Sifting myths from mountains on the long green march

China is so huge in every respect that its environmental and social challenges can easily seem like insurmountable mountains - not just for the country itself, but the whole world. Yet it would be a mistake to accept all the well-aired myths of inevitable doom - and much more so to lay blame at China’s door ahead of time for the global catastrophes that the pessimists predict. Roger East sifts myths from facts in this overview of China’s long green march.

Work out China’s ecological footprint, and you’ll find that, on average, it takes a frugal 1.2 hectares of land to sustain each inhabitant - that’s less than a global ‘equal share’ of 1.7 hectares. Or look at its history in tackling massive environmental challenges - like population growth. This was, not so long ago, widely seen as a runaway train, a time bomb even. That train has slowed to a near standstill; the bomb has stopped ticking. China’s population stands at around 1.3 billion, and is growing at a modest 0.59% a year. Admittedly, this means over 40 million more people than in 2000 - but demographers predict the total will peak in 2035 at around 1.5 billion. It will gradually start to decline before mid-century - by which point it is expected that India will have taken over the dubious honour of the world’s most populous country.

Today, it’s China’s extraordinary economic growth that has woken up the world to the seriousness of the sustainable development challenge. In terms of scale, what is happening in China is comparable with compressing into a few decades all of last century’s economic growth in Europe, Russia, North and South America and Japan combined.

Sandstorms and stress

China’s leaders see no moral case for their people to settle forever for lower living standards than those to which the industrialised world has already helped itself. But, as Jiahua Pan points out [see p11], they recognise a common interest in avoiding catastrophic global warming. And they cannot afford to ignore the more local costs of unsustainable development either - the air filled with fumes and sand, water supplies under intolerable stress (so serious as to prompt such far-fetched notions as the eventual abandonment of Beijing as the country’s capital) and arable land disappearing under concrete and soil erosion.

Nor are they trying to. The government has declared green growth as its guiding economic policy goal. Heavily dependent on coal (for three-quarters of its power) and critically devoid of oil, it’s starting to address the huge issues of improving its very poor energy efficiency, ‘cleaning’ its coal use, and diversifying its energy sources. Nuclear power is, controversially, part of its answer, as is the (even more controversial) development of huge hydro schemes, notably the Three Gorges Dam. But there is also a commitment to generate at least 10% of electricity using renewable energy sources by 2010 - with financial incentives being put in place to boost the use of small hydro, biomass, wind and other options.

China’s buying up of scarce oil resources in aggressive international competition has done more than almost anything else to prompt apocalyptic speculation. It’s not only for oil that Chinese demand has affected global markets. It’s true for steel too, for copper and for cement. And every week there are fresh headlines in the business press about Chinese companies racing round the world snapping up timber, gas, phosphates and mining companies. The anxieties aroused by this acquisitiveness extend into the diplomatic field too. An important strand in the West’s engagement with China concerns the building of some common ground about standards of governance in dodgy but resource-rich regimes.

Oil, unsurprisingly, looms largest - as witness the commentaries that accompanied President Hu Jintao’s recent trip to Latin America, or the takeover of Nigerian oil interests. Not to mention the shrieks that went up when CNOOC, one of four big oil companies created when China’s oil industry was restructured in the late 1990s, had the temerity to bid for US firm Unocal last year - a bid that was halted only by unprecedented opposition from US lawmakers.

It’s not an issue that’s going to go away. China may be a newcomer as a big player on oil resources, but it’s already in the top league. Its imports of 2.4 million barrels of oil per day (in 2004) make it second only to the USA. And if those were to increase, in line with current estimates, to 8.4 million barrels by 2030? In a word, unsustainable. Look to China, then, for a better answer. Oil substitution may be part of it - although hardly with biofuels, in a country which so critically lacks the land to grow its food. But don’t be surprised if hopes for the hydrogen economy increasingly take on Chinese characteristics...

Really going to town

China is engaged in the world’s greatest experiment in rapid urbanisation. Its population is very unevenly spread, with 94% living in the densely inhabited eastern half. Soon after 2010, it will pass the point where over half its people will be living in cities - roughly the same proportion as in the world as a whole. For a society that was overwhelmingly rural just a couple of generations ago, this is a transformation of staggering speed.

Many new migrants are simply in search of a living. There are ten times as many without stable jobs in rural areas (150 million) as in cities. But that massive urban influx in turn helps spur China’s vast construction boom - a key element in its runaway economic growth. China currently accounts for 50% of world cement consumption - and Shanghai has famously built more skyscrapers in the last ten years than there are in the whole of New York. As architect Bill McDonough graphically expressed it, if China were to do its building with brick, it would lose all its top soil and burn all of its coal.

But China’s emerging megacities can be immensely innovative, bursting with vitality, magnets for inward investment and - nowhere more so than Shanghai - a showcase for high technology solutions to rival anywhere in the world. And, with a characteristic Chinese emphasis on learning through example, ten ‘model environmental cities’ have been designated to showcase a more sustainable path. These are not new projects built from scratch, such as Dongtan (or the three others like it, all of which are being designed by Arup - see p12). Rather they are existing cities, like Suzhou with its 2.2 million inhabitants.

A Special Economic Zone as well as an ‘environment protection model’ city, Suzhou is to spend $13 billion on its light rail/subway scheme. Its taxis are switching to compressed natural gas; recycling programmes are aggressively promoted, and polluting industries are shifted out of the city centre. This is sustainability at a price, however; whole villages have been moved to make way for relocated factories.

Beijing, too, has set itself stringent clean air targets - although it’s a measure of just how polluted the capital’s become that ‘stringent’ means aiming for 227 days in the year without serious fog or pollution. It’s allocating almost a fifth of the whole budget for the 2008 Olympic Games to improving air and water quality. And it’s using sticks as well as carrots: it threatened businesses which don’t meet pollution reduction deadlines with a three-year ban on raising stock market capital. Already, many US-made cars can’t be sold in China because they don’t meet stiff new efficiency standards.

All in the plan?

For all the pressures resulting from development at China’s speed, it is clear that sustained growth remains very much part of the plan. The Five Year Plan, that is, by which China’s economy is still so heavily shaped. The latest Plan - covering 2006-2010 - includes targets for annual GDP growth of 7.5%, and a continuing shift of population from the countryside to the cities at a net rate of 10.5 million per year.

Crucially, however, its growth targets are to be achieved by “optimising structure, improving efficiency and decreasing energy consumption”. That’s what the official communiqué in China Daily said when the Plan was unveiled at last October’s party plenum. And beneath those bland words lies an important acknowledgment that many things have been going wrong in China. At a rhetorical level, at least, its leaders accept that the country’s headlong growth has caused a vast array of problems.

It’s not just China’s environment that’s taken the toll. The health of its people, too, has reached a crisis point. The revolution brought massive improvements, famously doubling life expectancy - but the health ‘system’ is now creaking towards collapse. Millions struggle to afford basic care. Government spending on health has been declining dramatically over the last 20 years (down by 50%); most hospitals in cities now get just 10% of their funds from the state. TB is on the rise, and HIV/AIDS is rapidly taking hold: a million people infected now, ten million by the end of the decade.

A countryside in crisis

Among the newly rich, private spending on health care is soaring. But prosperity brings its own health crisis. In the boomtown of Shanghai, a shocking 80% of three- to six-year-olds could already be classified as obese - compared with fewer than 5% of adults in China as a whole.

But it’s in the countryside where some of the greatest challenges lie. Neglected by government in the rush for modernisation, under pressure from massive urban expansion, and suffering from decades of uncontrolled soil erosion and forest loss, China’s countryside is in crisis.

Three years after taking office, President Hu is aiming to redress the balance. He talks of “building a new socialist countryside” under the overall motto of creating a “harmonious society”, which is China’s near synonym for sustainable development. The Plan envisages higher spending on rural education and health, reductions in the tax burden on the rural population, more price support for agricultural products - and greater attention to environmental concerns.

It’s a move precipitated by another novel phenomenon in Chinese society - open protest. A cocktail of pollution, water shortages, land loss and degradation have combined to spark growing unrest in the countryside. The government itself admits to about 90,000 protests last year - and environmental organisations are playing an increasingly vocal part. Five years ago, the number of NGOs addressing environmental concerns in China was negligible. Now there are well over 2,000.

Consuming passion

Meanwhile, the surge of consumerism breaking across China remains the most visible emblem of its economic success - and its environmental crisis. Already, there are estimated to be 100-250 million ‘middle class’ Chinese consumers, the kind who go to Ikea on a Sunday. (Quite literally; the Swedish-based retail giant now has several stores in China and is expanding fast.) That’s rivalling, if not exceeding, the total of their American equivalents.

In the traffic-crammed cities, the rapid rise of private car ownership, and the passion for prestige models, is one of the most striking examples of this new consumerism. And growing per capita income (which is expected to treble to $3,000 by 2020) means surging demand for every kind of product and service - especially energy-intensive home comforts, from air conditioners to consumer electronics. TVs and fridges, once rarities, are now commonplace for all but the poorest. And China is already the world’s largest mobile phone market, with 390 million users.

Proportion of Chinese with use of:

	Fridge	Television
1985	7%	17%
2005	75%	86%

Diets too are changing: rice remains a staple, but China is fast discovering a taste for meat. It now out-consumes the US in the meat stakes (64 million tonnes versus 38 million). Not only is this widening waistbands - it’s increasing the pressure on everything from available land to energy resources: in each case, meat needs more.

If China as a whole took up this US lifestyle across the board, its ecological footprint would swell from 1.2 hectares each to a massive 8.4 hectares. The Chinese would need one whole earth for themselves. But China is taking the first tentative steps to reining in consumption via green taxes.

Taxes on bicycles have been dropped, and fuel taxes introduced, penalising the worst gas-guzzling cars and 4x4s. And even the re-usable plastic chopstick might become an icon of green progress, courtesy of a tax on the disposable wooden version. It sounds trivial, but 25 million trees are used up each year to make the 45 billion pairs that bite the dust. Now each wooden set will cost 5% more than the reusable equivalents. Well, every long march consists of many small steps...

At the double

Since 1980, China has consistently been the world’s fastest growing economy. Between 1980 and 2000, its GDP more than quadrupled.

Its growth rates over the last 13 years average 9.9%.

Absolute poverty (defined as an income of less than 625 Yuan - £42 - per year) has shrunk from 49% in 1981, to less than 7% today.

In 2000 the government set a target to quadruple GDP again, to $4 trillion by 2020.
Since then, GDP has more than doubled, to $2.25 trillion in 2005.

Roger East is editor of Green Futures

 

2 November 2006

Roger East