China “means business” when it talks of an “ecological civilization”

by CAMERON DUODU

PHOTO/Pulse GH

China is totally committed to environmental protection through its policy of ecological civilization. But how come Chinese authorities seem not to care about their own citizens involved in illegal artisanal mining that is causing environmental devastation in Ghana?

One of the things that have puzzled me a lot over the continued participation of Chinese nationals in galamsey (illegal artisanal mining) in Ghana – given the overwhelming visual evidence that attests to the horrendous devastation that galamsey is wreaking on the environment in Ghana – is why the Government of China is not forcing its nationals to end their participation in the wanton wrecking of the Ghanaian environment.

For I have never believed that the destruction of Ghana can be countenanced by the Chinese state.

The reason is that I heard one of the most respected Chinese leaders, the late Premier Zhou Enlai (formerly spelt Chou En-Lai) who ruled China with Chairman Mao Zedong from 1949 until his death in January 1976, say that the Chinese people do not think in terms of “decades or even hundreds of years but in thousands of years.” He was talking to a group of African writers, including myself, who met with him in Beijing in 1958. He actually advanced the notion that because of its traditional concern for the environment, China would be the only country that would survive a nuclear holocaust.

“Our culture is used to the planting of trees,” Premier Zhou said. “So, as we plant trees for thousands of years, the Chinese countryside will come to life again and recover from the ravages of nuclear radiation.”

I thought at the time that this was an impossible pipedream. But other “impossible” things have happened in China since 1958, so I am now not so sure that Premier Zhou’s prediction was all that unrealistic.

For instance: in 1958, China’s GDP per capita was estimated at only $77 per annum. By 2016, this had grown to $8,126.

Total GDP in China was $50,40 billion in 1958. In 2016, GDP totaled $11,202.92 billion!

Surely, a certain vision survived China’s many internal political upheavals to bring such an enormous economic growth about? That vision did not apply only to GDP growth. Indeed, there is evidence that “ecological civilisation” has been growing in prominence in China’s socio-economic calculations of late.

According to the London Guardian, an environmental lawyer called James Thornton has been helping to draw up the legal framework for evolving China’s ‘ecological civilisation’.

An article in the Guardian of 11 September 2017 says James Thornton is chief executive of ClientEarth, and, “in his four decades of legal practice across three continents …. never lost a case.” His “specialty is suing governments and corporations on behalf of his only client – the Earth – and he’s very good at it.” He started ClientEarth, as a public interest environmental law firm in London in 2007.

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