ABSTRACT
China, and this cannot be repeated often enough, is a developing country which is undergoing rapid economic and social change. These developments are comparable with the transformation that took place in Europe during the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the United States at a slightly later date. As an almost entirely agricultural society, traditional China was generally free from industrial pollution although accounts of the porcelain centre of Jingdezhen in the Ming dynasty refer to the constant smoke and fl ames emitted by the potteries and the noisy and dirty atmosphere that this created. Coal and tin mining have existed for centuries but the extraction of minerals was not on a scale comparable to that found in the West until relatively recently.
