Development in China has been accompanied by much environmental destruction and must be criticized. Again, the World Bank and the whole Western economics establishment, which equates development with unchecked levels of consumption, must bear a central part of the blame. Per capita consumption in China is currently just one tenth of developed countries. The U.S., with five per cent of the world's population, is currently the biggest single source of global climate change, accounting for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. The message of these figures is that unchecked consumption levels in the United States and other Northern countries continue to be the main threat to the global environment.
China is no workers' paradise.
Yet it is simplistic to say that workers have no rights, or that the government has, in the manner of a pimp, delivered its workers to transnationals to exploit. There are unions in China. China has the biggest trade union confederation in the world, with 100 million members. Granted, this confederation is closely linked with the government. But this is also the case in Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and many other countries.