China counts costs of tackling pollution.
Yet she’s not opposed.
“This river used to smell in the summer and garbage floated on the surface,” Xie said, sitting in her shop in a market built on a bridge spanning one of the water channels that crisscross the home of Asia’s biggest textile market.
I think this is the better way to go.” China is embarking on a government-mandated environmental clean-up right down to the municipal level, prompted by popular outrage over everything from Beijing’s infamous smog to groundwater fouling, greenhouse gases and vehicle emissions.
At the Communist Party’s own admission, the country’s pollution problem is “grave,” and officials now seem to recognise that breakneck growth at the expense of the environment is no longer sustainable.
The challenge that policymakers in Beijing and at the local tier face is how to tackle the tidy-up without collapsing an economy that’s rested for so long on production without regard for the consequences.
It’s becoming one of the swing factors for economists now trying to judge how much reform in China will impact output.
“China’s need to curb pollution is a binding constraint on growth,” said Liang Hong, chief economist at China International Capital Corp in Beijing.
“Still, China needs to fix environmental damage and that requires huge investment.
In Shaoxing, the water pollution clampdown since 2016 provides micro-level evidence of how the authorities are responding.