Linea De Tiempo China

Environmental policies


Historical evolution

Environmental public policies exist in China since the first dynasties, Xia, Shang, and Zhou323. The concern of the Chinese bureaucratshas been always to maintain acceptable degrees of productivity without damaging the ecological balance. In spite of this concern deforestation, desertification’s, erosion, loss of habitat and pollutionof air, land and water sources, have been a constant throughout the Chinese territory for five thousand years. Characteristics of climate and topography make the area available for cultivation beingrelatively small for the size of population. Even when comparing it
With other countries, this proportion is still very small. According to latest data, China must feed 22% of the world's populationwith only 7% of the land arable325. In the United States each farmer has on average 99 hectares available for cultivation; in China only one third of a hectare.
Although this percentage has increasedconsiderably in recent years, this relationship was not very different from past centuries. According to Madison, in the last two millennia, China managed to duplicate its population twenty-two times,from 55 million to 1.2 billion habitantes326. Developing to dispose of more land for cultivation, the Chinese have gone to farming terraces, dredging of lakes and swamps and felling of forests.Despite these efforts, from the time of the Sung dynasty, the areas available for cultivation only have been doubling five veces327. The pressure caused by the population density concentrated in certainareas is one of the key elements for understanding the environmental problem in China. In its modern sense, public policies on environmental issues began in China in 1932, during the nationalistgovernment of the Guomindang328. After the founding of the People's Republic of China and the arrival of Mao Zedong to the power, and the implementation of their campaigns to boost the productivity of the...