LIVING IN OBLIVION

Another week and another lethal mining accident in China. This time, a gas explosion in a coal mine in central Hunan province claimed the lives of seven workers even as rescue workers were trying to rescue eight miners trapped in a flooded mine elsewhere in the same province.

These numbers still pale in comparison with the string of major mining accidents in China's recent history, which include four of the eight worst such accidents in the world. Indeed, 80% of coal-mining fatalities globally occur as a result of accidents in China, with methane explosions the most common cause, followed by collapsing roofs. Officially, over 250,000 mineworkers have died in mining accidents since 1949. (The US-China Institute has put together a handy set of graphs that compare coal mining in China with the rest of the world.)

Below is a table of year-on-year statistics that describe the dangers of Chinese mines. Since these are official figures, they probably underestimate the scale of the problem. And even if they were true, the fatality rate in China's mining industry is still higher - and declining more slowly - than in other major economies at a comparable stage of development.

In trying to make sense of these numbers, commentators often fit them into two basic narratives: proof that the central government values economic growth over human life, or that their paternalistic efforts are undermined by recalcitrant local governments.

You get a flavour of both opinions in this BBC News report on a gas explosion at the Xialuichong coal mine last year:

In this post, I want to try to present a picture that is a little more complicated than either of these. The central government has passed laws and regulations and established monitoring agencies in order to enforce minimum safety standards in China's coal mines, not so much out of altruism but because their priority is central control over the allocation of coal, rather than the absolute quantity produced (above a certain amount). The central government needs this control if it is to sustain an economy built on various dimensions of social and geographic segregation and segmentation - because the power of the Communist Party is served by a policy of "divide-and-rule."

Seen from this angle, the ability of local governments to flout central regulations - and the public support they receive from local workers and peasants - is not just a blind rejection of any restraints designed to reduce the social costs of economic activity; it is also a rejection of an economic model that distributes the fruits of that activity in a necessarily highly unequal way. The flipside of the marginalised and exploited miners who are usually the victims we read about in the news (and those that go unreported) are a priveleged class of workers in the large mining state-owned enterprises (SOEs).  

The heaviest price for the central-local war of attrition is ultimately borne by those miners who do not have better options than working in unsafe, dilapidated and often unregistered coal mines. But sometimes, they fight back.

As they did in the 1920s, when coal miners were the backbone of the newly-formed CPC.

THE GREAT HELMSMAN GOES TO ANYUAN

Just as today, coal was critically important in China at the turn of the twentieth-century, because it was seen as the key to industrialisation and catching-up with the West. Although China had scant known reserves of oil or natural gas at that time, coal was plentiful (China has 11% of the world's coal reserves, the third largest of any country). The main problem was how the largest coal seams were located in the North and the West of the country, far away from the most economically advanced areas on the Eastern seaboard - as the map below illustrates.

The challenge of redistribution was not made any easier by the political divisions and regional warlordism in the period following the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Against this backdrop, the CPC helped create China's first modern labour movement in the mining town of Anyuan in Jianxi province, which was known as "Little Moscow." In 1921 the young Mao went to Anyuan to support the mineworkers prepare for a successful strike the following year, which won them improved wages and working conditions.

A 1917 article in The Scientific Monthly by a foreign observer describes the appalling working conditions in China's mining industry at the time. In the absence of modern equipment, mineowners relied to an extreme degree on the specialisation of their workforce, who were overworked and unproductive:

"The "beehive", or native ovens, differ radically from the foreign and no machinery is used in filling or emptying them. The human beast of burden does everything by simple force of numbers and persistence."

In a curious twist, the author then accuses the lowly "coolies" of exhibiting the same deficiencies of character as their national leaders - of short-termism and muddling through, rather than thinking of the future, or of the wider interests of society:

"The coolie class is intractable, unreliable, and has no outlook either as to their own or their country's future. They reflect in a petty way the same qualities which now and always have been too much in evidence among their countrymen in higher circles. "Face", "squeeze", and dishonesty are the crying vices of the Chinese people."

To build on their victory at Anyuan, in 1922 the preparatory committee of the Anyuan Miners' Club was established, which included the future Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi (in the middle row, third from right). Their slogan was "once beasts of burden, now we will be human." 

In Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition Elizabeth J. Perry has explored the significance of the CPC's organising efforts amongst this still relatively small industrial working class. Central to these efforts was the role of education: besides guiding labour unions the Party set up night schools for mineworkers that offered a high quality education and issued its own diplomas. The Party cadres who oversaw the schools believed that by teaching the workers to read, write and count they would win their sincere trust and support - in a sense they were correct, as regiments from Anyuan played important roles in the Autumn Harvest Rising and the Long March, and continue to venerate the Party's radical education programme to this day.

Li Lisan and Lisa Kishkin


For some cadres, it went further than that. One of the Party leaders who played a prominent role in Anyuan was an idealist named Li Lisan. Li was the son of a teacher and had studied in France in 1920, where he ran afoul of the authorities for supporting strike action. By 1924 mineworkers in Anyuan comprised a third of the Party's 900 members across the country. The lesson that Li drew from this was that the Party should concentrate on winning over the urban working class as the route to taking power; by contrast, Mao argued that the numerically dominant but dispersed and uneducated peasantry should take priority.

In the end, Mao won the argument, but not before his then superior Li (who served briefly as General Secretary in 1930-1) persuaded the Party to launch a series of military campaigns to seize the cities. These were mostly dismal failures and led to Li's exile in the Soviet Union, where he spent 15 years under scrutiny and married a Russian typesetter named Lisa Kishkin.

In Mining in China's Economy and Society, 1895-1937 Tim Wright summarises the pre-1949 state of China's coal mining industry as being highly uneven across the country due to a number of intercorrelated political and technological factors, chief amongst them being: the varying quality of transport infrastructure (esp. railways); localised civil wars that had uneven temporal effects; the limited and isolated growth of the modern sector of the economy, and corresponding demand.

FIRE AND WATER

Shortly before the PRC was founded in 1949 Li returned to China and was appointed Minister of Labour and chair of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. In his mind, there need not be any contradiction involved in occupying both posts: a socialist state was a workers' state, so workers' welfare would be the government's priority.

But although Li pushed through many laws to improve worker safety at the mines, in the absence of an independent judiciary their enforcement depended on the "stop-start" vicissitudes of high politics. The 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950s saw Mao's priorities shift towards achieving a rapid and dramatic increase in production, at the expense of harsher conditions and longer working hours. As D. J. Dwyer describes it:

"A call to "overtake Britain in fifteen years" in the production of coal, steel, machinery, cement, and electric power went out to the nation in 1957. [...] In coal it partook of one of the principal characteristics of the 'leap', namely the prominence given to local production by indigenous methods."

In this sense, the period of the 'leap' is a milestone in the story of how China's coal industry got to where it is today - vastly unequal life chances and occupational hazards between a comparatively well-off class of urban miners employed by large state-owned mining companies, and the predominantly peasant-based shadowy, marginalised and semi-legal workers at small, mostly privately-owned rural mines. I have described what I see as the logic at the heart of the 'leap' in a previous post, but what matters for our purposes here is the "policy of developing the industry 'on two legs' - that is, through small, local mines using indigenous methods as well as large mechanised units". In other words, a policy of squeezing the countryside to feed and incentivise industrial workers, and encouraging makeshift rural industry.

What resulted was a predictable deterioration of miners' safety, with a series of explosions in the small mines that had sprung up across the countryside. In 1958 Li was purged from the ACFTU for opposing these policies (having a Russian wife didn't help after the Sino-Soviet split). But besides these excesses of the 'leap', there were fierce debates at the top of the Party on the general subject of the importance of miners' safety. The government was promoting a broader geographical spread of coal mines, both for defensive purposes and to sidestep the difficulties of transportation, but they could only go so fast without facing significant risks.

The 1960s were overshadowed by a power-struggle within the Party as Mao attempted to restore his authority after the 'leap' debacle, and to eliminate his rivals in the "moderate" camp, who included the Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi. One interesting dimension to the 'Cultural Revolution' that Mao launched as a means to this end is the way he sought to displace the part played by his rivals in the "Great Strike" of 1922. As Elizabeth J. Perry has argued, this was his way of re-claiming leadership of the urban working-class after his long association with the peasantry.

First, Mao used propaganda to emphasise his indispensable role in the liberation of Anyuan. Whereas earlier propaganda had eulogised other Party leaders, like Liu Shaoqi...

...after Mao's cult of personality went into overdrive in the Cultural Revolution, he was depicted with near-religious reverence. The famous painting below by Liu Chunhua, entitled Chairman Mao Goes To Anyuan, became a central icon of the period, and one of the most reproduced paintings in history (with 900m copies in circulation at one time). Below it are images of it being used in Red Guard propaganda.

Now Li, who had been brought back to the PRC to help run the cities and the industrial workers, was deemed to be a "counterrevolutionary" for repeatedly questioning Party policies that adversely impacted on the workers' health and safety. In 1967 he died after being tortured in detention.

"YOUR RICE BOWL OR YOUR LIFE"

For the purposes of discussing China's coal industry in the post-Mao period, Elspeth Thomson has provided a useful three-part categorisation of the mines: the large, state-owned Central Mining Administrations (CMAs); the local state (LS) mines, operated by local governments; and the local non-state (LNS) mines, the small, predominantly rural mines either run privately or as collectives or as joint ventures with local governments and/or the People's Liberation Army (PLA).


Coal mining factory in Huainan, Anhui province


In the late 1970s crippling power shortages convinced a rather more sober CPC leadership that they would continue to need LNS mines to provide enough coal to meet targets for high but steady economic growth. So instead of trying to subsume all such mines under the LS sector, the government chose to focus its limited resources on upgrading the CMAs. Once more, it evaded the need to improve the railway infrastructure and it thereby further entrenched a pattern of unevenly paced development.

The constraints on the Deng administration were not only material, but also resulted from its half-way attempt to separate Party organs from those of the government. This resulted in a cross-cutting lattice of two parallel hierarchies with much potential for vested interests to obstruct reforms issued from above. As Jonathan D. Spence has written:

"In Shanxi province, where Deng Xiaoping had personally expressed an interest in using foreign technology to develop huge open-pit mines, the central government could not simply enforce its will over coal production as a whole. Coal mines in the province fell into three quite different administrative categories, each subdivided into further classifications, and all with their own sub-bureaucracies, specialised staffs, supervisors, and workers. [...] Cutting across all these divisions were the various national, provincial, and municipal bureaus that supervised transportation of the coal and determined its allocation. [...] A central decision to reallocate coal or open a major new mine was thus not a simple act."

Through the 1980s-90s the dominant trend was towards modernisation and mechanisation of the CMAs. A
decision was taken to fully mechanise some mines (the big CMAs) rather than partly mechanising most or all of the mines, because of the need for increasing returns to attract much-needed private and foreign investment into the heavily-indebted CMAs.


Rescue team at a flooded mine in Guangdong, 2005

 Yet the problem of antiquated equipment still hounds both the LS and LNS mines, and this has generated a vicious cycle: without machinery the mines are overreliant on labour, which makes for more dangerous and overcrowded mines, which drives out the most qualified workers who can find work elsewhere, and the mine-owners are thus ever more dependent on substituting quantity of workers for quality. As early as the mid-1960s the LS mines responded to this "brain drain" by recruiting peasants on short-term contracts, usually with piece-rate remuneration.

Thomson writes:

"Employees in these mines are mostly from farms, and have been lured by the potentially high earnings obtained by selling the coal on the open market. The fact that the majority have little or no training in the use of explosives, the prevention of flooding and gas seepage, and the building of roof supports has led to appalling accident rates."

She goes on to describe life at the coalface:

"One official graphically described the perils of working underground in the small mines, where lighting was by the occasional incandescent lamp, fans for ventilation were only switched on briefly every 20 minutes or half-an-hour, and coal faces as high as churches had no timber supports."

Power shortage

Hence it is hardly surprising that the small LS and LNS mines - and newer mineworkers across all sectors -  make up a greatly disproportionate share of all mining injuries and fatalities, with a fatality rate 7-8 times higher than that of the CMAs. According to Tu Jianjun, "small coal mines account for about one-third of national coal output while their mining related fatalities make up 74% of the national total." Through the era of 'reform and opening-up', the proliferation of these small mines went hand in hand with the spread of rural industry - the well-known township and village enterprises (TVEs).



 However, the government's strategy of easing the financial burden of insolvent CMAs by allowing LNS mines to take up the slack backfired. The government underestimated the rate of economic growth, and thus the demand for energy from coal, and thus the number of LNS mines that would start operating to meet the demand in the absence of adequate North-South transport infrastructure (today, half of China's rail capacity is used for transporting coal). At the peak of coal shortages in 1988-89, the market price of coal was 7 times higher in Shanghai than in Shanxi.

The rapid proliferation of LNS mines also put them further and further beyond government control, and by the 1990s they had become serious commercial competitors to the CMAs, eroding their profit margins ever further. According to Tim Wright, it was this artificial cut-throat competition between different coal mine sectors that led to the small progress in improving the safety record of China's coal mines in the 1980s to grind to a halt a decade later. And, sectoral disparities aside, in an article entitled "Your Rice Bowl or Your Life" Wright has explained that even the large CMAs are unusually dangerous places to work by international standards. Faced with harder budget constraints, state mines started delaying payment of wages, which only fuelled the problem of brain drain in the industry.



Showing the strain: coal train facility


The government's response to these further developments was two-fold. First it closed the least profitable CMAs. Here is how Jonathan Fenby describes the cuts:

"China's uneconomic coal mines were a prime target for rationalisation; the Five-Year Plan for 1991-5 provided for 400,000 of the 7 million workers in the heavily loss-making industry to be laid off. Visiting a huge coal mine in Shanxi in 1992, Zhu Rongji was filmed upbraiding the managers to their faces about how they should cut the labour force...the Vice-Premier wondered why people would not do their jobs properly until he lost his temper with them."

Second, the government launched a campaign in 1997 to close as many LNS mines as it could, under the pretext of worker safety but strongly motivated by the need to raise producer prices for the CMAs (which found themselves squeezed by increased competition and static demand as "two-tier" price controls were removed after 1993). Whilst many have closed since then - and this has contributed to the decline in mining fatalities since 2000 - they frequently re-open a year or two later and operate unlicensed, so that campaigns against LNS mines have become a routine occurrence.
      

In 2006, for instance, the government declared its intention to halve the number of small mines - the kind of crude target-setting that Tu Jianjun has criticised for unfairly penalising those LS and LNS mines that have invested in modern safety equipment and management (and thus are likely to be smaller when measured by output or profit). Nevertheless, the CMAs were on a more secure financial footing by the 2000s.

Here is a documentary by Journeymanpictures of a visit to the mining hub of Linfen, which has been described by the World Bank as "the most polluted city on earth" due to smog and waste from coal washing. It is very one-sided and doesn't really go into much depth, but it has some moments of interest, such as the traffic jam of back-to-back coal trucks that prevent the cameraman from leaving (23 mins in) and some footage of an illegal black market, and the operator of an illegal mine that restarted after being shut down by government officials.

It also features signs residents have put up to try to limit the encroachment of waste on their space. My favourite is: "IF YOU DUMP TRASH HERE, YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY WILL DIE."

BLACK MASS

There is one final feature of Chinese coal mining today that I think is historically notable: the tendency amongst observers inside and outside of China to utilise miners as metaphors for the condition of China's society and its politics.

As was shown earlier in the passage from The Scientific Monthly, this habit of thinking has a long heritage. More recently, Li Yang's 2003 film Blind Shaft, which  won numerous awards at international film festivals, was loosely based on a true story about con artists working in an illegal mine in North-Eastern China.

In the film, they use the mine as a place to murder their victims and then allege they were killed in mining accidents; in this way, they easily secure the assistance of the mineowner in disposing of the body, because he is used to covering-up accidental deaths to avoid paying fines (many such mineowners buy-off bereaved relatives to avoid being levied fines by local governments, which have become more dependent on fines and charges for revenue since fiscal reforms in the 1980s).

Here is the trailer:

In this shadow economy, hidden from view, it seems as if only the worst kind of people can rise to the surface. Only vulnerable victims and/or callous crooks would choose to work there, no?

And yet in Wright's article, he quotes Peter Dorman as saying that: "most rural cultivators would prefer Dickensian industrial working conditions to a life of agricultural toil." This is because there is surplus labour in the countryside, and an array of other government policies have been designed to limit the mobility of this workforce.

As such, they cling adamantly to any prospects they have for improving their lives - which helps to account for the local protests against centrally-mandated closures of small mines:
 

"It was often possible to mobilise miners and local peasants to oppose government attempts to close down mines for safety reasons: even as late as 2002, when the campaign had been in operation five years, one report from Shanxi listed a whole series of sit-ins and disturbances organised by local mine-owners to resist closures."
 

Balancing the grimmer, seedier face of the business is the notion that the miners represent the wretched of the earth. I think it is a lesson of history that this line should not be taken too far - the more wretched, the more in need of a saviour or messiah, and the more opportunity for someone to fill those shoes.
  

The mines are extremely dirty, dangerous and unpleasant places to work, but I think that if we want to respect the dignity of the mineworkers we have to start from a point that acknowledges their agency. Most miners choose to do this work, because the mines represent droplets of industry on otherwise parched landscapes. It is horrible work because they are effectively replacing machines - but in doing precisely this, they are not acting as machines. They are standing opposed to the central government's vision of carefully managed growth with the benefits skewed towards serving its own interests.

I just hope that the Anyuan miners' slogan still has the potency to inspire: "once beasts of burden, now we will be human."

TURNING CAVERNS INTO THOROUGHFARES

Twenty years after the famous 'Earth Summit', delegates from across the world travelled to Rio de Janeiro recently for the 'Rio+20' follow-up conference. Much of it seems to have been spent trying to explain the inadequate implementation of earlier commitments on global warming and environnmental protection in the intervening period. It was larger but also less ambitious than previous summits, establishing a process to agree on the definition of contested terms.

I am not going to discuss the details of the summit in this post. Instead I want to explore the history of China's participation in international environmental summits. It is often heard that China's involvement in these negotiations promotes democracy within China because it makes the central government dependent on (relatively) independent environmental NGOs and civil society groups exposing local officials who violate China's robust body of environmental protection laws.

That is true. However, the Communist Party has also used certain discourses of environmental summitry to expand the reach of the state into the lives of its people. In particular, these summits have often strengthened the technocrats in the CPC vis-a-vis the liberals, by creating the impression that national governments have less agency than they had in the past and thus making the ability to choose between governments seem less relevant to the problems society faces.

But before that, we need to go back to a time before climate change became a permanent item on the international agenda.

SQUEEZING LAND FROM ROCKS

In the 1950s, the slogan Ren Ding Sheng Tian was proclaimed throughout China - it means "man must conquer nature" and it embodied Mao's confrontational stance towards the natural world.

Nature, argued Mao, was there to be tamed and harnessed for human purposes. Traditional Chinese ideas about living in harmony with nature, such as in Daoism, were outdated relics. Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought revealed that the obstacles to man's mastery of his environment were not inherent in nature but were political; once the control of technology was placed in the hands of the people (via the Party), they would be free to use it to liberate themselves and achieve their fullest human potential.

One can see this as an expression of the ideas Marx espoused in his Grundrisse:

"Nature does not construct machines, locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will to dominate nature or to realise itself therein. They are organs of the human brain, created by human hands; the power of knowledge made into an object."

It has become fashionable to denigrate not only the often brutal means the CPC used to achieve these ends, but the ends themselves, and the way they conceived of the basic relationship between man and his environment as reflected in their great optimism about technological solutions. A well-respected recent examples of this is Judith Shapiro's book, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China.

Her central argument is that the violent, repressive tactics the CPC used to try to tame nature are inseparable from the end goal itself:

"Few cases of environmental degradation so clearly reveal the human and environmental costs incurred when human beings, particularly those who determine policy, view themselves as living in an oppositional relationship to nature - as well as to each other - and behave accordingly. The relationship between humans and nature under Mao is so transparent and extreme that it clearly indicates a link between abuse of people and abuse of the natural environment."

Shapiro sees this connection as essential because she sees the efforts of man to achieve rational control over nature as doomed from the start and thus a contributing factor in man's exploitation of his fellow man - and she sees it is a doomed mission because she believes that biology explains all (or almost all) human behaviour, so that man has no vantage point "outside" of nature from which he can bend it to his will.

The Mao era certainly seems like a perfect case-study for her thesis, with its legacy of land degradation, air and water pollution and ecological destruction. But the connections between Mao's ambitions, his policies, and the environmental damage is not so simple. Shapiro is right to link the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of human beings, but I think the case of Mao's rule shows that she has the direction of causation the wrong way round.

A basic idea about man's relationship to nature does not automatically entail particular policies (unless, perhaps, you are a Behaviourist); rather, there are a range of different social, economic and cultural systems that can be theoretically derived from the basic Maoist concept. The factor that determined Mao's choice of policies was not so much anthropocentric ideology as it was a fear of imminent war, and his perceived need to dramatically accelerate China's industrialisation. It was this imperative, processed through a highly authoritarian state machine, that drove the worst environmental excesses of the Mao era: not an excess of rationality, but rational calculation "bound" by the irrational pressures of the Cold War.

Seeing the unsustainable policies adopted in pursuit of crash-course industrialisation as "irrational" misses the point that key decision-makers in the CPC could not foresee a future for China without it - if China could defend itself until the threat had passed, then it would have the space it needed to develop rationally. In the meantime, the threat of war could be used to mobilise efforts for industrialisation on an epic scale.

The perceived need for speed is crucial to understanding the PRC's unique - and uniquely disastrous - strategy for catching-up to the West. Instead of first developing light industry and modernising antiquated Chinese agricultural practices, the government aimed to get as much food as possible out of the land as quickly as they could by labour-intensive methods, and to use this to feed an enlarged urban workforce, who would then supply the countryside with the fruits of heavy industry. The 'Great Leap Forward' was supposed to be a big kick to get a virtuous circle in motion, but - to put it mildly - it failed to generate the required abundance of food.

Below is a CIA documentary about the start of the Great Leap. It features an exhibition of impressive-sounding farming machinery but the Great Leap was meant to be the progenitor, not the child, of modern technology: "This was the only steam shovel I saw in China. But this was only the beginning they said. The Leap Forward was only the first step."

Alongside the Great Leap were other harmful schemes born from similar motives: factories relocated from coastal areas to inland provinces where they polluted downstream rivers; mountains blasted ("turning caverns into thoroughfares") and hillsides terraced causing floods; rivers dammed, raising the water table and turning nearby crops into swamps; Lysenkoist schemes for planting grain in deserts ("squeezing land from rocks").

Another prominent slogan of the period was Ren Duo, Lilang Da ("with many people, strength is great"), which reflected Mao's view that a large and growing population was a net benefit for the PRC. But many academics in China who feared the environmental consquences of promoting large families. Chief among them was an economist named Ma Yinchu.

In 1957 Ma went public with his 'New Population Theory', which argued that the government should adopt policies to control fertility and reduce the high rates of population growth. Politically, his timing could not have been worse, coming as it did at the start of the Great Leap. Over the next three years he was attacked as a "Malthusian" undermining socialism, before being purged from his post as President of Peking University.

It would be another twenty years until Ma's - and Malthus' - arguments were accepted by the Party.

ONLY ONE EARTH...BUT TWELVE WAYS TO DESTROY IT

In 1972 the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. It was the first major meeting of governments from around the world to discuss the environmental damage caused by modern economic growth and the need for international solutions.

China participated even though it was in the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, issuing notably modest statements that acknowledged its own environmental problems. Directly and indirectly, the conference had a major impact on China's future development.

In the same year, a seminal book was published by a group known as the Club of Rome that received a great deal of attention and publicity because it seemed to capture the spirit of the conference. It was called The Limits to Growth, and it captured headlines by claiming that, on present trends, the world was headed for general and catastrophic environmental collapse. It did this by running twelve different statistical models of industrial society on computers.

The graph below shows the "standard" projection:

As the video below illustrates, the urgency this vision of pending collapse gave to the environmental movement chimed with the themes of the conference, with its emphasis on the need to go beyond national sovereignty and adopt a global system-level perspective.

A year later, in pursuit of better international relations, Premier Zhou oversaw the first National Conference on the Environment in Beijing. As in the international arena, the Beijing conference was followed by a flurry of small leadership groups, follow-up meetings and policy frameworks over the next few years. In his article on the environmental legacies of Mao and Deng, Richard Sanders writes that at this time:

"There was a noticeable change of attitude towards the environment. Perhaps influenced by the 'Limits to Growth' debate in the West, ecology became a political topic and the concept of 'environmental hygiene' was replaced with that of 'environmental protection.'"

'Peking Man'

According to Susan Greenhalgh, the key to understanding policymaking in the PRC in the late 1970s is that "hard" science had come to be valued above all other disciplines as a criterion for decisionmaking and, because of the damage the Cultural Revolution had inflicted on the Universities, this was only to be found in the military and aeronautic research establishments. Non-military branches of science had been heavily politicised under Mao - for instance, archeologists were required to affirm that the remains of 'Peking Man' confirmed Engels' theories of primitive communism.

One of the luminaries of aeronautical research who had benefited from state protection and largesse was a scientist named Song Jian. Song was an expert in 'control theory' - controlling the behaviour of dynamic systems, which in his case meant controlling how missiles moved in the sky.


Song Jian

 In the early 1970s China steered its population policy towards 'family planning' measures, increased availability of contraception, and so on - "later, longer, fewer." Song was one of the scientists the government drafted to advise on further measures necessary to reduce population growth. Searching for a framework, he read Limits to Growth, and was won over by its message that governments had to act urgently to counteract man's "natural" tendency to destroy the planet.

The book had been co-written by engineers and adopted a systems-analysis approach to the problems of sustainability and demography, which saw the world as an interconnected system in need of management and control. It is full of block diagrams of "vital" social variables, like this:

To Song, this was exactly what China needed to solve its socioeconomic problems: more plain, hard scientific facts and less sociology and economics, which always led to arguments and political instability. He had studied cybernetics in the Soviet Union, which was closely related to system dynamics; the great Russian cybernetician A. N. Kolmogorov defined his field as "the study of systems which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control." Here he is at work:

Song told his colleagues that he was astonished when he first began studying graphs of demographic trends, because they reminded him of the trajectory of a missile. And this was the insight that guided him in designing China's population policy - it was essentially the same as guiding a missile smoothly to its target.

He did this in spite of the many criticisms levelled at Limits to Growth in the West. In a scathing review of World Dynamics, a forerunner to the model elaborated in Limits, the economist William D. Nordhaus described its treatment of empirical relations as "measurement without data." He went on to summarise the book's static and simplified view that human beings are incapable of recognising problems and finding solutions without the state controlling their behaviour:

"Human society is a population of insentient beings, unwilling and unable to check reproductive urges; unable to invent computers or birth control devices or synthetic materials; without a price system to help ration scarce goods or to motivate the discovery of new ones."

In 1975 Song travelled with a delegation of scientists and mathematicians to Twente University. On arrival there was an administrative error and he was left with a young mathematics professor called Geert Jan Olsder to keep him company. They went to a bar and chatted over beers, and at last Olsder revealed that he had published a paper earlier in the year entitled 'Population Planning: A Distributed Time-Optimal Control Problem.' To Song's delight, the paper tried to mathematically derive a solution to the same problem he had been studying, even using the same metaphor: "Given a certain initial age profile the population must be "steered" as quickly as possible to another, prescribed, final age profile by means of a suitable chosen birth rate."

As Susan Greenhalgh has documented in a fascinating narrative, Song was able to persuade the Party leadership that drastic action had to be taken immediately in the form of state-imposed one-child policy because he was able to ride the tide of "scientism" prevalent in the PRC at that time and he used his credentials to outmanouevre strong opposition from the "humanistic" disciplines:

"Song and his colleagues laid out their ideal vision of a birth-planning technocracy in which state technicians were in charge of designing and running a multi-level system of social engineering aimed at managing the growth of the entire population from the top, with little input from the objects of control at the bottom."

 In early 1980 he reframed it as not just an environmental issue, but an "extremely urgent strategic duty":

"By arresting the fierce growth of human numbers, China could accelerate its own modernisation and help alleviate a global crisis. Through population control, China would join the world's powers as an economic powerhouse and a socially responsible member of the community of nations."

The irony is unmistakeable: a coercive and intrusive policy for which the PRC has been much criticised was adopted in order to win plaudits from abroad.

As with Mao's Cold War-fuelled dash for modernity, China adopted the one-child policy out of a belief that it confronted an imminent threat to its security - this time emanating from environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. But whilst the CPC in the '50s and '60s had seen the temporal constraints of the Cold War as amenable to change through politics - as it had tried to do by "exporting revolution" - by endorsing all of the Malthusian assumptions in Limits to Growth in the '70s and '80s the Party effected a subtle but hugely significant shift in its ideological position.

RED AND GREEN AND BLACK ALL OVER

In 1992 the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) - the largest environmental conference of world leaders since Stockholm - met in Rio de Janeiro. Since 1972 there had been many follow-up conventions, agreements and working groups, such as the 1985 Helsinki Agreement on limiting sulphur dioxide and the 1988 Montreal Protocol on restoring the ozone layer.

A feeling of underachievement still hung over the 'Earth Summit', which led the delegates to try to achieve something bolder. Among the outcomes were the creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (which is still the forum for GHG reductions negotiations today), a landmark convention on biodiversity, the 'Rio Declaration' of 27 shared principles and priorities and Agenda 21, a non-binding action plan for implementing "sustainable development." But it lacked quantitative targets and timetables.

PRC representative,
2002 Johannesburg Summit



China's government attended Rio, led by the Premier Li Peng, although at the time there were still no indigenous environmental groups inside China to participate. The negotiations in Rio proved somewhat fraught. Coming after a coalition of developing countries had failed to create a 'New International Economic Order', a big sticking-point at the summit was the precise meaning of the "common but differentiated responsibilities" nations of the 'North' and the 'South' supposedly had for paying to protect the environment (for the same reason, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol).

And in each of the follow-up meetings over the last two decades the failure to agree on a division of the costs, and to implement the sharing of "clean" technologies amongst developing and developed countries, has obstructed progress on other fronts. The failure of national governments to implement serious sustainable development initiatives - let alone finding a detailed balance between development, equity and environmental protection they could all agree on - has made negotiations over binding targets for GHG emissions reductions into a proxy war. In 1997 - year of the 'World Summit II' - the General Assembly of the UN declared that: "Much remains to be done to active the means of implementation...in particular in the areas of finance and technology transfer."

These tensions reached a dramatic high point in the closing session of the 2007 Bali Climate Change Conference, where the organisers were blasted by the Chinese delegation and the U.S. representative appeared to make an astonishing u-turn after criticism from developing countries:

Against this backdrop, China's recent environmental record presents us with some stark contrasts. On the one hand, it is a world leader in producing renewable power sources and low-carbon technologies; on the other hand, it is the world's largest aggregate (but not yet per capita) emitter of greenhouse gases with extreme hotspots of air and water pollution and degraded land.

Here is a video of an informative talk on China's environmental strengths and weaknesses by Jonathan Watts, who was until recently the Guardian's environmental correspondent in China and is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind - or Destroy It. (There are also interesting talks on this subject by Elizabeth Economy and Orville Schell.)

China has set itself ambitious targets to get 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and prior to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit it committed to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40 to 45% from its 2005 level by 2020. In a recent article, Watts summarised the Chinese government's main environmental achievements:

"There have been several ambitious steps forward in terms of environmental policy: anti-desertification campaigns; tree planting; an environmental transparency law; adoption of carbon targets; eco-services compensation; eco accounting; caps on water; lower economic growth targets; the 12th Five-Year Plan; debate and increased monitoring of PM2.5 and huge investments in eco-cities, "clean car" manufacturing, public transport, energy-saving devices and renewable technology. The far western deserts of China have been filled with wind farms and solar panels."

Below is a graph showing the downwards trend in China's energy intensity or, seen another way, the increase in its energy efficiency:

This would still mean that China's overall GHG emissions will continue rising: they aren't predicted to peak until 2030, by which time they may have doubled - the rate of economic growth is projected to outstrip the rate at which carbon intensity falls. When the U.S. called on China to make a binding commitment to reduce the rate of growth of its emissions, the PRC responds by pointing to its relatively low per capita emissions and the failure of the industrialised nations to come good on existing commitments to fund and share green technology. Many of the voluntary programmes to reduce GHG emissions are due to expire in 2020.

Isn't the fundamental reality here that progress towards solving a serious problem is grindingly slow because governments have reached a stalemate, but are managing to create just enough of an impression through summit diplomacy that they are still moving forwards?

For those of us who believe in anthropogenic climate change, there seems to be one unarguable proposition: China cannot take the same path to prosperity that the West did. In the first Industrial Revolution per capita energy use increased proportionally with the population, but because China is industrialising later, with a larger population, taking the same path would likely cause catastrophic climate change. Similarly, China can't clean up its environment in the same way that Western countries did, by outsourcing its dirty industries, because the world is running out of buck-passing destinations (or, at least, viable and affordable ones).

Indeed, the trend is towards "insourcing" polluting industries to far inland provinces, as illustrated by the map below (carbon monoxide concentrations indicating hotspots of GHG emissions):

But just because China can't follow the Western route to "clean" prosperity does not mean there may not be alternative routes, and some of these alternatives may in fact have been available to the developed countries, albeit perhaps at too great a cost, whether financial or sociopolitical.

Because the other fundamental reality is that China does need to develop. Most of the symptoms of its environmental malaise can be traced back to its dirty "halfway" model, and the Party's attempts to keep the society segmented and divided to avoid the tensions caused by massive inequality from spilling over.

For instance, with water being diverted it would make sense for farmers to be relocated to urban areas rather than staying put and depleting the non-replensishable water table on which everyone depends, but the government is worried that this would lead to ethnic riots and other violence breaking out in its cities. And it would be more environmentally sound to clean and convert coal at its source before piping it to where it is needed, but because of lopsided price liberalisation in China's energy sector, this is resisted as it would effectively mean piping any profits out of the poorer regions where coal mining predominates. China's dispersed rural Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) contribute a disproportionate share of both its GHG emissions and its pollution.

New clean-coal technologies are costlier than conventional equipment but because of their relative stages of development and associated opportunity costs, China can still operate them more cheaply than the U.S. But the industrialised world is unwilling to collaborate with industrialising countries to develop green technology on the scale required.

China either needs to retreat, or to move forwards in an entirely new way. But I would argue that, in political terms, a sustainable future has to mean one that is secured by people themselves, through political movements that are rooted in people's shared aspirations, and not handed down to them by international bureaucrats. The real problem is that climate change negotiations are being framed in terms of a conflict between the developed and developing world, rather than as a conflict between people around the world and their national governments, which are too alienated from eachother to share technology or to allow their own people the freedom required for indigenous innovation on the necessary scale.

So those who see a link between the alienation of man from his environment, and from his fellows, are correct in a sense. I just think it is wrong to see that alienation as a feature of nature rather than as an aspect of a contingent political arrangement. Malthusianism and technocracy will not solve our problems - we ought not to abandon our confidence in technology and innovation just because those principles have been abused in the past.