Originally Posted by Orius

Yeah, the pollution there is bad. When I was there a year ago, my lungs actually hurt by the end of the day. There are days when you can't even go outside because prolonged exposure burns your nose and eyes (mostly the sulfur dioxide does this). It's pretty bad.

In fairness though, China is working on the 3 Gorges Dam project which will substitute a lot of coal power for clean energy, and it has designs on nuclear energy. Until then though, the cities are going to be a polluted mess. I remember a few years ago, after the UN slammed China for its environmental practices, China did an internal audit of the country's environmental index. They had a particular prediction, but by the end of the project the findings were something like 250% higher than they expected. In utter embarrassment, they scrapped the census project, and immediately put money into the relevant ministries to do monitoring and some cleanup projects.

The environment is on everyone's mind in China right now, and it's an issue that has the longterm potential to topple the government. People won't care about prosperity if they are choking on it.