China's shiny facade hides truth

WASHINGTON -- My friends who travel to China these days return with oddly dreamy looks in their eyes. China is the "future of the world & quot;! China "knows how to get things done." Once-dowdy Beijing is a cosmopolitan "Star Wars" fantasy, and the red, purple and silver lights of the world's most glamorous metropolis never go out in Shanghai.
All of this is true -- plus the fact that China has been forging ahead with a staggering 9 percent to 10 percent growth rate, that it is clearly the up-and-coming leader of Asia, and that the "sleeping giant" has become the single world power that might challenge the United States. If there is a "can-do" country in the world today, it is China -- while America looks more and more like the "has-done" country.
But not so fast! There is no question that China gleams and glitters on the surface, with its immense glass and mirrored buildings and its odd mixture of communist political centralism and minimally limited forms of free enterprise. But when you peep underneath all that sheen, there's, as the old "Music Man" song went, "trouble, trouble ... right here in River City."
Anti-government demonstrations all over China today, particularly in the countryside, are being sparked by greedy government bureaucrats and get-rich-quick entrepreneurs who are trying to take over the peasants' lands for their own predatory uses. After police confront peasants, scores of them lie dying in this supposedly prosperous and forward-moving society.
Peasant rebellions
The other day, I was chatting with Daniel Southerland, the vice president of programming of Radio Free Asia, the congressionally mandated station that broadcasts news all over Asia. I mentioned that I had heard there were 10,000 peasant rebellions in China in 2004. "Ten thousand!" he proclaimed. "There were 70,000!"
In fact, last August, the public security minister, Zhou Yongkang, said that China had had 74,000 "mass incidents" in 2004, compared with 10,000 only a decade before. And Li Jian, an activist in northeastern China, wrote revealingly on his human rights Web site based overseas, "The authorities worry that from its midst will emerge opinion leaders and organizers with special credibility and broad influence."
He's got it just about right. With more than 100 million Chinese roving about a countryside that is already devastated by poor land management, deforestation and the destruction of farm land, China is far from the sparkling, progressive and (don't forget) intrinsically warlike country it appears to be on the world stage.
One who has for many years seen the internal environmental/human weaknesses in China is Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, arguably the world's preeminent environmentalist. His new book, "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble," is likely to become the "Green Bible" of the movement because it deals not only with forests and plants but also with the veritable continuance and quality of human life.
Serious situation
"The ecologists have been angry for a long time, but the economists didn't realize the seriousness of the situation," he told me over a long talk here. "Ecologists knew you had to restructure the economy if you wanted progress. But now their arguments become more convincing because climate change is giving credence to them. But what will really convince the economists is what happens in China.
& quot;China is now consuming more of the basic resources than the U.S. -- grain and meat, coal and steel. China is consuming 67 million tons of meat per year; the U.S., 39 million tons. In steel, the U.S. is consuming l04 million tons; the Chinese, 158 million tons. China has now eclipsed the United States in consumption of all but oil. If China's economy expands at 8 percent per year, income per person will match the current U.S. level by 2031. At that point, its 1.45 billion people will be consuming more of many resources, for example, oil and paper, than the world now produces. There goes the world's oil. There go the world's forests."
Brown has answers: an entire new economy that can be seen in the wind farms of Western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the fast-growing hybrid car fleet of the United States, the reforested mountains of South Korea and the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam. But is the world ready to make such relatively simple, effective, but modest-appearing changes?
Universal Press Syndicate