In 1978, a tiny, quiet revolution in a Communist behemoth

The Secret Document That Transformed China

by DAVID KESTENBAUM and JACOB GOLDSTEIN
NPR

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm; there was no personal property.

"Back then, even one straw belonged to the group," says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. "No one owned anything."

At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: "What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?" Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.

(More here.)

Photograph by Greg Girard

Can China Go Green?

No other country is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much coal to fuel its economy.

By Bill McKibben
National Geographic

Rizhao, in Shandong Province, is one of the hundreds of Chinese cities gearing up to really grow. The road into town is eight lanes wide, even though at the moment there's not much traffic. But the port, where great loads of iron ore arrive, is bustling, and Beijing has designated the shipping terminal as the "Eastern bridgehead of the new Euro-Asia continental bridge." A big sign exhorts the residents to "build a civilized city and be a civilized citizen."

In other words, Rizhao is the kind of place that has scientists around the world deeply worried—China's rapid expansion and newfound wealth are pushing carbon emissions ever higher. It's the kind of growth that helped China surge past the United States in the past decade to become the world's largest source of global warming gases.

And yet, after lunch at the Guangdian Hotel, the city's chief engineer, Yu Haibo, led me to the roof of the restaurant for another view. First we clambered over the hotel's solar-thermal system, an array of vacuum tubes that takes the sun's energy and turns it into all the hot water the kitchen and 102 rooms can possibly use. Then, from the edge of the roof, we took in a view of the spreading skyline. On top of every single building for blocks around a similar solar array sprouted. Solar is in at least 95 percent of all the buildings, Yu said proudly. "Some people say 99 percent, but I'm shy to say that."

(Continued here.)

Rare earths: Another reason why we're more dependent on China

The Secret Ingredients of Everything

From smart phones to hybrid vehicles to cordless power drills, devices we all desire are made with a pinch of rare earths—exotic elements that right now come mostly from China.

By Tim Folger
National Geographic

Most of us would be hard-pressed to locate Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, or Guangdong on a map. Yet many of the high-tech devices we depend on—cell phones, laptops, and hundreds of others—would not exist without an obscure group of elements mined, sometimes illegally, in those three and other regions of China.

Rare earths, as the elements are called, were discovered beginning in the late 18th century as oxidized minerals—hence "earths." They're actually metals, and they aren't really rare; they're just scattered. A handful of dirt from your backyard would probably contain a smidgen, maybe a few parts per million. The rarest rare earth is nearly 200 times more abundant than gold. But deposits large and concentrated enough to be worth mining are indeed rare.

The list of things that contain rare earths is almost endless. Magnets made with them are much more powerful than conventional magnets and weigh less; that's one reason so many electronic devices have gotten so small. Rare earths are also essential to a host of green machines, including hybrid cars and wind turbines. The battery in a single Toyota Prius contains more than 20 pounds of the rare earth element lanthanum; the magnet in a large wind turbine may contain 500 pounds or more of neodymium. The U.S. military needs rare earths for night-vision goggles, cruise missiles, and other weapons.

(More here.)

Watching China Run

(LP note: To the right is the world’s largest solar powered office building, located in Dezhou, northwest China. Photo: Livbit.)

By BOB HERBERT
NYT

It was primarily a symbolic gesture. Way back in 1979, in the midst of an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They were used to heat water for some White House staffers.

“A generation from now,” said Mr. Carter, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people, harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Ronald Reagan had the panels taken down.

We missed the boat then, and lord knows we’re missing it now. Two weeks ago, as I was getting ready to take off for Palo Alto, Calif., to cover a conference on the importance of energy and infrastructure for the next American economy, The Times’s Keith Bradsher was writing from Tianjin, China, about how the Chinese were sprinting past everybody else in the world, including the United States, in the race to develop clean energy.

(More here.)

Language: Just in time for the Beijing Olympics...

Anyone here speak Chinglish?

By Michael Erard, Wired

The targeted offenses: IF YOU ARE STOLEN, CALL THE POLICE AT ONCE. PLEASE OMNIVOROUSLY PUT THE WASTE IN GARBAGE CAN. DEFORMED MAN LAVATORY. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

(Continued here.)

China's expectations are rising, with no end in sight

"An American criticizing China's environmental record is like an addict blaming his dealer."

The Road Ahead

By Peter Hessler, National Geographic

The genesis of a Chinese factory town is always the same: In the beginning nearly everybody is a construction worker. The booming economy means that work moves fast, and new industrial districts rise in distinct stages. Those early laborers are men who have migrated from rural villages, and immediately they're joined by small entrepreneurs. These pioneers sell meat, fruit, and vegetables on informal stands, and later, when the first real stores appear, they stock construction materials. After that cell phone companies set up shop: China Mobile, China Unicom. They deal prepaid phone cards to migrants; in the southeastern province of Zhejiang, one popular product is called the Homesick Card. During these initial stages there's rarely any sign of police. Government officials are prominently absent. It's not until plants start production that you see many women. Assembly-line bosses prefer young female workers, who are believed to be more diligent and manageable. After the women appear, so do the clothes shops. It's amazing how quickly a shoe store emerges from a barren strip of factories, like a flower in a broken sidewalk. In the early days garbage accumulates in the gutters; the government is never in a rush to institute basic services. Public buses don't appear for months. Manholes remain open till the last instant, for fear that early settlers will steal the metal covers and sell them for scrap.

Over a two-year period, I traveled repeatedly to Zhejiang, watching factory towns rise from the farmland. Every time, I rented a car and followed a brand-new highway that connected the boomtowns of tomorrow. I drove the road for six months before noticing any clear indication of local authority. That's when I began to receive speeding tickets — $20 each, three or four every journey. They were issued by automated cameras, usually in places where the posted speed limit mysteriously dropped without warning. I collected violations in factory towns all across the province: in Jinhua, known for producing brassieres; in Lishui, maker of synthetic leather; in Qiaotou, famous for buttons and zippers.

(This must-read article is here.)

Human population and the planet: When is enough "enough"?

What happens if China’s “one child” is left behind?

Robert Engelman

Based on a senior official’s remarks, it looks like China may soon relax its one-child policy. That has raised fears among some demographers that the country will experience a massive baby boom once the reproductive shackles come off, and hence “could overturn predictions of an imminent end to global population growth,” in the words of New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin.

Almost one in five human beings is Chinese (1.3 billion out of a global total of 6.7 billion), so the country matters immensely to human numbers. But there’s an assumption embedded in this discussion that deserves to be challenged. How do we know it’s the one-child policy that actually explains China’s current low fertility? Could factors outside of the heavy-handed government framework of fines and sanctions continue to keep Chinese families small even if that framework becomes less heavy-handed?

After all, families are small (and getting smaller) in lots of countries where governments don’t dictate their size. And surveys indicate that three out of five Chinese under the age of 30 want no more than two children, with very few wanting more than three. The government estimates (and not all demographers trust this) that Chinese women now have an average of 1.8 children each over their lifetimes. That alone tells us the one-child policy is ineffective at driving births down to a national rate anywhere close to one child per woman.

(The article is here.)

A green economic stimulus in China

It is common knowledge that China's headlong drive towards economic development has created massive environmental problems in the most populous nation on earth. The Chinese are now recognizing this and are attempting to deal with the challenge in a variety of ways. This is one.

China Uses Green Loans to Tackle Environmental Problems
Yingling Liu, WorldWatch Institute

A new joint effort between China’s government and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) will likely wean industrial polluters in the country off of environmentally destructive bank loans. In late January, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) signed an agreement with the IFC to introduce the globally recognized Equator Principles in China, according to China Daily. The Equator Principles are a voluntary set of guidelines for assessing and managing the environmental and social risks associated with project finance.

Under the collaboration, SEPA and the IFC will conduct joint research on adapting the Equator Principles and developing environmental benchmarks for lending in China’s financial sector. The collaboration will provide a set of international standards for China’s “green loan” initiative, launched in July 2007 by SEPA in partnership with China’s Central Bank and the China Banking Regulatory Commission. The initiative aims to construct a platform for sharing the environmental records of industries with environmental authorities, the Central Bank, and commercial banks. Banks will also be pushed to factor in environmental considerations when distributing loans. The initiative aims to use financial tools to force “self discipline” on businesses for their own survival and development.

More here. For more about China's environmental problems — and solutions — read "The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global" in Mother Jones and Lester Brown's Plan B 3.0.