China’s environment minister has issued an unusually stern warning that pollution threatens to imperil growth, positioning it as a central theme of the next five-year plan to be launched at the annual National People’s Congress this weekend.
“Natural resources are shrinking, degenerating and drying up. Ecological and environmental decay has become a bottleneck and a serious obstacle to our economic and social development,” said Zhou Shengxian. “If our homeland is destroyed and we lose our health, then what good does development do?”
His comments echoed those of Wen Jiabao in a web chat on Sunday, in which China’s premier emphasised the need for slower, cleaner growth and announced a new, lower, gross domestic product growth target of 7 per cent.