration, what kind of loss is greater than a
future generation of children losing their IQ?
Ganhetan, however, is just one of many hinterland towns and cities to be
swarmed by polluting industries. As China's coastal economies move up the
value-added chain, more manufacturing industries, many of them polluting
ones, are shifting their bases to the country's hinterland.
Despite criticism that they choose to look the other way when faced with
the pollution problem, hinterland cities' government officials often have
their own tale to tell. They argue that the industries, polluting as they
may be, are a major source of revenue for the local governments and that
they contribute to the GDP growth and create jobs.
Faced with the challenges of creating employment for a growing population
and raising standards of living, many cities and towns such as Ganhetan
in underdeveloped Northwest China have found it difficult to resist the
arrival of polluting industries.
Despite mounting pressure to clean up its act, the government of Ganhetan
is ready to usher in a couple more lead smelting units, local residents
told the CCTV news team.
Many local government officials are faithful subscribers to the
pollution-development formula of "grow first, clean up later." But if
they are bringing up a future generation that lacks intelligence and an
entire labour force that would only function at low intellectual levels,
how could the economy possibly sustain its growth?
Email: zouhr@chinadaily.com.hk
(China Daily 04/28/2006 page4)
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