Living Hand to Mouth

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 26, 2005

Shanghai

You don't see this every day: A columnist for The China Daily wrote an essay last week proposing that the Chinese consider eating with their hands and abandon chopsticks. Why?

Because, Zou Hanru wrote, "we no longer have abundant forest cover, our land is no longer that green, our water tables are depleting and our numbers are expanding faster than ever. ... China itself uses 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, or 1.66 million cubic meters of timber, or 25 million full-grown trees." The more affluent the Chinese become, he added, "the more the demand for bigger homes and a wide range of furniture. Newspapers get thicker in their bid to grab a bigger share of the advertising market."

In the face of rising environmental pressures, he said, China must abandon disposable wooden chopsticks and move to reusable steel, "or, better still, we can use our hands."

Mr. Zou's column underscores that while year after year of 9 percent growth may be economically sustainable for China, it is reaching its environmental limits. That pressure hits you the minute you land in Shanghai.

As you wait for 90 minutes to get your visa stamped at the airport, crushed between traveling Chinese and visiting investors, you can feel that you are in a country engaged in extreme capitalism. Every other person around me in the visa line was already on a cellphone or P.D.A. - as if people could not wait to get through passport control to start doing deals.

Not only is China not a communist country anymore, but it may also now be the world's most capitalist country in terms of raw energy. Indeed, I believe history will record that it was Chinese capitalism that put an end to European socialism. Europe can no longer sustain its 35-hour workweeks and lavish welfare states because of the rising competition from low-wage, high-aspiration China, as well as from India and Eastern Europe.

But can anything stop Chinese capitalism? Yes, Chinese capitalism. Other than political breakdown, the biggest threat to China's growth is now the environment. One Sam's Club, part of Wal-Mart, in the Chinese city of Shenzhen sold 1,100 air-conditioners in one hot weekend last year. There is a limit to how long you can do that. China's leaders know this and have been taking steps to reverse deforestation and find alternatives to the coal-powered electricity plants that have turned cities like Shenzhen into just one big gray cloud.

One thing the Chinese government is doing is changing how local, state and national officials are judged. G.D.P. growth is not the only metric anymore.

"During the transition period from planned economy to a market economy, there was a period when the economic indicators were the only criteria, because we had to develop the economy," Shanghai's deputy mayor, Feng Guoquin, told me. Today, however, more and more Chinese citizens demand that their local officials "pay equal attention to economic development and ecological protection."

But given that the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party rests largely on its ability to keep raising living standards, it can't afford a recession and mass unemployment - in any crunch, officials will always choose raw growth. The party cannot afford a recession, and it also has to extend growth to the still impoverished rural areas. But many of those villages are already boiling because, while villagers crave jobs, they resent the deforestation, dams and polluted rivers that have already been dumped on them by the big cities.

So I'm glad that Donald Rumsfeld finally came over to China to talk with China's military last week, but that is so 20th century. How China uses its growing military is purely hypothetical. What China's impact on the global environment will be if it continues to grow at this pace is a certain disaster - for China and the world.

Tighter regulation alone won't save China's environment, or the world's. Since logging in most natural forests was banned here in 1998, China's appetite for imported wood has led to stripped forests in Russia, Africa, Burma and Brazil. China outsourced its environmental degradation.

That is why you need an integrated solution. And that is why the most important strategy the U.S. and China need to pursue, in concert, is one that brings business, government and N.G.O.'s together to produce a more sustainable form of development - so China can create a model for itself and others on how to do more things with less stuff and fewer emissions. That is the economic, environmental and national security issue of our day. Nothing else is even close.

Green Dreams in Shangri-La

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 28, 2005

Shangri-La County, China

I came to Shangri-La and I met the Buddha.

Well, not the Buddha, but one of the "living Buddhas" designated by the Buddhist hierarchy as spiritual leaders throughout this Tibetan region of China, and not the mythic Shangri-La of "Lost Horizon," but this lush western China countryside near the border with Burma that has renamed itself Shangri-La to attract more tourists.

But don't underestimate this Shangri-La. Its spectacular wetlands, pine forests and mountains (this is where your rhododendrons originally came from) make up one of the 34 biodiversity hot spots designated worldwide by Conservation International as places with large numbers of unique plant and animal species threatened by human development - which, once lost, may never come back.

And that's why I came here. Because Shangri-La County is a microcosm of the biggest challenge facing China. Put simply: if development doesn't come to Shangri-La and other rural areas, the divide between haves and have-nots will widen and destabilize China. But if the wrong development comes here, it will add to global warming and ravage the rural environment where many of China's indigenous cultures and species are nested.

Yes, China must get its smoke-belching factories out of the coastal cities because they are making the cities unlivable, but if it just pushes them into the countryside, they will destroy way too much of China's farmland, and the natural areas that are the home of things like Tibetan culture.

The living Buddha, Ang Weng, is right in the middle of this drama, trying to promote a higher living standard for his people - without destroying the "sacred forests" essential to Tibetan spirituality. The living Buddha wears a sunny smile and a cowboy hat. His wife, who makes a mean butter tea, a traditional Tibetan drink, translated from his Tibetan dialect into Chinese for my translator.

He got right to the point: "The human brain is moving much faster into the modern world than the environment, and this fast move is having an impact on the environment. Build this and build that, and you lose the environment."

The good, and surprising, news I found in Shangri-La was how much the poor villagers here were coming up with their own green growth solutions. For instance, the 39 families in the village of Hamugu have bundled their savings to build a lodge for ecotourists drawn by the wetlands. "We just need a Web site," the manager told me. A local botanist has built Shangri-La Alpine Botanic Garden, which employs two dozen people and shares profits with the local village.

It also has the finest public toilet I've ever used, a solar-powered composting toilet with an automated plastic green seat cover - in the middle of nowhere! It was labeled "The Lavatory of Environmental Protection of the Travel."

A U.S. multinational, 3M, is financing the restoration of the local forests to reduce climate change and protect the watersheds. And the old log-and-mud town of Zhongdian here is a Disneyland-like traditional Tibetan village, with hot-pot restaurants that attract droves of Chinese tourists.

"All the basic elements of a network solution to safeguard environment and culture are here," said Lu Zhi, Conservation International's director in China and my traveling companion. (My wife's a C.I. board member.) "But the challenge is how do you organize this business-N.G.O.-government network more effectively so you can provide ecofriendly alternatives to industrial development that could be replicated in the rest of rural China."

Not only would this be enormously important for China's environment, but it could also be a model for other developing countries. What we don't want is for China to protect its own environment and then strip everyone else's in the developing world by importing their forests and minerals.

"For 30 years, the business of development has been Americans and Europeans lecturing poor countries about how they need to do things differently," said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International. "What we hope to see here is a new paradigm, where China, itself a developing country, offers a new model of sustainable development to other developing countries."

I sure hope so. We all need China to start assuming an environmental leadership role commensurate with its impact on the world. Imagine a day when China is sharing its own approaches to environmentally and culturally sustainable development with other developing countries - not just pursuing them for its resources.

Now that would be a great leap forward.

Understanding China

By Kishore Mahbubani

KISHORE MAHBUBANI is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. This essay is adapted from his book Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World.

THE WAKING DRAGON

China today is like a dragon that, waking up after centuries of slumber, suddenly realizes many nations have been trampling on its tail. With all that has happened to it over the past 200 years, China could be forgiven for awakening as an angry nation, and yet Beijing has declared that it will rise peacefully. This good disposition stems partly from China's awareness that it is relatively weak. But it is also a sign that Beijing has endorsed the vision of progress that the United States has extolled since World War II. States no longer need to pursue military conquest to prosper, the theory goes; trade and economic integration pave a surer path to growth. And Beijing has noted how much adhering to this philosophy helped Japan and Germany emerge from the ruins of World War II.

As the main architect of the world order today, the United States should be among the first to celebrate China's progress. For if Beijing continues to abide by Washington's rules, peace and stability could reign, and the United States, as both a society and an economy, could benefit a great deal from the renaissance of Chinese civilization. Curiously, however, the United States is doing more to destabilize China than any other power. And no one in Washington seems to be proposing, much less pursuing, a comprehensive new strategy for U.S.-Chinese relations. The working assumption appears to be that with a little tinkering here and there, the relationship will stay firmly on track. In fact, however, nagging suspicions and mutual misunderstandings are already threatening to derail it.

Continue reading at: The New York Times

China's Search for Stability With America

By Wang Jisi

WANG JISI is Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China. This essay is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in Zhongguo Dangzheng Ganbu Luntan, a journal of the Central Party School.

The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its "hegemonism" -- a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance -- many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation's security and domestic stability.

Yet the United States is a global leader in economics, education, culture, technology, and science. China, therefore, must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed. Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing, where economic prosperity and social stability are now top concerns.

Continue reading at: Foreign Affairs

So he walks with his sister down Washington Avenue, under oak trees older than most fears, towards an even older Gulf of Mexico. It is only half-a-mile down the two lane concrete road from Miz Holloway's goats, all of whom have now come over to the fence to be petted. But Joseph and Annette have walked on over the hill and they can see the water spreading out before them as the animals' indignant bleating follows.


Actually what they see is not the Gulf of Mexico, that is out beyond the barrier islands. The body of sparkling water stretching blue and wide as they walk closer is really the Bay of Beauvoir: here, Pierre Lemoine de Iberville landed in 1699 and built Fort Maurepas, not a 1000 yards from where Joseph and Annette now live.

Walking in troubled silence they come to the beach road and, turning back to their left, begin the climb up to the house. Seeing the cream colored '55 Ford Fairlane in the driveway, Joseph says, "Pop must've come home early. See? I tol' ya ever'thin' would be alright."

Annette doesn't answer, she just rolls her dark brown eyes at his forced logic, shifts her books from one hip to the other, and continues up the sharply sloping hill that is their front yard. ...



Walking next to his pop and looking back at his home on the hill as Annette joins her mother in preparations for the evening's visitor, Joseph Vickers soon sails into his safe harbor. This perfect place, and his dad...

The large, rambling, gabled old house, so typical of its time (built before the turn of the century), sitting on the green grassy hill about 100 yards from the water's edge, had been his father's dream. Every Sunday afternoon before they moved here, they'd driven by and looked at the For Sale sign, only to return to the small shotgun house on Cherokee Street in Beauvoir. Now that house is home to the four of them. If there can be living nightmares, then, just as surely, there can be living dreams. Joseph has found his. He wants to live here forever. This is his world. The endless water. The gleaming beach. And the sleepy little village: Maurepas. ...

Maurepas has a volunteer mayor, three fulltime policemen, and a lot of churches. The most distinguishing quality of the town (other than its beautiful beaches) is the oak trees. There are oak trees all up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but not as many great trees all in one place as here. Most especially right here.

Joseph's dream house is framed by massive evergreens, plus one giant hickory tree that is reputed to be the largest any one has ever seen this far south. The old beach house sits well back on the plateau of a hill, which rises quickly from the tiny road that separates the lawn from the sifting, white-powder sand. The property is 1500 feet in depth and 250 feet wide. The hill runs across the width, similar to a miniature mountain range, dropping off in front to the bay and behind into a sunken paradise of a semi-tropical rain forest. The property rights run another 1500 feet out into the bay and according to tradition 10% of all seafood harvested from in front of the house belongs to the owners. By 1958 this is not really the case any longer; out of sentiment, however, the offer is still made by some of the older oystermen and shrimpers. ...

Like sea communities everywhere, it's hard to get too awfully tense about anything in Maurepas. With the bountiful Gulf, even the poor eat well. And the breeze cools rich and destitute alike, so neither needs air conditioning; nor "airs" for that matter.

No, there isn't undue strife in paradise. But, if there was, and one didn't fuss over it too much, make a big to-do, it would probably just go away. That is storm mentality. If you live by the Gulf you see the water knock down and reclaim things from time to time. But things always get rebuilt and go on the same as before until the water takes them under again. It gives a good perspective on time--given enough of it, almost everything will even out in the wash.