Not that bad?

Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer
By JIM YARDLEY reports

The central government promotes big solutions but gives regulators little power to enforce them. Local officials have few incentives to crack down on polluters because their promotion system is based primarily on economic growth, not public health.

It is a game that leaves poorer, rural regions clinging to the worst polluters.

"No doubt there is an economic food chain, and the lower you are, the worse off your environmental problems are likely to be," said Elizabeth C. Economy, author of "The River Runs Black" (Cornell University Press, 2004), a study of China's environment. "One city after the next is offloading its polluting industries outside its city limits, and polluting industries themselves are seeking poorer areas."

However, the Economist says of Economy's book

Until more people get richer, China may not have the resources or the willpower to care much about pollution. Ms Economy more or less ignores this trade-off and concentrates on the negative consequences of economic growth. And at times she uses questionable statistics to support her argument—for example, her assertion that children living in Chinese cities are doing the equivalent of smoking two packets of cigarettes a day is lifted from a local newspaper and is hard to verify.

Ms Economy holds out the hope that local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will compensate for China's institutional shortcomings. By one count there are now 2m of these, and the book includes profiles of several courageous individuals who are trying to change things. But the vast majority of them are no more than individuals fighting single issues with little funding. The Communist Party immediately outlaws anything more ambitious that could threaten its authority.

The book pays insufficient attention to another influence for change: the positive impact of foreign multinationals. While these may not operate with quite the same clean technology as they do at home, their standards are still far higher than those of their local rivals.

Despite her name, she's less interested in what economists have to say.