[I found a full length version, with English subtitles, of Chai Jing’s (柴静) ‘Under The Dome'(穹顶之下) here at http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/under-the-dome-watch-the-viral-video-documentary-about-pollution-that-is-scaring-the-chinese-government-20150308-13yag6.html. Released on February 28th it got 150m hits on Tencent in the first three days before being pulled on March 2nd; strong stuff. Now read on.]
Life expectancy increases with economic growth; and this has been reliably observed many times. China is no different thus, so far then, ‘dog-bites-man’.
The (quite literally) dirty secret buried in the data though is the composition of for whom life expectancy has improved in China over the last 20-years ? Most of the headline gain is due to the improvement of under-5 mortality; the incidence of heart disease, lung cancer and other cardiorespiratory disease over the same period is virtually unchanged.
What makes this a ‘man-bites-dog’ story is the comparison with the neighbors of Korea, Japan and Taiwan, all of whom, despite significantly slower economic growth have achieved significant improvements tackling these same health issues.
In this Working Paper from Mr. Avraham Ebenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem et al produced for the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago the authors stop short of pointing a stern finger but the important conclusion from this work is clear.
Videlicet? China has done a great deal for its citizenry by pursuing a path in recent years of rapid economic growth. The full cost however in terms of how its adult population have had to suffer in terms of the high levels of pollution that has been associated with this are only now being fully appreciated.
A telling acknowledgement comes early in the piece ‘ This study is supported by the China National Science and Technology Pillar Program 2013 (2013BAI04B02) from the Ministry of Science and Technology.’ This, to me at least, suggests that as unpleasant as the truths revealed in this work are the true picture is almost certainly worse.
The silver lining though must be that a robust dialogue within China appears to have now begun; to which this sort of work can only add coherence.
Happy Sunday
[The paper in full is free to download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2563693]