average Chinese was the phasing out of honeycomb home stoves—the
least efficient, most polluting means of burning coal. This phase-out,
which was still under way during my visit to China during the winter
of 1996 and 1997, was pursued in concert with the demolition of vast
tracts of huotongs, the traditional one-story courtyard dwellings of
urban China, where residents invariably used home stoves for cooking
and heating. The huotongswere replaced by high-rise apartment build-
ings that relied on central heating from industrial-sized boilers.
The improvements in energy efficiency continued and even
expanded during the 1990s. Two of the leading individuals in the effort
have been Zhou Dadi, a longtime senior official with the State
Planning Comission’s Energy Research Institute, and William
Chandler of the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the
United States Department of Energy. The increase in China’s efficiency
between 1980 and 2000, Zhou and Chandler have written, meant that
the amount of coal needed to make a ton of steel fell by one-third by
2000; the amount of coal needed to make a ton of cement fell by 17
percent and a kilowatt hour of electricity by 8 percent.
Meanwhile, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory at the University of California were helping to improve the
efficiency of household appliances. This was crucial, because the rise
of incomes in China was unleashing enormous demand for refrigera-
tors, televisions, and other symbols of the global middle class. “In
1980,” the Lab’s China Energy Project website explains, “China pro-
duced fewer than 50,000 household refrigerators, 200,000 television
sets, 250,000 clothes washers, and 13,000 air conditioners. By 2001,
refrigerator and clothes-washer production exceeded 13 million, room
air-conditioner production soared to 23 million, and more than 40 mil-
lion color televisions were rolling out of factories, making China the
largest appliance producer in the world. The increase in appliance
ownership has led to an average 16 percent growth in household elec-
tricity consumption per year since 1980.”
The new efficiency improvements promise to reduce the environ-
mental burden of this surge in consumption. Although sales of appli-
ances and consumer electronics items continued to grow at a double-
digit pace through 2000, total household energy use was no higher
China 19