Among the technological, economic, and ecological lenses described in Parker and Blodgett’s report, economic and ecological lenses best characterizes the view of China. But there is another sociological lens through which climate change can be viewed and it plays a more important role.
China’s economy has developped rapidly over the past decades, but its environment condition has also worsened sharply. Because of China’a immense population base and its economic dimension, the environmental problem has become international and has a growing influence in the international society.
To some extent, China’s environmental problem is a by product of its reform and opening-up decades ago. The purpose of the reform was to liberate and develop productivity, but for a country with limited capital but abandant resource, people could only take advantages of its resource. So at the beginning of the reform, there were new established corporations everywhere which made the environment badly polluted. The foreign-funded enterprises in China at that time mostly had very severe pollution problem that they were washed out from their own countries.
The aggrevation of the problem was caused by different factors. China has the largest population pressure, owing to its thirteen hundred million people. In order to enable one fifth of the world’s population to survive, people had to ask for more and more from nature and neglected the adverse influence these actions had on it. China is also facing economic pressure. As a developing country, China’s economic development is its main mission. The environment and the economy have an inverse relationship, so people find that the better the economy is, the worse the environment is getting. Especially with the development of urbanization and industrialisation, only more pollution will be let out. But at the same time, China does not have adequate capital to control and fix the problem and to improve the environment. Moreover, Chinese people have never had a high ecological awareness. Eventually, with so many disastrous catastrophies happening in China in the past several decades, people began to realize that the problems of environment and climate change have become a threat to all mankind.
In 2005, China established the strategy of sustainable development as the country’s basic strategy. It is aiming to create a society that “satisfies its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations.” (Parker and Blodgett, 22) Ever since, the government has been taking an active role in solving the problem and going towards sustainability. There are organizations being founded, reduction goals being made, and activities being held to advance people’s awareness. Climate change is not an issue for only one country, instead, every country should take up its own responsibility, and together, create a better living environment.
