Sustainability in China: attitudes past, present and future

China is on everyone's agenda, the more so after President Obama's visit there last week. As a country it is seen as a rising economic and political power, as a threat to some, as a model for others, and potentially as a danger to itself as well as to the world over its treatment of the environment. It should be said that those who demonize China often do so to distract attention from their own shortcomings.

The aim for China as for the rest of us is to achieve sustainability. By any reckoning sustainability is an elusive concept, as elusive in China as anywhere else. There is an apparent contradiction. On the one hand we live in a consumer society, and talk endlessly about development in the classic sense of rapid economic growth. On the other hand we pursue sustainability in the equally classic sense of a long lasting process favouring this and future generations, requiring greater respect for the environment and better care of the limited resources of the Earth.

The phrase which is supposed to bring these two together and to reconcile them is sustainable development, which still haunts the international vocabulary. My own preference is for a soundbite from Rob Gray: "Treating the Earth as if we intended to stay". At the moment it scarcely seems that we are doing so, and the Chinese are no better than the rest of us.

In fact the Chinese environment is particularly vulnerable, and has been so throughout the millennia of Chinese civilization going back over 10,000 years. Water is a perennial problem. So are the huge dust storms that sweep across the country, shifting deserts and creating new ones. With its long low coastline, China is sensitive to even small variations in sea level which quickly affect wetlands and river deltas. It suffers from relatively frequent earthquakes (as we have seen in Sichuan in 2008), and even occasional hits from space (the last and most serious in the 15th century).

This combination of destructive natural forces has profoundly affected Chinese history and culture. Nature was there to be placated as well as so far as possible controlled or even mastered. Heaven and Earth were closely linked, and the line between the natural and the supernatural was blurred. Humans sought to establish a balance between opposing forces to lead to overall harmony. Under whatever guise, life sustained but also punished humans. Even the behaviour of the weather was an aspect of human activity so there was morality in meteorology.

As elsewhere in the world, the end of the last ice age marked major human expansion in China. Deforestation made way for agriculture. There was a bonanza as soils were exploited, wild animals and species were lost, and human numbers multiplied. This led to the growth of towns, cities and states, followed by increasing competition between them, often with use of such environmental weapons as demolition of dams and crop burning. Communities rose and fell.

Everywhere control of water was essential. What has been called hydraulic despotism may tell only part of the story, but communities and even states grew out of the need to manage this precious and often capricious resource. The struggle to run irrigation systems, limit marine incursions, maintain banks and walls, undertake dredging, cope with floods and storms, and adapt to ever changing weather was more difficult in China than elsewhere.

The industrial revolution came relatively late to China, and its effects have been most marked in the last 40 years. More perhaps than elsewhere, and certainly in a shorter time span, it has profoundly affected the Chinese relationship with the natural environment. With greater political stability, mass development, mass production, mass consumption, mass transport and mass discharge of wastes have transformed China. In the words of the World Watch Institute of Washington DC, "It is as if all of Europe, Russia and North and South America were simultaneously to undertake a century's worth of economic development in a few decades."

Not surprisingly the impact on the Chinese environment has been dramatic. Even if the rate of population increase has slowed and will eventually decline, the rise in population has led to increasing emigration to the cities, and the growth of cities has led to ever greater strains on urban infrastructure. Transport is a particular difficulty, with some official encouragement of car manufacture and potential use far exceeding the capacity of road systems. Chinese cities face the problems and prospects which are already favouring trains and bicycles in Britain, and even rickshaws in central London. China has 16 of the world's 20 cities with the worst air pollution.

Demand for fresh water may be constantly increasing, but the vagaries of the weather have not increased supplies, and some provinces such as Guangdong, with a population of 110 million, have recently suffered a sharp drop in rainfall. It has also been among those most affected by recent storms. Water tables have been falling, particularly in northern China, through exhaustion of aquifers and new irrigation schemes, and the Yellow River now reaches the sea only a few days a year.

There is also a long-term factor. Global warming is reducing the Himalayan glaciers feeding Chinese rivers as a source of water. They could all be gone by the end of this century. This also has the effect of diminishing the reflectivity of the Earth to solar radiation, and thus increasing warming.

So far as climate is concerned, the predictions of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences are far from encouraging. They suggest new patterns of rainfall, including less in certain areas of high population and more elsewhere. There should be no wonder that there are plans to build a major canal system to convey water from south to north. The Chinese are among the pioneers in developing technologies to modify weather patterns. They notoriously did their best for the Olympic Games in 2008, and did so again recently with unforeseen results.

The increasing demand for energy raises a host of environmental problems. China has large reserves of somewhat dirty coal, and depends on them. It is alleged that a new coal-fired power station is built every week. But it has greatly increased its imports of other fossil fuels, and is now investing heavily in clean coal technology and alternative energy sources of all kinds, ranging from solar and wind power to biofuels. It is building one of the world's first pebble bed nuclear reactors, and has other nuclear reactors on order. It is trying, not always successfully, to improve its energy efficiency. The Chinese have also spread themselves and their investments in energy sources all over the world: from Svalbard in the Arctic to Brazil and Mexico, to Zimbabwe and Angola, and to Iran and other countries in the Middle East.

Rising living standards are changing the Chinese diet. This too has environmental effects. There is a general move away from rice towards meat: not just pork, as in the past, but towards beef, lamb and chicken. Per capita consumption of meat, eggs and milk increased four fold between 1978 and 2001. This means different use of land, greater dependence on pesticides and artificial fertilizers, a big increase in agricultural waste, and a demand for feedstock, which cannot now be met from domestic sources. World grain prices have already been affected, and probably will be more in future.

The cumulative effect of these changes reaches far beyond China. There are the emissions of carbon dioxide. The Chinese can argue with some justice that as other countries are transferring some of their manufacturing plants to China, thereby reducing their carbon emissions, they can hardly reproach the Chinese for increasing theirs. They can argue that those who consume the products of fossil fuels are more responsible than those who produce them.

In fact Chinese efforts to reduce emissions have been patchy, and their total emissions now exceed those of the principal villain in this respect, the United States. It has been calculated that if Chinese and Indian emissions per capita ever reached US levels, world emissions would be three times higher than today and the results would be catastrophic.

Another global environmental hazard are the sandstorms which may have their worst effects in north eastern China, but still spread to Japan, to Hawaii, and even to the western seaboard of the United States. Soil deterioration and erosion in China inevitably affect all China's neighbours. China is a substantial contributor to the brown cloud which hangs over Asia with perverse environmental effects.

In addition, although the Chinese government has recently reduced its own timber cutting, Chinese demand for timber is strong and increasing, and China is a major importer of timber, some of it apparently illegal, from other parts of south east Asia. The effects of changes in biodiversity, and in particular the import or export of alien species, has been fully explored in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report of 2005, and all this directly involves China.

There are also the less tangible effects of Chinese technological experiments which spread unease elsewhere: for example experiments in genetic modification of food plants, in nanotechnology and in the nuclear field. For good or ill, technology is no respecter of frontiers. The President of the Royal Society Lord Rees has calculated that, whether due to inadvertence, criminality or other factors, the prospects for our civilization surviving the end of this century are no more than 50 percent.

Few are more conscious of this intimidating complex of problems than the Chinese themselves. Between 1992 and 2006 I was a member of the independent China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, and was able to see for myself the growing concern of the Chinese leadership, and the efforts which have been made not only to take limited action, but also - perhaps more important - to think differently about the environment.

First let me give credit where credit is due: China was the first country in the world to confront and do something about its multiplying population. The one child / one family policy has had its critics, but will soon cause the level of increase to stabilize and eventually reverse. The present premier Wen Jiabao has also introduced the policy of what he calls the Three Transformations:

• the first is to give equal status to environmental protection and economic growth;
• the second is to join the two together and see each in terms of the other;
• and the third is to apply them across society and the economy generally.

The idea is that they should come to represent the harmony at the bedrock of Chinese philosophy.

Thinking differently is easier said than done. Current efforts are well illustrated by the search for a better methodology for measuring economic progress than that represented by the classic - and misleading - Gross Domestic Product / Gross National Product mechanism. Successive Chinese governments have spoken of the need for a 'socialist market economy' in which the framework is set by the public interest, with the free market functioning within it.

These thoughts have been expressed many times, notably at a meeting of the Chinese government on Population, Resources and Environment on 12 March 2005. On that occasion the current President Hu Jintao and the Premier Wen Jiabao both spoke of the need to adopt a "new development mode" or "new economic growth mode" within the overriding objective of achieving what they called xiaokung, without extremes of rich and poor and looking long as well as short term.

The idea of "clean green growth" or "green GDP" was set out in a joint report by the State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on 7 September 2006. It meant bringing in the externalities or hidden costs of change, estimating the true costs of pollution so far as they were known, and giving priority to human wellbeing rather than mere productivity. Others have since taken up the same themes, notably in the Stiglitz Commission report of last September.

Another report entitled Environmental Protection in China 1996-2005 contained a detailed account of relevant legislation, the prevention and control of industrial pollution, measures to cope with water problems, reafforestation and conservation, and Chinese participation in international bodies and commitments. Perhaps most important, it admitted that the problems were very serious, and that the condition of the country was "grave". It still is.

A lot of these issues have come up at the China Council. Over the years I have had the opportunity to speak and listen to a succession of Chinese Presidents and Premiers, and am always impressed by their knowledge and grasp of environmental issues (better than most of their Western counterparts), and of the enormous political issues involved both nationally and globally. It is perhaps not a coincidence that so many in the Chinese leadership are engineers.

This is not to say that much tangible progress has been made. There are encouraging signs. The China Council recommended more than once that the State Environment Protection Administration should be promoted to the rank of Ministry. This eventually happened at the National People's Congress in March last year. Indeed the new Ministry will be something of a super Ministry, bringing together the work of such other Ministries as Agriculture, Forestry and Water Resources.

But all is not well:

• Even the theoretical advance made in the joint report with the National Bureau of Statistics in 2006 seems somehow to be in question.
• A report on the use of Green GDP as a measuring device was apparently suppressed last year on the grounds that it might be unreliable, and in any event was not internationally accepted.
• One of China's most influential Deputy Ministers for the Environment - Pan Yue - seems to have been sidelined.
• Work on the model eco-island Dongtan seems to have come to a halt, partly due to Shanghai politics.
• Nonetheless information leaks out of the system, nearly all to show that environmental problems, including pollution of land, air and water, are worse than publicly admitted.
• A recent study by the Chinese National Academy of Sciences showed that the cost of environmental damage in 2005 outweighed GDP growth by almost 14 percent.
• Sea level rise is a particularly serious prospect. Will Shanghai eventually be drowned?

Infighting within the government is more than matched by struggles between the national government and local governments and communities, and each of them has its own patterns of infighting. Wen Jiabao has freely admitted this. A relatively new development has been a rise in environmental awareness and mobilization of local discontent. No-one is more aware of this than the Politburo of the Communist Party.

A good example was the rioting over a dam project in Tiger Leaping Gorge which eventually led to the withdrawal of the project. There are other manifestations of popular discontent, and the government seems increasingly concerned about them. This often goes with increased migration from the country to towns without facilities or jobs to receive more people. The familiar division is between the elite and the rest: 'us and them'. The image of China as a monolithic society is increasingly false.

The central government has long had difficulties in enforcing laws and regulations. The price structure is often perverse. For example some people in China and others elsewhere think that access to water is a basic human right, and for that reason water should almost be free. The result is that there is little incentive to look after it properly and avoid waste. It has been calculated that a tonne of Yellow River water for use in irrigation costs less than one-tenth of a small bottle of spring water, thereby removing any incentive to conserve it. Those in cities can often afford to pay more for their water, and so win an advantage over those who may need water more. All this is now changing.

There are many reasons for hope. As a relative latecomer to the industrial world, China has the opportunity to leapfrog over the mistakes of others. Its stated aims are to wean the economy away from export-oriented, low value manufacturing, ban foreign investment in enterprises which increase pollution, and reduce energy consumption. It is not averse to protectionism and use of monopoly positions, for example over the export of rare earth metals. Its leadership gives technology a high priority and is ready to put enormous resources into it.

It is also recovering its self-confidence after its century of troubles, and the balance of power in the world is visibly changing as a result. After all it was until fairly recently the most sophisticated society in the world. Shooting down an old satellite and aiming for the moon comes almost normally to the Chinese leadership. It has been calculated by Goldman Sachs that the proportion of the world economy represented by China and India in 1825 was around 40 percent. By 2025 that proportion may be restored.

It should be no surprise that China is playing an increasingly important role in international work on the environment. One of the most significant aspects of preparations for the United Nations conference on climate change at Copenhagen next month is the leadership shown by the Chinese in marked contrast to the lack of it and continuing confusion in the United States. The Chinese approach covers the whole spectrum of environmental issues: how best to move to a low carbon economy; how to improve energy efficiency; how to promote renewable energy sources, including nuclear, and which technologies to pursue. According to Steven Chu (the US Energy Secretary) China is at present spending more than any other country - some £5.5 billion a month - on clear energy.

All this became painfully evident during President Obama's visit to Beijing. A declining superpower talked with a rising superpower on equal terms, and seems to have established a relationship on environmental as on some other issues which could change the relationship of each with its traditional friends and allies, including those in Europe and the Far East. We have yet to see whether it represents, as we must hope, a workable reconciliation of national and global interest which could serve as an example to others. Copenhagen will show. In the meantime China is spreading its power and influence throughout the world.

Within China as elsewhere the environmental cost of necessary action may be high. The struggles will continue at all levels: within the government, between the government and provincial authorities, between a rich variety of vested interests, and within and between local communities. But the Chinese seem well aware of the risks and hazards, and know better than their critics of the need to look after the only China, indeed the only Earth, there is. They may turn out to be pioneers in doing so. As in technology, the rest of the world may soon be learning as much from the Chinese as the Chinese learn from the rest of the world.