To an LSE Environmental Initiatives Network seminar last night on China. I had meant to get there for a talk on Dongtan, the “zero-carbon” new city that is going to be the size of Bristol and will have the first phase of 30,0000 people living there within little more than three years.
But events being events, I didn’t make that half, but the second half, about the absolutely fascinating China Dialogue website, presented by its editor, Isabel Hilton.
She presented a bit of a dampener on the Dongtan enthusiasm, pointing out that China is continuing to build other cities at phenomenal speed, and not on the Dongtan model.
She said that Dongtan was typical of the top-down environmental model now being applied in China. If you spoke to the senior leadership and read the 11th Five-Year Plan you’d feel good about China’s moves on sustainable development. That plan represented a substantial change in direction from the 10th, which although it set a few environmental targets, all of these were missed and there were no consequences.
The 11th Plan by contrast represents a rebalancing of growth model – the terminology is of working “towards a harmonius society” At the official level that’s fine, and also encouraging is the view on the street. The general view is clearly that the environment needs to be cleaned up.
Where the problem lies is in the middle levels of officialdom. Ms Hilton spoke about Anwei province, which has a huge coal industry that has caused enormous environmental damage about which there is great local concern. But the businessmen who run the companies that run the mines aren’t worried, because of course they don’t live in Anwei province, and the environmental damage doesn’t affect them.
“The ‘development first environment second’ Jiang Zemin model is still held very widely across the country.” For most Chinese, pollution is the price you have to pay for prosperity. Memories of hunger and deprivation are still strong.
Another aspect of contemporary China was that it didn’t really feel comfortable in the world, as a global player. The last time the nation was really engaged with the rest of the world was in the Ming dynasty.
Yet the internet was providing a new and very broad (if still politically limited) window on the world for huge numbers of Chinese people. “For us to engage with China it needs to be across very broad spectrum. Just at official or political level is not enough.”
But there were many barriers, which China Dialogue was trying to overcome. The first barrier – and a large one – was language, so China Dialogue is fully bilingual, with all contents in both languages – including the comments.
There was also a huge cultural barrier. Since China had not thought of itself as part of outside world for long time there was a great deal of suspicion. So the site very deliberately tried to set up a dialogue and 50 per cent of the content is Chinese.
Ms Hilton said there was a common misconception about China that there were no politics: but there are, just almost all inside the Communist Party. Another misconception was that public opinion didn’t count, but this was becoming less and less true. “Protests are embarrassing. If the public get the idea that the price of unsustainable development is too high, the government will change course, as it did in 11th Five-Year-Plan.”
The view emerging from China Dialogue was that the environment was high on the list of the people’s concerns, particularly obvious observable issues such as particulates and “cancer villages”. Climate change is, however, way down on the list of priorities. But, said Ms Hilton: “Think back 10 years and you could have said that of the West.”
Asked about Chinese official attitudes towards the “contraction and covergence” philosophy, Ms Hilton said that the Chinese regarded this as writing off past too easily. But nonetheless, they had brought down the point at which they were prepared to accept greenhouse gas outputs from 2050 to 2018, and there was a sense that might be shifting a bit more. “A lot of that is going to be determined by the approach of the US. If there is no pressure from the US, China is not going to put pressure on itself.”
Finishing on a cheerful note, Professor Herbie Girardet noted that in solar hot water systems and photovoltaic cells, China was among the world leaders. And the more remote areas were getting heavily into wind power. Six more Dongtan projects have been mooted, and the project is getting a lot of publicity in China.
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