CHINA: How China copes with the colossal pressure on its resources will either make it a world leader or tip the planet into disaster, writes Fintan O'Toole, in Beijing.
In the West we tend to assume that the best thing that can happen to China is that it becomes more and more like us. The stark reality that becomes clear from any sustained contact with the country is that China simply cannot become like us. And if it were to do so, the result would be a global disaster. If, in 25 years' time, China were to be essentially similar to Europe or the United States, life on earth would be unsustainable. For all our sakes, China's development has to be radically different.
One of the effects that living in China tends to have on any sentient outsider is that the big environmental questions that form a background noise to our daily lives in the West become much louder and more urgent. You can't drink the tap water. You are amazed when, very occasionally, the mountains that surround Beijing appear out of the almost constant haze and you remember they exist. Sand from the ever-advancing Mongolian deserts leaves its murky tracks on windows and parked cars.
Even China's beauty - its pervasive mountains, its great high plateaux, its bleakly splendid deserts - all remind you that the vastness of the country is a kind of illusion, since 65 per cent of its land is no good for growing food. China has 7 per cent of the world's arable land, and 8 per cent of the world's fresh water to meet the needs of 22 per cent of the world's population. But even these scarce resources are being depleted at a frightening rate. Since economic reform began in 1979, China has lost 7 per cent of its arable land to development and desertification. In 58 per cent of the sites on China's seven main rivers that were monitored in 2004, the water quality was found to be too dirty for human consumption. Of the 20 cities in the world with the most polluted air, 16 are in China.
Over the next 15 years, China's population will continue to grow and its total economic output will probably quadruple. The burden on an already fragile environment will be so great that it could effectively destroy the gains made by economic growth. But this is not just a Chinese problem. As China grows, it consumes more and more of the world's resources. Last year, China used 26 per cent of the world's crude steel, 32 per cent of its rice, 37 per cent of its cotton, and 47 per cent of its cement. It has been estimated that if China and India continue to grow to a point where they consume natural resources at the same level as Japan does today, we would need a whole new planet earth to meet the demand. Equally, if both countries were to reach even half the current US levels of oil consumption, they alone would be using 100 million barrels a day. In 2005, total global consumption was just 85 million barrels a day.
What this means is that it is simply not good enough for China's development over the next 20 years to be as smart as that in the West. It needs to be much smarter.
The 45 Chinese cities with more than a million people each need to continue to grow in order to house the tens of millions of migrant workers who are moving from the countryside every year, but without destroying more arable land. The energy to power economic growth has to be generated without massively increasing carbon emissions. People have to become richer without consuming more non-renewable resources. If these circles are to be squared, China has to go back to being what it was for thousands of years: the most technologically sophisticated and innovative society in the world.
This is a very tall order for a society that is still emerging from a traumatic 20th century, and prophets of doom don't have to be mad. But there are some signs of hope. It is not accidental, for example, that the most vigorous growth of civil society in China is in the area of environmental activism. There are about 2,000 registered NGOs working on green issues. Meeting young people like those who work for the Alxa SEE Ecological Association in Inner Mongolia, helping nomadic families on projects to halt desertification, you can see that this is an area in which the energy, intelligence and idealism of a new generation can be tapped. Its flowering depends on larger political changes, but activism is already influencing official decisions, and even large-scale development projects have been suspended or stopped due to environmental concerns.
China's rapid development also means it has the opportunity to go directly for new, sustainable technologies. Arguably, indeed, China's best chance of real, long-term economic progress may lie in its capacity to take the lead in environmentally-friendly technologies which it could then sell to the rest of the world. It already leads the world in the production of super-efficient light-bulbs and 75 per cent of the world's solar-powered water-heaters are used in China. If necessity is the mother of invention, the urgency of China's needs could make it a world leader.
The stakes could hardly be higher. If China's push for development were to fail, the consequences for the world economy into which it is increasingly integrated would be terrible. But if it were to succeed without radical change, the consequences would be even worse. A rich, powerful China consuming resources as heedlessly as the West has done could tip the planet into disaster. On the other hand, a China that manages the transition sustainably, equitably and democratically would provide new hope for the underdeveloped world and create a much better balance of global interests.
Deng Xiaoping, who began the process of Chinese reform, famously likened it to crossing a rapid river while feeling with your feet for the stepping stones. I thought of the image a few weeks ago while watching people in a fun park in Hangzhou.
There was a pool of water with big squares of spongy plastic forming a link across it. If your feet landed too heavily on one of the pads, or you lingered too long on it, the water flowed onto it and it tipped you into the pool. To get across, you had to move lightly, quickly and cleverly. It was by far the most popular attraction in the park and huge crowds stood around to watch as braver fellows either got soaked or made it triumphantly to the far side. They gasped or cheered and remained riveted by the spectacle, as if sensing that this game had a real edge.