Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

This was already being done in the institute’s labs, but the processes were decades away from being commercially viable. 8China’s best short-term hope for coal was to improve its efficiency through conversion to natural gas or methanol. Strategic goals were at play too. As Madame Qian had told me earlier, the government wanted to tap Xinjiang’s massive coal reserves. This rich vein of fossil fuels had been left underground because of the cost of transporting heavy coal 3,000 kilometers to the factories on the coast. But if the coal could be converted to gas, it could flow cheaply along the west-east pipelines. This would be more efficient, but it could hardly be called clean energy.

I asked Li if he believed global warming was a man-made phenomenon. “The climate has changed. My grandfather told me that his grandfather had told him that our home in northern China used to be a forest. That made a big impact on me. Now our home is a desert,” he said. “I haven’t personally researched the causes so I don’t have firm beliefs, but Nobel scientists say carbon is responsible and I trust them. Even though I am not really a hundred percent convinced, I think mankind needs to err on the side of caution by trying to reduce greenhouse gases.”

Again, this was echoed by Minister Wan: “Human activities definitely have an impact on the climate, but the question is how much of an impact. That requires scientific research,” he told me. “There are different views about climate change. My role is to create an environment in which scientists can discuss this. Science requires democracy.”

As an affected nation and a responsible member of the world community, he said China has to take precautionary action immediately. “The goal is to change lifestyles and modes of production, so we cannot wait for the research findings to come out before we act.”

This opened up the business opportunity of a generation. China moved into the clean technology sector at a characteristically rapid speed. From 2005 until 2009, the capacity of wind power generation doubled every year. Car and battery makers promised to outstrip their U.S., Japanese, and European rivals in the race to mass-produce electric and hybrid cars. Plans were unveiled for a more efficient “smart grid” to distribute electricity. Already the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter of photovoltaic panels, China launched a program to install millions of solar heaters and mulled feed-in tariff incentives to further promote solar power. The world’s first solar billionaire, Shi Zhengrong, the founder and CEO ofA Suntech, had previously told me he expected his company to grow into a global energy giant like BP or Shell.

But there was a danger of moving too far, too fast. Low-carbon economic zones sprang up across the country. Municipalities quickly realized they could reinvent themselves and secure investment by talking the language of “eco,” “green” and “environmentally friendly.”

The northeast needed environmental healing and economic stimulation more than almost anywhere else in China. I was touring Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning, the provinces that formed the rusted upper lip of the Bohai Sea. In the era of a command economy, this had been the channel from the industrial blacklands of the northeast to the most polluted sea in China. A decade after the collapse of many old state-owned factories, the sprawling cities and mining villages of this region were trying to reinvent themselves as clean-tech centers and environmental pioneers. The result was part green makeover, part science fiction.

The journey had started in Tianjin, China’s third-biggest city and the world’s fifth-biggest port. Its name, which means Heavenly Ford, dates back to 1404, when it was still a small trading post. Now a megacity, its reputation was anything but celestial. On the way, my assistant told me a joke. “An enemy bomber is on a mission to blow up Tianjin. He flies across the Bohai Sea but, when he reaches the city, he turns the plane around and returns without dropping a bomb. ‘What are you doing?’ ask his commanders on the radio. The pilot replies: ‘We don’t need to waste our explosives. It looks like someone has already destroyed it.’”

Tianjin was still unlikely to be marketing itself as China’s premier honeymoon destination, but the city was modernizing impressively. The first surprise was the sleek high-speed train from Beijing that sped along the rails at 335 kilometers per hour, faster than any train I had ever been on in the UK. Advertisements for turbine manufacturers indicated the city’s growing role in the wind energy sector, which had doubled in size for five years in a row mostly by putting up turbines along the old Silk Road. Tianjin’s ambitions were grander still. It wanted to create a new model eco-city.

I was on my way to a former dump site on the shore of the most polluted sea in China, where the technocratic governments of China and Singapore were pooling expertise and finance to build a new, green urban community of 350,000 people. Due for completion in 2020, it was touted as the most environmentally friendly city in China and an example for developing nations across the planet.

The Tianjin Binhai New Area was more than an hour’s drive from the station. We had trouble finding it. The area was not well enough established to merit proper signposts. For most of the previous fifty years, the alkali-polluted flats had been an outlet for industrial discharge pipes. In the middle of that morose expanse we found bulldozers clearing a stretch of land. And in the middle of that was a single, lonely, bright-orange exhibition center, where I went to meet one of the architects behind the project.

Wang Meng was in an office filled with models: balsa-wood shopping malls, Perspex factories, and paper skyscrapers. His job was to scale them up to full size. The young bespectacled planner said it was a childhood dream come true.

“Model making was my hobby. I loved it so much that I used to enter competitions. One year I came fifth out of the whole of Tianjin city with a plane powered by a rubber band. It flew for a minute and a half.”

Twenty years on, he was attempting to make a rather more ambitious project fly with alternative energy. The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City was being billed as a model metropolis, a standard setter that would help the fast-urbanizing nation turn from gray to green. Within ten years it was supposed to get up to 20 percent of its power from renewable sources. Instead of winding up rubber bands, Wang would tap the spinning rotors of wind farms and the geothermal heat contained in the earth. 9Domestic water use would be kept below 120 liters per person per day, half supplied by rain capture and recycled gray water.

For optimum energy efficiency, every building was be insulated, double glazed, and made entirely of materials that reach the government’s green standards. More than 60 percent of all waste was supposed to be recycled. To get car journeys down by 90 percent, a light railway would pass near to every home, and communities would be zoned to ensure everyone could walk to shops, schools, and clinics. It would be greener than almost any other city in China, with protected areas for wild grasses, such as bulrush, hairy uraria, and wild chrysanthemum, and wetland birds, including purple herons, flying snipes, and black-winged stilts. Overall, there would be an average 12 square meters of parkland, grassland, or wetland for each resident. Environmental health would be further enhanced by an on-site water treatment plant to ensure that all tap water was potable, by free sports facilities, and by a commitment to keep particulate matter in the air below 100 parts per cubic meter for more than four out of every five days. That, at least, was the plan.

But Wang, the deputy director of the construction bureau, admitted it would be tough to build a green city the size of Bristol in a single decade. It was not the scale that bothered him. Like many Chinese urban planners, Wang had been playing a real-life version of SimCity, the virtual megalopolis building game, for many years. 10But the environmental goals were new. And he was not sure if they could be achieved.