It’s always wise to be careful what you wish for. When China was poor and communist, its government disdained consumption and castigated the evils of capitalism, while in the West we argued that happiness lay in the joy of stuff. The good news is that China now agrees about the stuff, embracing a strange hybrid of capitalism with distinctly Chinese characteristics. But that is also the bad news, as Jonathan Watts explains in When a Billion Chinese Jump.
The title derives from a boyhood nightmare: the Chinese, Watts thought then, were so numerous that if they all jumped together they could knock the world off its axis. Now that most of China’s 1.4 billion people prefer to live better today than to trust the promise of a socialist paradise tomorrow, the shock to the world’s economy, atmosphere, soil, water, forests and natural resources seems set to trigger his boyhood terror: the demands of a billion Chinese bent on becoming prosperous consumers could indeed, on China’s present trajectory, knock the world off its axis.
Each industrial revolution has been dirty and environmentally damaging and the cumulative unintended consequences include changing the climate on which human civilization depends. But while industrialization was confined to a handful of relatively small countries, the environmental impacts, climate aside, were relatively local. In China, though, carbon-fueled industrialization and unsustainable development has metastasized by virtue of its scale and speed into the global game-changer of Watts’ title. The West invented unsustainable living; China has taken it up with enthusiasm.
We are barely three decades into China’s industrial and consumption revolution. There are still hundreds of millions of poor Chinese who wish to prosper and consume in a country that wastes so much energy that its average per capita carbon emissions already equal those of France. The most worrying thing about the Chinese industrial revolution is not the appalling damage that Watts meticulously chronicles, but the capacity for more that is still in the system.
Few were counting the cost in the first giddy decades of China’s industrial revolution, but in the past 10 years, the bills have begun to come in: they include acute and chronic water shortages, toxic algae blooms, desertification, acid rain, dying grasslands and angry people. The new middle classes in the prosperous cities of eastern China now want dirty factories closed or cleaned up, but the inland provinces further back in the queue for prosperity are keen to welcome them. In 2007, the World Bank conservatively estimated the cost of Chinese pollution at 5.8 percent of GDP. (Others have put it as high as 8 percent to 12 percent.) If we subtract these sums from China’s headline growth, the present looks substantially less impressive and the future more worrying still. Illegal deforestation in China continues, despite belated prohibition; the pollution carried down China’s rivers poisons the sea from the Bohai Gulf to the Pacific; particulates are carried on the winds to other countries and China’s contribution to the great brown cloud helps to create a giant smog blanket even over otherwise unpolluted areas of Asia.
In Beijing there are efforts to turn to a less destructive course. Sustainable development is now the mantra of government policy and China is committed to a low-carbon economy, not least in order to dominate the technologies of the future. But as Watts discovers, to accomplish this unprecedented feat at this stage of development requires more than shaky legislation and a fiat from the top. It requires a profound cultural shift away from the entrenched idea that nature exists to be exploited and plundered and that any environmental problem can be fixed by engineering.
Watts’ journey takes us to nature reserves where the animals are served up in official banquets, to the tragic province of Henan, once held up as an exemplar of Maoist development, now stricken by poverty, soil exhaustion, corruption and an AIDS epidemic traceable to an official blood-selling scheme. Then there is Linfen, a coal town in Shanxi Province, said to be the most polluted place in the world, where birth defects run at six times the national average which, in turn, is three to five times the global norm; and where the miners’ death rate per tonne of coal is 30 times that of the US.
The Yellow River is all but destroyed. The government has encouraged people to move west from the overpopulated heartland into the arid and mountainous lands of the Uighurs and the Tibetans, places able to support sparse populations but where ecosystems rapidly collapse under the weight of numbers.
If this is a bleak story, it is because the prospects are bleak. Watts tries to balance this journey through dystopia with signs of hope, but we sense he would wish to be more convinced than the evidence allows. This book is not simply an indictment of China’s development path: it is a lesson for us all in the dangers of how we live. Will we heed the lesson and will China’s bid for sustainability prove more than a rebranding exercise? Any reader of When a Billion Chinese Jump must hope so.
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