Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

This is not just wishful thinking. Look and you can find positive signs that, perhaps, just perhaps, China is emerging from the mire. Compared to the past, Beijing is no longer a smoggy construction site. There are fewer cranes and more “blue-sky” days. In Henan and Anhui, the notorious Huai River basin has improved albeit only from an appalling low. Dalian and Hangzhou are becoming as clean and modern as any city in the West. Even Tianjin and Shenyang are smartening up. Nationwide, there are tentative indications that pollution may be approaching a peak, though for the moment perhaps only in some forms and in some areas.

Attitudes are also changing. At China’s grass roots, there is a hunger for new ideals to replace the grim materialism of the recent thirty years. The thousands of protests against chemical plants and waste incinerators show the extent of concern about environmental health. If China could blaze a new low-carbon trail of sustainability and energy security, the government could win the lasting affection of young nationalists who are desperate for their country to secure international respect.

That is still a long way off, but a space has opened up with the retirement of the Great Leap Forward generation of scientists and policymakers such as “Mother Poplar” Zhang Qiwen, the Three Gorges Dam builder Madame Qian Zhengying, and General Guo Kai, who calculated how many nuclear bombs would be needed to blast a channel through the Himalayas. Their successors are better educated, more focused on detail, and—thanks to pollution protests and commodity inflation—acutely aware of the consequences of ignoring the environment. Many challenge the megaprojects conceived in the past, though that era is far from over.

A debate is under way in Zhongnanhai, the center of power in Beijing, about the future course of development. It divides along political fault lines: wealthy coastal regions that are moving up the value chain line up against poor western provinces that are the destination for insourced dirty industry; the privileged party elite who run power companies challenge merit-based technocrats who have experienced the consequences of untrammeled growth; and advocates of pollute-now-clean-up-later market solutions tussle with those who call for tighter regulations and increased state intervention. President Hu’s Scientific Outlook on Development attempts to bind all these strands together with a promise of sustainable green growth.

China’s leaders are proving more adept and ambitious than many of their overseas counterparts in pursuing the opportunities of low-carbon technology, which they see as a new driver of economic expansion and national power. If their most ambitious plans are realized, Gansu’s deserts will one day be filled with solar panels, the Silk Road will be lined with wind farms, cities will throng with electric-powered public transport, and bodies of water throughout the country will be divided up into fields of harvestable algae. It is impressive, inspiring stuff. Not for the first time, the country is stirring up extremes of hope and despair. With the government promising enough investment in renewable energy to overtake Europe by 2020, the world’s biggest emitter is suddenly being hailed as a budding eco-power. Red China, we are told, is not going to destroy us after all; Green China is going to save us.

The true story is more complicated. Few would begrudge China a savior’s status if it could supply the world with affordable clean technologies and set a more sustainable model of development. The government is trying to do just that, but at the same time it is also following many of the worst examples of the old development model, and in some cases making them worse. Like governments across the globe, Beijing’s leaders focus on technology and growth rather than ecology and sustainability, which means many problems are just pushed out of sight. The skies above Beijing have become bluer at the expense of the rural areas where factories have been relocated. Environmental problems are insourced to marginal land, reclaimed tidal flats, and poorer western regions. “Clean” hydropower has attracted dirty energy-intensive industries into pristine valleys. Reservoirs of garbage are filling up as the national appetite for resources swells. Despite the surge in renewable energy supplies, China is more dependent on coal than ever. As well as mining record amounts of the fuel, it has also become a net importer.

Rhetorically, “Scientific Development” sounds a little less Mao and a little more Tao but in practice, it is another attempt to manufacture a solution to China’s problems. Political engineers rather than natural scientists call the shots. Their approach focuses on the acute environmental symptoms of pollution and energy inefficiency. Meanwhile, they often neglect the chronic problems of resource depletion, heavy-metal accumulation in the soil, and the rising clouds of carbon in the air. The overall trend is that of a dozen small, dirty chimneys being replaced by a single towering smokestack. The result is that local pollution improves but more emissions than ever are pumped into the global atmosphere. China’s greenhouse gas output will more than double between 2005 and 2020, despite the government’s promise to reduce the carbon intensity of the economy by more than 40 percent.

Instead of constraining demand for natural resources, the government puts more effort into increasing supply. At times its measures appear reckless, even desperate. How else to see the building of dams near seismic fault lines, the development of coal liquefaction facilities, the expansion of genetically modified crops, and the expensive ecological gamble of the South-North Water Diversion Project? There is clearly a strong willingness to experiment, despite frequent failures. Almost none of the eco-cities, eco-villages, eco-cars, and even eco-toilets I have seen are operating successfully on a commercial basis. Several are a disaster. But who would bet against China leading the way in future global experiments in cloud whitening, ocean fertilizing, and genetic modification?

Hopes for a green future are premature. Fears of a red past seem outdated. If any single color predominates in today’s China, it is the gray of smoke and ash and concrete, of horizon-blurring smog, of law-obscuring vagueness, and of color-stifling monotony. More species are dying out, more forests are emptying, fish stocks are declining, water shortages are growing more severe, deserts are encroaching on cities, glaciers are shrinking, and the climate is becoming more hostile. Countless millions die each year of environment-related disease. Yet the government is choosing farm animals over wildlife, monoculture over biodiversity, concrete over earth, and weather modification over truly ambitious moves to tackle global warming.

It is difficult to be dispassionate, still harder to claim the truth. Different baselines clearly produce very different expectations. Amid the smog, dust, and algae, I have felt at times that China portends an environmental apocalypse. Yet, more often that not, local people tell me, “Life is getting better.” That is probably the refrain I have heard more than any other during the past seven years, often prompting me to wonder which was coloring perceptions more: my western, liberal, middle-aged prejudices or the communist propaganda of the Chinese government.

Whatever the political label, I sympathize with President Hu and Premier Wen. Environmental triage is particularly difficult in China, which can be afflicted by drought, floods, dust storms, and pollution disasters in a single week. That is not the only reason this is no ordinary developing nation. China is a 3,000-year-old civilization in the body of an industrial teenager; a mega-rich, dirt-poor, overpopulated, underresourced, ethnically diverse mass of humanity that is going through several stages of development simultaneously; a coal-addicted powerhouse attempting to pioneer new energy technologies, and a communist-led, capitalist-funded economic giant traveling at unprecedented speed. If that is not enough of a challenge, environmental pressures have forced the leadership to attempt something unprecedented in the world’s history: to reengineer an economy before it has finished industrializing.