1949: Only socialism could save China
1979: Only capitalism could save China
1989: Only China could save socialism
2009: Only China could save capitalism
It has been more than thirty years since I prayed for China. During that time, the country’s population has surged to over a billion and its economy has jumped far past that of the UK. The globe has not stopped turning, but the comfortable world order I knew as a child has indeed been shaken off its axis.
A new power is emerging in Beijing that represents both the apotheosis of human development and the folly of continuing with global business as usual. As I have shown in these pages, the planet’s problems were not made in China, but they are sliding past the point of no return here.
Mankind’s capacity to consume has reached a crescendo. There has never been more of us on the planet. Our species has never lived longer. Our footprint has never spread wider.1 The average human today burns more carbon, travels farther, and eats far more than any of our ancestors. A billion people in the rich nations of Europe, the United States, Japan, and South Korea have taken the world to the brink with their unsustainable consumption. Two billion more in emerging economies like India, Brazil, and Indonesia are pressing up from behind. In between is the Middle Kingdom, threatening to tip us all over the edge with a population that is now twice as big as that of the entire world in 1750.
It is a tough place to be at an extremely challenging time. Mankind is growing old. The generation born at the historical apex of human fertility in the late 1960s is now hitting middle age. The global population is growing at half the speed it once was. That is an opportunity and a risk. In the long term, the slowdown will be good news for the environment, but during the next twenty or thirty years it adds a demographic challenge to the ecological crisis. Once the current peak-generation era passes, there will be fewer working-age adults to support more elderly in rich nations and more children in poor countries. As a species, we are about to pass our prime.
Our planet too seems to be aging. On the road, I have seen how the earth’s lungs—the forests—have been decimated; its skin—the soil—is getting drier and more reliant on chemicals; the pressure on the earth’s arteries— the rivers—is higher than ever, owing to blocking dams and clogging pollution. Our energy reserves—coal and oil— are being run down faster than ever. Temperatures are less predictable, and there are more and more unhealthy growths in lakes and oceans. Many nations show some of these symptoms. But they are all apparent in China, where the impacts of development are accumulated, amplified, and accelerated.
Historians may well look back on China and Britain as bookends on the most spectacular and unsustainable passage of development that humanity has experienced. The model of carbon-fueled, capital-driven economic growth probably seemed a brilliant idea when it started in my country in the late eighteenth century. But that was one relatively small nation in a world that was, at the time, home to fewer than a billion people. Since then, the same model has expanded across the globe with barely any consideration for the finiteness of the earth’s resources. Like a game of pass-the-parcel, rich countries have “outsourced” the accumulated impact of unsustainable growth to faraway lands and future generations. China currently holds the unpleasant consequences. Not surprisingly, it does not want the music to stop. But it may not have a choice.
An alarming number of the country’s problems are spreading across borders to become a global security concern. Nationalism is rising as the environment declines. Dust storms in Japan, deforestation in Russia, and the increased extraction of oil from Canada’s tar sands can all be traced back to China. With the population expected to swell by almost 200 million by 2030, resources will come under increasing demographic pressure. Water shortages and pollution are already causing unease in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Southeast Asia. If rivers are diverted away from India, there is a very real risk of a conflict. Unless China kicks its coal habit, scientists say greenhouse emissions will surge, global temperatures will rise, and climate change will create millions more eco-migrants and food supply instability. It is no coincidence that the West suddenly seems more concerned with Beijing’s environmental performance than its governance or human rights record.2
Fear is not the only reason for this attention. There is also hope that China is modernizing so quickly that it might find a sustainable route up the economic value chain. Compared with the 1970s, China and the developed world have far more in common. Our economies are more mutually dependent. Our tastes are converging. Many of us watch the same DVDs. We drink the same coffee. We eat the same junk food. This brings with it a temptation to assume that as in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, a rise in incomes will eventually bring an improvement in the environment. Under this optimistic scenario, the world’s biggest population is now clambering over the hump of the dirtiest, most wasteful phase of economic development. Once China manages to overcome that obstacle, our species can breathe easy. The heavy lifting will have been done. Other developing nations will be able to follow. After the global population peaks, probably around 2040 to 2050, the pressure on the environment should relent.
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
