China published its annual report on the state of its environment yesterday, but don’t get too excited. As usual, the sensitive bits were labeled state secrets. Sadly, even the publicly available parts look bad.

What we found out

What we weren’t told

To an extent, this report simply confirmed what is already widely known—pollution is extremely widespread, largely due to weak regulation and corruption. With China’s economy slowing to around 7.7% growth in the first quarter of this year, the country’s policy of gunning for growth at all costs is getting, well, costlier. The World Bank estimated (pdf) in 2007 that pollution costs China about 5.8% of GDP each year (for instance, water pollution raises the cost of farming; poor air quality erodes building structures.)