When I visited China for the first time two years ago, I went with high expectations. China was constantly touted as the new giant of the 21st century, a country at the center of globalization and development with GDP per capita growing at an unprecedented eight percent per year. I expected to see a country in its economic peak, a country different from the one my parents experienced, one not crippled by war, famine, or the outrageous social agendas of the Cultural Revolution. But in the end, it wasn’t growth that left the deepest impression on me, but rather the consequence of growth, industrialization, and social disorder—including the devastation of the environment.

Statistics are never as visceral as firsthand experience. It’s one thing to know that 300 million Chinese adults are either tobacco smokers or are exposed to cigarette smoke on a daily basis, with 40 percent of nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke. It’s another thing to walk inside any Internet café—which is the only affordable way to access the Internet for most Chinese—and choke from all the tobacco constantly being devoured by computer game addicts. Urban environments were so inundated with smoke that I could smell tobacco almost everywhere I went in Beijing, Chongqing, and Chengdu.

China also rates domestic water quality on a scale from grade I through V, with grade V being the most polluted (unsuitable for even agricultural or industrial purposes). According to the Water Environment Partnership in Asia, 61.9 percent of water is Grade IV or worse in China’s seven major river basins, with 38.1 percent of water hitting Grade V or Grade V+.

Looking at the Chongqing by the intersection of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers, it wasn’t hard to see why. The water was murky grey and appeared to contain everything from household garbage to industrial sediment and waste. And it’s really no surprise, since environmental regulations do little to prevent the dumping of waste into water bodies by factories and farms, including everything from petroleum to ammonia nitrogen to mercury. Since China has only one-fifth the water supply per capita as the U.S., conservation and stricter regulation is essential in order to preserve a sustainable water supply.

In particular, infrastructure is not and cannot be the panacea for all the country’s problems, a belief that the Chinese government has unfortunately espoused for much of the last decade. China’s last major infrastructural project—the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant—was finished in May 2006. Designed to control flooding and provide electricity to three percent of the nation’s inhabitants, it has even been touted by Forbes as one of the modern wonders of the world.

But for all the problems it solved, it created more. The construction of the dam led to over a million people being forced to relocate as well as the destruction of numerous ecosystems and cultural relics. (I might have boated along the Yangtze myself except that there was no longer anything to see along the river banks after the dam was built.) The daily operation of the dam has also generated enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, and not to mention the dam poses significant sedimentation risks in addition to being vulnerable to tectonic and seismic activity. The lessons that can be learned from the Three Gorges Dam have led me to view China’s new $60 billion project directing Yangtze River water to the silt-choked Yellow River with a very cautious eye.

What China really needs is fundamental change, a colossal effort on the part of the government to stem the tide of the irreversible environmental damage already inflicted on the country, through regulation and policies that are not only fantasized about at the national level but also executed at the local level. It might be disheartening to realize that many Chinese may never see a blue sky for their entire lives, but bureaucratic posturing and solutions that come too easily without proper environmental impact assessments can only exacerbate the problem. It’s a tightrope that China walks in its bid to become a new global power, with economic and environmental implosion all too plausible and immediate, visible even from my brief sojourn into the country.

Yifei Chen ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an economics concentrator in Cabot House.