China Travel Guide

The scale of China's environmental problems makes an appropriate partner for the breadth of its wildlife and natural beauty. It ranks among the most well-endowed countries on earth, and its list of big animals includes tigers, pandas, elephants and cranes. Yet the country's environmental importance goes far beyond these well-known species, with a massive range of geography and habitats resulting in an extraordinary diversity of plant and animal life. The world's third largest country, China rises from sea level in the east to the peak of Mount Everest on the border with Nepal. The south shares tropical rainforests with Laos, Vietnam and Burma, while the Da Hinggan Mountains in Inner Mongolia have tundra-type vegetation on top of permafrost. China is also home to East Asia's most important wetlands and Asia's longest river and is the source of two rivers of inestimable importance to hundreds of millions of people in South and Southeast Asia - the Ganges and the Mekong.

Arrayed against this natural beauty and biological importance are equally dramatic problems . To begin with, China's 1.2 billion souls account for a fifth of the world's population , but the nation encompasses less than one tenth of the world's arable land. Furthermore, almost the entire population lives in the well-watered eastern half of the country, where virtually every centimetre of farmland has been developed. Indeed, China has very little land that has not been altered in some way by man. Any attempts at sustainable development are complicated by the sheer size of the population relative to available resources; forests and wetlands, grasslands and agricultural fields are stretched beyond the limits of sustainable production. Dramatic growth in the economy and the continuing need to raise living standards for some of Asia's poorest people means that urban areas face a similar crisis: coal dust, untreated factory emissions, vehicle exhaust and wind-blown desert sand make Chinese cities some of the most polluted on Earth; more than thirty percent of the nation's rivers are polluted and virtually all water in urban areas is heavily contaminated.

China's development has a direct impact both on Asia and the rest of the world. Plentiful coal resources make it a cheap fuel for meeting ever-growing power requirements, but is set to create one of the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions for any nation, and has already caused substantial acid rain fallout downwind on South Korea. The wildlife of neighbouring countries has also been affected by China's development, with populations often heavily exploited to supply the Chinese market. For example, tiger bones from India, Russia and Southeast Asia were sold legally as Chinese medicine until world pressure encouraged the government to outlaw the practice in December 1994. Fish, turtles, and sharks' fins however, are still legally imported in huge quantities from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Daniel A. Viederman