Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

19. Interview with Neville Mars.

20. Elizabeth Economy, “The Great Leap Backward?” Foreign Affairs 86, 5 (September/October 2007).

21. The average city dweller produces 440 kilograms of waste a year. The effect on emissions is contested. United Nations agencies, former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s climate change initiative, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all stated that between 75 and 80 percent of emissions come from cities. However, this figure is refuted by the International Institute for Environment and Development, which argues that cities account for only 40 percent of emissions, so they are actually more efficient.

22. Reuters, “China Will Sink under the Weight of Its Own Rubbish,” January 9, 2007.

23. The previous year, twenty strikers required hospital treatment after police broke up a 10,000-strong protest over layoffs from the Tegang state-owned steel factory. Less than a year earlier, police cars had been torched and overturned in a riot by thousands in the satellite city of Wanzhou. Professor Ye Jianping, head of the department of land management at Renmin University, told me, “The problem is that local officials have too much power, governors are too inclined to measure their importance by the extent of their city limits, and the amounts of money involved are too great a temptation.” Other academics say local governments get 60 to 70 percent of the profits from land transfers. Much of it ends up in the hands of cadres and officials—many of whom treat their territory like the fiefdoms of old. In 2007, Chongqing was the focus of probably the most famous land dispute in China.

24. Initiated by the mayor, Bo Xilai, in 2009 (Jonathan Watts, “A City Fights Back: Chinese Gangsters Get Death Penalty,” Guardian, October 21, 2009).

25. Jasper Becker goes into detail about this in City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China (Penguin, 2008).

26. Jonathan Watts, “Minister Rails at China, Land of a Thousand Identical Cities,” Guardian, June 12, 2007.

27. Despite the influx of migrants, even the city’s poor district is better than the corrugated iron-roofed slums of India and South America. Such is the mood of confidence that city planners expect the city to reach the state’s primary goal of a xiaokang (all around, well-off) society five years before the central government’s target of 2020. By that time, they say the municipality’s economy will have tripled from its 2005 level to reach a per-person average of 77,300 yuan (about $11,000).

28. Named after the economist Arthur Lewis, a Nobel Laureate well known for his studies of labor. According to him, developing countries’ industrial wages begin to rise quickly at some critical point when the supply of surplus labor from the rural areas tapers off. This shifts the labor supply from surplus to shortage (Kam Wing Chan, Cai Fang, and Du Yang, The China Population and Labor Yearbook, vol. 1: The Approaching Lewis Turning Point and Its Policy Implications [Brill, 2009], p. 12).

1. In an interview with Hari Kunzru, October 2007, http://www.harikunzru.com/jg-ballard-interview-2007.

2. Fraser Newham, “China Puts Its Best Face Forward,” Asia Times, April 6, 2006.

3. Wu Jiao, “50% of People to Be Middle Class by 2020,” China Daily, December 27, 2007.

4. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2008 Living Planet Report, www.panda.org, 2008.

5. Ibid. A European or Japanese lifestyle is a little less eco-intense than that of the U.S., but it too would be catastrophic on a Chinese scale. The comparison is similar to that of launching 3,000 or 4,000 nuclear warheads. One number is bigger than the other, but it is almost irrelevant as destruction would be total in either case.

6. Shanghai’s carmakers account for almost a fifth of the local economy. Its port is expected to overtake Singapore as the world’s busiest container port, in terms of cargo handled, before 2012 (“Singapore Remains World’s Busiest Container Port,” Port World, January 11, 2008).

7. Song Ligang and Wing Thye Woo (eds.), China’s Dilemma: Economic Growth, the Environment and Climate Change (Brookings, 2008), p. 8.

8. As ever, the expansion was superaccelerated in China. In the U.S., it had taken thirty years for the chain to hit the 600-restaurant mark (Warren Liu, KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success [Wiley, 2008]).

9. The term appears to date back thousands of years. When archaeologists excavated the terra-cotta warriors in Xian, one way of distinguishing the ranks of the soldiers was the size of their stomachs. The poor foot soldiers were lean. The officers were distinguished by a more fulsome girth.

10. Though it is nowhere near as bad as in the U.S., where a third of people are obese and nearly two-thirds are overweight (James Randerson, “China’s Alarming Increase in Obesity Blamed on More Affluent Lifestyle,” Guardian, August 18, 2006). In the first fifteen years after the start of economic reforms in 1978, the number of overweight people in China more than doubled to 200 million. A six-year-old boy in China is now 6 kilograms heavier and 6 centimeters taller than his counterpart thirty years ago.

11. Speech at the Nature Conservancy conference ConEx in Vancouver, 2008.

12. The average consumer in China ate 54 kilograms of meat in 2007, up from 20 kilograms in 1980. The country as a whole now chomps through 65 million tons of meat per year, equivalent to 260 million cows, 650 million pigs, or 26 billion chickens (Jonathan Watts, “More Wealth, More Meat: How China’s Rise Spells Trouble,” Guardian, May 30, 2008). A study by the Australian Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation forecasts a sharp rise in demand for meat and dairy in twelve Asian countries—home to more than half the world’s population. By 2020, it predicts a rise in beef consumption in the region by 50 percent, pork by 30 percent, chicken meat by 40 percent, and dairy products by 55 percent.

13. Europeans have a leaner diet but still get through 89 kilograms of meat per year.

14. Between 1978 and 2006, the number of air conditioners in China rose 390,000-fold, refrigerators 1,200-fold, and cars 700-fold ( National Statistical Yearbook 2007 [China National Bureau of Statistics, 2007]).

15. Ibid.

16. The 140,000 tons of tissues and toilet paper Shanghai uses every year consumes some 80,000 tons of wood pulp, equal to about 300,000 tons of wood. Wang Yueqin, vice director of the Shanghai Paper Trade Association, noted: “While I am happy to see many young people adopt paper tissue for its convenience, which is a sign to reflect our social development and has helped improve our industry to some part, I am beginning to worry about the large wood consumption” (Cao Li, “Toilet Paper Demand Upsets Wood Supplies,” China Daily, February 15, 2005). Figures on carbon usage provided by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, based on data from the China National Bureau of Statistics, IPCC, and the World Bank.

17. McKinsey and Co., “The Coming of Age: China’s New Class of Wealthy Consumers,” www.mckinsey.com, 2009.

18. Ibid. Wealthy households are defined as those with incomes of at least 250,000 yuan.

19. “China’s Auto Consumption Likely to Surpass That of the U.S. by 2017,” Xinhua Economic News Service, April 14, 2008.

20. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 15.

21. Jonathan Watts, “A Miracle and a Menace,” Guardian, November 9, 2005.

22. The countryside was also targeted. After the economic downturn of 2008, the Chinese government attempted to spur consumer demand by giving 13 percent rebates to farmers who bought air conditioners and refrigerators.