Postcards From Tomorrow Square (22 page)

Inside the new building was an electricity-generating plant, and what I was seeing was the handiwork of a Chinese engineer in his mid-forties named Tang Jinquan. Tang had never intended to get into the cement business. But when he graduated from the technical university in Harbin, in far northern China, the government was still assigning jobs to graduates—and his assignment was a cement-research institute in his hometown of Tianjin. “I am interested in heat generation, this place is about cement—no match!” he told me (through an interpreter) at the factory in Zibo. He spent nearly the next 20 years of his career in a long effort to make the dirty, wasteful, fast-growing cement industry less environmentally destructive.

The heart of his idea—easy to describe, tricky to implement—is capturing the enormous amount of heat normally wasted in cement making and using it to run turbines that generate electric power. This power can then be fed back into the factory, doing work that would otherwise require burning even more coal. The reduction of dust is a visible indicator of the more fundamental reduction of waste. Over the course of a long day, I heard about the many, many refinements Tang had made to this cogeneration system since he first started working on it in the mid-1980s. The punch line is that it now works well enough to cut the energy (mainly from coal) required to make clinker by 60 percent, and the overall power demands of the cement production line by 30 percent.

In 2004, Tang left the cement-research institute to form, with two colleagues, a technology start-up company called Dalian East Energy Development, which sells cogeneration systems to cement producers like Sunnsy. (It’s a long way from the days of government-assigned jobs.) The energy-recycling system at the factory I saw is expected to cover its multimillion-dollar cost (the exact sum is confidential) within four years, through reduced coal demand and government rebates for energy-saving investments. Sunnsy is a private firm, with annual sales of more than $1 billion and a recent $50 million investment from Morgan Stanley. According to Tang, the 120 similar installations at cement factories throughout China save 1.7 million tons of coal per year.

When I met Tang, he had just returned from a trip to Vietnam, where two of his systems are operating, and was about to head to Uzbekistan, where he has another (others are in India, the Philippines, and Pakistan). His dream now is to apply his cogeneration technology to more of China’s most wasteful industries, starting with steel. “I have a long vision, which may not be realized before I die,” he told me when we had lunch. “Of course, that might not be so long!” he added, laughing and waving a cigarette at me—one of 60 he smokes per day.

Tang added that when he goes to class reunions from his university and sees that he is the only one in the cement business, “I feel unacceptable, because the industry is not good.” But he says he knows otherwise, and he tells recruits to his firm to hold their heads high. “They should be proud of what we are doing! Other industries are consuming the earth. We are preserving it.”

H
ere is what I learned by visiting the cement factory, and by seeing and asking about many similar “green” projects in China: China’s environmental situation is disastrous. And it is improving. Everyone knows about the first part. The second part is important, too. Outside recognition of where and why China has made progress increases the prospects that it will make further advances. Recognition also clarifies the most important obstacles, political and economic, to such progress. And it is simply fair to the many people within China, including within the Chinese Communist Party, who are trying their best to make a difference—and who are having more success than most Westerners who rely on media accounts would suspect.

It is right, of course, that Western publications emphasize so often and so clearly the damage that China’s economic rise has inflicted on its own environment and the world’s. But the despairing tone of this coverage is itself becoming an issue within China—one more illustration in the long national narrative of not being fully appreciated or respected by the world’s established powers. It might also be having an effect on what the government does.

Surprisingly enough, even official sources within China have gone far to recognize the challenges the country faces and its responsibility to deal with them. In November 2007, the Chinese government released its 11th Five-Year Plan for Environmental Protection. The tone of this document would come as a shock to anyone familiar with the relentlessly upbeat nature of official Chinese pronouncements—or with the famous mock-news video released by
The Onion
in spring 2008, in which Chinese authorities burst with pride as they announce their nation’s new status as the No. 1 polluter in the world. (The mock festivities include the “100 Widow Smog Dance” and a spokesman declaring, “The labor of the people has made the sky black with the smoke of progress. We are overjoyed!”)

The “environmental situation is still grave in China though with some positive development,” the real Chinese government said in the English translation it issued. It went on to catalog a familiar set of problems: “The emissions of major pollutants far exceed environmental capacity with serious environmental pollution. . . . The quality of coastal marine environment is at risk. . . . The number of days with haze in some big and medium-size cities has some increase, and acid rain pollution is not alleviated. . . . The phenomena of no strict observation of laws, little punishment to lawbreakers, poor law enforcement and supervision are still very common.” And on through a very long list, with this stark conclusion: “China is facing [a] grim situation in addressing climate change. . . . Environmental problems at different stages of [the] industrialization process of developed countries over the past several hundred years [are now] concentrate[ d] in China.”

The alarming trends mentioned in this report correspond with what the outside world has heard, read, and assumed about the environmental disaster of modern China. A new book or white paper on the topic seems to appear every day. The surprise is seeing them acknowledged in a paper issued not by an international research group but by the Chinese government itself, which has long been accused of refusing to see what is plain to everyone else. The problems, after all, are visible to any tourist from the moment of arrival. Everyone has heard or read about China’s big-city air pollution, yet visitors are still shocked the first time they encounter a bad day in Beijing—or Chongqing or Xi’an or Shenyang or any of the other large cities with chronically grimy skies.

And the problems that are less obvious at a glance are even more threatening. Toxic emissions into lakes, groundwater, and farmland; the drying-up of rivers and silting-up of dams; the rapid exhaustion of water in the northern half of the country that, in the view of many experts, is likely to be China’s next great environmental emergency; the millions of new cars that hit the road each year, spewing carbon dioxide; the billions of tons of coal that go up in smoke (yes, billions—China burns more than 2 billion tons of coal each year, about one-third of the world’s total); the engines on Chinese airliners that must be overhauled or replaced more frequently than elsewhere, an airline engineer told me, because operating in Chinese air corrodes the turbine blades . . . living here, I don’t have the heart to keep ticking items off. The title of one authoritative book on the subject,
The River Runs Black,
by Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations, conveys the general idea, as does that of her follow-up
Foreign Affairs
article about China’s environment, “The Great Leap Backward?”

Through nearly two years in China, including the winter and spring of 2008 in Beijing, my wife and I have found the bad air and other forms of pollution to be the only serious challenge—physical, practical, or emotional—we face. We are here temporarily and voluntarily, and we’re living like royalty compared with most local Chinese. Still, we continually face a basic choice. Either we decide we can’t stand the conditions, in which case we should leave—an option for most foreigners but few Chinese. Or we decide that the openness, possibility, and importance of today’s China justify these and other discomforts, in which case we should stop complaining, try to ignore what we don’t like, and be grateful for the historic opportunity we have. We keep deciding to stay. The point is, even privileged outsiders here must live with conditions they can’t change, and those conditions are only a tiny window on the endurance required of the Chinese public.

But remember that other phrase from the government’s 11th Five-Year Plan: there has been “some positive development” amid the catastrophe. After travels around the country to look at factories, farms, and conservation projects, and talks with several dozen scientists, think-tank experts, officials, and businesspeople from China and overseas, I have come to think that the modestly positive developments merit more of the world’s attention than they’ve received.

T
here will be no shortage of attention for the next big test of China’s environmental positive developments: the Beijing Olympic Games. In 2007, the economist Matthew Kahn ranked 72 major world cities on overall environmental “livability.” Beijing came in dead last, below Bangkok and Mumbai. In 2001, as part of its agreement to host the Olympics, the Chinese government promised to bring the air quality up to the standards of previous Olympic venues—in addition to making other commitments about reducing press controls and increasing civil liberties for its people. Whatever the government might or might not do toward keeping the political commitments, most people assumed that it would take any steps necessary to make the air acceptable by the opening ceremony on August 8.

On a trip to Beijing in August 2006, I wondered when the authorities would ever get around to applying the clean-air plan. With each passing month, the woeful quality of Beijing’s air and the implausible nature of official statements increased my skepticism that a normal Olympics could occur. At a press conference broadcast live from Beijing soon after I moved there from Shanghai, in October 2007, Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee, said that some events might have to be rescheduled unless things improved fast. My TV screen went black at that point, and his remarks were not covered in the local press. When the world-record holder in the marathon, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, said he wouldn’t compete in that event for fear of hurting his lungs, the Chinese media pointed out that he hadn’t yet been named to the team anyway. The Beijing city government was mocked in the foreign (though not the local) media for reporting an ever-improving count of “blue sky days” per month, which had to refer to something other than the actual color of the sky. I myself have been incredulous at the skies I see regularly outside the windows of the apartment my wife and I have been renting here. As a personal chronicle, I take a picture of the sky each day I’m in town, so I can record when, if ever, things really improve in preparation for the Games. (Current plans are to impose sweeping factory shutdowns and other emergency cleanup measures starting about three weeks before the Olympics begin.)

But, as at the cement plant, after I spent a day with the group of more than 20 scientists in charge of measuring the real quality of the city’s air, I found myself less ready to scoff. These were physicists, atmospheric scientists, and other researchers from various institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or CAS. I met them at the Academy’s Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, which is next door to the main Olympic site on the north side of Beijing.

The sky was a brilliant blue that day, thanks to the frigid wind roaring in from Mongolia. When the wind comes into Beijing from the west, as it did that day, it pushes the city’s haze out toward the sea. But usually it comes from the south and southeast and brings smoke and dust from the hyper-polluted coal and steel regions of Shanxi and Shandong provinces, including the chokingly polluted coal city of Taiyuan, 250 miles southwest of Beijing. The smoke and dust from the south combine with Beijing’s own automotive and factory fumes and hang over the city, trapped by mountains on the western edge. That’s when the air is so dense and dark that spectators on one side of the Olympic Stadium will barely be able to see to the other.

I visited the scientists at a complex of about 15 research centers, plus an apartment block with housing for hundreds of CAS employees. The complex is next to the Olympic grounds, in an area where new public buildings of all sorts are going up. In a series of briefings and outdoor tours, the scientists laid out the steps they had taken to get honest measures of Beijing’s air problems. They built 1,000-foot-high towers in and around the city to measure pollutants at different altitudes and predict how the wind would spread them. They shot laser beams at reflectors on distant buildings and assessed the return signal to measure what was in the air. They mounted sensors on cars and vans and drove them around the city’s ring roads to see where the pollution was worst. They converted the entire roof of their office building into an open-air lab overlooking the Olympic Village. American-made spectrometers measured particulates and pollutants like ozone and nitrous oxide. A satellite dish received a steady stream of data from U.S. geophysical satellites, which was then matched with their local findings. And that was just a start.

I couldn’t judge the machinery, but everything about the people and process seemed serious and scientific rather than political. Therefore I was willing to listen when Liu Wenqing, the director of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, and Wang Yuesi, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, said that, according to the team’s readings, the air in Beijing was actually improving. Between 2000 and 2006, the city’s population went up by half, to 15 million, and in about the same time the number of vehicles on its roads doubled, to 3 million (apparently the scare stories about a thousand extra cars per day joining Beijing’s traffic are true). But because of tougher auto-emissions standards that took effect in 2006—similar to America’s CAFE rules, but more stringent—and the forced closing of many factories in and around the city, the levels of all major pollutants fell during the same period. (The pollutants included nitrous oxide, ozone, and VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, like benzene.) These were long-term changes, not whatever emergency shutdown measures the government will take just before the Games begin.