Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

24. “China’s buildings are roughly two and a half times less energy efficient than those in Germany. Furthermore, newly urbanised Chinese, who use air conditioners, televisions, refrigerators, consume about three and half times more energy than do their rural counterparts” (Economy, “The Great Leap Backward?”). Regulations are often ignored or geared toward boosting the economy rather than minimizing consumption of scarce resources. There are few mechanisms to check whether people are following the rules. Wang Xuejun, a professor at Peking University’s College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, spelled out the challenges to me in an e-mail exchange: (1) lack of funds for enterprises to improve their energy efficiency; (2) lack of new techniques and experts in energy efficiency improvement; (3) cheap energy makes energy saving less cost efficient; (4) lack of policy incentives such as tax reduction and exemption; (5) improper statistical and reporting systems for energy consumption.

25. Shenyang aims to have 35 percent of households using solar power for water heating by 2015, compared with the national target of 20 percent, according to Wang. It will be tough to achieve. Reaching that goal will require the installation of more than 500,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels. Shenyang currently lags the national average with just 6.3 percent coverage of households.

26. For heating purposes, northern China is defined as everything north of the Yangtze River, much to the annoyance of people in Shanghai who miss out on the benefits of subsidized central heating.

27. Though not consistently. Several administrations have pursued policies to keep gasoline prices low. Even so, energy prices are not capped as they have been in China.

28. On my five visits to Pyongyang since 2002, I have never failed to be struck by the gloom inside buildings and the darkness outside at night. No capital in the world is better for stargazing.

29. The situation was worsened by largely self-imposed isolation, friction with the outside world, and an overemphasis on military spending.

30. Though perhaps not for much longer: Xinhua/NBS, “China’s Rural Population Shrinks to 56 Per Cent of Total,” October 22, 2007.

31. The Huangbaiyu design is a collaborative work by William McDonough, Tongji University, the Benxi Design Institute, and the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. See also Mary-Anne Toy, “Green Dream Vanishes in Puff of Reality,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2006.

32. Richard Spencer, “Man Faces Death for Ant Scam,” Daily Telegraph, February 16, 2007.

33. In 2008, 360 out of 366 days were under level II on the national pollution index, which means less than 100 parts per million of particulate matter in the air. By Chinese standards this is great. But even Dalian would fail to meet the World Health Organization’s benchmark of 50 parts per million for almost half the year.

34. Bo later became China’s commerce minister and mayor of Chongqing Municipality.

35. In 2007, the per capita GDP was 51,000 yuan. Dalian regularly tops polls of China’s most desirable city in which to live.

36. Shanghai Automotive is working on mass-producing 100 percent electric cars, but they will need a recharging infrastructure that will not be in place until at least 2030. In the interim, China has moved into the hybrid-car field. The Shenzhen-based company BYD—which stands for Build Your Dreams—has built the world’s first mass-produced, plug-in hybrid sedan, the F3DM. The car has a gasoline engine that kicks in above 60 kph; up to that point, it runs completely on electricity.

37. Although China plans to build thirty-one nuclear plants by 2020 (Associated Press, “China Begins Building New Nuclear Plant, First in Country’s Northeast,” August 18, 2007), Chinese energy specialists believe that nuclear power can have only limited use because the country lacks large supplies of uranium and does not want to be too dependent on imports for power. Worldwide, nuclear power cannot solve the earth’s energy problems. Nathan Lewis estimates that we would have to build a new nuclear fission reactor every two days for fifty years to meet humanity’s demand for power. But even if that were possible, there wouldn’t be enough uranium on the planet to fuel them all (Nathan Lewis, “Powering the Planet,” California Institute of Technology, 2007).

1. In 2007, Shandong’s population stood at 96.37 million (China National Bureau of Statistics). The province is home to the country’s biggest cement maker, its second-largest oil field, its third-biggest reserve of coal, and its leading brewer of beer.

2. National Statistical Yearbook, 2006 (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2006).

3. The province was a gateway to the creative and destructive influence of the outside world. At the low point of Chinese power at the end of the nineteenth century, the German navy made Qingdao their base. The failed Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence began in Shandong in 1899. This was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting against Japanese troops in the 1930s and 1940s.

4. This concept is covered in more detail in Ch. 3.

5. The thirteen-year, $3.1 billion program will research dozens of varieties of GM rice, maize, soy, and wheat, according to a spokesperson for the ministry of agriculture. The initiative involves sixty-four projects on GM rice, maize, wheat, and soybean, and the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science will be involved mainly in the project’s downstream work, including genetic transformation and evaluation of the performance of the transgenic plants in biosafety greenhouses and the field, according to Huixia Wu, CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) wheat transformation specialist (cited in Science magazine, September 5, 2008).

6. The father of China’s GM rice program, Professor Zhu Zhen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told me this (Jonathan Watts, “Illicit Rice Trade Endangers Biotech Barriers,” Guardian, June 14, 2005).

7. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 80.

8. Up until the 1960s, for every increase in the human population there was a corresponding expansion in the area of arable land under cultivation. But after that, all the gains in yield came from the green revolution (Joel Cohen, speaking at the Nature Conservancy conference ConEx in Vancouver, BC, 2008).

9. Construction accounted for more than half of the 25,000 square kilometers of cultivated land lost in the 1990s. Remote-sensing surveys show that China’s cultivated land area fell from 1,307,400 square kilometers in 1991 to 1,282,400 square kilometers in 2000—from 1.8 mu (0.0012 square kilometer) per head to 1.5 mu (0.0010 square kilometer) per head. Construction accounted for 56.6 percent of the decrease, 21 percent of land was forested, 16 percent was flooded, and 4 percent became grassland.

10. Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (MIT Press, 2008).

11. Italy was the only other country to adopt it, but not on the same scale (interview with Zhang Qiwen).

12. It is too cold for them north of Shenyang, too hot for them south of the Yangtze (interview with Zhang Qiwen).

13. China now has 7 million hectares of artificial forest—the most in the world—almost a third of which are poplar 107 and 108. China claims greater progress in afforestation than any other country in the world, yet its “success” is based largely on these species and similar “economic forests” of eucalyptus in the south.

14. In the gardens of the Forbidden City in Beijing stand four ancient junipers which were repeatedly split in the middle and the wounds were covered in burlap, then tightly bound in oilcloth so that the base of the trunk split in two parts that met higher up the trunk. The intended shape is the character for “person.” Even centuries ago, horticulturalists were shaping nature in man’s image.