Postcards From Tomorrow Square (25 page)

The conclusions I’ve suggested so far all bear on the ways that China’s environment might be improving, however slowly, and whether and how that improvement might be sped up. All of these changes lead to one further and now unanswerable question that is raised by Sean Wang’s comments. Promising as some trends might be, bright as is the potential for efficient, moneymaking green investments, does China’s scale and ambition, plus its reliance on coal, simply doom the world’s effort to control greenhouse-gas emissions?

China is no idle bystander to this discussion. Its major rivers originate in glaciers on the Tibetan plateau, which have begun to melt. Even if every building in China were to be better insulated and built with Albert Wong’s windows, and every factory were equipped with Tang Jinquan’s cogeneration pipes, would China’s newfound commitment be coming too late? One data point among hundreds: A recent study by Maximilian Auffhammer and Richard Carson, of the University of California, concluded that without some startling change in technology, China cannot avoid increasing its greenhouse-gas emissions faster than other countries can possibly cut theirs back.

Startling changes in technology have appeared over the past century. Antibiotics, to name the one that has made the biggest difference in human welfare. Telecommunications, from the radio to the Internet. Air travel and knowing our world from space. Startling changes in energy technology are now necessary—in producing, conserving, and containing the by-products of fossil-fuel combustion. This is the next big technological challenge for the world as a whole.

The world will have more time to work toward a solution if it nurtures promising developments in China—and if it recognizes that its most populous nation is doing some things right.

HOW THE WEST WAS WIRED

OCTOBER 2008

Y
ou could compare the far west of China to America’s western frontier, if U.S. territory reached only to Nevada. In China as in the United States, when you head west into the continent from the crowded eastern urban corridor, the land becomes drier, the trees are sparser and the cities farther apart, and eventually you’re in stark desert. But in China there is no coastline with fish and forests on the other end. Just more desert, steppe, and mountain, until the country reaches its borders with “the ’Stans”—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the rest.

In China’s history, some interior cities have been prosperous and powerful, especially when the Silk Road trade routes to the Middle East and Europe brought commerce through places like Dunhuang and Xi’An. But in modern times, to say
xi bu
(“the west”) in China is to signify the poorest part of the country, as “the South” meant in America for a hundred years after the Civil War.

Only a quarter of China’s population lives in the western provinces and “autonomous regions,” including Tibet. But that is more than 300 million people, roughly the entire population of the United States, many of them trapped in a kind of subsistence economy hard to imagine from the perspective of even China’s own major eastern cities. After trips to a number of these areas—Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, the western parts of Sichuan and Shaanxi—I was sobered as I have been by nothing else in the country.

If I were running a travel agency, I would skip the likes of Beijing and Shanghai and send foreign visitors out toward these western villages, where they would see aspects of China beyond its urban spectacle and manufacturing prowess. In China’s most famous cities, tourists are surprised by the scale, speed, intensity, and ambition of the activity all around them. But seeing all this firsthand mainly gives a more detailed confirmation of the impression they already had. Even the poverty of the big cities, impossible to ignore and startling because it appears right next to the fanciest luxury projects, involves people who are connected to the modern world: For instance, migrant construction workers live oppressed and very dangerous lives, but they work on fancy high-rise office buildings and new freeway overpasses.

But in the villages, people effectively live in a different century. Their families may exist on the cash equivalent of $10 or $15 per month. Their entire life experience may be encompassed within a radius of ten or twenty miles. When my wife and I visited a high school in an ethnic Tibetan village in Gansu province, we were the first foreigners the students—or any of their teachers, or the principal—had ever seen outside of textbooks. At that school and others in the west, we talked with children who went to school in some years and didn’t in others, depending on whether their families had sold enough crops to pay the public-school fees. This is not the China most foreigners read about or experience on visits, but its isolation and poverty are important parts of any understanding of China.

To my taste, the arid western provinces are the most beautiful parts of China. The eastern seaboard is mainly flat, featureless, overdeveloped, and devastated. Much of the west is awe-inspiring to see. This is the austere beauty of the desert: limitless vistas, clear skies, dramatic topography, an unforgiving environment for life of any kind.

Several of the trips we took through western villages were in the company of a Taiwanese-born software expert in his early sixties named Kenny Lin, who is now engaged in the most touching and quixotic enterprise I have seen in China—one that my wife and I felt moved to support after seeing its effects in rural schools. During the year I’ve followed Lin, I’ve found his efforts both fascinating and significant, in this sense: They underscore the depth of the economic challenges today’s mighty China still faces. And they suggest the power of a new way of dealing with those challenges. This involves neither the government edicts that have guided the economy for decades nor the me-first capitalist vigor of recent years, but instead a deliberate use of market incentives and technological tools in what Kenny Lin calls an altruistic way.

To see what this means in 2008 requires going back more than forty years, to Lin’s friendship in Taiwan with his college classmate Sayling Wen.

______

I
n the summer of 1966, Lin and Wen started college in the electrical-engineering department of National Taiwan University, in Taipei. Lin’s father was a doctor and politician; Wen’s, an electrician who died when his son was young. Wen was smart and the most diligent among his group of friends. After graduation in 1970 and mandatory military service, he joined one of the small electronics companies then proliferating in Taiwan. Over the next quarter century, he grew very rich, as Taiwan went through an outsourcing and manufacturing boom like the one that recently got under way in mainland China.

As the mainland Chinese economy opened in the 1990s, business opportunities, plus his own curiosity, led Wen to spend more and more time on the mainland. In 1992 his company, Inventec, built its first mainland factory, in Shanghai. Wen had long been a man of passions and pet projects. For instance, from the start of his career, he was convinced that the right English-teaching software could make it easy for Chinese speakers to learn English and, in his view, end their isolation from world discourse. (So far, no dice.) In 2000, he developed a new and very powerful passion: to save the poor people of western China.

Through the 1990s, Wen had traveled incessantly through China’s industrial areas. In the summer of 2000, he had his first exposure to the driest and perhaps most challenging of the western regions: Gansu province, in the windblown yellow-earth plateau on the edge of the Gobi Desert. At an economic conference in Gansu’s capital, Lanzhou, he heard officials compare China’s development of its western frontier to the development of the American West, a process that would unfold over many generations.

Wen strongly disagreed. He stood up to say that even a 50-year target was unacceptable. For one thing, it was too far off to fit into any business’s investment plans. With the advantages of airplanes, telecommunications, and global trade, progress should be much faster. Moreover, the 300 million people living in the arid west were “like us, all children of the Yellow Emperor, sharing the same ancestral blood,” yet still living in poverty. If China let them languish another fifty years, “their suffering would be unbearable.”

He had a new idea: Western China would have to become fully modernized—brought into parity with Shanghai and Beijing—within ten years, by 2010. Soon he had written a manifesto called “Develop Western China in Ten Years,” which was published in English and Chinese, and he steered Inventec’s money toward sites in the west. And he learned that he would have an unexpected ally: his old classmate Kenny Lin.

I
n the years after college in Taipei, Kenny Lin went to the United States, earned a doctorate, and had a successful twenty-year run as an engineer, researcher, and manager, winding up at Bell Labs and NYNEX. He married a woman from Taiwan, became a U.S. citizen, and raised two children. But China’s opening under Deng Xiaoping attracted him, and after investigating various possibilities, he left the United States and in 1993 started a software center in Tianjin, outside Beijing, for his friend Sayling Wen’s Inventec company.

One of Lin’s engineers in the Tianjin software facility, Peng Haina, had spent a year as a volunteer teacher in a remote, desolate village in Gansu province called Huang Yang Chuan, literally “Yellow Sheep River.” It lay at the junction of two shallow streams in a gorge eight thousand feet above sea level. The village of several thousand people had two streets. Most families lived in mud-brick-walled courtyard structures where their sheep and cattle also slept. In the frigid high-altitude winter, they kept warm by burning charcoal or animal dung inside their homes, in the lower part of large rectangular brick structures called kangs. They sat and slept on top.

Economically they survived by grazing sheep on already overgrazed, dry, and rapidly eroding hillsides, and by growing wheat and potatoes when there was enough rain. The people of Yellow Sheep River had virtually no contact with the world beyond their little gorge, except when young men and women who had fled hundreds of miles to take factory jobs returned for a few days each year during the Chinese New Year holiday to see their hometown, and often the children they had left behind. Peng encouraged his Inventec colleagues to donate books and computer equipment to the school and told Lin that he, too, should visit western China, which he had never seen. In late September 2000, Lin went to Yellow Sheep River and afterward decided to change the direction of his life.

In a book recounting that visit, which he wrote during a two-week burst, Lin described the hardships of the life he had seen in the hinterland—and also a solution that had come to him. It was a solution in the same spirit that had already motivated his old classmate Wen, though at the time he had no idea of Wen’s own interests.

The hardship that stunned him most was the powerlessness of rural people against brute natural misfortune. A bright and promising young girl had made it through elementary school—but then a drought dried up the crops, and her peasant parents pulled her out of school because they didn’t have money for the fees. In an hour-long video documentary he made to accompany the book (available at
YellowSheepRiver.com
), Lin showed the peasant parents saying they mainly wanted to get the girl married off as soon as possible. (An uncle then gave her money for school.) Another boy was shown sobbing about the dim fate that awaited his younger sister, who had been pulled out of elementary school to save money and would remain uneducated like their parents. “Oh God, help these simple and innocent children out of the poverty, deliver them from the tortures of the lack of rain,” Lin wrote.

Lin’s immediate impulse was direct charity. On his first visit, he pledged 2,500 RMB per month, about $365, to pay for meat in the school lunches and for fuel to boil drinking water. But he believed in “teach a man to fish”–type help rather than long-term charity, and so he conceived his scheme.

The villagers’ fundamental problem was their isolation. The Internet could solve that! Lin’s branch of Inventec could give more computers and software to the school. It could work with the local government to bring in a broadband line and set up a computer center that everyone in the village could use. The students could take courses far beyond the range offered by their impoverished school. They could communicate with people they had not known all their lives. The local farmers could use the Internet to learn about the weather and market conditions. Local craftsmen could offer items for sale to distant customers. Working-age people could look for good factory jobs elsewhere. “The shackles that had bound their spirits had been taken off,” Lin wrote after he had, within a few weeks of his first visit (things happen fast in China), established the computer center, declared Yellow Sheep River an “Internet village,” and created the Yellow Sheep River Web site.

It was just after his momentous first trip into the mountains that Lin saw Sayling Wen again. The year 2000 was the thirtieth anniversary of their college graduation, and Wen sent a note to his classmates saying that he was now so rich, he’d throw a celebration in Shanghai for the entire class and their families at Christmastime and pay their way. (His choice of Shanghai for a reunion of Taiwanese alums is an indication of the near-total integration of the mainland and Taiwanese economies.) On Christmas Day, he overheard Kenny Lin say that Yellow Sheep River now gave purpose to his life. Neither man had known about the other’s recent interest in western China. Both had converted to Christianity, and both thought of helping western China partly as a spiritual obligation.