The People's Republic of China poses a grave threat to the environment and humanity

China's apparent economic success is based, among other things, on three very dubious pillars: disregard for human rights, disregard for the environment and a colossal debt. Not a blueprint for sustainable joy, obviously.

China is a totalitarian state. The prime concern of its rulers is to consolidate their power. This is done by keeping the population under very tight control, by force if necessary, but rather by education, indoctrination and propaganda. The Chinese people are brainwashed from cradle to grave into believing that they are living in the best of all countries. This propaganda is also used to fool foreigners and they, eager to do business with this economic giant, are just as eager to believe whatever they are told.

Now China is presenting itself as the savior of the environment. It has announced that it is going to become an ecological economy.

In the words of Xi Jinping himself: "China has become an important participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global endeavor for ecological civilization".

This is just not believable. For decades China sacrificed its own environment and the global environment for economic growth.

• It is the largest air polluter in the world, accounting for almost 30% of greenhouse gases
• Its water pollution is among the worst in the world
• It is responsible for nearly 30 per cent of the plastic pollution clogging the oceans and is conspicuously absent from the list of countries that have joined the UN Environment's #CleanSeas campaign
• Its relatively small supply of groundwater is being depleted and severely polluted at alarming rates
• More than 40% of its soil is degraded, increasing the risk of famines, forcing it to import more and more food
• It cut down half of its remaining forests between 1980 and 2000, causing widespread floods and a steady increase of deserts

For 25 years it did not pass any meaningful environmental protection laws while existing laws were poorly enforced. It only began to act because the situation had become so desperate that even its brainwashed people were becoming restless, being killed by air pollution at a rate of more than 1 million a year.

Although China is being forced into doing something about its ruined environment, this does not mean that it has suddenly turned into a devoted conservationist.

When the Chinese government says it's scrapping 100 coal-fired power stations, it does not mention that it won't stop private companies from building them.

When it boasts that it has started massive reforestation it forgets to say that many of its grandiose, but ill-conceived, schemes have failed miserably, that most of the so-called reforestation means plantations with little or no ecological value and that it has boosted its imports of timber from other countries, often by illegal logging of mature, and ecologically valuable, forests.

Most telling of all is Xi's announcement that China is going to push ahead with its economic developments. That is impossible without grievous harm to the environment. In other words China is not really solving its environmental problems, but merely passing them on to the rest of the world.

Postscript August 2018

Recently western media have been praising China's new attitude towards the environment after decades of unrelenting destruction, some even calling that country an example for the rest of the world. Our skepticism can be imagined and was fully vindicated when, in spite of all the green noises coming from China, its CO2 emissions went up again in the first quarter of 2018.

It was also found that plastic foam manufacturers in China were behind the sudden surge in emissions of an illegal ozone-destroying chemical, which has been banned around the world since 2010.