Week 14

This week in class, we talked about China’s economy and how much it has increased over the years, and it has been doing well, even with the Stock Market crash of 2008, which I found very interesting since China’s economy is more involved than it was when the first Stock Market crashed in 1929. We also discussed China and Southeast Asia, where China claimed an entire area. They claimed it through the “nine-dash line, ” where China claimed almost the entire South China Sea; other countries are also in the South China Sea. They did this for their advantage, which is obvious because they would have fishing rights, control of potential oil, mineral/resource deposits, and territorial protection.

We also discussed how much China had affected the environment, such as the Three Gorges Dam(San Xia Dam), which, before the dam, was a tourist attraction and had great beauty. Since the dam was built, it has eliminated 17 cities, 109 towns, and over 1,500 villages, and 1.3 million people had to move because of the dam. Now the dam is a new tourist attraction because it has an underwater museum, which is neat, but the cost of building it was worse because it destroyed the environment and people’s homes.

When we were put into groups, we talked about the good and bad(mostly bad) of how much China is ruining the environment. I read a short article about how China uses island building, dredging, and pipes to fill land on these islands and use them to their advantage or benefit. According to my article, China’s Island-Building Is Ruining Coral Reefs, Philippines Says, “China’s island-building activities have destroyed about 300 acres of coral reefs and are causing “irreversible and widespread damage to the biodiversity and ecological balance” of the South China Sea, a spokesman for the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. “China has pursued these activities unilaterally, disregarding people in the surrounding states who have depended on the sea for their livelihood for generations,” the spokesman, Charles Jose, said during a news briefing in Manila. He said China’s neighbors in the South China Sea could lose up to $100 million a year because of the loss of the coral reefs, which are breeding grounds for high-value fish harvested by countries surrounding the sea.” As stated above, there are destroying environments that are not just destroying reefs that are important to marine life but also destroying environments we rely on.

Bibliography

Whaley, Floyd. 2015. “China’s Island-Building Is Ruining Coral Reefs, Philippines Says.” The New York Times, April 13, 2015, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/world/asia/chinas-island-building-is-ruining-coral-reefs-philippines-says.html.