Reporting from China's Gansu province,
Jonathan Watts of the Guardian recently explored
efforts of regional and local officials to wean
that northwestern region from reliance on coal and
steel industries, and instead to construct a
"green" economy built around clean and renewable
energy sources, in particular wind and solar. [1]
[Watts refers, for example, to an area
around Jiuquan, where wind turbines " stretch into
the distance, competing only with far mountains
and new pylons for space on the horizon". The area
alone has wind energy capacity "roughly equivalent
to that of the whole United Kingdom. The plan is
to more than triple that by 2015, when this area
could become the biggest wind farm in the world."]
[In Dunhuang, an official says that "Ten
years from now, I believe
every home in Dunhuang
will be powered by clean energy. The Gobi desert
will be filled with blue photovoltaic panels. It
will be a beautiful sight."]
Those efforts
may well be interesting and important, not just
for China, but also for the whole world. On the
other hand, the central Chinese state, which has
surpassed the United States as the leading
producer of greenhouse gases in 2012, continues to
set energy prices, and to ensure that energy
produced from coal powered plants remains cheap.
Chinese industry thus remains dependent on
an energy source that holds a dominant position
and continues to grow and to spew vast amounts of
pollutants and global warming gases into the
atmosphere. It's almost as if there are two Chinas
- one on the leading edge of developing energy
from clean and renewable sources, and the other
recklessly polluting land, air, and water in a
break-neck race to industrialize as rapidly as
possible, and maybe, after that task is
accomplished, to clean up their environment.
In response to Western environmental
critics of these rapidly expanding emissions,
Chinese officials have asserted that this was
precisely the Western approach. But even that
pattern is not so clear, as the pressures for
continued economic development in the world's
richest economies continues to drive our
unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels.
The relationship of Chinese to their
natural environment is - and has been - filled
with contradictions. Beginning over 3,000 years
ago, the Chinese state harnessed agricultural
development to its strategic interests, and
although the resulting processes were not without
change or setbacks, the fact is that by the 18th
century, most of the space we now call "China" had
been brought under both the control of the Chinese
state (at that time ruled by Manchus) and the
plow. China was increasingly deforested, resources
were being depleted, and it was moving inexorably
into a deep environmental crisis that added to
China's political tumult in the 19th and 20th
centuries.
On the other hand, Chinese
farmers, especially in core river valley regions
such as the North China plain, the Yangzi River
valley, and the Pearl River delta, developed
various techniques to recycle critical nutrients
back to the soil.
Despite the ravages of
deforestation, land that was cleared for farming
1,000 or even 2,000 years ago is still being
farmed, albeit with massive inputs of synthetic
fertilizer. Historian Mark Elvin pointed to this
contradiction with his argument that China has
seen "3,000 years of unsustainable development".
It is true that rice paddy production in
particular, especially when paired with
pisciculture and sericulture, creates more
sustainable nutrient feedback loops that are less
destructive of the land, and can support a dense
human population. But those ecological
relationships prevail mostly in China's core
economic and agricultural regions.
Another
of China's contradictions, therefore. is the
relationship between core and periphery. The
Chinese imperial state (roughly 500 BCE-1900 CE)
was expansionist. From core regions in the north,
the state extended its sway over new lands,
environments, and peoples. Hundreds if not
thousands of different peoples with their own ways
of organizing themselves politically, socially,
culturally, and environmentally confronted the
powerful Chinese state.
As James C Scott
points out in a recent book, many chose to flee to
the highlands in a region he calls "Zomia" that
includes much of upland Southeast Asia as well as
parts of what is now south and southwest China.
Others acculturated themselves to Chinese ways,
and still others resisted as best they could.
Mongols in the grasslands to the north of China's
Great Wall, Tibetans on their far western high
plateau, and the Naxi in the southwestern
mountains all had their own written languages, and
were able to maintain some measure of cultural
autonomy, but those appear to be more exceptional
cases.
The imperial Chinese state
distinguished between two groups broadly as the
"cooked" and the "raw" barbarians, and saw
transforming those peoples' exotic environments
into Chinese farm landscapes as a means of
bringing them the benefits of Chinese
civilization. China's central state has long
tapped resources from peripheral regions for
strategic and economic purposes.
One
significant long-term outcome of the relationship
of Chinese to their environment, therefore, has
been not just the loss of biodiversity, but also
the simplification of political, cultural, and
socioeconomic systems into increasingly Chinese
forms and the extension of Chinese power over the
peoples on their periphery.
Added to these
long-term historical processes in the 20th century
has been the establishment in 1949 of a
communist-led state committed to mobilization to
assure the most rapid industrial growth possible.
For the first 30 years inspired mostly by visions
arising from Mao Zedong and conditioned by China's
isolation both from the capitalist world system
and after 1960 from the Soviet world as well,
China's developmental strategies depended on
extracting surpluses from agriculture to be used
for industrialization. The Maoist emphasis on
"self reliance" was a virtue made of necessity.
Over the past 30 years, China's developmental
strategy has mostly followed principles first
enunciated by Deng Xiaoping and his followers,
emphasizing the privatization of productive
resources and full engagement and integration with
the capitalist world economy.
Regardless
of the developmental approach, both the Maoist and
Dengist policies have had devastating
environmental impacts, from massive deforestation
under Mao to extensive pollution of land, air, and
water concurrent with the rapid industrial
development and automobilization of the past two
decades.
Arguably, the environmental
impacts of China's industrial development have
been more severe than experiences anywhere else in
the world, with the possible exception of the
Soviet Union. Where Mao called for "man to conquer
nature", with predictable environmental results,
the contemporary modernist agenda insists that
China needs to develop first and clean up its
environment later. The result has been to
intensify the pressures not just on China's
environment, but that of the whole world.
Polluted land, air, and water have dire
consequences for the health and wellbeing of
people down wind or down stream from the sources
of that pollution, prompting thousands of "mass
incidents" in which people in China protest at the
gates of factories or in front of local government
offices demanding that environmental clean up. A
"green" movement thus arose in the 1990s (the
first "green" NGO, the Friends of Nature, was
formed in 1993), and it continues to work within
the confines of the political system to press an
environmentalist agenda.
The Chinese
central state established a national Environmental
Protection Agency charged with developing and
implementing environmental policies. Despite the
commitment of the EPA officials, and their
far-sighted efforts to get environmental
legislation adopted at the national level, those
regulations have to be implemented at the local
level. And there, local officials more often
support rapid (and polluting) industrialization
over environmental protection: their advancement
and promotion is dependent on economic growth, and
it seems that most (but certainly not all) local
officials pay little heed to cleaning up or
preventing environmental messes.
The
region reported on by Watts - Gansu, in the
northern-central part of the country - is among
China's most peripheral and poorest regions, and
the evidence provided by the Guardian reporter is
that it is being "developed" for the purpose of
producing energy for export to industrial
enterprises and urban centers of consumption much
further to the east in and around Beijing and
possibly as far away as Shanghai.
China's
rulers have remade environments elsewhere - in
particular through the Three Gorges Dam on the
Yangtze River, and the various dam projects in
southwestern Yunnan province - for the same
purpose, and with enormously destructive
environmental impacts. Is there reason to think
the prospects for Gansu are much different, even
though the renewable energy resources are wind and
solar?
Whether the Gansu experience Watts
reports on will transform China's economy and
relationship to its environment, or recapitulate
earlier patterns from either its imperial or
communist past, remains to be seen. If past is
prologue, the prognosis is not promising. I hope
I'm wrong.
Note: 1. Click
here
for a video of Jonathan Watts' visit to Gansu, and
here
for his environmental blog.
Robert B
Marks is Richard and Billie Deihl Professor of
History at Whittier College. He is the author
of China: Its Environment and History
(2012), The Origins of the Modern World: A
Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth
to the Twenty-first Century (2007), and
Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and
Economy in Late Imperial South China (1998).
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