"China's western areas should carefully evaluate the quality of
potential foreign investment before making the decision to accept,”
said Zhou Guoxun, vice director of the Environment and Resources
Committee of the Gansu Provincial People's Congress. Zhou added
that the eastern regions have been selective with the foreign
investments they've accepted; and the west should follow the
suit.
Gross domestic product in the eastern regions has grown rapidly
in recent years, which has pushed land and labor costs up. As a
result, several labor and resource intensive industries have
transferred operations to the less developed western regions.
Unfortunately, many of these industries are also high consumers of
energy and responsible for much of the country's industrial
pollution.
"Last year, there was an application to start a foreign-funded
alloy steel project in Gansu. Although it was a potentially
profitable project, we turned it down because of the high levels of
energy it would consume and the resultant pollution it would
cause," Zhou said.
Echoing Zhou's remark, Ji Jinshan, a professor at China's
Southwest Financial University, indicated that high energy
consuming and highly polluting enterprises set up operations in the
eastern coastal areas at the beginning of the 1980s. As profitable
as many of them were, the end result was and is a badly damaged
environment.
(China Development Gateway by Wang Sining, March 6, 2007)
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