China denies officials pressed World Bank to change pollution report
By David Barboza Published: July 5, 2007
SHANGHAI: China denied Thursday that government officials pressed the World Bank into removing estimates of the number of premature deaths linked to pollution in China from a World Bank report.
At a regular press briefing, Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, rejected media reports that the government had asked the World Bank to excise information, including statistical models estimating that as many as 750,000 people a year die prematurely in China because of air and water pollution.
"China didn’t ask for any information to be removed from the report," Qin said, adding that the final report has not been published.
But a person involved in drafting the report said the Chinese authorities wanted the information removed because they had doubts about the method used to estimate the deaths and they were worried about the social consequences of making such statistics public. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is considered so delicate in China.
A draft of the report, "Cost of Pollution in China," was released at a conference in Beijing in March after the deletions.
In a statement released Tuesday, the World Bank did not deny that some data had been removed from the draft report at the request of China. But a World Bank spokeswoman in Washington said that the matter was under review.
"Consistent with the World Bank’s approach to this type of joint research project, the findings of the report are being discussed with the government," the World Bank’s statement said. "The conference version of the report did not include some of the issues that are still under discussion."
The disclosure that China had pressed the World Bank to remove some information was first reported Tuesday in The Financial Times.
The Chinese government agencies participating in the project include the State Environmental Protection Administration and the Ministry of Health.
Despite the omissions, the report, which was developed over three years by a large group of World Bank scientists, Chinese government officials and academics, is still a grave warning about the costs and consequences of the pollution and environmental degradation that have resulted from the Chinese economic boom.
Researchers estimated that pollution would cost China as much as 5.8 percent of its gross domestic product, or about $160 billion a year. China said its trade surplus in 2006 was about $177 billion.
The report also says that because of the Chinese dependence on fossil fuels, particularly coal, it is the largest source of sulfur dioxide emissions in the world. Sulfur dioxide is a pollutant that helps produce acid rain.
The study found that acid rain caused more than $4 billion a year in crop damage, and that water scarcity and water pollution resulted in more than $21 billion a year in losses
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