When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It
By Jonathan Watts
FABER AND FABER, 2010

As I write this, the sky outside my Beijing office is the color of wet concrete. Air-quality monitors at the U.S. Embassy report that the level of PM 2.5 – tiny airborne particles that can lodge in the lungs and that have been linked with cancer and respiratory disease – is “very unhealthy,” a saturation that in the United States would trigger a health alert, but here generally evokes little more than grumbling and resigned shrugs.

Jonathan Watts’ enthralling new book When a Billion Chinese Jump makes clear, however, that if we don’t want to end up on a burnt-out shell of a planet, we should take China’s environmental woes more seriously. Consider, for example, that by 2020 the volume of China’s urban garbage is expected to reach 400 million tons, equivalent to the entire world’s trash production in 1997. Or that, according to some scientists, if China’s masses were to consume as much as today’s Americans, global production of steel, paper and cars would double, oil output would rise by 20 million barrels daily and miners would dig an extra five billion tons of coal each year.

Well-researched and written with a deep passion for the subject, When a Billion Chinese Jump provides both a powerful warning that the world is hurtling toward environmental devastation and a personal account of how China’s breakneck growth has ravaged its own land, water and air. The Guardian’s longtime China bureau chief, Watts became the paper’s Asia environment correspondent last year, and he takes readers on a rapid-fire tour across China. In Yunnan, a province that makes up a tiny sliver of the country but is home to almost three-quarters of China’s endangered animals, we visit remote mountains that provide “a living history of biological history, a glorious reminder of what nature is capable of.” Among the sprawling insta-cities of southern China we see the impact of electronic waste shipped to China from developed nations; tens of thousands of people work to recycle old computers and cell phones, and few have any idea about the dangerous toxins the junk contains.

We travel on a research boat searching for signs of baiji, a blind, white dolphin that evolved for millions of years in the Yangtze, and watch hope fade as the scientists find nothing. Among a few dozen other stops, we examine dams in Sichuan (China has almost half of the world’s 45,000 biggest dams), study conspicuous consumption in Shanghai (where, according to former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, residents have larger carbon footprints than average Brits), visit homes in northern China abandoned to expanding deserts (the water table in northern China is falling by more than a meter a year), and tromp around a rapidly receding glacier on the Tibetan Plateau (China surpassed the United States as the world’s top emitter of new greenhouse gases in 2006).

Watts uses the stories to introduce discussions about how China’s environment became so worn down and what citizens and officials can do about it. He provides lucid analysis of why China’s top-down Confucian traditions overpowered the more environment-friendly ideals of Buddhism and Taoism and attacks, rightly, the prevailing wisdom that China’s new clean-energy policies will create a greener future. While many experts have focused on China’s new spate of “green” laws, few people outside of China understand how China’s one-party autocracy undercuts the grassroots activist needed to check China’s environmental slide. According to one expert interviewed in the book, only a tenth of China’s environmental laws are actually enforced.

Most importantly, the book offers a much-needed wakeup call. At the end of his journeys, Watts sums up his experiences by stating that Beijing “represents both the apotheosis of human development and the folly of continuing with global business as usual.” The planet’s problems, “were not made in China, but they are sliding past the point of no return here,” he writes, adding that our collective, global consumption requires a new way of thinking: “It is unreasonable to ask China to save the world, but the country forces mankind to recognize that we are all going in the wrong direction.”

That argument is woven through When a Billion Chinese Jump, a book for anyone concerned about what China might look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years and whether China’s environmental nightmare offers a prelude to a greater global meltdown. ❶

Craig Simons is the former Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers and is writing a book about China’s global environmental footprint. It will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2011.