Authors: James Fallows
An American teacher who had lived for years in a second-tier city in China began cataloguing the make-work jobs of modern China, in order of superfluousness. First came the “bus line monitors,” who walk around and observe as snarls of passengers struggle to get on buses but who have no apparent influence over the process. Then the “receipt stampers,” who stand by the exits of even fancy Western stores and add an extra stamp, in red ink, to receipts as people leave, certifying the sale as official. Then the separate staffs of ticket-sellers and ticket-takers at museums and other public buildings, usually with several people assigned to each role. And on through a list that any foreign—or Chinese person—could match, or top. Yet as the teacher noted, in the end the reason for this countrywide featherbedding was really no mystery at all. It mainly indicated how low prevailing wages still were, and how important it was to keep everyone on someone’s payroll.
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With a more ruthlessly efficient approach to output-per-man-hour, many Chinese enterprises could get twice the results with half the staff, and could afford to pay the remaining staffers much better. But what would those laid-off receipt-stampers and ticket-takers do?
These patterns are changing, with more of the innovation coming from inside China, and with the average value of Chinese factory output (and therefore average wage) going up. But they are not changing fast enough, from the Chinese planners’ point of view. Every policy paper, every speech, just about every conference or newspaper editorial since the mid-2000s has
stressed China’s “need to move up the value chain” or “create a high-value economic base” or “switch to high-margin industries for a better life.”
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This push and logic have obvious application to aerospace, as one of the mainstays of the U.S. economy for nearly a century and as a symbol of advanced technological status. As Joe T told me one afternoon when I met him at his office at a Chinese aviation university, “This industry is a perfect test case of economic maturity in general, since there’s no shortcut to success.”
In biology there is the concept of the “apex predator”—the lion on the savanna, the wolf or puma in the forest, the hawk or eagle in the air, the marlin or salmon in the sea. Their existence depends on many tiers of prey beneath them. If they survive, it suggests that the ecosystem as a whole is robust. Aerospace provides that same capping symbolism for an economic and technological establishment, Joe T suggested. “You have to do everything in consonance,” he said. In the design and construction of the airplanes themselves, that meant research, design, engineering, testing, manufacturing, and very large-scale and complex project management. In the creation and maintenance of an air-transport system, it meant certification, training and education, route design, inspection, enforcement, weather-and-navigation research, air-traffic control, airport design, accident investigation, and more. And then for airline companies come all the vagaries of dealing with often dissatisfied customers, at vast scale, while also buying and maintaining aircraft, setting route schedules and prices, training and scheduling crews, and such nightmares as dealing with baggage and security. So if Chinese companies could succeed in aviation, that would be an “apex” indicator that they could succeed at anything.
2. A green economy
Different people have different assessments of the main threat to China’s continued economic success. For me the easy choice is environmental devastation. “The environmental situation is still grave in China, though with some positive development,” the Chinese central government itself said shortly before the Beijing Olympics, in a surprisingly candid white paper that accompanied its Eleventh Five-Year Plan for Environmental Protection. While the “positive developments” part is true—efforts are being made everywhere to insulate buildings, purify water, install clean-energy plants—the “still grave” part is more evident by the day. “The emissions of major pollutants far exceed environmental capacity with serious environmental pollution,” that white paper said. “Environmental problems at different stages of [the] industrialization process of developed countries over the past several hundred years [are now] concentrated in China.”
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The problem is so deep and widespread that for now the point is simply to mention that it affects every aspect of China’s development. In 2011, the Chinese health ministry announced that cancer had become the nation’s leading cause of death. This is an unfortunate distinction. In poorer countries, infectious diseases and malnutrition are the leading killers; in richer countries, heart diseases and the consequences of obesity. China’s cancer epidemics, and the “cancer villages” found near a number of factories or mines in the countryside, are consequences of decades of uncontrolled industrial emissions. The reported air-pollution levels in major cities are routinely in the “hazardous” level, by international standards, and until 2012 the Chinese government did not even measure or report on particulate matter that the rest of the world considers the most dangerous form of air pollution.
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Despite its investment in conservation and clean-energy projects, China’s growth is still energy-intensive.
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As fast as the economy grows, its energy consumption grows faster still. Each percentage-point increase in economic output leads to a more than proportional increase in demand for energy. Although it is harder to be sure whether this energy consumption leads to a corresponding rise in pollution and reliance on ever-greater water use, overall China is clearly in a race between how bad this problem is and how fast the system can regear itself to cope.
China’s aviation dreams are right in the center of this tension. Air travel inevitably creates disproportionate environmental stress. For the foreseeable future, airplanes will be able to operate only on liquid fuel—oil, in one form or another. Battery-powered planes have made test flights, mainly in Europe. A Swiss design team has even created a plane that flies with no energy source other than the solar panels across its wings. But those are small, experimental models. Batteries must become much lighter, and solar-panel efficiency much greater, before they will be able to keep passenger planes in the air. Modern turbine engines are a great deal cleaner and more efficient than their kerosene-guzzling predecessors of a generation ago. Nonetheless, they inject their emissions into a layer of the upper atmosphere that magnifies their potential “greenhouse” effect, so one airplane traveling at 35,000 feet can do two to three times as much damage, in global-warming terms, as the same engines burning the same amount of fuel at ground level would.
Chinese engineers and environmentalists know this. They also know that more aircraft will be flying to more cities, more frequently, carrying more passengers, every year in China than they did the year before. So they work on their plans for expansion fully aware that everything about their efforts will be subject to increasing scrutiny and pressure. One sign of that
pressure is the competition between China’s heralded investment in high-speed rail projects and its simultaneous construction of airports by the dozens across the country. Foreign reports often present these projects as carefully coordinated expressions of China’s larger ambitions for a modern transportation system, and to an extent they are. But there are also bitter bureaucratic and commercial rivalries between the airline and railroad interests within China, each seizing any opportunity to argue that it reflected the wiser and more farsighted use of the country’s resources. In reality, Chinese designers are likely to push ahead on both fronts.
3. Megacity China
What drives Chinese people away from their rural homes is the same force that has propelled urbanization for centuries: the bleak, unrelenting lack of opportunity in the countryside. When interviewing factory workers in Shenzhen or Dongguan, men and women in their late teens through their early thirties, I frequently heard about the gap between China’s rural and urban economies. Back on the farm, their entire family’s cash income might be $150 to $200 per year. In the city, one worker might earn that much in a month, or every few weeks. Chinese working-age people by the tens of millions have come from their family homes in the countryside to the factories and dormitories or apartments of the big cites. They have replicated at much faster speed and larger scale the social history of Europe and North America through their eras of industrialization.
In 2009, the McKinsey Global Institute released a five-hundred-plus-page survey of the scale and likely effects of the increasing movement of Chinese people to the cities. It was called “Preparing for China’s Urban Billion,” and it described a phenomenon with no precedent in economic or urban history.
According to the study, within a twenty-year period, from 2005 to 2025, more people will be
added
to China’s major cities than now live in the entire United States. In 2005, about 575 million people, or just under 40 percent of the whole Chinese population, lived in big cities rather than agricultural areas. By 2025, about 925 million are expected to, an increase of 350 million. The rural-to-urban shifts that transformed the culture and economy of Europe through the course of the nineteenth century and North America through the twentieth will be compressed in China into a span of a relatively few years.
This shift is expected to give China some 221 cities with populations of over a million by 2025, versus 35 in all of Europe as of 2010 and only 9 in the United States. Time and again in China, I would have the exciting but disorienting experience of coming to a city I had never heard of before and finding out that it was larger than most cities in the United States. For example: Yueyang, which is the second-largest city in Hunan province, behind the capital, Changsha (which is also the home of the environmentally minded mogul Zhang Yue and was the departure point for my Cirrus flight to Zhuhai). Until I spent several days in Yueyang, at the Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, I had never heard of it. But if Yueyang were in the United States, with a population that could be as high as 5 million people (counts vary), it would be a major metropolis.
The heavily urbanized future China would also have fifteen “megacity” complexes, like Shanghai-Hangzhou, of more than 25 million people. The Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Zhuhai complex of the Pearl River Delta would by itself have 80 million to 100 million inhabitants. The only way to amass comparable population totals in the United States would be to combine the multi-hundred-mile stretches from San Francisco to San Diego
on the West Coast, or from Boston to Washington in the east, each of which includes 25 million people or more.
As the McKinsey report put it, simply building China’s new cities “will account for around 20 percent of global energy consumption and up to one-quarter of growth in oil demand” over the next decade. By 2025, as many as 170 Chinese cities could have subway systems or other capital-intensive mass-transit projects—twice as many as in all the countries of Europe combined.
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Everything about China’s development and its presence on the world stage will be affected by these shifts. Environmentally, it creates both problems and opportunities. Hundreds of millions of people who had been living without air-conditioning, elevators, dishwashers, street lights, neon lights, and other energy-intensive urban amenities right down to espresso machines will now demand them. “When I was a child, it was incredible for my father to have even one cold beer,” a Chinese friend of mine named Sean Wang told me in Beijing not long after the Olympics. “Now people want twenty-four-hour heating, hot water, refrigerators. It is not sustainable unless we make a change.” The opportunity, as with almost every physical and technological aspect of modern China, comes from the chance to start from scratch. Unlike the United States and Europe, China largely skipped the landline era and went straight to mobile phones. It similarly has the chance to skip the suburban-sprawl model of mid-twentieth-century America and go straight to the higher-density urban patterns that made subway and streetcar lines efficient for cities like Paris, London, and New York.
Decisions being made right now will affect China’s look, livability, sustainability, and environmental and cultural effect on the world for decades to come. The early twenty-first century is,
for Shenzhen and Xi’an and Nanjing and a hundred other cities, what the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were for New York, or the whole of the Victorian era for London, or the Imperial period for Rome: the age in which big and lasting choices are made about how and where people will live, where they will work, how they will move about, and what identity and spirit their city will be known for.
Chinese city planners do not lack for grandiosity. One of the dependable joys of even a modest-size Chinese city is seeing the dioramas of how it will look when it is all done. Beijing and Shanghai have set a model for other cities in creating “building museums” that present scale-model replicas of the entire urban sprawl, with tiny representations of every structure.
What is happening in Chinese cities is two centuries’ worth of development compressed into ten or twenty years. And as with previous episodes of high-speed expansion, this one has already been characterized by waste, fraud, extravagance, and scandal. Starting in 2010, both Chinese and Western journalists chronicled the construction of “ghost cities” mainly in the Chinese hinterland. These were huge tracts of factory zones, apartment buildings, civic centers, and shopping malls, all built to accommodate populations of a million or more, and all standing virtually empty. They had been built on free or nearly free land from provincial governments, with free or nearly free loans. While they were going up, they had enriched construction companies, kept workers on the job, and boosted GDP figures for the local Party officials. What would become of them afterward no one could say.
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One night in 2007, while my wife and I were living in Shanghai, we looked out our twenty-second-floor apartment window and saw a worker fall from a nearby forty-story scaffolding where welding was going on around the clock. The blue glare
of welding torches kept the night lit in Shanghai, even when many of the neon billboards around People’s Square were shut off each night at 10. We could not see where the worker landed, nor did we see any follow-up Chinese or English news coverage, but it seemed impossible that he could have survived. An average of two hundred people die each day in China in accidents at construction sites, coal mines, factories, or other industrial sites. Soon after we left Shanghai, an unoccupied thirteen-story apartment building fell over onto its side, intact, because it had been put up so quickly with such shoddy foundations.
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