one Western consultant with regular access to senior Chinese officials
put it, “They know very well they can hold the world for ransom... and
whenever they can extract concessions, they will.”
“The Americans say China is the straw that breaks the camel’s
back on greenhouse gas emissions,” comments Zhou Dadi, a self-
described insider on China’s climate change policies. “But we say,
‘Why don’t you take some of your heavy load off the camel first?’ If the
camel belongs to America, fine, we’ll walk. But the camel does not
belong to America.... China will insist on the per capita principle [of
distributing emissions rights]. What else are we supposed to do? Go
back to no heat in winter? Impossible.”
Dadi, I should emphasize, is no party hack. He is fully aware of the
prospects for global climate change, and doing what he can to prevent
it through his tireless promotion of efficiency improvements. But he
also recognizes the understandable appetite of the Chinese people for
more comfortable lives after decades of want and repression. “China is
not like Africa, you know, some remote place that’s never been devel-
oped,” Zhou told me when I interviewed him in a Beijing hotel one
afternoon. Explaining China’s goal of becoming what he called “a mid-
dle-class country” like France and Japan, Zhou added, “We used to be
the most developed country in the world. Now, after many decades of
turbulence, civil war, revolution, political instability and other difficul-
ties, we finally have the chance to develop the country again. And we
will not lose that chance.”
Even leading Chinese environmental officials support the goal of
continued, rapid economic growth. Few Chinese respect the
Communist Party any longer. But the Party has kept the economy
growing, and everyone is desperate to avoid a relapse into the kind of
chaos, waste, and stagnation that befell China during the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s.
“This is the terrible dilemma of China’s environmental crisis,”
argued one Chinese environmental advocate who must remain name-
less. “Rapid economic growth is the most critical prerequisite for
improving China’s environmental situation. If economic growth stops,
people will go back to the old, dirty, cheaper methods of production.
Worse, there will be political instability, and that will overshadow every-
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