As Beijing starts the count down to the 2008 Olympic Games, the U.S. media also concentrate more of their reporting on the developments of the Middle Kingdom. There is hardly a day without a topic related to China, including trade conflict, mining accident, and recall of Chinese manufactured toys.

On August 26, 2007, The New York Times published an article, "As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes," in which it started by writing: No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo." But it went on by stressing that "the speed and scale of China's rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents." "China is choking on its own success," the report continues.

What should China do and what can the international community do to help China?

I ask this question for two reasons: First, about sixty percent of China's exports come from foreign-owned producers who set up plants in China. Foreign companies are continuously moving and building factories that produce pollutants to make China not only the "World Factory," but also the "World Dumping Site." My recommendation to the Chinese government is: China must set and enforce strict environmental protection standards to safeguard its air, water and land, and forbid more unhealthy industries moving into the country. This is not only for its-own survival, but also for the protection of the rest of the world.

Second, Western industries can take China's problem as an opportunity to sell their technologies and know-how to the Chinese to help China clean its environment.

By 2009-2010, China will overtake the U.S. as the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter. By 2030, seventy percent of Chinese energy will be generated by coal-fired power stations. The Chinese government says that the country lacks the technology to significantly reduce emissions. Also, shutting down old factories or power plants could wipe out jobs in poor areas. Australia pledged to help China clean its heavily polluted air by working intensively with China on developing clean coal technology. But Australia and the U.S. were the only two major industrialized countries to reject the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which commits 35 nations and the European community to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Throughout the late 19th and the early 20th century, the Europeans were busy cleaning their dust-covered house walls. Also, look at the American dust bowl - the plains of the U.S. were a lot less densely populated, and the human toll was still devastating - mass relocations (mostly to California), dust storms to the East Coast, respiratory-related illness and death, and in scattered areas the land itself has never recovered. ...Some countries have to learn these lessons the hard way, as in the U.S. in the 1930s.  (http://72.14.235.104/search?q=cache:UiVT3WKAINcJ:www.urbanplanet.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t8273.ht). But now we are more aware of the issues with this.

China is going through their industrial revolution like Europe and the U.S, did. Since China may become the world's second largest exporter in 2007, and the largest exporter, surpassing Germany, in two years at the latest, there is no reason to doubt that China will not be able to solve its environmental problem, if it has the determination.