International Law

China: Where Only The Good (And Bad) Die Young.

By Dan

Apologies for the Billy Joel.

Just read an interesting, disquieting, yet not terribly surprising article on China's life expectancy. The article is entitled, "In China, Uneven Progress on Health Front," and its focus is on how since 1990, China has had less of an increase in life expectancy than just about "every other big developing country" and even less than Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, South Korea and Sudan:  

From 1990 to 2008, life expectancy in China rose 5.1 years, to 73.1, according to a World Bank compilation of United Nations data. Nearly every other big developing country, be it Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia or Iran, had a bigger increase over that span, despite much slower economic growth. Since 2000, most of Western Europe, Australia and Israel, all of which started with higher life expectancy, have also outpaced China.

Though China has grown wealthier over the last thirty years, it has not grown healthier; 

China can sometimes look like the economy of the future, having grown stunningly fast for almost 30 years now, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But it, too, has real problems. Above all, its growth has been uneven. The coast has benefited much more than the interior. Almost everywhere, some aspects of life have improved much more than others.

Whether China can switch to a more balanced form of growth, as its leaders have vowed, will obviously have a big effect on the rest of the global economy. Yet it's worth remembering that the biggest impact will be on the one-sixth of the world's population who live in China. And arguably the best example is the fact that the country has grown vastly wealthier but only modestly healthier.

Though "many more people in China today "have acquired indoor plumbing, heating, air-conditioning or other basics. Other aspects of the boom, however, have pushed in the opposite direction": 

As in the Industrial Revolution, many people have left the countryside and poured into crowded cities. Accidents have become common, like the Shanghai fire last week or a series of workplace tragedies in recent months. Obesity is rising. Pollution is terrible.

I recently spent some time in China, and despite everything I'd heard in advance about the pollution, I was still taken aback. The tops of skyscrapers in Beijing can be hard to see from the street. Breathing the smog can feel like having a permanent low-grade sinus infection. For the Chinese, cancer has displaced strokes as the leading cause of death, partly because of pollution, notes Yang Lu of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Every month or so I speak with someone who lived in China for many years and loved it, but left when their kid was born because they worried about the impact pollution would have on their kid's health. I also not infrequently speak with clients whose top people in China are insisting they be transferred back to the United States or to Europe because they are suffering health problems from the pollution.

China's life expectancy is currently five years behind that of the United States. Will they ever be the same?  What do you think? 

Full post as published by China Law Blog on November 23, 2010 (boomark / email).