陳博士的評語:
中國大陸重蹈台灣的覆轍 為了拼經濟 不顧環保
大陸污染地球環境的規模 超過地球上任何一個國家 怎麼辦呢?
之前 我有引用一篇報導 說北京空氣的污染可能會使2008年奧運選手無法締造佳績 有一位熟悉大陸的人士告訴我 大陸高層已經有了萬全的對策 我很好奇 有什麼好辦法 他說 大陸高層很可能在奧運前 把北京附近鄰省的工廠 全部勒令停工一個月 這樣空氣就會很清新了 這實在是中央集權的好處 也是身在民主社會的人不會想到的好點子
Reader’s Digest, March, 2007
By Bill Mckibben
這是摘自讀者文摘本期一篇長達11頁，對中國資本主義大躍進的觀察報告，值得深入探討
On the flight from Newark to Beijing, I read the following interesting report in the China Daily: “According to media reports, several air conditioner installers have fallen to their deaths in Beijing. As the sweltering summer heat sweeps the country, sales of air conditioning units are booming…The spurt in installation service demand has left many firms understaffed, so some are temporarily recruiting untrained installers to cash in…[some] even refuse to provide safety belts to save cost.
自Newark 飛往北京的途中，我從中國日報讀到一則吸引我注意的報導: 已經有許多冷氣安裝工人，在北京墜樓身亡，原因是酷夏熱浪橫掃全國，冷氣銷售量大增，造成冷氣安裝人手不足，許多公司就臨時去招募一些未經訓練的工人，投入安裝工作，甚至為了節省成本，連安全帶也拒絕提供。
The article- evoking as it did an urban sky filled with plummeting air-conditioner installers- coincided perfectly with my mental image of China, so I tore it out and filed it. I’d done the same thing before, creating for myself a China full of smog-blackened cities, factories paying slave wages, a rapidly expanding consumer class hell-bent on buying cars with no regard for the environmental costs. I wanted to see it for myself, to gaze at the sheer spectacle of it all, and then come home with cautionary tales about what heedless growth meant for the future.
這篇報導勾繪出一個都市的天空，充滿了安裝冷氣的水電工人：這和我想像的中國，完美重疊。因此我剪下這則新聞並將它歸檔，以前我也這樣做過，所描繪出來的中國，充滿著許多黑煙的城市、工廠用奴隸般的待遇在付薪水、快速澎漲的消費階級不顧環保拼命買車。現在我要親眼去目賭所有的透明場景，然後在回家後，小心的敘述這樣毫無規劃的粗糙成長，對未來所代表的意義到底是甚麼。
…
Because of the summer heat, everyone worked from 7.30 to 11.30 and then again from 3 to 7. We’d been there only a few minutes when all labour ceased and everyone poured into the cafeteria for lunch. Rice, green beans, eggplant stew, stuffed dumpling and a big bowl of soup: 1.7 yuan, or 20 cents.
因為夏天的酷熱，每個人從早7:30 工作到11:30，再從下午3:00工作到7:00，我們抵達沒多久工人開始到餐廳用餐，白飯、豆子、煮茄子、肉丸還有一大碗湯，1.7元人民幣。
While people ate, we wandered into one of the dormitory rooms for girls. Each room had four bunk beds, one of which was for storing suitcases and clothes. The others were for sleeping, four to five girls to a room. One desk to share, one ceiling fan. Next to the domitory was a lounge with a giant TV; the room next door had a Ping-Pong table.
當他們用餐時，我們走進一間女生宿舍， 有四張床，一張用來放行裡和衣服，其它的用來睡覺，四到五個人一間，共用一張桌子，天花板有電扇。整個宿舍旁有一間休息室，有大電視和一張兵乓桌。
Had I stumbled into the one decent factory in all of China? After all, Chinese workers reportedly lose tens of thousands of arms, hands and fingures to industrial accidents every year. For his part, Bao says he thinks 70 to 80 per cent of China’s factories would offer similar working conditions. One reason his factory is decent is because he’s a good guy. Another is that he sell some of his shower curtains to Ikea. The company sends an inspector, unannounced, several times a year to check on the living space and the number of toilets and so on,
是不是我來到一家環境較好的工廠呢？畢竟，據報中國工人每年在職場上損失幾萬隻的手臂、手掌和手指。老闆說七八成的中國工廠工作環境都類似，他工廠之所以比較好，因為他是好人，另一個原因是他們的浴簾有賣給Ikea，買方不定時會來抽查工作環境。
Once I ‘d been to Yiwu, sights I’d seen earlier made more sense. Chunming, for instance, was a tiny rural town in the hills of Sichuan. Most of the men worked at a makeshift coalmine, trying to avoid the cave-ins and explosions responsible for many of China’s miner deaths each year. The place was pretty bleak.
我曾經去過Yiwu, 這些之前所見的景像現在變得更有體悟。例如Chunming(四川山邊的一個小城)，大部份的男人在一個臨時權宜設立的礦坑工作，以免礦坑倒塌或爆炸，這類事件每年奪走6000個礦工生命，這地方實在很悽涼。
With my translator, I wandered up to a series of crumbling courtyards shared by seven or eight families. A few pigs slept in the room next to the kitchen. Here, we met Zhao Lintao, 12, who proudly spoke the English she’d learned in the village school. When we asked her about her life, though, she was soon in tear: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them. The government was taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no more money.
隨著我的翻譯，我來到一處七八戶人家所共用的老舊院子裡，幾條豬睡在廚房旁邊。在這裡我見到趙麗桃，一個12歲的女生，她很驕傲的說著學校教她的英文，當我們問起她的生活時，馬上淚流滿面的說：母親拋下她和妹妹，交給會打她們的父親，自己到城裡的工廠工作。然而政府只會負責她們到國中畢業前的學校費用，之後就沒了。
Multiply this story by half a billion and you will begin to understand why the biggest migration in the history of the planet is underway in China. Tens of millions of people leave desperately poor farms every year to work at the factories that feed Yiwu.
這個故事乘上五億，你就不難想像為甚麼地球有史以來最大的移民潮正在中國進行著，每年上千萬人離開極度貧窮的鄉村，到像Yiwu一樣有著工廠的城市工作。
About 800 million people, roughly 60 per cent of China’s population, are crowded onto those tiny farms. And on average they are earning one-third the incom of city dwellers. It is easy to see why the United Nations predicts tha by
2030, 60 per cent of Chinese will live in the cities.
佔中國60%的人口中(約八億人口)，擠在那些很少的耕地上(之前已描述一般農民耕地只有十分之一足球場大小)，平均收入只有城裡的三分之一，由此也不難理解為什麼聯合國推估，在2030年前， 有60%的中國人口會住在都市內。( 1. 依此推估近三億人口在2030前湧進都市。2.沒有事先衛生系統規劃的都市，這麼多人擠進來，恐難免爆發重大疫情)
The explanation for this surge has to do with those farmers streaming into the city: Yang says the best guess is that more than 20 million people come to the cities every year. They make enough money to get small refrigerators or even air conditioners. They get jobs making shower curtains and suitcases, which also take energy. And building even simple concrete huts for them requires resources- five per cent of China’s fuel may go to producing cement alone.
這樣的大起伏(指都市電力需求)，與大量的農民大量移入都市有關，每年遷移進入各都市的人口，預估超過二千萬人。他們在賺到足夠的錢後，開始買小冰箱甚至冷氣機，顧用他們製造浴簾、行李箱等的工廠也要耗費能源，而且就算建造很簡單的水泥屋來住，也需要能源：光是生產水泥，也許就耗掉百分之五的中國燃料。
Yun Jianli, a retired civil servant from Hubei provinces, showed photos of her brigade of activists walking more than 200 kilometres along the Han River- which was gruesomely polluted by effluvia flowing from small factories- and of campaigners waving a huge green flag with “Save Our Mother River” written in Chinese. She had pictures of herself at huge meetings and a riverside village of 3000 people, 110 of whom she said had cancer. After the villagers complained, she said, provincial officials provided money to drill a new well that would provide clean drinking water.
By some accounts, there may be 70,000 protests a year in China, many of them over particular factories spewing out toxins.
余澤麗，一個湖北省退休的公務員，展示她們勘測隊沿著漢河步行超過200公里所拍攝的相片-河水被受到嚴重的污染，惡臭的廢水從小工廠直接流入河內，還有寫著要拯救母親的河的抗爭標語。她也出示參加一個河岸村落(約三千人)的大型會議，這三千名村民中，有110人罹患癌症，在村民抗議後，省方才提供預算開挖新井，提供村民乾淨的飲用水。
根據一些統計，中國每年有 7萬件的抗爭事件，許多是因為工廠噴放有毒氣體所引起。(cw: 怪不得中國黨和統媒一天到晚洗腦台灣人，說中國多好多美麗，但卻一個個往美國跑，沒一個要當樣板搬去中國住，因為也怕得癌症，最壞有三十分之一的機會)
But forget pollution for a minute. The bigger problem is that almost every natural system in china shows the effects of thousands of years of hard use and, especially, of the last half century of ideologically inspired misuse.
暫時撇開汙染不說，中國最大的問題是：幾乎每個大自然系統都受到千年難以回復的衝擊，尤其反應出上世紀後半，中國整個偏激誤導的意識形態。
To get a sense of the burden the Chinese face, I followed the Chao River, a main source of Beijing’s old reservoir, upriver. Although the lowlands were covered in corn, the hills were without trees. In 1958, the Great Helmsman declared the Great Leap Forward. The people were to start making steel in their backyards. Making steel required heat, which required wood. The hills were soon bare.
為了了解中國人所要面對的困頓，我沿著一個北京老舊水庫的主要源頭上游觀察，雖然低地都有玉米覆蓋，但邊坡則沒有樹木。在1958年偉大的中國舵手的號召下要全中國大躍進。人民在後院煉起鋼鐵，煉鐵需要火、需要木材，山坡就變得光禿禿。
Without roots to hold the soil, much of the countryside has simply turned to sand. Deserts expanded by hundreds of kilometers annually, and the dust storms of April and May are now a recognised Beijing season, just like spring and autumn.
沒有樹根環抱泥土，許多偏僻地區已經沙質化，沙漠每年數百公里的擴張，讓沙塵暴成為每年四五月，北京特有的季節景觀。
As the flow of the Chao and other rivers has been siphoned off by the cities growing alongside them, Beijing has been drawing more and more of its own water from an underground aquifier- as a result the water table has been sinking by meters in recent years of drought. ” Some northern cities will simply be out of water in eight or ten years,”
由於Chao及其它河川的水流已經被沿岸新興都市吸走，北京市已大量抽取地下水，造成地下水位在近八或十年的乾旱期間，下降好幾米。北方的許多城市在八或十年內，將面臨無水可用。(中國北京如果發生大地震或久旱不雨，恐怕會造成一場大動亂)
It’s not as if the Chinese haven’t noticed that big problems come with this kind of growth. Pan Yue, the country’s deputy environmentminister, told Der Spiegel that the country’s economic miracle ” will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. Five of ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China; acid rain is falling on one third of our territory; half of the water in China’s seven largest rivers is completely useless.” But without that level of growth, there’d be no way to absorb the endless influx from the countryside. How are you to keep people down on their 670 square metres once they’ve heard that city dwellers eat meat?
中國人並不是不知道這樣的經濟成長所帶來的大問題，中國環保官員自己坦承中國的經濟奇蹟即將結束，因為環境資源已無法提供快速經濟成長所需，全世界污染最嚴重的十大城市，中國佔五個，中國三分之一的土地在下酸雨，中國前七大的河川有一半以上的水完全不能用。
但如果沒有這樣程度的經濟成長，根本無法消化從鄉村永無止竟湧進的人口。你如何制止那些耕地只有十分之一足球場大的一般農民，當他們聽說住都市的人都有肉可吃時，仍願意留在農村(之前作者曾訪問一個農民，他說他們的村子裡缺乏糧食，根本沒有任何肉類食物)
And so the country is trying to muddle through. On the one hand, it must keep growing fast enough to absorb all that restless labour. And on the other hand, it must keep resources and energy use enough in check that China doesn’t simply crash and burn.
因此這國家正嘗試去敷衍應付這個問題，一方面要維持高成長，以消化一直湧入的人力，另一方面又要確保自然資源與能源的足夠使用，以免中國就此翻車起火。
On my last night in Shanghai, I ended up strolling the Bund, the strip of old European banking hous
es that face the Huangpu River. On the other bank, in the Pudong District that China has made its great urban showpiece, huge towers rose in neon splendor- the Jin Mao Tower, with the highest hotel on earth taking up its top 34 floors; the Oriental Pearl TV tower, its great kitschy globes glowing pink against the sky; the Aurora building, with its vast outdoor TV screen showing ad after ad. Tens of thousands of spectators were content just to stand there in the dark and look. Many were new arrivals from the countryside, in shabbier clothes and with ruddier faces than the city folk.
在上海停留的最後一夜，我結束在Bund的漫步，那是一個面對黃浦江的老歐銀建物的河岸。對岸是浦東區，中國把它變成最大的樣板城市，高聳的大樓矗立在倪紅的炫麗中- Jin-Mao大樓有著世界最高的34層旅館，東方珍珠電視大樓大型地球儀放射耀眼的粉紅光到夜空，那Aurora大樓，有著超大型的電視牆，播放著一支支的廣告，幾千人在黑暗處滿足的看著，許多人穿著破舊的衣服，有著黝黑的臉孔，這都是剛從鄉村來的。
I’m not sure China can escape the horrible enviromental contradictions of its own growth( the soil is subsiding even in Pudong as Shanghai overpumps groundwater). But that vista across the Huangpu River is filled with a kind of hope for the people who nightly drink it in.
我不能確定中國是否能躲過經濟成長所帶來的環境浩劫(就連浦東都在地層下陷，肇因於上海過度抽取地下水所致)，但跨過黃浦江有著每夜喝著河水，期盼美麗願景的人們。