CHINA AND INDIA

Three observations: Environmental pollution and devastation are so egregious in China they are already a drag on its economy. Human health is significantly impaired and will grow worse, requiring huge spending in health care and environmental remediation. India might grow its economy differently, without the worst of the pollution industries.


The transition to democracy in China is a giant question--about how it will play out. Already Chinese citizens launch protests at polluters who pay off local Party functionaries to bypass environmental regulations. The Chinese governmental system is corrupted at the local level and is the biggest complaint by citizens. So far, the Chinese economy has done well under the Chinese governmental system ("What does it matter the color of the cat, as long as it catches mice?" goes the big-poster slogan by Deng Xiao-Ping), but the future interplay of government (a one-party system) and the capitalistic economy is an unknown. Much instability could result, with capital fleeing the country. India, the world's largest democracy, could end up much more stable, although it has its sectrian troubles.


China is experiencing a worrisome aging of its population, and, I believe, will grow older in average age the fastest in the world, due to the demographic successes of its two-child policy (which it has loosened over the last decade). China's dependence ratio, then, will soon be a huge drag. Too many old people! India sits at a different, earlier, point along the demographic transition, so will have more workers longer than China (although India is in the midst of a population explosion it might not be able to handle well--too many young people!).


How to add up the pluses and minuses of China and India? Seems India looks better because of environment, democracy, and demographics.

PEAK OIL, DE-GLOBALIZATION, AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECT

I believe the Chinese have a valid point in their claiming that they have become the world's workshop (capital easily relocates to take advantage of cheaper inputs) and thus pollute. In essence, the US has exported pollution, by shifting industries and jobs overseas (the Chinese, beginning with reforms of Deng Xiaoping, were certainly not forced by us) to save our cities (but not our workers' jobs). And, our cities are, for the most part, cleaner. Our primary air pollutants are no longer caused by electricity-generating power plants and factories but automobiles. Of course, "pollution knows no boundaries," so pollution returns to us in several ways. It's all so short-sighted.

In any case, with peak oil just a very few years away (if you accept the views of some economists), then there must come a process of de-globalization that will change everything. The previous decades-long era of the global shift to a geo-economy will end, and a reversal will commence, including the "neighborhood effect" of industries re-relocating back closer to customers in North America and Europe. This will begin to happen even before peak oil, as oil prices (already at $76 pb) continue to climb as the global economy continues to recover.

But with peak oil (some see as high as $200 pb within six years) we will see the growth of regional economies as the geo-economy declines. This scenario depends on the advent of peak oil. There would necessarily be a great deal of destabilization and turmoil (but opportunity as well)--so get ready.

Otherwise, China will manufacture a very high percentage of all automobiles within ten years as well as continue to be the world's workshop for smaller consumer items, although it is beginning to have such severe environmental problems and incipient labor shortages that production will be hampered, to the advantage of the other emerging economies, such as India.

Seems there are two basic scenarios: Manufacturing continues to locate in China (and India and the other emerging economies: Brazil, Philippines, etc.) or peak oil changes it all.

Regardless, we might have only a very few years (now measurable in only a few dozen months) to hold global atmospheric CO2 under 350 ppm and hold global warming under 2.0C (to perhaps 2.4C) to prevent environmental tipping points from being tripped--the melting of the Arctic ice cap, the thawing of permafrost, and the warming and acidification of the oceans. Each of these is a positive feedback loop, thus the reason they are critical. For example, with increase of global atmospheric CO2, the oceans absorb CO2 and acidify; with oceanic acidification comes the dying off of zooplankton which are CO2 absorbers and O2 emitters.

So, from China as economic powerhouse and global polluter (along with ourselves!) to the globe in peril--we collectively have questions to answer and changes to be made and adjusted to. It WILL be interesting!

CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES: WHICH IS LARGER?

For several years, I have tried to find out why American published sources now have the U.S. larger than China in area, a change I noticed several years ago. Previously China was always listed as larger, as it is on my 1993 National Geographic The World: Political wall map, showing China 87,000 sq. mi. larger than the U.S. Recently, according to my National Geographic Atlas of the World, 8th ed. (2007), China is listed at 9,596,960 sq. km. and the U.S.--larger--at 9,826,630 sq. km. (notice different units of measurement) (thus neither country is as large as Europe, at 9,938,000 sq. km.)

Not wanting to start an international incident, and not knowing the criteria for calculating area, but there must have been some change in calculating area sometime between 1993 and approximately 2003. The difference between the two calculations is large: the 2007 figures above show the U.S. some 230,000 sq. km. larger than China. The difference cannot be Taiwan, as it has only 36,000 sq. km. And the border disputes that China has with India would not, I assume, be enough to make up the difference. Also, if onshore area plus EEZ-plus-territorial waters figures are included (see the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone#Rankings_by_area ), the U.S. becomes the second-largest territory in the world, much larger than China. So, that cannot be the answer, either.

Does anyone know anything about this?

CHINESE REFLEXIVITY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

A recent article in the Washington Post ( 24 July 2008) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/24/AR2008072402162.html?wpisrc=newsletter has enough merits about what it informs about Chinese society that I will likely use it as a reading in the A. P. Human Geography courses I teach.

No matter Mr. Xu's claim that soccer is China's "beloved sport," today it is actually basketball that has captured the attention of Chinese youth, not soccer; the latter is simply more globally mediated, and thus critical to how the Chinese self-evaluate. His article delves into the collective psyche of Chinese people, who (along with the Japanese--is this a Confucian cognitive trait?) are quite preoccupied with their place at "the world's table," as he puts it.

Chinese are deeply reflexive about who they are, where they fit in the world, and how they are perceived internationally. They believe they rightfully should occupy a prominent place as equals at that table. Yet, they have self-doubts. Mr. Xu, as apparently the Chinese nation generally, uses the plight of their national soccer team as barometer of their country's--and their own--success and worth. They use international soccer as a heuristic metric of their international stature.

A key passage is where he says there is a basic paradox within their collective psyche: superficially feeling ebulliently confident about the future, especially about the unprecedented strides of the Chinese economy, but more deeply unsettled about their identity (he even brings up feminization of Chinese society and male frustration).

History as taught in China makes its citizens well aware of past injustices by European, American, and Japanese colonial powers. With this history in mind, Chinese strive to overcome that past--the past that they feel is most pertinent to them today as a nation. For example, they see American foreign policy vis-a-vis China as operating to hold China back from their rightful, prominent place at the global table.

If, as I contend, it is not too late for an individual to "have" a happy childhood in the present (i.e., change one's attitude towards one's past), then perhaps it is never too late for a people to have--create--a more felicitous history. This is not to say a person or nation should ignore actual history or to whitewash it; it is to say that our attitude towards that history is critical. National (and personal) historiography should never be allowed to become deterministic. Humans must maintain control of the essential nature of who they are, whether as individuals or nations.

I recommend that Chinese not measure their national worth in terms of soccer or any other sport. They have 5,000 years of magnificent civilization for which the world can marvel. This should inform their self-evaluation.

Note: I will travel again to China and Japan in October 2008 for two weeks. Places on the itinerary: Beijing, Shanghai, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka.

CHINA'S (AND THE WORLD'S) GREAT ENVIRONMENTAL LEAP BACKWARD

Leslie, Jacques. 2008. The Last Empire: Can the world survive China’s headlong rush to emulate the American way of life? Mother Jones 33(1) Jan.-Feb.:28-39, 83-85.

Reading the litany of environmental complications and predicaments and prodigious ecological changes that China as a dominant economic power is undergoing, as depicted in the article, would lead one to answer the question posed in the subtitle with an emphatic negative: No, the world cannot survive China's current pace and model of economic development.

On the production side, China is now first among the world’s 193 countries in production of steel, cement, coal, and 10 kinds of metal, and lesser products as buttons (60% of world’s total) and cameras (50%). In terms of specific industries, the Chinese furniture industry is highlighted, an industry that now produces more than 30% of the international furniture trade, and is the world’s leading importer of illegally logged wood, and re-exports 40% of its wood exports to the U.S.

On the consumption side, China (its middle class is projected to number 700 million by 2020) consumes more refrigerators, cell phones, television sets, fertilizer, and grain than any other country.

From the “backyard furnace” campaign during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), in which villagers cut down 10% of China’s trees in a few months; to the Kill the Four Pests campaign (1958), in which there was a mass slaughter of sparrows resulting in the explosion of the locust population; to today’s even greater environmental problems, including possessing 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, manifesting four-fifths of the length of its rivers as too polluted for fish, dumping each year a billion tons of untreated sewage into the Yangtze, and generating one third of the world’s garbage--China, and tangibly the whole planet, suffers from its immense environmental calamity-in-the-making.

The environmental repercussions travel outside China’s boundaries to severely damage forests and watersheds in Korea and Japan. It also impairs air quality in the U.S., not only by its supplanting the U.S. as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, and not only that it is now the world’s leading producer of anthropogenic mercury emissions (one study found that up to 36% of anthropogenic mercury emissions settling on the U.S. originated in Asia), but China now rivals North Africa as the world’s leading producer of border-crossing dust.

In its headlong rush to develop economically and emulate the American economic model, China shows what happens when the U.S., still the world’s largest economy, shifts so much of its production, including pollution-heavy industries, to a country that only recently is becoming concerned about its environment. Where does blame lie?

OLYMPIAN POLLUTION

Being something of a sinologist, my information tells me that most religions are NOT banned in China, except for Fulan Gong. However, the central government does license and thus somewhat controls religions. This means, for example, that Christian congregations must be authorized by the state. I have also read that the government does not allow importation of Bibles. So, Christian worship is allowed; Bibles are not.

Yes, easy for the Chinese central government to issue fiats, such as the recent one banning plastic bags by all sizes of businesses, but local authorities frequently do not follow dictates of the central government. Therefore, a ban on plastic bags might mean little. At the local level it is government by bribery, or rather non-government due to bribery and corruption. If a business wants to continue using plastic bags, a bribe would do the trick.

Certainly there is a trade-off between paper and plastic. But, the idea that the Chinese government has is that their citizens will use fewer plastic bags and also use cloth bags as they did previously to about 15 years ago. China now consumes about 3 billion (!) bags per DAY! They are strewn over the landscape (like they were after Hurricane Katrina here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast). The government is banning the thin plastic bags by June 1 this year; however, the thicker bags still will be available, but stores must charge their customers for them.

The U.S. Olympic Committee plans to not allow American athletes to prepare for the Olympics in China, due to the horrendous levels of air pollution, about which the U.N. has declared China to be the world's worst. American athletes will be flown in for each event from, I believe, the Philippines.

By the way, Australia is also phasing out plastic bags by the end of the year. Wonder when the U.S. will follow?