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Harper's Magazine (December 2005) â Letter from China
The Great Leap: Scenes from China's industrial revolution
by Bill McKibben
Part 3 of 3
â¦But the problem, he quickly added, is that the extra water will probably just be used to fuel a new round of rapid growth. One of the million reasons the Chao has run dry is that Beijing has thirteen ski slopes in the surrounding mountains, all of them relying on manmade snow. And they've just opened a fourteenth, this one entirely indoors.
When we'd reached the head-waters of the Chao, we crossed a few valleys and drove back to Beijing along the equally dry White River - another of the city's main tributaries. But this time we were more interested in power than in water. Along the way we passed one new high-tension line after another. These massive, still-shiny steel towers crossed the mountains in the same lovely undulating ripples as the Great Wall; indeed we hiked to one ruined section of the wall to get a better look at the power lines, which represent an engineering feat on the same heroic/insane scale. In 2004, China added fifty billion watts of generating capacity to its electric grid. In 2005, it will have added another 65 billion watts. You can do the math any number of ways - they're adding two New Englandâs to their electric system annually, or half of India, or a Brazil. No power grid on earth has ever grown anywhere near that fast. Almost all of the new power comes from coal, which China has in cheap abundance; Party officials have announced ambitious plans to build two nuclear reactors every year until 2020, but even if they manage to pull it off, only about four percent of their electricity will come from atomic reactors. Essentially, China is going to burn coal - it will have passed the two-billion-ton mark this year. And even with that utterly unprecedented growth in supply, the country is stretched to the breaking point - twenty-four of thirty-one provinces had power shortages in 2004. "In some provinces plants operate only three or four days a week", said Yang Fuqiang, the Beijing-based vice president of the Energy Foundation. "You get five or six or seven percent loss in local GDP". In late July the Beijing authorities announced that the 4,689 local factories "will arrange week-long summer vacations for their employees in the coming four weeks" to save power, and then offset the holidays by "adopting a temporary six-day week schedule in the coming fall".
The explanation for this surge is relatively simple, and it has everything to do with those farmers streaming into the city: Yang, hunched over his computer in a Beijing office where the thermostat is turned to 82 to save energy, says the best guess is that more than twenty million people come to the cities every year. There they make enough money to start consuming power - in the city people get, say, small refrigerators or even air conditioners. And they get jobs making shower curtains and spatulas and suitcases, which also take some energy. And building even simple concrete huts for them requires all sorts of resources - five percent of China's fuel may go to producing cement alone. China makes more steel than any nation on earth - not primitively, a la Mao, in the back yard, but it still takes energy.
Oh, and cars. Ten years ago there weren't any. "Driver" was an occupation - you took Party officials around in a big black sedan. Today, China is the world's number-three car market. Demand is surging - vehicle sales grew ten percent in the first half of 2005 - and automakers expect to sell 5.6 million vehicles by year's end. Visiting the big car markets in Beijing is like going to a ball game in the United States - you park blocks away at a gas station where attendants wave you in; sidewalk vendors sell Cokes to the gawkers. It's a fascinating place to drive, because almost everyone is a tyro. The traffic patterns are unlike anywhere else in the world - people weave in and out constantly, merging from side streets without stopping - but crashes are relatively uncommon because speeds are low. Five years ago, you suddenly realize, these people were riding bikes.
Again, it's not as if the Chinese haven't noticed there are big problems that come with this kind of growth⦠But without that level of growth, there'd be no way to absorb the endless influx from the countryside. How are you going to keep people down on their sixth of an acre once they've heard that city dwellers eat meat!
Only with a level of repression that the post-Mao Chinese probably wouldn't tolerate, a level of repression that would shake the country's power structure. (And if that power structure fell, the democracy that replaced it would have many virtues, but controlling migration wouldn't be one of them.) That's why the country is busy building cars - because automaking, road-building, tire-patching, bumper-fixing, and gas-pumping are ways to build an economy. What's good for Shanghai Automotive, or so the thinking goes, is good for China.
And so the country is trying to muddle through. On the one hand, it must keep growing fast enough to absorb all that restless labor - the newspapers are already full of reports about college graduates unable to find jobs, and then there are those people pushed out of work in the vast and useless state heavy industries. And on the other hand, it must keep resource and energy use enough in check that China doesn't simply crash and burn. The official goal is to quadruple the size of the economy by 2020 while only doubling energy use - a target that's probably unattainable due to the huge growth in electric generation in the last couple of years.
â¦And the government has adopted most of these schemes, at least on paper. It has pledged to provide ten percent of the power with renewable resources in the next fifteen years - windmills are being built left and right, which is more than we can say. And some of what the Chinese are doing we couldn't even begin to imagine. In Shanghai, for instance, if you want a new car you not only have to go buy it, you have to bid for a license plate - in an effort to control the growth in autos, the city allows only about 6,000 new plates a month, and in June's auction they went for more than $4,000 apiece. Not only that, but they've built a remarkably good subway system, designed to persuade people to hold off buying cars. "Look, if you have a cheap, low-end metro, then the people who need to wear business clothes to the office simply won't take it", Ma Jun said. "And those are exactly the people with enough money to buy a car". The Shanghai metro has plasma screens on every car, delivering a continuous English lesson; the weekend I was riding the metro the screens were endlessly explaining the phrase "home field".
â¦It used to be said that the point of travel was to see your own home more clearly. So let's look. When you're standing in Shanghai, at the city's urban-planning exhibition, admiring the basketball-court-sized model of the city's future plan, with every skyscraper and apartment complex carefully detailed, you just viscerally know that there are two countries that really count right now. You just viscerally know that this is the story that will define the future. China and the United States are now the world's biggest consumers of raw material, and of food, and of energy. Are they therefore morally equivalent?
â¦The longer I looked, however, the less alike the two nations seemed. Take cars, for instance. Cars define America - their proliferation is the single physical item that makes our continent's civilization unique. We have nearly the same number of cars as we have people. In China the number of automobiles is growing fast. But if the Chinese sell six million cars this year, that will be eleven million less than the United States - in a population more than four times as large.
â¦The world, as it turns out, cannot afford two countries behaving like the United States. It lacks the atmosphere (and it also may lack the resources, as this summer's scramble for control over oil makes clear. We can't let the Chinese buy Unocal, because we need its reserves for us). And the reason it's an actual tragedy is because, right now, a rapidly growing China is actually accomplishing some measurable good with its growth. People are enjoying some meat, sending their brothers to school, heating their huts. Whereas we're burning nine times as much energy per capita so that we can: air-condition game rooms and mow half-acre lots, drive SUVs on every errand, eat tomatoes flown in from Chile. I understand that our country has people living in poverty, some of whom are now losing their jobs to Chinese competition, but that's simply our shame - we have all the money on earth, and we haven't figured out how to spread it around.
Notes
{1} At the moment, the exchange rate is at around eight yuan to the dollar. But for an approximate number, it works to just drop the last digit - 10,000 yuan is something like a thousand dollars.
{2} Ikea's slogan, which in the modern economy almost passes as humane, is "Low Price, But Not at Any Price".
{3} No one knows for sure how effective the one-child policy has been. One demographer estimates that China has as many as 37 million uncounted children, hidden at least in part because local officials don't like to report bad news. But total population growth is not the main force driving China's problems. And however cruel the legislation was, most people I talked to, in the cities anyhow, seem to have internalized it as an indisputable fact of life.
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Author: Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home.
The entire article was posted at the following website:
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2005/12/letter-from-china.html
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