When a Billion Chinese Jump (41 page)

I asked the reason.

“This is China. All sorts of things happen here,” a bus conductor replied with considered vagueness.

“Like what?”

“Terrorism.”

“By whom?” I hadn’t heard of any separatist or religious extremists in this part of China before.

It took five minutes to get an answer. I was told the checks had started the previous year for fear of reprisals from “terrorist” investors who had lost a fortune in a bizarre 33-million-yuan ant-farming pyramid-selling scheme. Many staked their life savings on boxes of ants that they were promised would guarantee them rich returns from the traditional medicine industry. When the scam inevitably collapsed, 36,000 people lost their investment. Some were plunged into bankruptcy. Many protested. Others attempted to travel to Beijing to petition the central government. One committed suicide.
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The businessman behind the scheme, Wang Zhendong, was sentenced to death, but this harsh penalty failed to placate the enraged investors. The ant farmers are now considered the biggest security threat in Benxi. Salvador Dalí could not have painted a more surreal picture of China’s business landscape.

A brighter, more orderly canvas was on display at the final stop on my journey through the former rust belt. Dalian has arguably taken a bigger technological leap than any other city to clean up its environment. Home to 6 million people, this giant port has won accolades and investment over the past ten years as a result of cleaning up its air and opening up its development zones to green energy labs and high-tech companies. I was told that if any existing Chinese megalopolis could claim to be an eco-city, it was Dalian.

I woke up on my first morning in the city to that rarest of treats in urban China: clear skies. Against a sharp blue background, the red national flags fluttering atop government buildings seemed to blaze with pride. Clean, modern, and open, this was smart China at its best. While Shanghai was plagued by an overemphasis on fashion, Guangzhou by money, and Beijing by power, Dalian was blessed by moderate amounts of all three, along with sea breezes that helped to blow away what little pollution was emitted by the high-tech industries that concentrated here. This city boasted the cleanest urban air in China, with all but a few days of the year meeting the national “blue sky” standard.
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The transformation was remarkable. Twenty years earlier, Dalian had been a center for heavy industry with air as foul as the rest of the rust belt.
But the collapse of the old state-owned industries in the nineties proved a blessing. The former mayor, Bo Xilai, put parks and lawns on the sites of many dismantled factories (earning the nickname “Grass Bo” in the process), upgraded the city’s power plants, relocated the remaining heavy industry outside the city center, and invested heavily in wastewater treatment and public transport, which is now used for 45 percent of journeys—the highest level in China. In the process, Dalian reinvented itself as a clean, modern base for software and informational technology companies from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Bo, the son of Communist Party “immortal” Bo Yibo, was rewarded with promotion to the post of Liaoning governor, and the city was chosen to host the summer Davos conference.
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Average incomes in Dalian are high and living standards are considered to be among the best in China.
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“We have come to realize that a good environment gives us a competitive advantage,” the current mayor, Xia Deren, told me in the Japanese-built city hall. “This is a recent discovery. Practice has taught us the benefits of clean air and water in attracting talented personnel and high-value-added companies.”

Xia claimed to be going even further than his predecessor in greening Dalian. By his own reckoning, he spent more than a quarter of his time on policies to reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency. The city was pioneering the manufacture and adoption of hybrid buses and the hydrogen fuel cells that will be necessary if cars are ever to run solely on clean and efficient electricity.
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The city had also built up one of China’s biggest wind-power production bases and won the right to host China’s first national clean-energy laboratory. By 2013, said Xia, Dalian planned to go a step further than any other Chinese city in reducing carbon emissions by replacing all of the city’s coal-fired power plants with nuclear generators.

I asked Xia if he thought the nation could turn from red to green.
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His answer was unequivocal. “Yes, we should build a green China. We need to make our country greener and greener. All the top people in the world recognize this. I am confident that we will do more in the future for ecological conservation and sustainability.”

It was an encouraging message, though even Dalian still had a long way to go. Wen Bo, a native of the city and member of the Pacific Environment conservation group, warned against taking an overly rosy view of his home.
“The city looks clean because the sea wind blows the pollutants away, but there are a lot of problems that are not visible,” he said. “We discharge a huge volume of solid waste into the ocean, which damages marine life, and our dirty factories have been relocated, not closed down, so the damage has simply moved from the urban to the rural environment.”

Clearly, there was no perfect model. Nuclear power had well-known risks. Solar energy led to pollution and waste during the manufacture of photovoltaic panels and the refinement of silicon. Up to a third of wind turbines spun uselessly in isolation because they were not connected to the grid. “Clean coal” technology was expensive and carbon sequestration largely unproven. There was a real danger of a bubble forming in the renewable energy sector as local governments rushed to jump on the bandwagon. Yet overall, the push for renewable energy was one of the most positive stories to come out of China in many years. The government was clearly determined to make a technological leap. It was good for business. It was good for national security. And it was good for prestige. In short, it was a power play. China was bidding to own the low-carbon economy of the future.

But this alone did not mean sustainability. China was still ramping up coal production, expanding power-intensive industries, and boosting consumption. Clean energy was just one more area in which to expand. In many ways, President Hu’s Scientific Outlook on Development is a rebranding exercise. Rather than genuine sustainability, it is economy lite. As with low-tar tobacco, low-alcohol beer, or low-fat cheese, it tacitly acknowledges the health concerns related to business as usual, but instead of promoting change it has watered down the product, slapped on a new label, raised the price, and aimed for an even bigger market.

The communist engineers in the politburo were trained to optimize production and enhance technology rather than trim demand and reappraise values. Though it has promised to create an eco-civilization, the government continues to prioritize economic growth, social stability, and enhanced national power. Overreliance on technology looks likely to take China further from a sustainable balance with nature.

It was time to return to Beijing. First, a last seafood dinner at a grill-your-own restaurant, then a dash to Dalian station, just in time to catch the 9:45 p.m. overnight train.

Many passengers were already getting their heads down, including an
old man in the bunk below mine. But a gruff, middle-aged man opposite was in a garrulous mood. Seeing me open my laptop, he asked what I was doing.

“I’m trying to write a book.”

“What about?”

“China’s environmental problems.”

He snorted. “The problems are caused by foreigners. They pollute here what they can’t in their own countries.”

“Yes, that’s true. But China is also responsible.”

“Probably. The pollution is very bad. I live near the Bohai Sea. Have you seen it there? Terrible. It will take decades to clean up.”

He asks where I’m from.

“England.”

A louder snort. “That’s the country that first brought pollution to China.”

“We certainly didn’t help.”

Either tired or disappointed by the lack of verbal combat, he rolled over to sleep.

The next morning, the gruff man was in a mellower mood. We chatted in the corridor as other passengers, mostly men in their long johns, passed back and forth on their way to the washroom. He told me he was a police investigator. A gang of five thieves from Hunan had killed a woman in Dalian during a failed robbery, then fled to their home province. He was on his way to help hunt them down.

“Were the thieves black society?” I asked, using the Chinese term for organized crime.

“No, they were just poor and desperate,” he replied. “The economic downturn has made life tougher for a lot of people.”

The old man in the compartment returned from cleaning his teeth and joined in the conversation, which took an unexpected revolutionary turn as we approached the outskirts of Beijing.

“Which environment do you like better, Dalian or Beijing?” he asked, staring through the window as the brown fields of the countryside gave way to the gray buildings of the city.

“Dalian,” I replied. “It’s much cleaner, but I prefer to live in Beijing. My friends are here. It’s interesting. Pollution is a big problem, but I think it will improve in the future.”

The policeman interjected. “Right, in the past we took investment from
anyone. Now we can afford to be more choosy. But clearing up the environment will take a long time because of corruption. Our officials don’t follow their own rules.”

The old man agreed. “The problem of a corrupt bureaucracy cannot be solved by bureaucrats. We need a mass movement to clear them out. I think there will be one within five years.”

The policeman said nothing. His generation had a different view of mass uprisings. The old man, now in his eighties, was in his prime during the triumph of the anti-imperialist revolution. The policeman, now in his fifties, spent his youth watching the abject failure of the Cultural Revolution. While both generations agreed on the need to clear up corruption and the environment, they differed on how it should be done.

Snow started to fall as we pulled into the terminus. A row of cleaners wearing Eastern Star uniforms were waiting on the platform to tidy up the train. The digital clock above their head read 8:25:07. After an eleven-hour journey, we had reached our destination seven seconds behind schedule. China could do the efficiency thing when it chose to. No doubt about that. But, as I was to learn, efficiency could create as many problems as it solved.

Shandong

Dao zai shiniao (Tao is found in the shit and piss)
—Zhuangzi, Taoist philosopher, third century
BC

Relying on efficiency can be dangerous for two reasons. The first is self-deception: focusing on small proportionate gains is often an excuse to ignore a big negative picture.

I learned this from a Zen Buddhist monk in Japan. Masahiro was one of my favorite students when I was teaching English in Kobe in the 1990s. He had recently inherited his father’s temple and made a good living from funeral ceremonies, where his chanting and calligraphy skills were put to good use. But apart from that and his bald head, we had a lot in common. Almost the same age, we would go drinking, smoking, wenching, playing football, and singing karaoke together. He would often drive back to his temple drunk in the early hours of the morning. I wondered how he squared this lifestyle with his role as a spiritual mentor. There was only one way to find out.

“Masahiro, can I talk to you about religion?”

“Sure. Anything,” he beamed.

“Well, perhaps this is too British a way of thinking. But in my understanding a priest or a monk should set an example. Do you agree?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Yet you drink more alcohol, you smoke more cigarettes, and you have more girlfriends than most people I know. What kind of example is that?”

He laughed. “That’s difficult to explain …”

“Please try. My behavior is not much different. But you’re a monk. Shouldn’t you be better? What is the example you are setting?”

He laughed again and leaned back on his chair. “Well, I have an 80 percent rule.”

“What’s that?”

“I only do 80 percent of what I could. The other 20 percent I hold back.”

“Could you give me an example?”

“Well, I could drink ten beers when I go out, but I only drink eight. And I could smoke a hundred cigarettes in a week, but I only smoke eighty …”

“What!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Are you saying that makes you a 20 percent better person?”

“It’s hard to explain. Buddhism is not easy to understand.”

I did not buy the argument at all. Masahiro was a good friend but a dubious Buddhist. He was winging it with this explanation, which sounded a lot like the shopaholic’s excuse for splurging in the sales: “I might have spent a fortune, but look how much I’ve saved!”

A similar mind-set lies behind China’s claims of efficiency gains. As in the West, although technology is making energy use less wasteful, it is also encouraging people to use more power. Overall, the result is increased consumption. Scant consideration appears to be given to the fact that resources are finite.

The second danger of relying too much on efficiency is that it stifles creativity and diversity: once something is found to work, it is repeated and expanded to the detriment of all else. I learned that in Shandong, where I went to observe mankind’s efforts to improve the fertility of the land and the sea.

When people talk about environmental problems in China, they usually focus on factories and emissions, but it is often farmland and fertilizer that create the biggest problems. The impact is most striking in Shandong. This huge coastal province generates more agricultural revenue than any other.
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It is China’s leading meat producer and its number two supplier of wheat and cotton.
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