Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

Eco-city plans in China were not going well. The most ambitious at Dongtan near Shanghai, which was designed by the British architectural firm Arup, had ground to a halt several years earlier. 11The Tianjin project had a greater chance of success because it was being run and funded by the central government. China’s leaders had invested a great deal of political capital in the project. When Premier Wen Jiabao visited the site, he expressed hope that it would be “practical, replicable, and scalable.”

More important, it needed to be genuine. If the eco-label at Tianjin proved to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick to sell up-market real estate, it would quickly become an environmental cul-de-sac. If, on the other hand, it could reach stringent renewable energy, waste recycling, and carbon goals, there was a chance it could be followed by others among the 400 new similar-sized communities that are due to spring up across China over the next twenty years. 12

On the way out, we passed a scale replica of the project’s first phase, a community for 85,000 people. Wang and the rest of his team had until the end of 2010 to turn the model into reality.

“Scientific Development” is about planning the planned economy better, about moving from quantity to quality, about building a new smart model for growth. The country is staking its environmental future on design and technology. This is where the government is playing to its modern strengths. Along with a stronger army and economy, the Communist Party has been trying to build academic institutions capable of matching the West in the “soft power” battleground of thought. 13

By allying this brainpower with the nation’s growing financial muscle, the engineers in the politburo hope to solve the problems of growth with more growth and the problems of science with better science. In this way of thinking, man is not the problem. He is the solution. Everything else—Nature, God, Fate—can be outsmarted. There is no need to step back or slow down. To cope with the multiples of a growing population, rising wealth, and increasing consumption, China needs to reinvent itself. Essentially the challenge is to solve a math problem with science.

The scale of the task was evident as I drove north following the coast of the Bohai Sea, past stacks of containers, more construction sites, the foundations of the “GreenGen” coal-gasification center, a thermal power plant, and then desolate tidal flats and wetlands as far as the eye could see. Soon after crossing the border with Hebei, the land dried and firmed, the road widened, and we saw the telltale construction of another breathtakingly enormous development zone. Five years ago, Caofeidian was a small, sparsely populated island surrounded by tidal flats. Today, it is China’s most vast reclamation project. By the end of 2010, the government plans to make this area a model of “industrial ecology” with 300,000 workers, the country’s largest coal port, the biggest steel facilities, and a giant petrochemical processing plant. 14China already has ten of the world’s twenty biggest ports. Caofeidian would be another. It would be a base for heavy-industry giants, such as the Huadian power company, PetroChina, and Capital Steel, which previously had plants near heavily populated cities. By relocating and upgrading the furnaces and smokestacks, the government is cleaning up the air and improving efficiency. 15The latter is essential. China’s energy consumption is surging faster than that of almost any other country, but much of it is wasted. For every dollar of economic activity, the country needs three to eight times more energy than developed nations. 16

The roads were filled with bulldozers and trucks. Pile drivers, pumps, and ketouji cut busy silhouettes against the flat, gray horizon. Tens of thousands of laborers were at work on a new home for Shougang, or Capital Iron and Steel, formerly Beijing’s biggest polluter. 17At the sea’s edge were newly completed berths for a giant container and coal port. Most of the planned buildings were still only models in the local exhibition center. The building housed so many scale displays of new cities, factories, ports, residential blocks, office districts, and oil facilities that it resembled a giant toy shop. Even if only half of the plans were realized, this stretch of land was certain to be one of the planet’s mightiest powerhouses. If the entire project was completed, the 50 square kilometers of Caofeidian would have an industrial output bigger than many countries in the world. The scale of ambition was enormous. But, for me, this was no longer mind-boggling; huge had become the norm.

On a recent visit to London I had a strange sensation as I walked across Waterloo footbridge. The metropolis I had been raised in suddenly felt like a village. St. Paul’s Cathedral, so magnificent in my memory, seemed to have shrunk. In scale and significance, it looked puny in comparison with Beijing’s CCTV’s “Big Trousers” building, the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, and the “Egg” Grand National Theater.

Visions through time are telescopic. My British past seemed miniaturized, smaller than everything I saw from my Beijing window. But also the Chinese future was magnifying the present. Perhaps this was because I had seen so many tiny models of planned Chinese developments scaled up into giant industrial complexes, office blocks, or residential high-rises. A few years ago, almost every big city in China had its own Mini-Me: a huge model showing every completed and planned building in it. In Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput as I looked down at these dense clusters of little gray plastic buildings conceived by architects and urban planners. Today I find myself staring up at those same buildings, towering above me in steel and glass like grown-up children: outwardly mature but still somehow vulnerable.

Similarly with China’s environment, it is easy to lose perspective. On the one hand, the country is taking bigger strides to develop renewable energy than any other nation. But on the other, the benefits are being outweighed by an energy demand that is growing even faster. Like Gulliver, a handful of huge, high-profile, low-carbon projects are being swamped by millions of tiny, barely registered, high-carbon habits. To overcome this, it will not be enough to throw up buildings; lifestyles will have to be redesigned.

We moved inland on the overnight train to the city of Shenyang, the clunky buckle on the northeast rust belt. The provincial capital of Liaoning was formerly the center of the Manchu empire. When the Japanese created the Manchukuo puppet state in 1932, the colonial administration turned Shenyang into an industrial base, which it has remained ever since. In the 1970s, it was one of China’s three biggest economic powerhouses, along with Shanghai and Tianjin, but the city’s prestige declined in the following decades along with the fortunes of many state-owned heavy industries.

When I first visited in 2003, it was Grimsville: dirty, poor, and enveloped in one of the country’s filthiest hazes. Locals recalled the sky being so full of soot and sulfur that the birds turned black and clothes would fall apart because of constant scrubbing that never managed to remove the grime. To protect their lungs, many wore surgical masks when they ventured outside.

Today, however, Shenyang boasts one of the most improved environments in China. 18In 2004, it was designated a model city for environmental protection by the China State Environmental Protection Administration. That such a notoriously dirty industrial center could clean up its act gave hope to a nation that the peak of pollution might have passed.

The improvement in air quality has been achieved largely through a mass dechimneyfication campaign. From 2003, the authorities began tearing down smokestacks at the rate of three per day. 19After practically wiping out the city’s small 2–3 ton boilers, the chimney cullers have raised their aim to the 10-tonners. Locals marveled at the change in the skyline as clusters of small stacks were torn down and replaced by fewer, taller, cleaner, more efficient ones that belched their pollution higher into the atmosphere, where it could be dispersed away from the population centers.