Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

1. Since then, he has had to work harder to prove himself than his peers at more prestigious institutions. More than thirty years on, that effort is finally paying off. Li is now credited internationally for leading the team that discovered ultraviolet Raman spectroscopy technology, a groundbreaking tool for analyzing energy conversion; and for ultradeep desulfurization techniques that dramatically reduce the amount of sulfur emitted in the combustion of diesel. His more recent research on catalysis and solar energy has propelled him to a leading position in the clean-energy field in China.

2. China is pushing ahead with key “clean coal” technologies related to the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle and Carbon Capture and Storage (IGCC plus CSS), a method which converts coal to nonpolluting synthetic gas.

3. The government’s goal is to increase the share of the national budget devoted to science and technology to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, up from 1.4 percent in 2006. If achieved, this share would rank as one of the best in the world.

4. Containing 16 billion barrels of oil.

5. This figure was cited by Li Xiaoqiang, vice chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, in a speech on September 7, 2006, at Dalian’s “summer Davos” meeting. But it may be an underestimate. The International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook 2006 noted that China will need to invest $3.7 trillion in new energy sources between now and 2030 (Li Taige, “Investing in a Better Environment,” China Dialogue, October 3, 2007).

6. For example, Jeffrey Sachs, founder of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University, who argued in the 2007 Reith Lectures that the best hope for the world was for China to develop or borrow technologies to sequestrate, i.e., bury, carbon from coal.

7. In high concentrations, carbon dioxide can be lethal. In 1986, it bubbled up in Lake Nyos, Cameroon, and killed 1,700 people (Nathan Lewis, “Powering the Planet,” California Institute of Technology, 2007).

8. Li uses the energy from solar power to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen, which might one day be used to power cars. This can be done in the laboratory but is very far from being commercially applicable.

9. All targets in this section are published in the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Administrative Committee, Key Performance Indicators Framework 2008–2020 (www.tianjinecocity.gov.sg/).

10. In his previous job in the municipal construction bureau he had helped to redesign the city of Tianjin, which has a population of more than 11 million people. By comparison, the eco-project is modest.

11. The fate of Dongtan looked uncertain as this book went to press. Originally planned to house half a million people by 2040, the first phase was supposed to be ready by the Shanghai Expo in 2010. But construction has yet to start.

12. This is only part of the urbanizing shift, which is expected to bring 400 million people—more than the population of the U.S.—from the country to the city between 2000 and 2030 (Elizabeth Economy, “The Great Leap Backward?” Foreign Affairs 86, 5 [September/October 2007]).

13. Wang is part of a vast pyramid of technocratic model-makers. At the top is the hydroengineer Hu. One step below him is a politburo of former engineers and scientists. Under them are a broad network of academic policy-makers in universities, institutes, and research academies. They, in turn, can call upon an army of professors, doctors, postgrads, and other researchers. In the past thirty years, China’s universities have churned out 240,000 PhD’s, 1.9 million master’s graduates, and 14.1 million bachelor’s degrees. Since 1995, there has been a fourfold increase in science and engineering degrees, with the latter total in China now greater than that in the U.S. and Japan. The number of students taking science or engineering degrees in China each year climbed from 115,000 in 1995 to more than 672,000 in 2004, putting the country ahead of the United States and Japan; about two-thirds of the Chinese degrees were in engineering. In 2007, Chinese scientists accounted for 32,000, or almost one-quarter, of the 142,000 foreign students receiving PhD’s in the United States, more than any other country except India, which accounted for one-third. China’s share of the world’s published scientific articles soared from 0.2 percent in 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2006, when it overtook Japan for the first time (Declan Butler, “China: The Great Contender,” Nature, July 24, 2008). China’s ministry of science and technology has reported that 5 percent of the nation’s total investment in science is being spent on basic research, according to Bruce Alberts, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. By comparison, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has reported that 17.5 percent of the U.S. total investment in science was being spent on basic research in 2007 (Bruce Alberts, “Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Sees Science as a Key to Development,” Science, October 17, 2008).

14. Project of Comprehensive Development and Construction of Tangshan Caofeidian Eco-City, June 13, 2008, Tangshan government website ( www.tangshan.gov.cn/xiangmu.php?id=2278).

15. This upgrade is a major reason for China’s success in increasing energy efficiency by about 20 percent, and reducing pollution by 10 percent between 2005 and 2010.

16. “China’s Energy Consumption per Unit of GDP Is 3–8 Times Higher Than in OECD Countries” (World Bank Mid-term Evaluation of China’s 11th Five-Year Plan, February 12, 2009). Chinese scientists say this is only partly because of inefficiencies. A bigger reason is the structure of China’s economy, which is a global base of labor- and energy-intensive industries (interview with Wang Shudong of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics).

17. A factory official told visiting journalists in 2008 that the Shougang plant in west Beijing belched out a tenth of the particulate matter in the city’s air (Jonathan Watts, “Beijing Goes for Green with Olympic Clean-up,” Guardian, July 19, 2008).

18. In 2001, the city had 251 “blue sky” days, the water quality of the Liao and Hun rivers was at the worst level (five), and green cover was 29 percent. By 2007, the number of “blue sky” days had risen to 323, the water quality of the Hun improved to level four, and urban greenbelt coverage was over 38 percent. Industrial pollutant discharge had fallen by more than 21 percent since 2002 (data from Shenyang Environmental Protection Bureau).

19. In three years, the city destroyed over 3,000 chimneys and 1,200 boilers.

20. Municipal planners have adopted his designs at Qiaoyuan Park in Tianjin, Tiazhou in Zhejiang, Qinhuangdao in Hebei, and Zongshan in Guangdong.

21. Much of the urban landscape is a legacy of Mao-era reliance on a tiny number of Soviet designs and a thoughtless rush of development in the 1980s and 1990s. The construction vice minister, Qiu Baoxing, has lamented the fact that almost all of China’s cities look the same. Orthogonal buildings, white-tiled walls, and blue-tinted windows (Jonathan Watts, “Minister Rails at China, Land of a Thousand Identical Cities,” Guardian, June 12, 2007).

22. Because they ate seeds, sparrows were considered one of the four pests during the Great Leap Forward (the other three were flies, mosquitoes, and rats). People were encouraged to wipe them out by making so much noise with pots, pans, and fireworks that the birds were too afraid to land and died of exhaustion.

23. Of the 40 billion square meters of urban buildings, 95 percent are classified as high energy consumers (Pan Jiahua, “Building a Frugal Society,” China Dialogue, November 5, 2007).