Society

A suspected mental disease patient, a Chinese Girl, nudely climbed up a high voltage transmission tower which located at the crossing of Tanggu Dongjiang Road and The 9th Avenue, Tianjin, 12:00 31st Mar. 2011.

Songhuajiang Photo Shot in 2007

The program to reduce pollution between 2011 and 2015 will include emission targets for rural areas, Li Ganjie, vice-minister of environmental protection, said on Monday.

The country's vast rural areas, included in the program for the first time, are becoming more polluted than cities, he said.

"Pollution from agricultural sources already contributes to more than half of the country's total emissions," said Li. "It is high time that we addressed these problems."

But Li did not specify the contribution of rural areas in meeting these targets.

Nine people were confirmed dead and 13 others injured after a building under construction collapsed Monday in Southwest China's Guizhou province, a safety official said Tuesday.

Rescue teams try to move a piece of concrete blocking the search for survivors after a building under construction collapsed in Yangguan village, Jinyang new district in Southwest China's Guizhou province, March 28, 2011.

Developed-world proponents of the “China Model” often point to environmental degradation as an example of the intractable sort of problem authoritarian governments, free of the need for grinding public debate, are good at addressing. But in new study examining one of the country’s highest profile environmental problems, a team of Chinese and U.S.-based economists casts some doubt on that thesis.

The subject of the the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is Beijing’s air quality, which changed markedly before and after the 2008 Olympics.

Beijing spent more than $10 billion to clean up its sometime spooky brown polluted air before the Olympics. According to the study, the government managed to improve air quality by 30% during the games, compared to year-earlier readings. But a year after the games, about 60% of those gains had evaporated.

What’s one to make of this? Like many others, the authors of the NBER study — Yuyu Chen and Guang Shi of Peking University, Ginger Zhe Jin of the University of Maryland and Naresh Kumar of the University of Iowa – give credit for the impressive improvement in air quality during the Olympics to China’s authoritarian system. Countries with such governments can make huge efforts to clear away problems when they are motivated to do so, they say.