26. In Xinjiang, the pattern of warming and drying is particularly complex. While overall ice cover has declined dramatically, a few glaciers have continued to expand. Much of western China appears to be getting moister. Traditional temperature patterns may be inverting. Winters are warming faster than summers. While the highest, coldest places are melting, the lowest, hottest areas appear to be cooling and growing wetter. Deserts are getting more rain. Some scientists in Xinjiang believe the deserts may be an ally in the battle against climate change. They found that the alkaline ground gulps more carbon dioxide at night than temperate forests. Similar results in the U.S. led some to believe that deserts might soak up half the amount of carbon currently emitted by the burning of fossil fuels. Similar findings have come from studies in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, where the sand soaks up about the same amount of CO2 per square meter as in some temperate forests. If confirmed, this would be good news because almost a third of the earth’s land surface is desert (Richard Stone, “Have Desert Researchers Discovered a Hidden Loop in the Carbon Cycle?”
27. According to the World Resources Institute’s history of CO2 emissions since 1900, China is third behind the U.S. and Russia. http://www.guard-ian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/co2-emissions- historical. Earlier starting dates also put China behind the UK and other developed nations.
28. See ch. 11, n. 3 (Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” in Edmonds [ed.],
29. Xie Yan of the Wildlife Conservation Society is extremely concerned about the impact of global warming on orchids and other species because rare species are concentrated in such small bands of land that they cannot easily migrate for survival. “I think there will be big problems caused by global warming. Many species are very sensitive to temperature, such as amphibians. They are narrowly distributed. If the existing nature reserve is not suitable anymore, they could go extinct. Some plants only have 100 or so in some locations. Many are critically endangered. Orchids are extremely threatened” (interview with author).
30. Nomads were blamed by Han settlers for degrading land they and their ancestors had lived on sustainably for centuries. Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uighurs were targets of resettlement programs. Climate change was only part of the reason.
31. Since the completion of a 4,200-kilometer pipeline from the Lunnan field in the Tarim basin to Shanghai in 2004, Xinjiang has been China’s biggest supplier of natural gas. Several other vast pipelines have been built or are under construction that will link central Asia’s oil and gas fields with the factories and cities on China’s eastern seaboard. Engineers have built roads to carry oil through the Taklimakan, a desert where the dunes encroach so rapidly that guards have to be posted every 5 kilometers to maintain the 400-kilometer rose-willow defense line against the sands.
32. More ambitious still, a new Silk Road is under construction. Asia Highway One, as the modern version is prosaically called, will link Urumqi with Istanbul, passing through the resource-rich nations of Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Political ties are being strengthened through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups China, Russia, and central Asian states that together control a quarter of the world’s oil supplies.
33. The share value passed $1 trillion soon after the firm listed in 2007.
34. Introduction to Urumqi, Frommer’s (www.frommers.com).
35. During holiday peaks, their sprinklers and snow machines use enough water every day to fill more than twenty Olympic swimming pools. (Josh Chin and Zachary Slobig, “Xinjiang’s Melting Glaciers,”
36. At U-Cang, in the north of the city, work is under way on an “ecological park” aimed at nurturing a more sustainable lifestyle among residents. All municipal flowerbeds, lawns, and hedgerows are doused with treated waste-water. The skies are also clearer now that the huge coal-fired power plants have been ordered to wash their coal before burning it. Our driver Wu told us that the smoke from their chimneys has changed from black to white. See also Jonathan Watts, “China Plans 59 Reservoirs to Collect Meltwater from Its Shrinking Glaciers,”
37. The state media continues to give prominent coverage to her speeches. Her critics are marginalized. The best known of them is Dai Qing, who accuses Qian of irresponsibility for saying, “The coming generations are bound to have greater intelligence than we do? Let’s trust their ability to solve their problems” (Dai Qing,
38. The overseas Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer often linked environmental stress to ethnic tension as in this interview comment: “Han Chinese are brought in to water down our population … When the Chinese Communist Party first occupied us in 1949, only 2 per cent of the population was Han Chinese. Now, they number 60 per cent. There is also widespread environmental damage. Three lakes have dried up, our natural resources are exploited, and thus, the environment is disturbed too. In the early days Uighurs were able to work in agriculture and earn a living. Now, they no longer have this opportunity because so many Han Chinese have arrived. People resist such suppression” (Florian Godovits, “China’s Female ‘Public Enemy Number One’ on the State of China’s Muslim Uighurs,”
39. On July 5, 2009, decapitations, knifings, and beatings left 197 dead and 1,721 injured, according to government figures. The vast majority of the victims were Han. Uighur exile groups claim the toll is higher and includes more minority victims, but foreign reporters who were given relatively free access to Urumqi were unable to find evidence that large numbers of Uighurs were killed.
40. She cited the specific case of the Miyun Reservoir near Beijing, which had been designed for an annual runoff of 1.4 billion cubic meters of water, but had actually received just 500 million cubic meters.
41. According to government figures, Xinjiang now has 1.4 million hectares of farmland, accounting for 3.3 percent of the national total. Although much of it is used for cotton, the area is also famous for melons and other fruit.
42. Plans for expansion concentrated primarily on San San, Turpan, and Harmi (“Expert Says Xinjiang Is the Land of Opportunity for Coal Liquification Projects,”
13. Science versus Math: Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning
1. Since then, he has had to work harder to prove himself than his peers at more prestigious institutions. More than thirty years on, that effort is finally paying off. Li is now credited internationally for leading the team that discovered ultraviolet Raman spectroscopy technology, a groundbreaking tool for analyzing energy conversion; and for ultradeep desulfurization techniques that dramatically reduce the amount of sulfur emitted in the combustion of diesel. His more recent research on catalysis and solar energy has propelled him to a leading position in the clean- energy field in China.
2. China is pushing ahead with key “clean coal” technologies related to the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle and Carbon Capture and Storage (IGCC plus CSS), a method which converts coal to nonpolluting synthetic gas.
3. The government’s goal is to increase the share of the national budget devoted to science and technology to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, up from 1.4 percent in 2006. If achieved, this share would rank as one of the best in the world.
4. Containing 16 billion barrels of oil.
5. This figure was cited by Li Xiaoqiang, vice chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, in a speech on September 7, 2006, at Dalian’s “summer Davos” meeting. But it may be an underestimate. The International Energy Agency in its
6. For example, Jeffrey Sachs, founder of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University, who argued in the 2007 Reith Lectures that the best hope for the world was for China to develop or borrow technologies to sequestrate, i.e., bury, carbon from coal.
7. In high concentrations, carbon dioxide can be lethal. In 1986, it bubbled up in Lake Nyos, Cameroon, and
