“We Recycle our Water”
- iSSUes Vol. 1
- Dec 18, 2019
- 3 min read
Mingyue Tao on Climate Change in China
by Rebekah Aran
This week on a rainy Tuesday I had the pleasure of interviewing Mingyue Tao, a foreign exchange student from Nanjing Normal University in China. She is from a small town called Suzhou which is right near Shanghai, and is in her Junior year at Salem State studying English and World Languages. In our 40 minute conversation, we exchanged pictures and stories of our family. We even joked about how her grandfather thinks she will turn evil for becoming educated in two of his least favorite places on earth-- “America and Hong Kong.” Throughout our time together I learned some pertinent information about climate change, recycling, and generally the culture surrounding the environment in China.
The Mist is Gone
I began by asking Ming when she first noticed that climate change was evident in her hometown. When she was young, she always noticed a thick coat of fog all throughout her hometown, what she called a “mist.” As she grew older, she noticed that the mist became increasingly sparse until it finally never came back. This was the first change that she noticed based on the weather, and she strongly suspects that this could be attributed to climate change in her hometown. She does think that it’s getting hotter at home, and noted that though it is typically a warmer climate, she’s only ever seen it snow once in 2008, and the temperatures have been getting hotter ever since.
Save The Water
On the topic of recycling, she did note that she did a presentation in primary school regarding saving and recycling water. She said that when she wanted to wash her hair typically she would turn on the shower, and it would take a long time for the water to warm up. To save from wasting this water, she would take a bucket and collect the cold water and use it for something else. This small act she has carried from her childhood into her young adulthood, but she notes that though she and her family does it, not everyone does, and there’s a long way to go regarding wasting water.
Ming did indicate that things are beginning to change for the better regarding the recycling habits of the Chinese people. In Shanghai earlier this year, she exclaims, “there’s been a revolution.” Shanghai has begun a huge wave of recycling that is a “test run” for the rest of the country. She doesn’t know if they’ve continued, or the success of their recycling revolution, but will be following their story closely in the following weeks.
We did have a lengthy discussion on car use in China, specifically Shanghai. Ming was informing me that because there are so many cars in Shanghai, it can sometimes cost up to $14,000 to get a license plate for a gas car in the city. “However,” she said, “if you buy an electric car, you can just have the plates.” We agreed that this was an incredible incentive to be more environmentally conscious, but I questioned her as to why individuals would still pay so much money to have a gas car when they could just have an electric one. Ming told me that it was all about the accessibility. “There are so many gas stations around, and no charging stations. China still has a long way to go.”
Who’s Talking About This?
I told Ming that here in America, climate change and global warming are a hot topic, especially for politicians. I was curious as to if anyone in China was talking about the environment at all, and if so, what are they saying. Her answer was shocking to me. Ming told me that a few years ago there was a journalist named Chai Jing who created a documentary about the air pollution in China and how it is affecting the people living there along with the environment. Though it was accepted at first by the government, it was quickly banned. “Within four days it was taken down” she said. Because Jing blamed her health issues on the smog created from big companies that are emitting it and that’s bad for business, her message couldn’t be spread. “It’s sad,” Ming said.
“I Want the Government to Teach us How to Recycle.”
“What do you want to see happen?” I asked her. She responded after a moment with this: “I want the government to force us to learn how to recycle. Because we don’t know.” Ming speculated that because China’s main focus has been on economics and boosting business, they have overlooked the environment for a while. “We need some strife. We need somebody to push us. We need some laws,” she said. She hopes that what is happening in Shanghai is only the beginning, and soon it will spread throughout the rest of China.
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