Emily

== Welcome to my page :)      ==  ﻿ [|Pony]

China’s Economic and Industrial Boom Canadian scientists are mounting an intercontinental effort to measure China's impact on North America's air quality, proposing to create a network of air-testing stations around the Pacific Rim, including one atop Whistler Mountain. The deadly effects of air pollution on China's own environment are well known. Cities are often shrouded in toxic clouds poisoning the land and water, and experts believe as many as 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year due to the country's industrial pollution. One reason for China's massive ingestion of raw materials is the country's movement toward urbanization. Steel ranks high among the materials that China needs to convert 60 percent of their rural landscape to an urban cityscape. At 220 million tons per annum, China's steel production is more than the United States and Japan combined. China's economy grew 10.7% in 2006, the fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth and the highest growth rate since the 10.9% recorded in 1995. And the Chinese economy did it last year without even breaking a sweat: Inflation, a sign of potential overheating, came in at a core rate of just 1.5%. That's impressive enough, but if you take a slightly longer view, China's record is even more amazing.

No major economy in the past 30 years has grown at the speed of China's, The New York Times noted in its story on China's latest economic performance, and no other country has been able to do it year after year for over a decade.

China certainly is not about to slip backward into global economic insignificance again, but it appears that the current spate of growth has been built on nonrenewable human, environmental and capital resources. And when those resources have been mined for the easy gains, China's rate of growth will fall back to something like "normal." With this column, I'm starting a three-part series on the sustainability of China's economic miracle. Today's installment takes a look at China's biggest resource: its workers.

[] [] []