enjoy breathing air that was so polluted it nearly glowed. Rather, what
they were saying was that they were willing to put up with nasty pollu-
tion in exchange for warmer apartments and better pay, and finally hav-
ing their own refrigerators.
“We have a saying in China,” one Chinese journalist told me. “‘Is
your stomach too full?’ In other words, are you so well off you can
afford to complain about nothing? This phrase is used to describe
Americans who talk about saving birds and monkeys while there are
still many Chinese people who don’t have enough food to eat.”
My interpreter in China was a good example of this mind-set. Born
in 1966, Zhenbing had grown up as the second of three sons in a small
village near the border with Inner Mongolia. His family inhabited a
mud straw hut and, like most rural Chinese of that time, was too poor
to buy coal in winter; for heat, they burned straw and dried leaves.
This, despite a climate as cold as Boston’s or Berlin’s, with winter tem-
peratures that often dipped below zero. “Often the straw was not
enough, so the inside wall of the hut became white with icy water-
drops, like frozen snow,” Zhenbing recalled. “In my village, when a girl
was preparing to marry, the first thing the parents checked was, is the
back wall of the son-in-law white or not? If not white, they approved the
marriage, because that meant his family was wealthy enough to keep
the house warm.”
These dreadful conditions began to change after Deng Xiaoping
came to power in 1980 and implemented market reforms that revolu-
tionized China’s economy. Before long, money was trickling down to
China’s poor, and, not surprisingly, one of the first things they bought
was more coal. White walls gradually became less common; at the age
of fourteen, Zhenbing finally got his first pair of shoes.
Multiply the story of Zhenbing’s family by the one billion plus peo-
ple living in China and you understand both why China now has the
world’s most ravaged environment, and why no one who is serious
about global warming can ignore the issue of global poverty. Over the
past 20 years, average incomes have doubled in China, enabling hun-
dreds of millions of Chinese to climb out of absolute poverty to “mere”
conventional poverty. The environmental consequences have been as
devastating as they were predictable. No one can begrudge the poor in
16 Mark Hertsgaard