The Color of Money

Visitors to modern China are often struck by the lush greenness of its product packaging, building signage and highway billboards. Idyllic images of an unspoiled countryside play well in advertising. It seems every billboard, regardless of the product, company or service being sold, evokes a pastoral, pre-industrial China unblighted by factories and smokestacks.

My Chinese friends tell me they revere nature and pay a lot of attention to what is being lost in China. It makes some sense. China's industrialization and rush to urban prosperity began only a few years ago. Its long history is predominantly agrarian.

Still, it is amazing to reflect on the disconnect between Chinese "green" marketing and what is actually going on behind the billboards in the despoiled industrial flats of coastal China. It asks too much of the imagination to believe that personal choices of plastic or paper at the grocery store could influence environmental threats of the magnitude facing China.

Yet, Chinese governments and companies push "green" consumer concepts, from food and home appliances to shampoo and building materials. Beijing has put forward a "Green Olympics," advocating energy-saving, nonpollutant technologies like "green" toilets and solar lighting systems in stadiums.

Some Chinese historians have linked the consumption of "green" goods with Chinese civilization. This view has modern China anchored in a tradition of preserving nature in balance with human economy, of promoting health and social security with sustainable growth. If all those green billboards mean anything, they stand above all for vitality and long life, core Chinese values.

The problem is that the use of "green" labeling to make money is even more promiscuous and rapacious in China than the United States. While a mere lack of uniform standards may confuse U.S. consumers, chaos and outright illegality plague China. People's Daily reports routinely about false environmentally friendly products.

For example, news reports last year told of building material markets around Shanghai hanging environmentally friendly signs on products that clearly did not deserve them. Several flooring companies were fined for failing to disclose the formaldehyde content and off-gassing potential of products they advertised as "environmentally friendly," "toxic free" and "anti-allergenic."