Interesting article in the WSJ.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/blast-erodes...1440094622

What this will mean in the future is the cost of business will continue to increase more and more. To get into the middle class, Chinese workers wages have steadily risen. Now, they will have to structurally transform their economy to include additional regulatory bodies - most notably in this article an environmental oversight department that is effective. Gone will be the days where the businesses could dump their waste anywhere they wanted and skirt the large costs of environmental controls that western countries have. It won't change tomorrow, but much sooner than you may think.

Quote:The deadly blasts that killed 114 people here also put a deep dent in the compact between China’s government and its middle class.

The hundreds of millions of Chinese who have ridden the country’s breakneck growth into comfortable middle-class lives have traditionally shied away from direct challenges to the Communist Party, accepting little say in the government’s workings as long as their living standards continued to improve.

But the blasts at a dockside warehouse hit directly at owners of high-rise homes nearby, dashing the perception held among many upwardly mobile Chinese that they were exempt from the ill effects of runaway growth.

“On the surface, your life is no different from a middle-class person in a normal country,” said an essay of unknown origin that has drawn nearly 32,000 views since it was posted online on Monday. “But after the blast, homeowners [in Tianjin] are finding that they are the same as those petitioners they looked down on.”

In Tianjin, entrepreneur Yan Hongmei did something she had never imagined: She joined a protest.

Quote:To many environmental activists, the episode illustrated the difficulty in getting independent voices on pollution and environmental hazards heard in China.

Meanwhile, street protests have sometimes been successful: Plans for a “showcase” nuclear-fuel-processing and equipment-manufacturing center in southern China were canceled in 2013, a day after demonstrators filled the streets to oppose the project.

Gradually such tactics have won over more in China’s middle class worried about the environment.

Luo Jianming, a 38-year-old who runs a recycling group in Guangzhou, was an office worker in 2009 when he learned of plans for a trash incinerator near his home. Worried about the potential toxic effects, he joined hundreds in protesting. The incinerator was eventually located somewhere else.

The Tianjin incident, he said, was extremely sobering, and likely to make more people reflect on the importance of environmental safeguards. “We can’t as a society continue this way,” he said. “We’ve developed too fast.”

Others say that the best way to prompt change is to create transparency.

As a manager in the steel industry, Ying Wenxiang, 29, traveled from mill to mill, seeing towns that “were full of dust and gray.” The Zhejiang province native left his steel job to start a company making affordable air-quality monitors and purifiers and is creating a mobile app of air quality in public places around Beijing.

“If people know what’s in the air and the water and the food, then the government will have to make changes,” he said.

China's been trying to cram all the positive aspects of the 20th Century Industrial Revolution into two decades while ignoring all the disruptions that happened along the way. Now instead of having to deal with minor hiccups, it's all going to converge into a steady state of unrest.

(08-20-2015 04:07 PM)vandiver49 Wrote:  China's been trying to cram all the positive aspects of the 20th Century Industrial Revolution into two decades while ignoring all the disruptions that happened along the way. Now instead of having to deal with minor hiccups, it's all going to converge into a steady state of unrest.

...a ticking time bomb they are....