The China Vortex

Environmental experts paint a bleak picture of the future when the subject comes to global warming. Now, it turns out because of the rapid increase in energy needs in China, what were originally worst-case scenarios for global warming will now, almost surely, turn into best-case scenarios.

This is because many of the decisions for new power plants and energy have been pushed from Beijing down to the provincial levels, and simply put, the provinces have more incentive to produce more energy than to decrease carbon emissions. What was a bad situation becomes much worse, not just for China, but for the whole world. While the US has previously been the world’s worst emitter of hydrocarbons, China is on the path to replacing the US to become a hydrocarbon emitting country on a much grander scale, and in a league of its own. This will lead to much greater condemnation of China in the international press and also in China’s more vocal domestic arena of public opinion which uses the Internet as its main venue.

Richard Carson, a professor at the University of San Diego, is the leading expert on China’s carbon emissions, and he has co-authored a paper on his measurements and forecasts for carbon emissions based on his on-the-ground work in China. You can read about it here.

If there has been a major problem with the Chinese leadership, it has been its slowness to recognize that the old way of industrialization simply does not work with a population as vast as China’s. Western Europe, then later America and Japan were able to get away with industrialization because they had smaller populations and did not urbanize as quickly as China is now.

Not only does reliance on energy imports crimp China’s foreign policy in the near future, it is crimping the environment now. And the whole problem will only get worse.

This is the problem with the traditional view of industrialization and urbanization.

The tragedy for humanity and for China is that other development models are available. Using computers and virtual teams on service-related projects reduces the need for commutes and polluting transportation. Everyone will have to make some sacrifices in lifestyle, but the sacrifices are not that huge.

The trouble is that we are straddled with a bunch of old thinkers in leadership positions who can’t make the change to a new model fast enough. We are not in control of our own fate.

Several days ago I attended Urbancamp Beijing, hosted by Orange Labs in Beijing.

The purpose of the event was to explore how cities of the not-too-distant future will look like; the theme was the Chinese City 2.0. Because China is growing so rapidly in this area, it has become a sociologist’s paradise for study. Neville Mars of the Dynamic City Foundation is a Beijing-based architect who is actively studying this field, and will come out shortly with an 800-page book on the subject in January.

His presentation was presented in a very interesting and chaotic manner, as if to reflect the chaotic development of the subject he covers. He alluded to how rampant growth in China was being fostered by the government, and then in most cases, the government took over development from the artistic groups.

Another group which is studying Chinese urban growth is the Urban Forum, which is studying the effects of China’s urban development. A Chinese language magazine, Urban China, is now covering China’s development, and a speaker unveiled plans for a web version of the magazine for global distribution.

Shang Dan of Orange Labs Beijing provided a fascinating report on car clubs in China, which bring together car owners to join in social activities. Since Chinese treat cars mainly as symbols of social rank and status, it is natural for them to research the car clubs before buying the model they want. This fits well into the city landscape well because it hard to find like-minded people in a literally new city, and the car club provides a welcome activity club for the new car-owner.

I wonder what kind of car club there is for owners of black Audi A6s? (If you have lived in China for a while, you’ll get this joke.)

Kenneth Fields of Peking University spoke about how to use tagging for location data, and City8 introduced their 3D mapping software for cities.

The afternoon discussion, which was a free discussion, was about the different themes in the definitions of place and city.

One subject which was not clear to me was what is the definition of city where people spend more and more time online on the Internet? Most of us spend a good part of the day jacked into the Internet; is it really important to have cities anymore? Has the city become a state of mind instead of a physical place? When pollution and hydrocarbons and global warming become ever greater issues, why bother with physical cities anyway? What are online and offline communities, and how do they map to each other?

Are Chinese developers and the Chinese government going exactly contrary to development trends by developing physical urban cities now, when they are falling into discredit?

These are interesting questions which need to be explored further.