Environment

Spotlight on the Trib’s Beijing correspondent, Evan Osnos

As someone who won a scholarship from the Overseas Press Club, I have always admired foreign correspondents, especially those who are not only talented writers, but who are also sensitive enough to pinpoint the nuances of a complicated story and smart enough to draw out the bigger picture.

Evan Osnos, the Chicago Tribune’s Beijing bureau chief, who began reporting on China in 2005, has demonstrated talent, sensitivity and intelligence with his reporting. His three-part series, “China’s Great Grab,” about how China’s hunger for natural resources affects the rest of the world, won him the prestigious $10,000 “Oz Prize” from the Asia Society.

Image via the Asia Society

Osnos made the front page again today with his special report on migrant workers. The article, “An odyssey into the heart of China,” is a snapshot of life among laborers who move from their rural homes to the crowded basements of boarding houses in urban Chongqing, looking for higher wages, but the story of individuals illustrates a more significant trend, a “revolutionary global shift,” according to the headline:

The march to China’s cities is part of a global sea change. Sometime next year, the UN predicts, the planet will pass a major milestone, when the world’s population becomes more urban than rural for the first time in the history of the species.

Leading that change are China’s 1.3 billion people, whose village exodus has the potential to alter the nation as dramatically as its free-market revolution. And the impact on the rest of the world spans everything from how fast diseases spread to the price of seafood.

Keeping in line with the main subject matter of this blog, I’d like to highlight an excerpt from the article that describes the impact of urbanization on the environment:

The rising standard of living comes at an unmistakable price.

“This is called Clear Water Stream,” said local environmentalist Wu Dengming, standing on a bridge over a murky, sluggish gully in northwest Chongqing.

Indeed, this model city is buckling under its own waste. Water-treatment plants are overwhelmed, sending tens of thousands of tons of raw sludge into rivers every day. Chongqing is sunless most days, blanketed in smog that stands out even by modern China’s standards.

A new network of pipes is designed to upgrade treatment capacity by year’s end, Wu said, which should restore places like Clear Water Stream. Chongqing also has introduced natural-gas taxis and buses, along with stricter energy-efficient building codes. But global environment experts are paying particular attention to the Chinese heartland as a measure of how breakneck urbanization will affect the country and beyond.

“As the Chinese countryside goes, so goes the planet,” said Rob Watson, chief executive of the design firm American Sino-Tech, who has advised Chongqing authorities on energy efficiency. “When you move a Chinese peasant into an urban area, they end up consuming three times the resources as when they were in the village. And as wealth increases, as people get plasma screens and everything else, the ratio will get larger.”

Osnos explains the other types of impact this rural-to-urban shift has on China and the rest of the world:

• The draw of cities is a uniting force. “It is as close as today’s Chinese citizens come to a national religion.”
• Cities are status symbols. Those hundreds of millions of rural Chinese who move to urban areas “are united less by their income levels than by a daily unending quest for something better: a nicer car, a bigger meal, a finer education, a higher status.” And city wages prove that this new kind of wealth that is achievable: “City residents in Chongqing can expect to earn an average of $1,470 a year, nearly four times the amount in nearby rural areas.”
• The migration is also divisive. “The country is more porsperous than at any time in history, but the gap between haves and have-nots has surpassed the U.S. and is approaching the yawning divides associated with Latin America….And as urbanization increases, those left behind fall even further behind.”
• Migrant workers symbolize a new freedom. “For all its overwhelming bleakness, the migrants’ world also reflects an essential improvement in Chinese life: 30 years of reforms have unmoored Chinese farmers from their villages to to a greater degree than ever before.”

Some things about the article that made me feel a little uneasy were the repeated references comparing present-day China to 19th century Chicago. I understand that the Trib wanted to find a local “hook” into the story, but saying China’s migrant workers are “the 21st century heirs to America’s meatpacking migrants” discredits the country’s advancement, perpetually keeping it “behind” America (or “the West”) in the grand timeline of global civilization. Plus, the allusions to the “heart of China” made me think of Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness,” as though China is this deep, dark, scary void that hasn’t yet been penetrated by the light of democracy or capitalism. To be fair, Osnos does end the story by showing one of the day laborers emerging from his basement boarding room, “out into the light”…but only after saying that men like him “slipped through the cracks in China’s history” and that “their world is defined, above all, by deprivation.”

Click here for a collection of Osnos’ Tribune stories.

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