We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
China-resident
American journalist and environmentalist Craig Simons nails his colours to the
mast very early in The Devouring Dragon,
which is subtitled How China’s Rise
Threatens the Natural World.
In the book’s prologue, he visits
an American small town, which used to have a booming economy based on
coalmining. The town has been in economic decline for years, because American
and European demand for coal has fallen away drastically in more
environmentally conscious times. American and European factories and
power-plants are no longer coal-fired. But suddenly the small town is booming
again, because an important foreign customer wants coal – China. In fact,
across much of the world (including New Zealand), old coalmines are being
re-opened to feed this gigantic customer.
As Simons remarks:
“I suspected that China was more than a peripheral part of [the American
small town’s] story. In 2009, China burned 3.5 billion tons of coal, almost
half the world’s total. But it was China’s potential demand that was
creating a global mining renaissance. In 1976, when Mao Zedong…. died, the
country had used only 550 million tons of coal each year, one sixth of today’s
total. By 1997, its demand had exceeded that of the United States, but it still
used what now looks like a quaint number: 1.4 billion tons. Then – in the
thirteen years from 1997 to 2009 – China added over 2 billion tons of annual
coal demand, the equivalent of two new nations as voracious as the United
States, which – until China surpassed it – had been the world’s biggest coal
consumer. And experts predicted that China’s growing energy appetite wouldn’t
peak for many years.” (Prologue Pg.2)
So, after a quick survey of
China’s impact on global economies and the global environment, Simons announces
his main theme:
“This is
a book about how China’s rise is changing the physical planet. For many readers
the facts about how quickly China has grown since the late 1970s and what that
means for the global economy and geopolitics will be familiar, even if we don’t
always keep the facts straight. Many will have heard that China is not only the
world’s fastest-growing large economy, but also that it is the only
large economy that has ever sustained such a high growth rate – roughly 10 per
cent each year for the last three decades, enough that it has moved from being
the world’s tenth largest economy (in 1979 wedged between the Netherlands and
Spain) to its second largest today. Only the United States earns more each
year, and much of that is derived from investments and outsourcing, not from
actually making anything. Most economists predict that the Middle Kingdom….
will surpass the United States as the world’s top economy during the next two
decades.” (Prologue Pg. 8)
But this unprecedented economic
growth of China is happening at the very time that the world is becoming choked
with pollutants and environmentally degraded by greenhouse gases and
perceptible global warming. “The more I
read, the more I realised that China was hitting its stride just as the planet
is reaching environmental tipping point”, says Simons (Prologue Pg.17). He
illustrates how China’s fossil-fuel-burning economic boom has created great middle-class
wealth in China itself, and a huge appetite for all the material goodies
associated with the capitalist West. But it has also created huge social
inequality. And, more crucially for the rest of the world, it has battered
China’s ecological systems and threatens the “commons” (the Earth’s shared
environment). Sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are in China,
where the urban air is almost unbreathable. The great Yangtze River is rapidly
becoming a running sewer. Species are being made extinct (such as the Yangtze
River dolphin).
Thus says Simons in his 20-page
prologue.
The rest of The Devouring Dragon is essentially an illustration of this thesis.
Three chapters (1,2 and 3) focus
on the Yangtze River and the colossal Three Gorges Dam, which has destroyed
much of the environment, and much of China’s essential fresh-water supply. This
ecological disaster could have been avoided (as even some Chinese commentators
noted) if a series of more modest dams – capable of generating just as much
power - had been built on the Yangtze’s
tributaries. But the Three Gorges Dam became a prestige project for China’s
leadership; a symbol of Chinese power and technological modernity; and they
could not cancel the project without losing “face”. As it is, the great river
is now unable to flush out toxins like mercury and cadmium, creating massive
pollution and wiping out species that have lived there for millions of years –
the Chinese sturgeon among them. With little unpolluted water supply, farming in
its neighbouring provinces becomes less practicable.
While Simons does not write his
polemic with any xenophobic agenda, he does suggest that there is something
ancient in the Chinese mentality that leads to an extreme exploitation of the
environment:
“To understand China’s modern environmental crisis, one needs to grasp
those historical roots: Confucian ideology both bolstered the belief that the
natural world should be controlled to serve man and created a top-down
political system with weak support for civil society – the checks on power
provided by democratic elections, a free press, an active nongovernmental
sector, and the rule of law. Mao Zedong sharpened those historical forces by
nurturing a revolutionary zeal that often ignored and silenced science and
common sense. And China’s post-Mao era has greatly increased the speed of
environmental damage and pushed it far beyond the nation’s borders.”
(Chapter Two, Pg.48)
Turning from China itself, Simons
then devotes three chapters (4, 5 and 6) to the way the Chinese demand for
traditional medicines has become a major threat to species in many parts of the
world. Tiger bones, shark fins, pangolin shells and rhinoceros horns are all
components of traditional Chinese medicine, and turtle is regarded as a great
delicacy. However, before the recent exponential growth of a wealthy Chinese
middle class, most Chinese were unable to afford these things. Now there is a
huge paying market for them, even though most of them offer no real medicinal
benefit whatsoever (apart, perhaps, from a placebo effect).
Result? The existence of India’s
few remaining tigers is threatened by a huge illegal trade with China. Turtles
have virtually been wiped out of southern Asia. China is becoming “the vacuum
cleaner” of marginal species.
In like fashion, three chapters
(7,8 and 9) deal with the loss of ancient and native forests elsewhere, because
of China’s demand for both hardwood furniture and palm oil. Simons takes the
example of the extinction of the kwila
tree in New Guinea to service markets in Shanghai and the new cities of China’s
hinterland. Russia’s far eastern forests are rapidly disappearing for the same
reason; while every year hundreds of square miles of Amazonian rain forest are
destroyed so that palm oil can be harvested.
The final two chapters (10 and
11) move to the impact of China’s use of fossil fuels on the Earth’s
atmosphere. Simons first looks at apparently idyllic environments, but then
shows how each of them is being affected by climate change, related to China’s
pumping out of greenhouse gases. There is the example of pockets of rural China
itself, where the air is still breathable but perhaps won’t be for long. There
is the example of the Pacific atoll of Tuvalu, which may soon sink beneath
rising seas. There is India’s Bihar province, where the monsoons become more
intense and destructive each year. Simons gives a disenchanted account of the
2009 Copenhagen conference on climate, complete with the grandstanding of some
Western countries, but also with China’s firm veto of any attempts to curb the
burning of fossil fuels.
He remarks:
“If China maintains its current policies, its total demand [for energy]
is expected to almost double again by 2035, adding demand equivalent to
what the United States now uses. According to the International Energy Agency….
it would meet that demand roughly as it does today: 87 per cent would be
generated by burning fossil fuels. And it has become a model for other rapidly
developing nations [such as India, Russia and Brazil]” (Chapter 10
pp.187-188)
As you might expect, the book
ends with a call to real action on climate and conservation.
One major point I take away from
this book is the sheer scale of the Chinese enterprise. To quote one example of
the many hundreds that are given in The
Devouring Dragon, by 2025, China will have 221 cities with populations
above one million. Europe has only 35 such cities. (p.201)
It must be emphasized that Simons
is not pointing the finger at a people, but at a system. It is often said that
what China is doing today is no more nor less than what Western countries have
done in the past in order to accumulate wealth – destroying whole environments
to feed coal-fired industry, and creating massive ecological messes. Simons is
fully aware of this. When he discusses the pollution of the Yangtze, he
compares it with similar pollution in the United States in earlier phases of
American capitalism. When he speaks of the extinction of species, he discusses
the fate of the North American bison.
He understands that the problems
China now creates spring from its people’s desire to have a wasteful
consumerist life based on a Western model. He also notes that individual
Chinese consumers are far less prodigal with the Earth’s resources than
individual American consumers are. Per
capita, Chinese still drive only a fraction of the automobiles that
Americans do. Per capita, Chinese use
far less petrol and oil. Indeed, says Simons, if Chinese were as wasteful of
paper and wood as Americans are, then China would consume the world’s total
yield of timber. The desire to do as Americans do also inspires those New
Guineans who wield chainsaws against native forests in return for hard Chinese
cash. They too want to have colour televisions and i-pods and air conditioners
and all the commodities of the American home. Simons quotes the remarks of
environmental biologist Thomas Lovejoy:
“Everybody’s
basically mimicking what America did, but the reality is that in the end,
there’s just not enough world to go around for everyone to live a
top-of-the-food-chain American or European lifestyle…. Biodiversity loss can
look sort of like a stream – and with the addition of China it’s a much more
rapidly flowing stream now – but we have to realise that there are going to be
some big thresholds that are crossed and there’ll be large chunks of
biodiversity lost.” (Chapter 6 pp.117-118)
As a very minor criticism of this
book, I should note that there are some sections in which Simons becomes
perhaps a little too lyrical. He comes over all mystic when he sees a tiger in
its (protected) natural environment in India’s Corbett National Park. He can’t
help (a little unrealistically, I think) comparing Hindu oneness-with-nature
favourably with more pragmatic and hierarchical Confucianism. Sometimes he
quotes from the nineteenth century writings of Alfred Russel Wallace to remind
us of how pristine the forests of the Malay Archipelago once were.
But I’m quibbling. This is a very
forceful polemic, well indexed, and substantiated with forty pages of endnotes.
In simply summarising my reading of it, I hope I have given you an accurate
idea of how worth reading it is.