Japan'S Introspection: The Death Of Economic Growth Mode

Recently, many media reports have pointed out that our country is energy conservation Emission reduction preparations are further intensified. Many real estate developers say they want to create a green, energy saving and emission reduction community. And the furniture industry says what kind of low carbon furniture to make. These people are totally blind. In fact, what qualifications do we Chinese have for energy conservation and emission reduction? That's something in Europe and America. I am not saying that this problem is not important, but that we Chinese have more important things to do, energy conservation and emission reduction, which is a game played by Europe and America. You know we China What is the real urgent problem now?

Do you know how terrible our living environment is now? Wang Jiuliang, a citizen of Beijing, published a photo of the garbage dump in Beijing after a year's investigation. It is really shocking. These garbage dumps are basically distributed between the five rings and the six rings, which are densely packed, and more than 400 of them are of medium scale. In fact, these garbage dumps are good, at least in the planning, can be unified management. What's more terrible is that many of the rubbish is burned and stacked at random. Take the pear garden area in Tongzhou District, Beijing, for example, there is an open garbage dump. There are many motor tricycles to dump garbage every day. Basically, every two or three days, the garbage dump will burn in a concentrated way. When burning, there will be smoke and a lot of pungent, unpleasant odors in the next few kilometres. What is particularly worrying is that such a situation is not unique to Tongzhou. It is very common throughout the country. Nearly 1/3 of the country's garbage is disposed of in such a simple way. Do you know how much garbage we produce in China every year? Nearly 1.6 billion tons! I have data here. In our city, the average annual output of garbage per person is 440 kilograms. 600 cities in the whole country have stacked or buried all kinds of garbage up to 80 million tons. The cities with 2/3 have been surrounded by garbage, and garbage accumulative total occupied 500 million square meters of land.

Why do we have such a serious pollution? Today, Professor Lang, I have decided to give you an answer, that is, we do not understand the correct way of economic growth. We are walking on the old road in Japan in the last century. History is always strikingly similar. Recently, I read a book called "Japan's introspection: the crime and punishment of the United States". about Economics In the process of growth, the Japanese have already started a deep introspection, and will not make the same mistake again. And what about us?

False economic growth one: at the expense of the environment. We carefully analyze the domestic cases of mercury poisoning and blood lead pollution, it is not difficult to find that the largest source of pollution is actually mining, mineral processing and smelting. This phenomenon happened in Japan in twentieth Century. For example, mercury poisoning, we found that the data of water maitu town had 180 people and more than 50 people died. In the new line County, he also found more than 100 NMO victims and 8 deaths. The bone pain of Japanese God Dongchuan was caused by cadmium pollution, which resulted in 230 cases of bone pain patients and 34 deaths; while the Japanese Yitai incident was caused by the excessive sulfur dioxide concentration in the air, resulting in air pollution, which led to 871 people and 871 deaths in the city.

Zhi Zi bathing is the most famous and widely disseminated work of the American photographer, Eugene Smith, "Minamata". In early 1950s, in a town called Shui Mo town in Xiongben Prefecture, southern Kyushu, Japan, there were some patients who were ill articulate, stun in their faces, trembling hands and feet, and nervous disorders. These patients had been cured for a long time, and were all bent and miserable. There are 40 thousand residents in Shui Mo town. In recent years, 10 thousand people have suffered from this disease to varying degrees. After several years of investigation and research, the Japanese government confirmed that the residents of Shui Mo town were suffering from mercury poisoning due to the discharge of factory waste water. It is said that when taking the bath of Chi Zi, Smith, a loving mother, was bathed in the eyes of her disabled daughter. Eugene's eyes filled with tears and she could hardly press the shutter. In fact, the water pollution incident in Japan is not uncommon in the process of industrialization in Europe and America. Since 1952, there have been 12 major smog events in London. In December 1952, more than 4000 people died in 5 days.

What if this ecological crisis happens in China? It may be a punishment for the factory, and it will be over if it is shut down, but if you think the Japanese government is doing the same thing, you are too naive. They started a very deep introspection trend. They found that if the garbage was not handled properly, the pollution would be more powerful than the factory, and would become a hidden killer in life. So since then, Japan has begun to pay special attention to environmental protection, and has passed three very strict environmental protection laws. The result of the legislation is that the Japanese no longer manufacture batteries in their own country, but they sell them to China in a planned and purposeful way, or move to China. Now 80% of the world's lead-acid batteries are manufactured in China.

Erroneous economic growth two: at the expense of over consumption of oil and raw materials. The first oil crisis began in 1973 for 3 years, during which industrial production in the United States dropped by 14%, and GDP dropped by 4.7%. Japan is much more serious than the US. Its industrial production has dropped by 20% and GDP by 7%. Japan finds that every time there is a crisis, they are always the ones who are most hurt, because Japan can not import raw materials from abroad because of a little trouble. For example, the copper raw materials urgently needed by the Japanese electronics industry were up to 3000 US dollars or even higher in 1973. As a result, the income growth rate of machinery manufacturing industry, electrical machinery and equipment, conveying machinery and equipment industry in Japan dropped to -6%, -6% and -8% in 1975, and the profit growth rate dropped to -51%, -45% and 6.4%. Therefore, Japan has begun a deep reflection. What is the result of reflection? They found that if the rubbish produced in the city was recycled properly, it would be a rare metal deposit. For example, if the copper imported every year, whether it was finally processed into copper or copper pipes, if it could recover 50%, then the import volume of the next year could be reduced by half. This is why Japan is also a big manufacturing country, but it does not need to import so many raw materials as we do. Not only that, but Japan also thinks that if the combustion efficiency of the engine can be raised by 6%, will the oil import be able to save 6%? In that case, they do not have to import so much oil.

It is through this transformation that Japan has made rapid economic development. In the 10 years since 1973, Japan's GDP has increased by 47%, but the consumption of disposable energy has increased by only 17%, and the consumption of oil by unit GNP has also fallen by half. Let's look at their performance in heavy industry. The status of non-ferrous metals, steel and chemical industry is also in the fields of medicine, transportation machinery and precision machinery. So, after the second oil crisis that broke out in 1978, although oil prices jumped from $13 a barrel to $40 a barrel, Japan's economy suffered very little.

Erroneous economic growth three: at the cost of E-Waste and construction waste. Japan's resources are very scarce, but their appliances are being replaced very quickly, so they generate a lot of electronic waste. If we all know, can Japanese do not know? So what do they do? Therefore, Japan has implemented the "household electrical appliances recycling law". This bill stipulates that the waste products of the 4 categories of TV sets, washing machines, air conditioners and refrigerators are recovered by the manufacturers. After recycling, the parts that can be reused can be used and can not be used for processing. Lots of valuable metals can be extracted from it, so that Japan does not need to spend so much money to import it. This is the concept of "urban mines" proposed by Japan. In 2008, the Japan Institute of materials and materials released a report that Japan's domestic urban mines ranked the highest in the world in terms of the storage capacity of various metals. Resources In terms of the content ratio, Japan's gold, silver, indium and lead are the world's four metals, copper is the world's second, platinum is the world's third, vanadium and chromium are the world's fourth, molybdenum and zinc are the world's fifth. Through this bill, another employment problem has been solved. For example, a household appliance factory has laid off 20% of its employees. Now these people can be rehoused by the new electrical recovery enterprises. After the implementation of the bill, Japan felt that the result was good, and then proposed the vehicle recycling act, which stipulates that automobile manufacturers are obliged to recycle waste automobiles and reuse resources. In addition, the "construction recycling law" stipulates that the recycling of waste cement, asphalt, sludge, timber and other resources at construction sites should reach 100%. The reason why I have talked so much about the transformation of Japanese economic development mode is that Japan's environmental protection, recycling of domestic waste, waste electrical appliances, waste automobiles and even waste building materials all come from its serious reflection on every crisis. This point deserves our consideration and reflection. However, I am very worried that our nation's self-examination ability is not very poor, but almost none.