When a Billion Chinese Jump (38 page)

“I chose chemistry. To be honest, it was not my favorite subject. I had always preferred math and literature, but I thought I would have more chance of securing a place with chemistry. You cannot understand what it was like then.”
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I had a soft spot for Li’s generation. The wave of university students who came of age as the country removed the ideological blinkers of the Cultural Revolution tended to be more open-minded, down-to-earth, and appreciative of education than others. “I can still do acupuncture,” the former barefoot doctor said with a smile as he poured a fresh cup of green tea. He had come a long way from curing desert villagers with traditional medicine.

We were sitting in Li’s spacious study in the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy. The research center had just been established to spearhead China’s efforts to escape the energy crunch and ease the risks of global warming. Li was the first head. He was engaging company. As he talked about the future of China, the world, and energy, it was clear he had huge ambitions.

“Solar is the most important renewable energy source for China’s future. Wind and biomass are good, but their potential is limited. With solar, though, we can do more. There is a lot of land available for solar farms in the deserts of Gansu and Xinjiang. We have calculated that if we covered just a third of those areas with photovoltaic cells then we could meet the current energy needs of the entire country.”

That would mean filling the old Silk Road with billions of solar panels. Professor Li’s old home in Gansu would become a power hub for the nation. The barren deserts would be transformed into China’s greatest asset. If any nation could build such a model it was likely to be China, which had the land, the scale of vision, and the manufacturing resources. It was a thrilling prospect. Li had high-level backing to make it work. The science and technology minister, Wan Gang, told me solar was the best long-term hope.
“The sun has more than enough energy for all our needs, but we currently lack the understanding to utilize that,” he said. “Since 2007, we have been using more solar power, and I think we will increase in the future. The priority is to strengthen research and build a strong business model.”

But realization was still a long way off. In the short and medium term, the boffins (research scientists) working under Li would work on ways to improve the efficiency of coal. Major experiments were taking place across the country. In some cases the work was more advanced than anything in the U.S. or Europe, suggesting China might one day become a leader in low-carbon technology.
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It was heady stuff but exactly what I was looking for in the northeast rust belt, where I planned to put “Scientific Development” under the microscope. Could brainpower and money solve China’s environmental problems and make the country a green superpower that could save the world from the accumulated side effects of industrialization and overconsumption? Cities were trying to go green. Industry was moving toward greater efficiency, and the state was planning to ramp up spending on research and development to levels close to those of the U.S., Germany, and Japan.
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Businesses and local governments were generating a new boom in wind farms, photovoltaic cell manufacturing, electric cars, “eco-cities,” and smart-grid technology.

The government had just announced a new front line of the intellectual effort to produce more light and heat with less smoke and waste: the National Laboratory for Clean Energy. If climate change was the biggest challenge facing the planet, and China was the country most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, then this laboratory was where much of the hope had to be focused in the search for a scientific solution to save the planet.

It was based in the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, a reassuringly boffin-friendly environment. Nerdy types wandered through a pleasantly green campus. The only distraction was a giant electronic screen that at first appeared to be made for displaying the latest football scores or stock indices. But look a little closer and the data was good solid science: “Test run of new vanadium redox battery-powered display. Time since last recharge: 30 days, 17 hours.” Inside the buildings, the corridor walls were decorated with complex flowcharts and compound diagrams. In the workrooms, students with impressively unkempt hair had their noses deep in lovingly worn research papers and books. The laboratories fitted the 1950s
mad-scientist stereotype: semichaotic and crammed full of spectrometers, chemical lasers, and manifold catalyzing experiments, most of which seemed to be housed inside Robbie-the-Robot stainless-steel casings.

The changing role of the institute has tracked trends in resource availability. Founded in 1949, its original goal was to find alternative supplies of energy. Most of the scientists worked on synthetic replacements for oil, which was then in desperately short supply in China. Their role changed completely in 1959 with the discovery of the huge Daqing oil fields in Heilongjiang.
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After that, the institute quickly reinvented itself as an intellectual resource for the petrochemical industry. By the time of my visit, the wheel had turned again. With more than three-quarters of Daqing’s reserves gone, scientists were switching in droves to renewable energy and coal-conversion technology. In their labs, they could see the future and—in the long term, at least—it was green.

China planned to invest about $300 billion to provide 15 percent of its power from renewables by 2020.
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But far bigger sums would be invested in “new energy,” including “clean coal” technology. This would ensure that, for the medium term, the color of development would remain a smoky brown. For the next twenty years, and probably much longer, China would be unable to kick its coal-puffing habit. The government has yet to set a target for when its carbon emissions might peak. Wan, the minister, told me he personally expected the peak between 2030 and 2040. Other officials put it closer to 2050. There was simply no other energy available to fuel the massive economic growth that the government was planning. All the scientists could do was try to ease the damage to the nation’s lungs and the world’s climate.

But Li insisted a real change was possible. He aimed to use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen, which could then be used as clean fuel. Under his instruction, scientists will focus on catalytic processes to improve the efficiency of coal, through conversion to natural gas, and to deal with polluting emissions, such as sulfur and carbon dioxide, by converting them into other fuels such as methanol.

Many foreign scientists and economists believe it is essential for China to capture and store carbon dioxide so it would not add to the volume of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
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But Li was skeptical. “Burying carbon dioxide is expensive, energy intensive, and potentially dangerous. I think it’s better to find a way to convert it into other chemicals that we can use.”
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This was already being done in the institute’s labs, but the processes were decades away from being commercially viable.
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China’s best short-term hope for coal was to improve its efficiency through conversion to natural gas or methanol. Strategic goals were at play too. As Madame Qian had told me earlier, the government wanted to tap Xinjiang’s massive coal reserves. This rich vein of fossil fuels had been left underground because of the cost of transporting heavy coal 3,000 kilometers to the factories on the coast. But if the coal could be converted to gas, it could flow cheaply along the west-east pipelines. This would be more efficient, but it could hardly be called clean energy.

I asked Li if he believed global warming was a man-made phenomenon. “The climate has changed. My grandfather told me that his grandfather had told him that our home in northern China used to be a forest. That made a big impact on me. Now our home is a desert,” he said. “I haven’t personally researched the causes so I don’t have firm beliefs, but Nobel scientists say carbon is responsible and I trust them. Even though I am not really a hundred percent convinced, I think mankind needs to err on the side of caution by trying to reduce greenhouse gases.”

Again, this was echoed by Minister Wan: “Human activities definitely have an impact on the climate, but the question is how much of an impact. That requires scientific research,” he told me. “There are different views about climate change. My role is to create an environment in which scientists can discuss this. Science requires democracy.”

As an affected nation and a responsible member of the world community, he said China has to take precautionary action immediately. “The goal is to change lifestyles and modes of production, so we cannot wait for the research findings to come out before we act.”

This opened up the business opportunity of a generation. China moved into the clean technology sector at a characteristically rapid speed. From 2005 until 2009, the capacity of wind power generation doubled every year. Car and battery makers promised to outstrip their U.S., Japanese, and European rivals in the race to mass-produce electric and hybrid cars. Plans were unveiled for a more efficient “smart grid” to distribute electricity. Already the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter of photovoltaic panels, China launched a program to install millions of solar heaters and mulled feed-in tariff incentives to further promote solar power. The world’s first solar billionaire, Shi Zhengrong, the founder and CEO ofA Suntech,
had previously told me he expected his company to grow into a global energy giant like BP or Shell.

But there was a danger of moving too far, too fast. Low-carbon economic zones sprang up across the country. Municipalities quickly realized they could reinvent themselves and secure investment by talking the language of “eco,” “green” and “environmentally friendly.”

The northeast needed environmental healing and economic stimulation more than almost anywhere else in China. I was touring Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning, the provinces that formed the rusted upper lip of the Bohai Sea. In the era of a command economy, this had been the channel from the industrial blacklands of the northeast to the most polluted sea in China. A decade after the collapse of many old state-owned factories, the sprawling cities and mining villages of this region were trying to reinvent themselves as clean-tech centers and environmental pioneers. The result was part green makeover, part science fiction.

The journey had started in Tianjin, China’s third-biggest city and the world’s fifth-biggest port. Its name, which means Heavenly Ford, dates back to 1404, when it was still a small trading post. Now a megacity, its reputation was anything but celestial. On the way, my assistant told me a joke. “An enemy bomber is on a mission to blow up Tianjin. He flies across the Bohai Sea but, when he reaches the city, he turns the plane around and returns without dropping a bomb. ‘What are you doing?’ ask his commanders on the radio. The pilot replies: ‘We don’t need to waste our explosives. It looks like someone has already destroyed it.’”

Tianjin was still unlikely to be marketing itself as China’s premier honeymoon destination, but the city was modernizing impressively. The first surprise was the sleek high-speed train from Beijing that sped along the rails at 335 kilometers per hour, faster than any train I had ever been on in the UK. Advertisements for turbine manufacturers indicated the city’s growing role in the wind energy sector, which had doubled in size for five years in a row mostly by putting up turbines along the old Silk Road. Tianjin’s ambitions were grander still. It wanted to create a new model eco-city.

I was on my way to a former dump site on the shore of the most polluted sea in China, where the technocratic governments of China and Singapore were pooling expertise and finance to build a new, green urban
community of 350,000 people. Due for completion in 2020, it was touted as the most environmentally friendly city in China and an example for developing nations across the planet.

The Tianjin Binhai New Area was more than an hour’s drive from the station. We had trouble finding it. The area was not well enough established to merit proper signposts. For most of the previous fifty years, the alkali-polluted flats had been an outlet for industrial discharge pipes. In the middle of that morose expanse we found bulldozers clearing a stretch of land. And in the middle of that was a single, lonely, bright-orange exhibition center, where I went to meet one of the architects behind the project.

Wang Meng was in an office filled with models: balsa-wood shopping malls, Perspex factories, and paper skyscrapers. His job was to scale them up to full size. The young bespectacled planner said it was a childhood dream come true.

“Model making was my hobby. I loved it so much that I used to enter competitions. One year I came fifth out of the whole of Tianjin city with a plane powered by a rubber band. It flew for a minute and a half.”

Twenty years on, he was attempting to make a rather more ambitious project fly with alternative energy. The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City was being billed as a model metropolis, a standard setter that would help the fast-urbanizing nation turn from gray to green. Within ten years it was supposed to get up to 20 percent of its power from renewable sources. Instead of winding up rubber bands, Wang would tap the spinning rotors of wind farms and the geothermal heat contained in the earth.
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Domestic water use would be kept below 120 liters per person per day, half supplied by rain capture and recycled gray water.

For optimum energy efficiency, every building was be insulated, double glazed, and made entirely of materials that reach the government’s green standards. More than 60 percent of all waste was supposed to be recycled. To get car journeys down by 90 percent, a light railway would pass near to every home, and communities would be zoned to ensure everyone could walk to shops, schools, and clinics. It would be greener than almost any other city in China, with protected areas for wild grasses, such as bulrush, hairy uraria, and wild chrysanthemum, and wetland birds, including purple herons, flying snipes, and black-winged stilts. Overall, there would be an average 12 square meters of parkland, grassland, or wetland for each resident. Environmental health would be further enhanced by an on-site
water treatment plant to ensure that all tap water was potable, by free sports facilities, and by a commitment to keep particulate matter in the air below 100 parts per cubic meter for more than four out of every five days. That, at least, was the plan.