THE ASIA BOOM : Environment : Is Pollution the Price of Asia’s Development? : China’s rapid growth has many worried, recalling the early days of Japan’s environmental problems.

From its hilltop perch overlooking the North China Plain, the Jietai Temple provides a stunning contrast between the ancient serenity of China and its modern industrial roar.

The dark wood and gray brick Buddhist temple, built in AD 622 during the Tang Dynasty, is a gracious retreat nestled in a pine and cypress grove 25 miles west of Beijing.

But on the plain 1,200 feet below, veiled by a thick cloud of sallow smoke, the massive Capital Iron & Steel Corp., cradle-to-grave workplace for 200,000 employees, works night and day to meet this booming nation’s demand.

Steel production has helped China maintain its phenomenal rate of growth, a 40% expansion of the economy in just three years. But the sulfur dioxide emissions from the plant’s coal-fired blast furnaces produce acid rain and make Beijing one of the most polluted major capitals in the world.

Just breathing the air for a day in Beijing, concluded one study, is the equivalent of smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes. According to a 1992 report by the World Bank, the concentration of sulfur dioxide is twice the recommended level; unburned particulate matter more than four times recommended amounts.

The environmental problems in China are not limited to Beijing or the major cities. Several of the main tributaries of the Yellow River, the lifeline of the North China Plain, are so polluted with chemicals that they can no longer be used for irrigation. Acid rain blackens crops throughout China and is such a danger that the Japanese and South Korean governments are increasingly concerned that it may reach their shores.

On a recent trip to a remote mountain area of southwest Sichuan province, Chinese photographer Gao Bo, back in China after five years in France, noticed a stunning transformation.

“Land that was once virgin forest was denuded,” said Gao. “The land looked wounded. Not only were there no trees, there was nothing green.”

Until recently, China has been slow to react to these warning signs. In general, people have been too busy enjoying the fruits of a booming economy to consider the environmental consequences.

“I think the basic problem with China is that people have totally misplaced expectations,” commented Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba who has emerged as the Cassandra of the China boom. “They have this idea that they can become whatever they want. They are totally drunk with this 13% annual economic growth rate, and we in the West feed them. What they cannot see is that the growth is totally unsustainable.”

Recently, however, senior Chinese officials appear to have heard the alarms raised by foreign environmentalists. At a Beijing conference, Xie Zhenhua, administrator of the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency, said the main threat to the Chinese environment was “irrational economic development that sacrifices the environment for advancement.”

Assessing the environmental price of Asia’s phenomenal development has become a front-burner issue as economic growth has soared. First there was Japan, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of World War II. Then it was the turn of the four little dragons--Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea--each one a small industrial powerhouse.

Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia came next, bringing double-digit growth to Southeast Asia. Finally, the great sleeping behemoth in the region, China, shook off ideology and isolation to join the rapid-growth club.

But every step forward seemed to have the potential of triggering two steps backward. How much does Malaysia’s emergence, for example, cost in the destruction of some of the world’s few remaining tropical rain forests? Is Taipei’s impossible traffic and foul air justified by Taiwan’s phenomenal growth?

As much as the world admires economic success stories, a handful of environmentalists and scholars have begun to ask tough questions about the price along the Pacific Rim.

“I believe that environmental constraints will soon affect China’s economic growth,” said Michel Oksenberg, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu. “They have already begun to affect quality of life.”

Others contend that it is not too late for China and the other emerging Pacific Rim nations to learn from Japan, which began its industrialization without a glance at the environmental price.

Indeed, Japan provides an impressive model of blind growth giving way to ecological awareness.

From the days of the Meiji Restoration, which began in 1868, a national goal of “catching up with the West” was so fixed in Japanese minds that high school anthems were composed in praise of smokestacks.

Even the names of cities in Japan became associated with pollution. The mention of Kawasaki and Yokkaichi conjured up images of smog--and asthma and bronchitis. Water pollution spread virtually everywhere--in rivers, lakes and even the treasured Inland Sea.

When the Bullet Line train opened between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, it was heralded as a triumphant symbol of progress. A few years later, it became a focus of complaints about noise.

Minamata, in Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu island, gave its name to what is still called “Minamata-byo” (Minamata illness), or mercury poisoning. It stands unrivaled as a pollution disaster in Japan.

The Chisso Corp., a chemical manufacturing firm, was found to have dumped about 27 tons of organic mercury compounds into Minamata Bay between 1932 and 1968, which started causing deformities and deaths as early as 1956. The mercury attacks the central nervous system. Cats that ate the fish in the bay were the first victims noticed; then came the humans.

The turning point came in 1967--a year before Japan surpassed the GNP of West Germany. A Marxist economist, Ryokichi Minobe, was elected governor of Tokyo running on a pledge to return “blue skies” to the nation’s capital.

From that time on, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party began stressing environmental measures. By the mid-1970s it had enacted automobile emissions standards even stricter than those in California.

Although “environment” today is a fashionable political topic, Japan still is no environmental paradise. The government established its Environment Agency in 1971 but has left it largely toothless. As an agency, it lacks the prestige of a ministry and enjoys few independent powers.

Nevertheless, government ministries have worked out with the business and industrial firms they are supposed to promote--and control--standards that have reduced pollution measurably. No one any longer is counting the days of the year on which Mt. Fuji can be seen from Tokyo--a statistic that in the 1970s was a major indicator of pollution.

Now, its economy secure, Japan has reached the level of Western industrialized nations in environmental awareness. Some environmentalists, however, doubt the relevance of the Japan model to China because of China’s size and population.

“Japan is in an altogether different category,” said Smil. “You can’t compare an island of 127 million people with a country of 1.2 billion people. Japan has been able to clean up by exporting some of its dirty industries and importing its energy. Japan closed down its coal industry. China can’t do that.”

By conservative estimates, China has enough coal in the ground to last 250 years. In order for the Chinese economy to reach Japan’s level, it will have to consume five times as much primary energy. “There is not enough oil in the world to supply them,” said Smil.

China hopes to double its generation of electric power by the year 2000. More than 80% of this power will be generated by coal. For Smil, this formula foreshadows environmental devastation for the entire East Asian region as acid rain spreads beyond China.

Oksenberg, the East-West Center president, is more sanguine. For one thing, he notes a heightened interest in Japan and South Korea about environmental concerns in China. Recent developmental aid programs from both countries have directed money to Chinese environmental programs.

Japan’s Asahi newspaper recently reported that Mitsubishi Corp., the huge and powerful trading company, has agreed to provide $25 million as part of a fund to build a 550-mile pipeline from Jingbian in China’s Shaanxi province to bring natural gas east to Beijing as part of a plan to replace the use of coal.

Finally, as the first glow of the economic blaze begins to fade, Chinese officials have shown increasing concern about the environmental cost of growth. The government has committed itself to spending $9.5 billion for environmental protection before the end of 1995 and another $23 billion by the year 2000.

In April, Wang Binggian, vice president of the National People’s Congress, said polluters should face the death penalty.

“Violators should be punished as severely as smugglers and drug traffickers,” added Song Jian, director of the legislature’s environmental committee.

Times staff writer Sam Jameson in Tokyo contributed to this article.