The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won, Revised and Expanded Edition

The Wages of Heavy Industry Is Death

China’s government rushed Thursday to shield the country’s southern business center, Guangzhou, from a toxic spill flowing toward the city of seven million—the second manmade disaster to hit a Chinese river in six weeks. As a slick of toxic benzene from the first accident in the north arrived in Russia, where worried residents flooded a telephone hot line, authorities in southern China were dumping water from reservoirs into the Bei River to dilute a cadmium spill from a smelter.

—Associated Press

China’s worst-polluting industries include paper and pulp, food, chemicals, tanning, and mining. Just on the banks of the Yangtze River alone, there are more than 9,000 chemical plants and tens of thousands more ...