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[DAVID FEINBERG VBS.TV]
Nice face, Feinberg. Nice face.
Yeah, that's it.
Can you duck a little bit? I want to get his face in the window.
Sure.
There we go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the guy who we rely on to do our camera work.
That ape.
I'm David Feinberg, and VBS sent me to China
with a camera to film the dirtiest place on the planet.
It is the city of Linfen,
and spending about a day here breathing in the air is about the same
as smoking three packs of cigarettes.
The scary part is that there's a lot of cities in China like this.
Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China.
And my bosses convinced me to come here and spend a week filming,
and breathing in all this crap, so they didn't have to.
[LINFEN, CHINA]
[THE MOST POLLUTED CITY ON EARTH]
[TOXIC LINFEN]
Linfen produces what any nation of over a billion people need:
a ton of energy.
It's an endless landscape of factories,
all spewing a bunch of toxic chemicals into the air
and poisoning the land and the water.
There's no clouds, just a permanent, toxic smog hovering over the city.
Linfen is located in the heart of Shanxi Province.
Everyday, thousands of coal trucks go between Linfen
and the rest of China's cities.
Then they come back empty, for more.
Coal is the main energy source in China.
Shanxi Province has the largest coal industry in China.
Utilizing coal without producing pollution is a worldwide dilemma.
[*** HONGYING COAL INDUSTRY OFFICIAL] In the last few years,
Linfen has been known as one of the
most polluted cities in the world.
The province not only produces a large amount of coal,
but it also consumes an incredible amount as well.
In the process of exploitation and utilization,
there's a misunderstanding about the concept of development,
which is to pursue purely rapid economic growth.
Therefore, we now encounter serious environmental issues.
China suffers from both local problems
[AILUN YANG GREENPEACE - CHINA] and global environmental challenges.
So, the combined impacts of climate change and local pollutions
are causing enormous consequences.
A lot of the environmental problems in China are very closely linked
to our energy consumption,
because there's something fundamentally wrong with
the economic model.
That's why the more the economy grows,
the more the environment starts to get worse.
Linfen really shows the other side of Chinese economic development,
which is actually the ugly side of it.
And this is about how unbalanced the Chinese development has been.
The sky in Linfen was taken from a sci-fi movie.
But life there seems relatively normal.
There's 4 million people, and like any other town in China,
its roads are clogged with cars and trucks,
and there's a lot of construction.
Linfen has had a bit of a PR problem,
ever since the World Bank called it the most polluted place on Earth.
Even the Chinese media has reported on the disaster,
admitting that people have been moving away because of the pollution.
I didn't see anyone leaving town, except all the coal trucks.
They're actually a big source of pollution themselves,
and are everywhere.
Linfen has no tourism,
and I think we were the only foreigners in the entire city.
Everywhere we went, we really stuck out.
Hello.
- Say "hello" to him.
Come in! Come in!
When we pulled up to this elementary school,
some kids were leaving for the day.
And it looked like there was a huge fire burning down the neighborhood.
The kids weren't too worried,
and I realized that this is probably what they see every time they leave school
or go outside to play.
Just take the example of air pollution.
Seventy percent of Chinese cities cannot meet the air quality standards.
The burning of coal is the main cause of air pollution in China.
But, of course, the increase of transport
and also the constructions going on everywhere in China
are also reasons for air pollution.
This is a private clinic.
I was born and raised here.
I've provided care for the people of this area for many years.
[QIU LIN VILLAGE DOCTOR]
We treat many illnesses that are common to this area.
Pesticide exposure, high blood pressure, heart disease, lung problems....
There are also many cases of stomach and lung cancer.
We don't have any protection against the dust.
We have no protection.
The people here don't like wearing masks,
but we all need to breathe!
The acute smell comes from the waste of these factories.
You can easily smell the sulfur dioxide.
Linfen is in a basin,
therefore, the air cannot flow well.
The polluted air doesn't disperse,
thereby worsening the pollution problem.
Because of the air pollution,
if you get sick, it's very painful.
Elderly people here have really bad lungs and,
over time, they develop heart failure.
Imagine someone about the same age as me,
who can't endure physical labor because of their ailments.
I've lived here for 50 years.
I just stay home...
here at this house.
I don't even go out to the road!
- The air here is poisonous...
so we're afraid to go near the road.
I have emphysema.
In the winter, it gets cold and I get worse.
In summer, the air is better.
I can hardly breathe indoors.
I pant when I'm in the house.
When I found out I was going to Linfen,
I had found some painters' masks under the sink in our office.
My mom also told me I should wear a mask at all times,
and I saw a lot of photos of people on the streets of Chinese cities
wearing masks.
When we got to Linfen,
we were surprised to find out that nobody wore masks.
I didn't want to stick out any more, so we left the masks behind.
However, I still took a photo wearing a mask,
just to show my mom when I got home.
Back from the waters of the Yellow Sea,
far inland from the eastern plains,
for unnumbered generations, farmers have plowed the fertile soil.
After the harvest, the plow, and after the plow, the planting.
This has been the cycle, endlessly repeated.
Through the ages,
water from the mountains have been fed to fields of the valley,
for crops that have never failed.
One day, the farmer looked up from his work in age-old fields
and saw a strange new carriage.
The engineers of a far-off land devised new uses for flowing streams,
producing a strange new power.
To the valley came electricity
to bring the valley home the signs of a changing world.
It was only 20 years ago that Linfen was nicknamed
"the fruit and flower town of Shanxi Province."
Since then, it's basically been turned into China's coal mine.
It's even more remarkable to think that
this has all happened in the span of my lifetime.
Linfen was just a small city...
Its economy was based on agriculture.
The environmental impact of coal exploitation
is essentially the destruction of the ecological environment.
It damages the soil, the water and the plant cover.
Dealing with the tainted water
is also a big dilemma.
- Is there usually more water than this?
There used to be.
There's only water when it rains upstream.
- Isn't the water dirty?
Yeah, pretty much.
We grew up playing here.
It was cleaner back then.
In China, over half of all the rivers are polluted.
One third of the lakes are polluted,
and over eighty percent, or ninety percent, of the urban groundwater
are polluted,
so this is about how serious the water pollution is in China.
Those pollutions mainly come from industry processes.
It's about factories who do not clean up their pollutants
before they release those things into the river.
And also, another main contributor is the pollutants from the pesticides
used in the agriculture process.
Most of those cancer villagers
actually caused by water pollution,
because the people in those villages
depend on this river for their water sources.
That's why you see a very high percentage of cancer patients
in those villages.
All of the food I had in Linfen was actually quite good.
It may have been full of cancerous toxins,
but at least I can tell it was grown in the ground,
as opposed to in some laboratory.
I have a feeling a lot of the stuff I eat back home
may be just as bad for me.
When I was a child, this village was very beautiful.
Why?
Because it had spring water.
There were three springs in this village.
You could find fish and shrimp in them.
They were used for watering the land.
Now all the springs are dried out.
Why is that?
Because of all the factories.
All the groundwater was used up.
Then, a few years back, cars started using the road,
and the crops nearby got a lot of dust on them.
This destroyed the young crops
and decreased production by about one third.
There's no profit.
The farmers stay here because there's nowhere for them to go.
Much has changed in the valley.
And much remains the same.
The farmer tills his fields today as his ancestors did in ages past.
A heritage endures.
The people of the valley come and go.
Life in village and city goes on.
As generations have come and gone,
the mountain streams have flowed on.
The friendly earth still yields its produce.
And cradling the valley, now as always,
silent, lofty mountains keep their eternal vigil.
Every piece of coal in China
is intended to go through one of the national coal factories.
This is a private coal mine that was shut down by the authorities.
Private mining is illegal, but since there's such a crazy demand for coal,
a lot of people try to start their own mine
in order to profit from the lucrative black market.
Most of them are not successful and get fined or put in jail.
The large-scale exploitation of coal in Shanxi started in 1978.
This is more or less
when China began its new Open Door Policy.
After receiving the order from the central government,
many large national coal companies were founded,
and Shanxi developed into a major energy center.
The enormous government factories are easy to spot.
We drove by a lot of them, but never hung out for very long
because we didn't want the security guards to see us.
If Shanxi could not mine and export this much coal,
then eastern China would not have enjoyed such economic success.
And if the eastern region did not reach its economic goals,
then China could not have quadrupled the size of its economy.
To get a better sense of the illegal coal industry,
we went into the hills about two hours outside of Linfen.
The area was still dense with pollution.
And we started to see smaller factories
and then what appeared to be some illegal mines.
Since they're not regulated by the government,
and are operated using old methods,
the illegal mines are a big part of the pollution problem.
Could we interview you and see your coal mine?
Is that alright?
Yes, of course.
Please come in, sit down and rest.
The coal mine I opened last year has already been closed.
Where is it?
It's up in the mountain.
It was buried.
Say this tea cup is the mine...
They just covered it with bamboo and filled it with dirt, like this.
They want you to wear a microphone to record what you say on the way.
I told you where the mine was.
Just go and take a look yourself.
I don't want to get myself into trouble.
If I'm seen talking to journalists,
I'll be in trouble.
Do you understand my point?
Private mining is already enough trouble for me.
After you leave, the villagers will be talking about this,
and the village council will come for me.
Do you understand me now?
It didn't take long for the government to find my mine and destroy it.
Very few people in our village can mine anymore.
Their mines were all buried by the government.
Ordinary villagers like me usually don't have steady work.
There is only one state-owned coal mine around here.
Most of the people we approached for interviews were very friendly with us.
- Thank you.
You're welcome.
But pretty soon, they realized
that the questions we were asking - Goodbye.
could get them in trouble.
A lot of the residents of Linfen
have been excluded from the economic prosperity that has come to the region.
It's basically what happens when a bunch of farmers
are forced to try to make a living
from harvesting coal instead of harvesting crops.
Everywhere we went, people seemed to be scavenging for bricks,
metal, wire or anything else to make some money.
After spending a week in Linfen,
my eyes burned a little, my throat itched.
And when I picked my nose, my boogers had turned black.
For the next 30 years,
coal will remain the primary energy resource in China.
This is inevitable.
With regard to pollution,
developed countries have had these problems before.
So, now that China is at this stage,
we can say that the current situation was inevitable.
Because of environmental and climate changes,
we are looking for environmentally-friendly energy resources.
I believe that, under the direction of scientific development,
and sustainable development theories,
China will be able to pursue
an industrial model in harmony with nature.
After almost a week in Linfen, the police came to our hotel.
They didn't come to our rooms,
but they had the hotel staff bring us what our translator said were 'registration forms.'
We were afraid that our tapes might get confiscated
because after all, we were filming illegally.
We were basically there as tourists
who happened to have professional video cameras.
We got a last glimpse of the factories and empty rivers.
It was as good a time as any to leave.
We are faced with a very short time window
to make the right choices about our future.
So, it's not a question about whether or not China should develop.
China has to develop in order to lift more people out of poverty.
However, it's more about how China should develop.
The local level officials are still very much obsessed with just economic growth.
Really, the evaluation of officials' performance have to change in a big way
in order to give more incentive for those people on the local level
to do more for the environment.
When the World Bank first named Linfen the most polluted city on earth,
the Chinese government set about to improve the situation.
Closing down factories, rerouting truck traffic,
and there were even some signs around the city calling attention to the problem.
[PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT IS VERY URGENT...]
[WE SHOULD NOT HESITATE TO SAVE THE EARTH]
[MAKE THE BLUE SKY BLUER AND MAKE PEOPLE HEALTHY]
[ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IS AS IMPORTANT AS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT]
[GOVERNMENT HOTLINE 0357-2598026]
[IF YOU DUMP TRASH HERE YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY WILL DIE]
As for the coal trucks,
we were surrounded by them for another 20 hours
as we drove back to Beijing.
And we sat in our van at one toll booth for about six hours
in the middle of the night.
All of the fumes helped me sleep through most of it,
as coal trucks idled around us
and the car in front of us ran out of gas.
[THE NEXT MORNING]
[BEIJING, CHINA]
Growing up, my impression of China
was of a huge boulevard entirely full of bicycles.
They've obviously been replaced by cars and trucks.
And if you add the burning of coal to that,
as well as all of the manufacturing that goes on,
China is now the world's leading polluter.
I think that China is trying its best, try to host a good Olympic game.
And try to give a good impression for the whole rest of the world.
Measures try to clean up air for the Beijing Olympics.
If you look at them, a lot of them are very short-term.
It's about shutting down factories
and it's about having strict transport restrictions.
You will actually be much more smart
if we try to think of long-term structured solutions.
As a Beijing citizen,
if I would have clean air for those two weeks in Beijing,
and then afterwards I would think,
"Why can't I have that every day?"
These are all things that can lead to much long-term thinking after the Olympics.
A lot of people say China is going through its own Industrial Revolution.
But I think that China's problem is kind of a global problem.
One of the biggest winners from China's economic rise
are the American and other multinational companies
who use cheap labor and materials
to produce goods that are sent all over the world.
As big a mess as China has to clean up,
the United States is still the largest per capita polluter in the world.
China's claims that the blue skies have opened over Linfen is obviously false,
especially when you watch the sunset end about 20 minutes early
when the sun sets behind an artificial curtain of smog.
However, once the sun goes down,
the stars do come out to shine in Linfen.
Dear guests, ladies, and gentlemen,
foreign friends from Taiwan and abroad...
Good evening, everybody!
Big bosses and hotshot officials...
China's Linfen CIty Hua Rui Relaxation Performance Center
proudly presents its splendid show...
beginning now!
Awesome!