Urban citizens flee pollution while rural Chinese facing climate change head to cities
As some Beijing parents reportedly take their children on short vacations to avoid the choking smog that triggered the city's first-ever red air pollution alert, experts have raised concerns over migration caused by environmental damage and its social impact.
Beijing suggested kindergartens, primary and high schools close following the red alert on Monday. While parents unable to take time off work can still send their kids to school, many have decided to leave the city.
Several parents reached by China Youth Daily on Tuesday said they planned to leave the city during the school shutdown to stay away from the smog. Some claimed that their children have been coughing a lot recently.
Xie Liangbin, father of a 6-year-old daughter, told the Global Times on Tuesday that several friends and other parents at his daughter's school have migrated to seek a better education and living environment.
"A friend of mine recently quit his job at an investment bank to live in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The city has a better environment and smaller population," Xie said. "International schools in the city are also cheaper [than in Beijing]."
Xie admitted that he also wants to leave and had chosen an apartment in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, but his plan to move there failed due to his parents' objections.
There is so far no official census data on the number of people who have migrated due to pollution.
Rich refugees
A 2015 survey conducted by Xiaokang magazine, which is affiliated to Communist Part of China magazine Qiushi, claimed that 93.2 percent of respondents said they felt threatened by air pollution, 16.6 percentage points higher than those who pointed to water pollution as a concern.
In 2014, the Annual Report on Chinese International Migration, which was compiled by the Center for China and Globalization and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that worsening pollution has become a major cause for emigration among Chinese elites, Beijing-based newspaper The Economic Observer reported.
Some 64 percent of China's rich - those whose assets exceed $1.6 million - have either emigrated or are planning to do so, according to a 2014 report conducted by Hurun Research Institute. This was up from 60 percent in 2012. Their top three motives have remained the same: education, pollution and food safety, Hurun reports released in 2014 and 2015 revealed.
Climate victims
While rich people move to their idyllic new homes, people in remote areas are also on the move after suffering from a deteriorating climate.
By 2016, a total of 350,000 people will have left their homes in the semiarid Loess Plateau in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, news site thepaper.cn reported.
Citing data from the Ningxia meteorological bureau, thepaper.cn said that the region's average temperature has risen 2.2 C in the last five decades, compared to an average national increase of 0.85 C over the last 130 years.
Ningxia has been stricken with droughts in recent years, which damage its agricultural industry. Over 65 percent of Ningxia's population work in agriculture, according to Zhao Xiaorui, head of the Ningxia Agricultural School. Experts say that droughts are likely to be made worse by global warming.
Statistics from the Ministry of Environment Protection in 2005 said 95 percent of the poorest people in China live in ecologically vulnerable regions, said thepaper.cn.
Since the 1980s, people from impoverished Xihaigu, Ningxia have been migrating to richer cities in the region. Over 700,000 people left the prefecture by 2013, which now has a population of around 2.5 million, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Pressing problem
"Behind urban eco-migration - be it a collective act organized by the authorities to protect the environment or an individual decision - is the unsustainable development path taken by cities as the urbanization process deepens, such as excessive urban planning without considering cities' geographical conditions," Luo Yameng, a Beijing-based urbanization expert, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
"Destination cities for eco-migrants could also suffer from the same unsustainable urbanization problem if too many people flock in," Luo noted.
"Pollution isn't limited to first-tier cities. It's inevitable that regions responsible for emitting dangerous levels of pollutants will be affected," Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times in a previous interview.
