It may be a long time before the full damage of the disastrous benzene spill near the Chinese city of Harbin and its effect on the health of its nine million inhabitants become known. However, it is already clear that this is an extremely serious environmental event. As the 50-mile slick of poisonous benzene moves down the Songhua, it will travel into Russia and have similar disruptive effects on the water supplies of the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. Meanwhile every mile of its journey the Songhua will be depositing poisons in the riverbed. These will enter the food chain via the fish that will eventually arrive to replace the many hundreds of thousands of fish that have currently perished.
This environmental calamity suggests that China may be paying too high a price for its breakneck economic growth. After the almost weekly loss of miners’ lives in the country’s poorly protected coal pits, the authorities were shamed into closing down some mines where safety precautions were nonexistent. Now again, with the benzene plant upstream from Harbin, it is quite clear that the safety systems failed utterly.
No industrial center can avoid the occasional small spillage of chemicals. However, to permit over 100 metric tons of highly poisonous material to escape and, worse, to flow into a major river, suggests major environmental malpractice and colossal mismanagement. Investigation teams have reportedly arrived from Beijing and arrests among the benzene plant’s bosses are expected. Yet these individuals, however immediately culpable they may be, must not be used as scapegoats to divert attention away from the deeper malaise throughout Chinese industry. Many Chinese will argue that they are too busy to worry about the environmental precautions considered essential in state-of-the-art chemical plants. They might point to the serious mistakes made way back in the European and North American industrial revolutions. They would, however, be wrong on both counts. The injustices and disasters that took place 150 years ago occurred largely because people knew no better. Modern safety and environmental technology now exists in large measure because industrialized states learned the hard way how to avoid disastrous accidents.
Moreover, no one can be too busy to protect their plant and the millions of people around it. Though its economy is making money, China is not plowing enough capital back into tackling the basic issues of environment and safety. The authorities need to take a hard and urgent look at their industrial plants. They also need to tackle contingency planning, which in the Harbin tragedy appears to have been completely lacking.
There is far more at stake here than the health of its people. China is immensely proud of its astonishing achievements, be they in manufacturing or outer space. The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will showcase this thrusting new China. However, as long as dangerous petrochemical plants and decrepit mines continue to be tolerated by the authorities, that bold new image will be flawed and China’s international reputation will be sullied.
