When a Billion Chinese Jump (65 page)

14.
Project of Comprehensive Development and Construction of Tangshan Caofeidian Eco-City, June 13, 2008, Tangshan government website (
www.tangshan.gov.cn/xiangmu.php?id=2278
).

15.
This upgrade is a major reason for China’s success in increasing energy efficiency by about 20 percent, and reducing pollution by 10 percent between 2005 and 2010.

16.
“China’s Energy Consumption per Unit of GDP Is 3–8 Times Higher Than in OECD Countries” (World Bank Mid-term Evaluation of China’s 11th Five-Year Plan, February 12, 2009). Chinese scientists say this is only partly because of inefficiencies. A bigger reason is the structure of China’s economy, which is a global base of labor- and energy-intensive industries (interview with Wang Shudong of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics).

17.
A factory official told visiting journalists in 2008 that the Shougang plant in west Beijing belched out a tenth of the particulate matter in the city’s air (Jonathan Watts, “Beijing Goes for Green with Olympic Clean-up,”
Guardian,
July 19, 2008).

18.
In 2001, the city had 251 “blue sky” days, the water quality of the Liao and Hun rivers was at the worst level (five), and green cover was 29 percent. By 2007, the number of “blue sky” days had risen to 323, the water quality of the Hun improved to level four, and urban greenbelt coverage was over 38 percent. Industrial pollutant discharge had fallen by more than 21 percent since 2002 (data from Shenyang Environmental Protection Bureau).

19.
In three years, the city destroyed over 3,000 chimneys and 1,200 boilers.

20.
Municipal planners have adopted his designs at Qiaoyuan Park in Tianjin, Tiazhou in Zhejiang, Qinhuangdao in Hebei, and Zongshan in Guangdong.

21.
Much of the urban landscape is a legacy of Mao-era reliance on a tiny number of Soviet designs and a thoughtless rush of development in the 1980s and 1990s. The construction vice minister, Qiu Baoxing, has lamented the fact that almost all of China’s cities look the same. Orthogonal buildings,
white-tiled walls, and blue-tinted windows (Jonathan Watts, “Minister Rails at China, Land of a Thousand Identical Cities,”
Guardian,
June 12, 2007).

22.
Because they ate seeds, sparrows were considered one of the four pests during the Great Leap Forward (the other three were flies, mosquitoes, and rats). People were encouraged to wipe them out by making so much noise with pots, pans, and fireworks that the birds were too afraid to land and died of exhaustion.

23.
Of the 40 billion square meters of urban buildings, 95 percent are classified as high energy consumers (Pan Jiahua, “Building a Frugal Society,”
China Dialogue,
November 5, 2007).

24.
“China’s buildings are roughly two and a half times less energy efficient than those in Germany. Furthermore, newly urbanised Chinese, who use air conditioners, televisions, refrigerators, consume about three and half times more energy than do their rural counterparts” (Economy, “The Great Leap Backward?”). Regulations are often ignored or geared toward boosting the economy rather than minimizing consumption of scarce resources. There are few mechanisms to check whether people are following the rules. Wang Xuejun, a professor at Peking University’s College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, spelled out the challenges to me in an e-mail exchange: (1) lack of funds for enterprises to improve their energy efficiency; (2) lack of new techniques and experts in energy efficiency improvement; (3) cheap energy makes energy saving less cost efficient; (4) lack of policy incentives such as tax reduction and exemption; (5) improper statistical and reporting systems for energy consumption.

25.
Shenyang aims to have 35 percent of households using solar power for water heating by 2015, compared with the national target of 20 percent, according to Wang. It will be tough to achieve. Reaching that goal will require the installation of more than 500,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels. Shenyang currently lags the national average with just 6.3 percent coverage of households.

26.
For heating purposes, northern China is defined as everything north of the Yangtze River, much to the annoyance of people in Shanghai who miss out on the benefits of subsidized central heating.

27.
Though not consistently. Several administrations have pursued policies to keep gasoline prices low. Even so, energy prices are not capped as they have been in China.

28.
On my five visits to Pyongyang since 2002, I have never failed to be struck by the gloom inside buildings and the darkness outside at night. No capital in the world is better for stargazing.

29.
The situation was worsened by largely self-imposed isolation, friction with the outside world, and an overemphasis on military spending.

30.
Though perhaps not for much longer: Xinhua/NBS, “China’s Rural Population Shrinks to 56 Per Cent of Total,” October 22, 2007.

31.
The Huangbaiyu design is a collaborative work by William McDonough, Tongji University, the Benxi Design Institute, and the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. See also Mary-Anne Toy, “Green Dream Vanishes in Puff of Reality,”
Sydney Morning Herald,
August 26, 2006.

32.
Richard Spencer, “Man Faces Death for Ant Scam,”
Daily Telegraph,
February 16, 2007.

33.
In 2008, 360 out of 366 days were under level II on the national pollution index, which means less than 100 parts per million of particulate matter in the air. By Chinese standards this is great. But even Dalian would fail to meet the World Health Organization’s benchmark of 50 parts per million for almost half the year.

34.
Bo later became China’s commerce minister and mayor of Chongqing Municipality.

35.
In 2007, the per capita GDP was 51,000 yuan. Dalian regularly tops polls of China’s most desirable city in which to live.

36.
Shanghai Automotive is working on mass-producing 100 percent electric cars, but they will need a recharging infrastructure that will not be in place until at least 2030. In the interim, China has moved into the hybrid-car field. The Shenzhen-based company BYD—which stands for Build Your Dreams—has built the world’s first mass-produced, plug-in hybrid sedan, the F3DM. The car has a gasoline engine that kicks in above 60 kph; up to that point, it runs completely on electricity.

37.
Although China plans to build thirty-one nuclear plants by 2020 (Associated Press, “China Begins Building New Nuclear Plant, First in Country’s Northeast,” August 18, 2007), Chinese energy specialists believe that nuclear power can have only limited use because the country lacks large supplies of uranium and does not want to be too dependent on imports for power. Worldwide, nuclear power cannot solve the earth’s energy problems. Nathan Lewis estimates that we would have to build a new nuclear fission reactor every two days for fifty years to meet humanity’s demand for power.
But even if that were possible, there wouldn’t be enough uranium on the planet to fuel them all (Nathan Lewis, “Powering the Planet,” California Institute of Technology, 2007).

1.
In 2007, Shandong’s population stood at 96.37 million (China National Bureau of Statistics). The province is home to the country’s biggest cement maker, its second-largest oil field, its third-biggest reserve of coal, and its leading brewer of beer.

2.
National Statistical Yearbook, 2006
(China National Bureau of Statistics, 2006).

3.
The province was a gateway to the creative and destructive influence of the outside world. At the low point of Chinese power at the end of the nineteenth century, the German navy made Qingdao their base. The failed Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence began in Shandong in 1899. This was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting against Japanese troops in the 1930s and 1940s.

4.
This concept is covered in more detail in
Ch. 3
.

5.
The thirteen-year, $3.1 billion program will research dozens of varieties of GM rice, maize, soy, and wheat, according to a spokesperson for the ministry of agriculture. The initiative involves sixty-four projects on GM rice, maize, wheat, and soybean, and the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science will be involved mainly in the project’s downstream work, including genetic transformation and evaluation of the performance of the transgenic plants in biosafety greenhouses and the field, according to Huixia Wu, CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) wheat transformation specialist (cited in
Science
magazine, September 5, 2008).

6.
The father of China’s GM rice program, Professor Zhu Zhen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told me this (Jonathan Watts, “Illicit Rice Trade Endangers Biotech Barriers,”
Guardian,
June 14, 2005).

7.
Judith Shapiro,
Mao’s War Against Nature
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 80.

8.
Up until the 1960s, for every increase in the human population there was a corresponding expansion in the area of arable land under cultivation. But after that, all the gains in yield came from the green revolution (Joel Cohen, speaking at the Nature Conservancy conference ConEx in Vancouver, BC, 2008).

9.
Construction accounted for more than half of the 25,000 square kilometers of cultivated land lost in the 1990s. Remote-sensing surveys show that China’s cultivated land area fell from 1,307,400 square kilometers in 1991 to 1,282,400 square kilometers in 2000—from 1.8 mu (0.0012 square kilometer) per head to 1.5 mu (0.0010 square kilometer) per head. Construction accounted for 56.6 percent of the decrease, 21 percent of land was forested, 16 percent was flooded, and 4 percent became grassland.

10.
Vaclav Smil,
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
(MIT Press, 2008).

11.
Italy was the only other country to adopt it, but not on the same scale (interview with Zhang Qiwen).

12.
It is too cold for them north of Shenyang, too hot for them south of the Yangtze (interview with Zhang Qiwen).

13.
China now has 7 million hectares of artificial forest—the most in the world—almost a third of which are poplar 107 and 108. China claims greater progress in afforestation than any other country in the world, yet its “success” is based largely on these species and similar “economic forests” of eucalyptus in the south.

14.
In the gardens of the Forbidden City in Beijing stand four ancient junipers which were repeatedly split in the middle and the wounds were covered in burlap, then tightly bound in oilcloth so that the base of the trunk split in two parts that met higher up the trunk. The intended shape is the character for “person.” Even centuries ago, horticulturalists were shaping nature in man’s image.

15.
The ministry of forestry has set a target of enough new artificial poplar plantations by 2015 to produce 143 million cubic meters of timber every year—almost equal to the entire amount that China currently imports.

16.
This felt horribly familiar. It reminded me of Mao-era architecture in Beijing, all of which was initially constructed according to fifty standard Soviet blueprints. Even this was considered too diverse during the ultraegalitarian Cultural Revolution, when everything was built to one of just four designs. The rural landscape was following the utilitarian path of the postrevolution cityscape (Jasper Becker,
City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China
[Penguin, 2008], p. 280).

17.
Interview with Jiang Gaoming.

18.
Interview with Jiang Gaoming. We met in late 2008, soon after the government admitted that melamine, illegally added to milk, had killed at least six infants and left a further 860 babies hospitalized.

19.
By one estimate, 2.7 billion tons of livestock manure are produced throughout China every year, 3.4 times the amount of industrial solid waste. But in most places less than a tenth of the manure is returned to the land (Wu Weixiang, Department of Environment Engineering at Zhejiang University, quoted in “A New Livestock Revolution,”
China Daily,
December 19, 2006).

20.
The World Bank is investing heavily in the project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce indoor air pollution, and improve sanitary conditions.

21.
But there is the problem of trust. In China today, few consumers believe “organic” labels are anything but a marketing gimmick. Their skepticism is understandable. Countless food-safety scandals have been caused by corruption, counterfeiting, and reckless shortcuts aimed at boosting profits. All too often a stamp of approval by the authorities merely shows that the regulatory officials have been paid a big enough bribe. Other checks and balances are missing. Journalists are frequently paid off with “taxi money” bribes. There are no independent courts. Consumer organizations are weak or nonexistent. Nothing is allowed to impinge upon the authority of the party. So if the party approves something, there is no comeback. Many commentators see this resulting “crisis of trust” as one of China’s biggest problems.