First of all, face towards China... "Face towards China" was the start of the instructions a friend gave me in explaining how to get to a particular place in Hong Kong. Seems a bit odd, but China is just up the road really, and does make a good reference point. Since we came to Hong Kong I've sort of been avoiding China as a topic here, but today I thought I might as well turn my face towards China and write a little bit about it.

I think I have to write about China today - you can't really ignore it because when you live this close China inevitably has some effect on you. And today I opened the newspaper and found that something I'd been worried about for a while has come true. Greenpeace did an audit of the two largest supermarket chains here in Hong Kong and found that both "were selling vegetables containing excessive levels of pesticides, at least one of them illegal in the territory".

Great. Cancer-causing agents in fruit and vegetables. We buy vegetables from those supermarkets, so unless we've washed them all properly we've ingested some of those agents. It is possible to get 'clean' food from Australia and Europe, but it's a lot more expensive. I suppose we could shop at the little markets instead of the supermarkets, but all that produce probably comes from China as well.

And this is the problem - everything in Hong Kong comes from China. And what happens in China affects Hong Kong. When the English and Chinese negotiated the return of Hong Kong to China, they came up with a "one country, two systems" solution, whereby Hong Kong would be a part of China again, but would retain it's own system of governance. This works fine in theory - you can basically say anything here, and the rule of law works as well as in most other places in the developed world. But unfortunately flu-carrying migratory birds aren't signatories to the agreement. Neither are the polluting power stations across the border. Or the various industrial zones that happily pump toxic waste and effluent into China's rivers (guess where Hong Kong's water comes from?). The Chinese farmers who use massive amounts of pesticides aren't parties to the agreement either.

So really the "one country, two systems" arrangement is a bit of a farce. Sure Hong Kong's citizens' basic human rights are protected, but what about their right to clean air, clean water and clean food? And there's not a lot the Hong Kong administration can do about it - by virtue of the 'one country, two systems' arrangement the HK administration doesn't get any say in what happens in China. So it can't really do anything to persuade the authorities in Guangdong to clean up the air, soil and water.

All we can do in Hong Kong is sit here and hope that the Chinese government will realise the scope of China's environmental problems and start fixing them. Unfortunately there is a sizable grouping in the CCP that sees these types of issues as being the inevitable side-effect of the transition to a market economy. So I think things will get a lot worse before they get any better.

tags: china | hongkong | pollution | greenpeace  ¶ 3:59 PM