Richard Smith - China's Engine of Environmental Collapse

Richard Smith's recent book China's Engine of Environmental Collapse has provoked discussion on the left about the scale of the ecological crisis in China, and how the Chinese government is responding. It is a measure of the importance of the discussion that the book is being debated, and so I felt I needed to engage. Several years ago Socialist Review magazine published a shorter piece by me on China's environmental crisis, and I was keen to see how that stacked up against Smith's study of the crisis in China.

The first thing to say about Richard Smith's book is that it is detailed. He documents an environmental tragedy in China which is taking place on an enormous scale. The geographical size of China, its huge population and the scale of its economy mean that numbers are often staggering. To take a few examples Smith uses from the early pages of the book. In 2013 the Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources "conceded that three million hectares of farmland, an area the size of Belgium, was 'too toxic to farm." In 2016, 80 percent of "tested  water wells across the North China Plain (home to 400 million people) were 'so badly contaminated... to be unsafe for drinking or home use". In terms of the greatest threat to the global environment, climate change:

In 2018 China's CO2 emission were nearly  as much as those of the five next-largest emitters (the US, India, Russia, Japan and Germany) combined. Yet China's population was only 68 percent as large as the total population of those five countries, and its GDP was just 32 percent as large as their combined GDPs.

China is "by far the leading driver of global climate collapse" concludes Smith. 

Smith argues that there are two key problems to understand why an allegedly socialist country is so environmentally destruction. The first is development. China has compressed industrialisation into a period of 30 years which took the US a century. The second is that the nature of Chinese society makes it impossible for its ruling class to enforce their environmental laws. The economic model is driving production for the sake of production - particularly of infrastructure like damns, high speed rail and urban areas. China is, according to Smith, a "highly organised and effective developmental party-state that could not only furnish labour and control labour costs, but could also clear land and concentrate resources" to drive forward economic development. 

Regional heads of government hope to attract investment by the constant expansion of infrastructure. Manufacturing can take advantage of low wages and appalling working conditions to maximise profits and the inability to enforce environmental laws means that pollution, waste disposal and emissions are effectively unrestricted. Even "green" development, such as the building of solar farms etc, is often ineffectual because the energy isn't connected to the grid, not maintained or built in unsuitable areas, simply to attract centralised funding.

It's a terrifying picture, and the greatest strength of Smith's book is to open our eyes to the environmental catastrophe in the country. Should Chinese economic development continue it will bring enormous disaster. There are, for instance, no sustainable ways to meet the rising demand for electricity in China.

Why does this happen? As I said Smith is trying to explain why such a highly centralised state, with dictatorial powers, is unable to curb pollution. Here Smith says that the problem is that the particular nature of the Chinese bureaucracy is at fault. Discussing the Chinese Premier, Xi, he says

Xi's limitations begin with his comrades and nominal "subordinates"... Xi cannot systematically compel subordinate officials to stop squandering resources and polluting the country and the planet, because, for all his nominal authority as head of the most powerful police state in history, in reality power is widely shared through the 90-million-member ruling Party .This means that most of the time he can't force subordinate officials to give up their ruinous practices when to do so would undermine their economic interests.

Xi is "powerless" Smith argues, to alter the "systemic growth drivers" which are "if anything more powerful and more eco-suicidal than those of 'normal' capitalism in the West". 

On the same page, Smith continues, 

Xi's overrising concern, like that of Mao and Deng Xiaoping before him, is not to build and ecological civilisation, but to make China rich and power, to restore its "greatness" to "catch up and overtake the US" and become the world's leading superpower. Like Stalin and Khrushchev, Chinese leaders have always understood that in the context of a hostile global imperialism, economic and military parity, if not superiority, are the only guarantors of power. The Soviet Union was doomed by its failure to win the economic and arms race with the US. This lesson was not lost on Xi. As China itself became deeply enmeshed with, and dependent upon, global capitalism, it became vulnerable. 

Here, while trying to show the speciality of Chinese bureaucratic rule, I actually think that Smith shows how much China's ecological destruction is the result of its integration into the world, capitalist, economy. In fact, I think it's clear that the dynamic of production in China is very similar to that operating (and destroying the environment) elsewhere in the world. For instance, when discussing how urban development allows mayors to get rich Smith says,

The real "miracle" in urban China is that mayors don't just get rich once off this theft. In many cities they've turned their monopoly of power and property into a perpetual motion machine of dispossesssion-demolition-construction-dispossesssion-demolition-construction on the same piece of land, with all the dislocation, waste (and profit) that entails.

Its difficult to see how this differs from the accumulation for the sake of accumulation that marks production in the rest of the world, even if the specific example might seem unlikely (though maybe not impossible). Thus it seems to me strange, and a distraction, that Smith constantly tries to hunt out differences between the Chinese and capitalist ruling classes to prove a point. He writes that 

Beijing can't systematically enforce its writ against resistance from below because it can't systematically fire insubordinate bureaucrats. They're not just employees like in capitalism,. They're Communist Party cadres, members of the same ruling class the leader ins Beijing, and do they are not powerless themselves. 

Smith concludes that the problem is the "collectivist nature" of China's ruling class. This seems to me to let the economic system off the hook, and by extension downplay the role of China in the global economic system and its environmental destruction. Recently I read Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia. There Cliff argues that the nature of Russia's behaviour arose out of its position in a wider economic system in competition with the West. It wasn't the specific organisation of Russia's ruling class that was the problem - but what those rulers were made to do by economic realities. I think the same is true of China today.

Nonetheless I do agree with Smith's conclusion. Tinkering with the market and China's system will not solve the problem. What is needed is for the Chinese masses to rise up against the bureaucratic system and put in place a system of collective, democratic, ownership and control of the economy "to prioritise the needs of society and the environment". Richard Smith doesn't see the Chinese workers as the problem, rather they are the solution. It's this, combined with his expose of the reality of China's environmental disaster makes his book a useful read and separates it off from the normal "blame China" approach of many environmental commentators.

Related Reviews

Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump
Lafitte - Spoiling Tibet
Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility
Gittings - Changing Face of China

Marx & Engels - On Colonialism

Reading about and around the Indian Rebellion of 1857 recently I picked up an old, unread, volume on my shelf - a collection of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' writings On Colonialism. I was drawn to their writings because I wanted to look at two things. Firstly the work of Marx and Engels has been neglected during the reawakened debates around colonialism and imperialism. The Black Lives Matter movement has sparked a renewed interest in understanding how our modern world (and the racism within in it) came about. But the work of these two great revolutionaries has rarely been discussed in this context recently. Secondly I waned to see what Marx and Engels made of contemporary events. They were, after all, writing at a time when the British Empire was at its height.

The book is a collection of varied pieces written by Marx and Engels that touch on colonialism. Many of the articles are those written by Marx (and occasionally Engels) for the New York Tribune. These include analysis of contemporary events (such as the progress of the Indian Rebellion) or discussions of British parliamentary debates around countries like China and India. India dominates these reports. Partly this reflects the importance of that country to the British economy. It also, no doubt, reflects the interest in Marx's readership on these questions - what happened in India and what Britain was doing had ramifications for the global economy after all.

The rest of the articles are snippets from letters, essays and chunks from Capital. Piecing these together one gets a real appreciation of two aspects of Marx and Engels work and ideas. Firstly their absolute horror at what colonialism did to the people of Ireland, India, China and elsewhere. Their anger at violence, poverty, the stripping of natural resources and the destruction of people and communities runs through these works that span their lifetimes. Secondly the reader quickly sees how Marx and Engels saw colonialism as a direct consequence of the nature of capitalism - where capital reshaped the world in its own image. Take some brief comments on India by Marx from 1853:

England had broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separate Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions and from the whole of its past history... Now the British in East India accepted from the predecessors the departments of finance and war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works... it was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindustan and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons.

As Kevin Anderson has shown, Marx demonstrated through his life an evolving understanding of what colonialism was and what non-Western societies were like. In some of the early writings here, Marx sees the impact of colonialism as horribly destructive as well as helping to push the development of India forward. In the same article just quoted he writes about the village organisation in India:

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilised communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

He cautions against any vision of the past as being any sort of idyll.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organisations disorganised and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisation, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all.

Attacking what came before Empire might seem like a celebration of its replacement with British rule. But the same year, writing again in the New York Tribune he shows that he certainly doesn't see colonialism or Empire as a civilising force.

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether

Marx's clarity on the way that capitalism transformed colonial nations into its own image shines through these writings. As does his (and Engels) disgust at what colonial rule meant. In the writings on the "Mutiny" and the suppression of the 1857 revolt both authors express their outrage and rail against the contradictions of the media which downplayed the atrocities of the British and exaggerated those of the enemy: "Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a Hindu mutineer."

In August 1857, in the midst of the suppression of the rebellion, Marx did not duck any critique of the responsibility of the British for the outbreak of the rebellion. In an article on the Investigation of Tortures in India, Marx concluded: 

We have here given but a brief and mildly-coloured chapter from the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?

The bulk of the writing here is by Marx. Engels articles tend to focus on the military aspects. In these he sometimes displays a very patronising attitude. He dismisses India military preparations for battle as showing "an ignorance of military engineering which no private sapper in any civilised army could be capable of". This contrasts with contemporary accounts which showed British forces often being surprised by the brilliance of the rebel military. While perhaps not being a good sample of writing from Engels, I think Marx displayed much more sympathetic understanding of the nature of India society, though both authors are certainly occasionally guilty of seeing India as backward before the arrival of Europeans - for all their hatred and disgust at what colonialism did.

Because of my own focused reading on India recently I've dwelt on what Engels and Marx wrote about India in this volume. However there is a great deal more - writings by both authors on Ireland, Algeria, Afghanistan and China. Critiquing British imperial policy in China they both rage at the hypocrisy of the British government which claims to be civilising and advanced, yet imposed war and opium on the Chinese people in the interests of profit. As Marx, writing to Engels in 1869 said, John Bull should be put "in the pillory!" Here Marx was commenting on a book that Engels was planning on Ireland. Sadly that never appeared, but Marx himself commented in 1867 how his own views on Ireland had changed, "Previously I thought Ireland's separation from Britain impossible. Now I think it inevitable."

As Priyamvada Gopal has noted Marx and Engels, like other radicals and revolutionaries in Britain, had their ideas shaped through an engagement with the rebels and rebellions that emerged against British rule. The experience of Empire and resistance to it transformed their ideas and their expectations. It also helped make both of them place anti-colonial politics at the heart of their revolutionary politics. 

This collection of essays is thus a very useful insight into the development of Marx and Engels ideas. It also serves as a way of understanding how those ideas developed. Its fascinating to see how both authors engaged with contemporary events, predicting, analysing and engaging. For activists trying to get to grips with the legacy of colonialism this ought to be part of the reading list.

Related Reviews

Anderson - Marx at the Margins
Gopal - Insurgent Empire
William Dalrymple - The Anarchy
Hibbert - The Great Mutiny: India 1857
Marx & Engels - The German Ideology
Marx - Value, Price and Profit
Marx - The Civil War in France
Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb

Saul David - Victoria's Wars

The period of Queen Victoria's reign 1837 to 1901 saw the consolidation of the British Empire over it's most important possessions, specifically the Indian sub-continent. Full expansion into Asia, the Middle East and Africa was only just beginning, but it was certainly during Victoria's era that the system began to take shape. The period saw the end of the old rule by companies like the East India and the beginning of devolved state power. It also saw the British Army become a modern military - ending antiquated systems like the buying of commissions for officers, uniforms that were more fit for use in the varied climates of the Empire and the use of more modern weaponry.

So Saud David's book covers a fascinating period of social and military transformation. It is accessible, well-written and entertaining. At times the author is prone to turns of phrase that are somewhat uncouth. Were the mutinying soldiers in 1857 joined by "the rabble from the bazaar" or did ordinary people join them? Is it fair, relevant or even appropriate for David to describe Queen Victoria as "far from unattractive (if you liked your women plump and homely, more milkmaid than courtesan)"?

This is very much a military history. The various campaigns are described in detail, particularly some of the key battles. David dwells on the heroism of British (and occasionally allied) troops, particularly given the relevance of the Victoria Cross to the Queen's personal interest in the military. This isn't a particularly left wing or socialist history of the period, though David highlights how the British government's involvement around the world was driven by their desire to protect commercial interests. This is most clear perhaps, in David's chapter on the Opium Wars, he comments, for instance, that Prince Albert feared that the fall of the Chinese Emperor would "usher in the anti-capitalist Taipings, with all the dire consequences that would have for British commerce".  In the event, following the end of four years of war, vast quantities of opium were brought from the British Empire - a vastly profitable industry which proves, once again, that capitalists are quite happy to make money from appalling trades if they are able.

One of the good things about David's book is that he demonstrates just how useless the British command could be. Not a few of the chapters (Afghanistan and the Crimea are cases in point) deal with the debacles that followed British imperial arrogance. It was these that drove military reform, and Albert had a peripheral role in that.

I was less convinced by David's thesis that Victoria played the central role he attributes to her. He argues that she was "shaping, supporting and sometimes condemning her government's foreign policy - but never ignoring it. And through all this she was helped and guided by her talented and hugely underrated husband, Prince Albert". The evidence that David presents does show the Queen closely following events and putting an argument, but I didn't quite feel that he proved his point. In fact, his epilogue where he describes Victoria's Wars as "the flexing of Britain's imperial muscle" and continues to quote Robert Lowe on Imperialism: "the assertion of absolute force over others... to impose our own conditions at the bayonet's point." In other words Victoria's influence may have shaped particularly responses (her indignation during the Crimean War certainly helped transform Britain's activity in the latter half) but the wars arose out of the needs of British capitalism, and were driven by those interests first and foremost.

Readers who are looking for an accessible account of Britain's military actions in the mid to late 19th century will find this a good start, particularly the accounts of the Crimea and the Opium Wars (I was less taken by his analysis of the 'Indian Mutiny' which David appears to see solely as the consequence of conspiracy, rather than the outcome of British rule). But having read this, I'd highly recommend Mike Davies' Late Victorian Holocausts and John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried - two books that properly put the wars into the context of the emergence of British capital as an international force.

Related Reviews

Macrory - Signal Catastrophe: The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842

Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts

Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

I will admit that when I fixed picked up Jonathan Watts' book I did not have much hope that I would enjoy it. Books on the environmental crisis and China often fall into crudities about the country something George Monbiot once called a manifestation of old racist tropes about the "Yellow Peril". Happily Watts' book is far better than this and as well as being thoughtful it is also very readable. China is a rapidly developing economy and since this book was first published in 2010 it is likely that some of the figures given are now dated. However the trends that Watt shows remain the same, if not worse, and it is this that makes it very useful for understanding China's environmental crisis and its role within the crisis.

Unusually for an environmental work, Watts bases his writing on his travels and specifically his encounters with individuals, often ordinary people on the frontline of the impact and the battle against climate change. Here are Chinese workers, farmers and migrant labourers, as well as officials, bureaucrats and business leaders.

Almost every book about China, its economy, environment or people begins with the scale of the country and its population. China's enormous economic power and, crucially, its cheap labour has allowed the current regime and previous ones to literally move mountains in the pursuit of economic improvement. Needless to say that historically this has had a devastating impact upon Chinese environment, an impact that seems to be growing worse by the day. Often current practise has been shaped by what has gone before:

[China's] waterways are now blocked by almost half of the world's 45,000 biggest dams... China's president Hu Jintao is a trained hydro-engineer. His view of the world - now imprinted into the communist ideological canon as a 'Scientific Outlook on Development' - has been shaped by his knowledge of water and how it can be controlled.

Hu Jintao's Presidency ended in 2012, yet it is fair to say that this approach continues, along with an belief that technology and science can cure the threat of environmental disaster. Famously we see this with the Three Gorges Dam, designed to harness the massive waters of the Yangtze River yet it brought along with it massive environmental and social disruption, and Watts dams tend to attract heavy industry enthused by the possibility of cheap and accessible electricity.

Despite whole areas of China being famed for their beauty and ecological diversity, much is under threat from industrial, agricultural and urban expansion. The global biodiversity crisis is enormous, but "the situation is particularly grim in China, where the die-off is reckoned to be taking place a twice the speed of the global average. According to the China Species Redlist, it is accelerating."

Much of Watts book looks at the different aspects of China's environmental crisis - water shortages, air pollution, fossil fuel expansion and so on. But the reason the book is useful is that he doesn't simply focus on these and the human tragedies that flow from them. He shows how the environmental crisis is not new - there were plenty of environmental mistakes, disasters and errors made throughout the 20th century - but how the current crisis is closely linked with the rise of industrial production for consumerism. In part this is due to demands of the Chinese population, a large section of which has far more wealth than ever and wants to emulate the lifestyles of the West. There's a fascinating section where Watts interviews Kan Yue-Sai, a multi-millionaire who got rich through marketing cosmetics who prides herself in helping launch China's "consumer culture" and for whom environmental problems were simply buzzwords to spout during the interview.

But crucial to the immense destruction caused by Chinese manufacturing is the outsourcing of emissions from the developed world. Western companies, attracted by cheap wages, low costs and minimal environmental restrictions have effectively moved emissions and waste to China. Pan Yue, a minister for environmental protect told Watts, "they raise their own environmental standards and transfer resource-intensive and polluting industries to developing nations; they establish a series of green barriers  and bear as little environmental responsibility as is possible."

This is of course not to let China itself off the hook. Not every factory is manufacturing goods for the west, the coal mines being dug and the land being destroyed are assisting the development of China's economy too. But this does help locate the problem in the right place. China is attractive to the west because it has low costs and high wages, something that its own capitalists are keen to exploit.

Resistance

Thankfully there is resistance. The Chinese have to acknowledge 1000s of "mass incidents" and Watts sees the aftermath of them, as well as often coming across accounts of protests, petitions and movements that have (sometimes successfully) challenged environmental destruction. In part this, as well as the very obvious destruction, has led the Chinese government to implement various pieces of environmental legislation. Sadly these are all too often ignored, or bribes ensure that no one is ever prosecuted. But it would be wrong to say there is no awareness of the problem.

The problem is that China's headlong rush to industrialise is done, not in the interest of people, but of capital. The need to compete with the United States, and the potential for a minority of people to get extremely rich, helps to undermine environmental laws. The immense bureaucracy doesn't help, nor does the short term interests of capital. It's staggering to read, for instance, that 1/3 of China's wind turbines are not connected to the grid and simply rotate pointlessly. Without fundamental change, the situation will not improve. Take agriculture:

China is the new frontier for agriscience. With a fifth of the world's population to feed on a tenth of the planet's arable land, the temptations of biotechnology have been enormous. Urbanisation and industrialisation add to the pressures by taking land for factories, roads and housing blocks. With the population expanding and appetites growing, China faces and uphill struggle to feed itself. As Vaclav Smil noted: 'All of the world's grain exports together would fill less than two-thirds of the country's projected demand for food.

Alongside technical fixes for agricultural comes threats to the environment, and while Watts highlights a few examples of more environmentally sound farming, they are far and few between (and some of them don't work at all).

Those that suffer are inevitably the poorest. "The rich folk have already moved out... It has become a slum" notes one woman about their polluted town. Though few in the country except the very rich can escape the worst pollution. In one of Watts' more startling statistics, he points out that only 1 percent of China's population breath air deemed safe, for a country of over 1.3 billion, that's a lot of illness.

Jonathan Watts concludes by saying that China cannot save the world, but it forces us to "recognise we are all going in the wrong direction". He highlights that there are many in the country who are struggling for a sustainable future, but focuses on individuals to change their behaviour to solve the problem. This seems barely credible given the scale of the problem he describes, and I tend to agree more with an old man he meets on a train who, when discussing the environment points out "The problem of a corrupt bureaucracy cannot be solved by bureaucrats. We need a mass movement to clear them out. I think there will be one within five years". The old man hasn't been proved right yet, but if we're to survive the 21st century as a global society it increasingly looks like we should follow his dream.

Related Reviews

Lafitte - Saving Tibet
Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility
Gittings - Changing Face of China

Gabriel Lafitte - Spoiling Tibet

Since ancient times people have known that Tibet is an area rich in mineral resources. As China's economy continues to expand at an unprecedented rate, there are greedy eyes looking at the gold, chromium and copper in Tibetan plateau in the hope of making a swift, and large, profit.

Gabriel Lafitte's new book looks at what this means for the Tibetan people and their environment. Unsurprisingly given the disdain with which China has treated the region for decades, the prospects are grim. That they aren't worse is not out of benevolence from the Chinese state, but because most of the resources can be accessed cheaper and easier from abroad. Tibet's remoteness, its underdevelopment and the fact that some resources are simply not as rich as in other places means that investors look elsewhere first. That said, there are major industries moving into the region, and with them comes repression, environmental destruction and undermining of local communities.

Into this context Lafitte puts Tibet's history. In particular he notes that Tibet is not a barren, peopleless area. In fact the mainly nomadic population has created a "cultural landscape" shaped by centuries of habitation. All this is under threat from the Chinese state's desire to access raw materials.

None of this takes place without resistance. It has been widely acknowledged that there are thousands of "mass events" every year across China protesting environmental impacts of industrialisation, or the destruction of communities etc. Tibet is not immune from this, and Lafitte points out that despite the brutal behaviour of authorities and draconian punishments, "Tibetan communities  have had some success in resisting mining, especially when miners were based far away and had not local protectors". Lafitte continues by arguing that as "national mining corporations" are coming to dominate production in Tibet, the people are "losing the capacity to delay or fend off any longer the party-state's plans for Tibet.

This trend, away from small scale mining, towards "state-owned and private corporations" systematic exploitation certainly does hamper ability to resist, but I am not sure its as bleak as the author makes out. After all, Tibet's movements have managed to put the spanner in Chinese plans before and I am always wary of commentators who argue that resistance won't be successful because of this or that change.

The best parts of Lafitte's book are where he highlights the enormous destructive power of mining and the way that this is central to an economic strategy by the Chinese state. The massive economic investment that is being made to support industrial plans for Tibet - whether its the building of railways and electrical grids, or the diversion of rivers for hydro-power - is truly staggering. Yet Tibet's resources, are but small change in China's insatiable demand for energy and material.

Sadly the book is undermined for me by Lafitte's theoretical framework which begins from the Tibetan people's spirituality. While there is no doubt that their Buddhist beliefs inspire a particular world view as well as resistance to the destruction of their communities, in and of itself it is a limited way to understand the motivations of Chinese State Capitalism. It is not enough to say that "Tibet should be seen through Tibetan eyes, as a land conducive to material comfort and ease" without also understanding that this is true of many other places that capitalism has destroyed in its hunt for profit. This is not to downplay the awfulness of what has and is happening to the Tibetan people; but to seek an alternative way of understanding capitalism and what it does to the planet.

Sadly, Lafitte's conclusion is extremely week. Stopping the destruction of Tibet's environment and the wider planet will require challenging the priorities of Chinese capitalism. It won't be enough for readers to choose a "mobile phone, computer or car [that] is not made in China from Tibetan metals". It's going to take mass mobilisations of workers, peasants and the Tibetan population to stop this environmental destruction, not western consumerism.

Related Reviews

Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility
Gittings - Changing Face of China

Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

Volume two of Cixin Liu's science-fiction trilogy is a brilliant follow up to his earlier Three Body Problem. In fact, that first novel, excellent though it is, serves in my opinion merely as an introduction to this far sharper story.

Readers of my review, or the first book will recall that humanity is faced with an existential threat - an alien invasion force, travelling at sub-light speeds is heading for Earth with the complete destruction of humanity as its explicit intention.

At the heart of this book is a study of how people react to the potential threat. Earth is limited by the restrictions the alien Trisolarans have placed on its scientific and technological development. Rather brilliantly, Liu's aliens are not simply humans with different exteriors as so much science-fiction has it. Instead they are completely alien, so much so they give humanity a single advantage because they cannot conceive of communicating anything other than their thoughts. So the human ability to think one thing and say another, is incomprehensible to the aliens.

With this in mind (ha ha) the United Nations conceives of the wall-facer plan, a group of brilliant individuals who are to come up with strategies to defeat the alien invasion, without letting the enemy know their plans. The story of the wall-facers is the core of this novel, the backdrop though is almost as fascinating. This is how the threat of alien destruction changes the wider social atmosphere on Earth. Despair, economic crisis, over-reliance on technology and faith in the military all take their toll.

Unlike many trilogies, this second volume is deeply satisfying in its own right. I eagerly await book three.

Related Review

Cixin Liu - The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem

This is a startlingly original piece of science fiction, which is as fascinating in its look at the history of 20th century China as it is with its story of the beginnings of an alien invasion, by a superior technology. Cixin Liu cleverly interweaves the historical backdrop to the contemporary story with that of a virtual reality 'game' designed to win converts to an understanding of what the aliens have done to human society.

Beginning in the 1960s, the story focuses on Ye Wenjie's work at the Red Coast station. A place she thinks is designed to track and destroy imperialist space-craft. Instead, the highest levels of the Chinese government are concerned that attempts to communicate with aliens will initially come from the capitalists, not the puveyors of peace and socialism represented by the Chinese state. Socialist readers may well smile at this, but the denunciation of the deviate socialism of the Soviet Union by the characters in the book certainly evokes certain Maoist political propaganda. Ye Wenjie manages to communicate with an alien society, and despite a warning not too from a dissident alien, she directs the civilisation to Earth.

But faster than light travel is not available, and the aliens know that they could arrive at an Earth with better technology than they have, so they devise a cunning plan to undermine Earth technology. To encourage science to be feared, and scientists themselves to go insane. Its into this world that the character at the centre of the story, a nanotech scientist, Wang Miao is plunged when the united secret services and military forces of the world conspire to try and find out what is happening.

The novel is original, and highly enjoyable. At times some of the characters felt a bit thin, and the dialogue a little wooden. I don't know whether that is the writing, or the difficulties of translating Chinese into English. There are certainly lots of footnotes to explain the history, the translation and cultural differences which I actually found added to the novel. Despite this limitation the story builds up to a satisfying climax and I look forward very much to the follow up volumes.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto - 1492: The Year Our World Began

The arrival of Columbus in the New World in 1492 is often seen as the date which changed history. But had  it been possible to have some sort of global over-view in the later half of the 15th century, few people would have bet that the rather uncouth, unlucky and insignificant admiral would have been the first to discover the Americas. Indeed, few would have put any money on the Spanish state doing it, or even anyone in Europe. Back in the 1490s, as this fascinating history shows, Europe was an economic, technological and scientific backwater compared to some parts of the world.

The years around 1492 had a whole series of "turning points" for world history and this overview of them demonstrates that the world may well have turned out remarkably different. It is also a useful book to demonstrate that European superiority has few historical roots, and violent conquest was the chief mechanism that made sure that Europeans dominated world politics for the next few centuries.

So this book covers some fascinating history. The period marks the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, that helped transform a whole number of countries. The point when Russia stopped being a group of fractious states and headed off down the road of becoming an Empire. A period when a whole series of sub-Saharan countries were at the peak of their prosperity and influence. 

The country that seemed most likely to dominate the future world back in 1492 was China. Her wealth was internationally famed. Travellers and traders did their best to get there and Europe found herself marginalised by local trade in the Indian Ocean. These "seas of milk and butter" linked the world's richest economies but were self contained, forcing European traders to either travel around Africa or find new ports.

China's explorers should have reached America first. Admiral He had made a number of voyages around the Indian ocean, creating Chinese trading sites and bringing embassies. He also brought back giraffes and other strange animals for the Chinese nobility to gawp at. Fernández-Armesto comments that: 

"An age of expansion did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The world did not simply wait for European outreach to transform it as if touched by a magic wand. Other societies were already working magic of their own, turning states into empires and cultures into civilisations. Some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas, south-west and northern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, in terms of territorial expansion and military effectiveness... some African and American empires outclassed any state in western Europe."

But Europe did come out on top. Not because of inherent genius or superiority, but because other countries did not turn outwards, or turned in on themselves or succumbed to invasion, war or collapse. China recalled its enormous ships and never found the Americas. But because Europe did;

"The incorporation of the Americas - the resources, the opportunities - would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way."

That's one factor. But to do it required guns, germs and steel. Indeed, the author makes the point that it was only the systematic and brutal conquest of the Canary islands by Spain that gave Columbus a launching off point that would allow him to utilise the Atlantic currents and reach America. 

While I don't agree with all of the author's historical analysis (or his historical approach), I found this a very useful introduction to non-European history. To places that have been forgotten or written out of history. A useful book that should prompt further thought and study.

Mike Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Ever so often you come across a book which profoundly shakes you. Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts is one of those. On every page there is a fact or figure that makes the reader rage with anger; every chapter is a ringing denouncement of capitalism and colonialism. It should be required reading for all those politicians, journalists and armchair generals who profuse to know what to do about the "Third World".

In the late Victorian era, a period stretching from roughly 1876 to 1900, a series of droughts and famines hit large areas of the world. Various studies, both contemporary and more recent, paint a truly appalling picture of the resultant deaths. A study by the medical journal The Lancet in the immediate aftermath suggested that 19 million Indian people died during the 1896-1902 famine. The totals from all the events, allowing for the variance of scientific debate suggest between 31.7 and 61.3 million died.

Mike Davis argues that these were not merely environmental disasters. Changing weather patterns were caused by the complicated ENSO changes of air-pressure and ocean temperatures. The El Niño effects certainly could be associated with dramatic changes in rainfall, or wind patterns that brought crop failure or flooding to large areas. In late Victorian times politicians and apologists for colonial policies made much of the supposed links between these weather patterns and regular famines. But Mike Davis argues that the economic policies and the particular nature of colonialism (specifically in the British Empire) made, in places as diverse as Brazil, India, the Philippines, Korea, Africa and China, the famines far worse. As Davis suggests, of the victims:

They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.

I've written elsewhere about the Irish Potato Famine and the way that British rulers application of the principles of Free Trade condemned thousands to starvation while grain was shipped out to be sold at a profit. What Davis describes is a similar process on an enormous scale:

Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion.. there were almost always surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.

It is worth repeating this simple fact. That (with the possible exception of Ethiopia in 1899) Davis argues that there was almost always enough food or other supplies that could have helped the starving peasants. The people didn't just starve - sometimes they sold their children into slavery in the hope they would survive, or killed strangers and committed cannibalism, or ate tree bark and mud. But their deaths, or many of their deaths, could have been avoided.

Take the official report on the Bombay famine of 1899-1902, which concluded that "supplies of food were at all time sufficient and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture." In neighbouring Berar, commissioners said that "the famine was one of high prices rather than a scarcity of food."

The problem was that the hungry couldn't afford to eat. It was rarely that there wasn't food. For instance Davis argues that the problem in the case of India was that the British had transformed the old social relations. Under British rule, profit was king, but so was private land. The British destroyed the old economic relations that gave peasants access to communal land and resources like wells. They broke up the old social obligations that meant Chinese rulers stockpiled grain for famine outbreaks. They scrapped the requirements to build or maintain flood defences or dams, because they were considered native, and not valid scientifically. All these facts helped make famine far worse when it arrived. Indeed some of the most shocking descriptions here are when Davis contrasts the way that before colonialism, societies in India, Africa or China dealt far better with drought than under the Imperial era.

Indian Famine Victims 1877

But there was a reason the British behaved like this. Over the 19th century the peasants of South America, Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent became attached to a world market. In a case study from India, Davis describes how the real local power was the Manchester cotton barons who effectively, through their representatives in the Raj, imposed a cotton market on some of the most arable land in India. By changing the local taxes, getting rid of previous local government structures and altering property relations, the British turned the area into a vast cotton factory which produced wealth for the cotton owners of Lancashire, but poverty for the native Indians. When famine came the peasants had no crops to eat, but nor did they have enough money to buy food. The logic of the market was then to abandon them to their fate.

And the vast infrastructure that the Empire builders created, the roads and rail-roads didn't serve to bring food to the hungry, it took it to where the profits were to be made. In the 1870-80 famine, according to official reports, In Bombay and Madras Deccan, "the population decreased more rapidly where the districts were served by railways than where there were no railways." It was easier to take the food away with trains. Davis also writes on how modern industry failed the hungry:

The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.

This is not a happy book. When Mike Davis describes the vast celebrations for Queen Victoria's Jubilee that involved enormous feasts at a time of vast hunger, most readers will feel sick. I certainly did. But the really sad thing is that nothing has changed. Capitalism's distortion of agriculture through the creation of cash crops and the domination of large multinationals leaves millions still in a precarious place, and as Mike Davis suggests, all the evidence is that global warming will make El Niños worse in the future.

Anyone interested in the confluence of the environment and the economy and the impact upon human beings should read this book. But so should anyone who wants counter-arguments to those who suggest that Empire was a good thing for the majority of people in the world.

Related Reading

Davis - Planet of Slums
Davis - The Monster at Our Door
Woodham-Smith - The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-9
Bello - The Food Wars
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis

Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility

There are a myriad of books and articles being written about the rise of the Chinese economy and the conditions inside the country for ordinary people. However too few of these are being written by Marxists, particularly those who understand that China is not a socialist society (despite the continued insistence from key figures in the country). More importantly, even those who do comment from a revolutionary point of view are rarely from China itself.

This makes Au Loong Yu's book very important. Based in Hong Kong he has a long record of being involved in the working class movement as well as being a key figure in left wing journals that discuss China's history. He is also from a Trotskyist background and so explicitly rejects the notion that China is a socialist society, or was in recent history. While I might quibble with some aspects of his, and his fellow collaborators, exact analysis of Chinese history, these are very much disagreements amongst friends who want to see change in China that benefits the majority of its population rather than a tiny elite. It should be noted that several of the chapters in this book are from other authors, who very much share Yu's general analysis.

In the preface to China's Rise, Yu quotes, with only a little irony, a Chinese academic who reports that "a total of 18 different names have been used to describe China's [contemporary] system, from authoritarian capitalism, commercial Leninism to Confucian capitalism". Yu himself describes it as "bureaucratic capitalism" and I think this label works well, describing as it does a country were the ruling elite have formed from the upper ranks of the only political party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However it also encapsulates the way that the lower levels of bureaucracy form part of local governing classes that overlap to a great extent with firms and companies that are the real face of China's capitalism.

Yu also points out that these officials to also gain personally from their role through their involvement in implementing the Chinese government's policies, as well as the "coercive power of the state machine". China's internal security budget is actually higher than its defence budget and involve enormous numbers, "in one county alone there are 12,093 informants which is equivalent to 3 per cent of the population" reports Yu.

All too often external commentators on China will focus on such internal repression, and while this should not be ignored, it would be dangerous to argue that this is the sole problem for Chinese workers and peasants. The real story is not just the internal repression, but the enormous growth of capitalism interests within the country. The opening up of the economy to private interests has been something of enormous interest to the world's wider governing classes. Reports in both 1997 and 2012 by the World Bank argued that China must let its state sector shrink in the interest of the private sector.

Such neo-liberal interests are not new, and have been imposed or encouraged in former "communist bloc" nations since the fall of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. But they hide enormous suffering and destruction.Yu points out that the CCP has strived hard to create a "favourable business environment" and this requires the "repression of working people". In a interesting chapter on the role of China's official trade union movement, Yu - the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Bai Ruizue shows how rather than fighting for its members, the ACFTU has become a tool of the CCP in implementing Privatisation and the interests of the bureaucracy. Indeed in a number of cases the authors point out that strikes and workers occupations have been broken up physically by representatives of the ACFTU's unions.

Favourable business conditions in China mean imposing major attacks on workers. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989, the "CCP reacted by brutally suppressing the movement" and also the "complete restructuring" of the working class. Over the following 20 years, forty million state workers were laid off in a "wave of privatization and those who kept their jobs experienced downward mobility." At the same time, a new working class was formed from 250 million rural workers. These workers had even less knowledge of their rights, or traditions of organising and now form a major part of the new urban working class in China.

Alongside the destruction of state industry, the Chinese ruling class have taken away much from a large section of the population. In particular rights at work and the hope of a job for life, meaning a simmering level of anger. There is resistance. Yu argues however that often this resistance comes too late, as workers often don't hear about the privatisation of their workplaces until long into the process. More importantly, state repression and the lack of genuine, legal workers organisations makes action difficult. Thus while Yu agrees with other writers about the growing number of "mass events" such as strikes and protests, he is less confident that this demonstrates a growing movement as opposed to mostly isolated examples of fight back. The chapter on "resistance in China today" then is a small selection of stories of resistance, but they all show the potential for Chinese workers to seriously challenge the power of the state.

"The Tonghua anti-privatisation struggle... begun when workers found out about plans for Jianlong steel to [privatise] the company... on 24 July 2009 a worker who had previously been laid off hung a banner outside the main office saying "Jianlong, Get Out of Tonghua" and workers started to blockade the company to suspend production. Approximately 30,000 present and former workers and their families were involved... the action ended after 10pm that night following factory boss Chen Guojun being beaten to death during the protest. Jianlong withdrew their offer to buy out the mill... the workers anger had been specifically directed at Chen... he was seen as the representative of Jianlong and known for his tough disciplinarian style... Chen was paid 3 million Yuan in 2008, some of the company retirees were receiving as little as 200 a month".

Yu and Ruixue are particularly interested in a strike of 2011 by Pepsi workers, because for the first time there were co-ordinated protests at bottling plants in five different cities. Workers used social media to network and create a powerful movement. They also write briefly on the Wukan events, when a whole village of 13,000 people defied the government and elected their own representatives which were then officially recognised. This struggle against the privatisation of land is a particularly important one, because it also demonstrates the way that the CCP is often not seen to be the enemy. Workers often believe the problem is corruption by bureaucrats locally. Indeed one of the key figures in the Wukan struggle was a local member of the CCP who was then elected by his fellow villagers to head their committee.

Sadly there aren't enough of such stories, but Yu and his colleagues argue that if there is to be significant change in China it will have to come out of these sort of struggles from below. A useful chapter on historical resistance in China shows the extent to which the 1989 events were a massive blow to the whole working class. In the west we often think of Tianiman Square as being a student protest. But there was significant working class involvement, particularly in Beijing. Yu believes that a new generation of workers is now beginning to get confidence to fight and they are not weighed down by historical defeats.

As China's capitalism grows and develops it is mirroring what happened with the development of capitalism elsewhere. Millions of peasants are being forced from the land into the cities, enormous destruction to the environment is taking place and poverty is endemic. The Chinese ruling class is not all powerful and Yu makes a good argument that there is potential for it to be challenged. However he leaves us in no doubt that this will require an enormous struggle.

There is much of interest in this book for those trying to understand China today. The chapters on the role of Chinese liberals and Tibet are particularly useful as they illuminate from a revolutionary Marxist perspective subjects that are dominated by neo-liberal thought normally. I was less taken by the chapter on wider Chinese history as I felt that it painted to bright a picture of China under Mao and the 1949 revolution. Rather than creating a socialist society as the author seems to argue, this seemed to be more of a argument of the way that a state could provide for improvements for millions of people. The lack of any descriptions of mass workers movements, or organisations such as workers councils would support this view. Nonetheless this does not invalidate the way that the turn by the CCP towards capitalism is destroying the lives of millions of people. As I argued at the beginning, these differences however are ones that do not undermine the usefulness of this book. Ultimately it will be up to the workers and peasants of China itself to settle some of the unresolved differences.

Related Reviews

Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Gittings - The Changing Face of China

John Gittings - The Changing Face of China

Barely a day goes by without some newspaper including an article on China. China, it is said, is likely to be the next superpower, or undergo an enormous economic crash, or haul the world out of recession. But few of the columnists writing these articles have any great depth of understanding of China's history or economy.

One of the writers who does is John Gittings. For twenty years he was The Guardian's East Asia editor and his first hand knowledge of the people, places and history of China is unparallelled. Subtitled, "From Mao to Market", this 2005 book covers modern Chinese history and attempts to explain how China is now one of the foremost world economies when, only a few decades back the country was effectively isolated from the world economy, while its leaders preached socialism. The book is a useful account of modern Chinese history. At times it is overwhelming in its detail, and sometimes it has a non-linear approach to the history, so following events can be difficult. Nonetheless it is a worthwhile read if only for the sympathetic and honest account of the Chinese people.

Gittings argues that before the 1980s China was a socialist state. It is not clear what he means by socialist in this context. Marxists in the tradition I'm from have argued that China, alongside Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, was a State Capitalist economy, one were a centralised bureaucracy directed an economy, which had very little to do with a democratic socialist tradition. Nonetheless over the decades this broke down with various attempts to reform the economy. In this context, reform means open up to more capitalist dynamics, but as Gittings' points out, this was often down in the "framework of socialist thinking which always put 'politics first'."

Yet this politics had very little to do with improving the lot of ordinary people, and everything to do with protecting the interest of the more powerful. That's not to say that the state didn't improve the lives of people at various times. Gittings shows how the ability of the state to provide health care, basic services and food for people was far greater than previously. He also shows however, how disastrous political choices often led to hunger, chaos and political crisis. By 1989 though, Gittings argues, "the scene .... with agriculture effectively privatised and the profit now accepted as the dominant force throughout the economy was unimaginable at the start of the decade." Oddly, Gittings follows this up with a quote from Trotsky, who was one of the few revolutionaries in the 1930s who argued that China had taken the wrong road and was not a bastion of socialism. Gittings' confounds this by badly misquoting Marx, "from each according to his ability to each according to his work." "Need" is the correct final word from this quote.

One of the problems with Gittings' understanding of what socialism is, is that he can wedge almost anything into the definition. In fact this is precisely what the leaders of China, in the past and more recent times have also done. Here's a fascinating quote from Deng Xiaoping justifying "reforms" that were actually impoverishing millions:

"During the 'Cultural Revolution' there was a view that poor Communism was preferable to rich capitalism... The main task of socialism is to develop the productive forces, steadily improve the life of the people and keep increasing the material wealth of the society. Therefore, there can be no Communism with pauperism, or socialism with pauperism. So to get rich is no sin."

Since the existence of "rich" people, inevitably means the persistance of poor people, Deng here is trying to have his cake and eat it. However Gittings points out that despite rhetorical appeals to "socialism" or "the party" over time, such arguments become less important and a more general appeal to the concept of "the nation" is enough. In the 1990s, change could be "justified almost entirely in terms of the material interest of the Chinese people and of the global interests of the Chinese state."

This book is at its best when describing the lives of Chinese people and the enormous changes that have taken place to them and their families over the course of the last century. In 1980, Gittings points out, over 80 per cent of the population still depended on the land. But "twenty years later, an accelerating process of urbanization had transformed the relationship between town and countryside: 31 per cent of the population were urban dwellers, the number of towns rose from some 3,500 to around 20,000."

Alongside this enormous urbanisation has been the growth of unemployment and wage labour in factories. While this book is not recent enough to include material on strikes and "events" at factories like Apples, it does include a number of accounts of strikes, as well as some depressing statistics on low pay, high levels of prostitution and the crisis of HIV/AIDS in the country. The flip side of China's rush to become a "quasi capitalist" system, Gittings puts it, is the destruction of peoples' lives in the rush to make profits. Again though, Gittings' argues that this is less to do with capitalism and more to do with "the loosening of Party authority together with the spread of corruption" which "encouraged new destructive forces in society".

At the heart of the book is an account of the 1989 repression of the protesters in Tiananmen Square. This was the culmination of many years of frustration and anger at the upper echelons of the Communist Party. The CCP had been silencing dissent and reacted to Tiananmen Square with enormous violence. While the student pro-democracy movements were silenced, the 1989 events certainly helped shape policy since. Post-Tiananmen, struggles have increased. Gittings quotes figures that show that labour disputes recorded by the Ministry of Labour went from 8,150 in 1992 to 120,000 in 1999. In the 21st century this has only increased as protests grow against unemployment, low wages as well as environmental issues.

Many years back, Leon Trotsky asked, Wither China. It is still a pertinent question. Gittings' book is reportage and doesn't seek to offer an alternative to the headlong rush towards capitalism. But socialists should neither look back to China's past as some sort of great socialist paradise (though Gittings' does appear to have some nostalgia for a time when there was less unemployment). Rather we should understand that simmering away in the belly of China is an enormous working class and peasantry who's anger at what is happening to their lives is only matched by their potential to shape society in their own interests. Those who use the language of socialism to increase exploitation can only have themselves to blame when the people fight back.

Related Reviews

Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges

Judith Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges

When groups of environmental campaigners gather together, it does not take long for China to come up in discussion. Frequently this is in a frightened or alarmist way, along the lines of the irreparable damage to the planetary systems that will occur if China continues to develop along the trajectory it is. Environmentalists frequently cite the number of coal powered stations being built, or the projected number of cars in China or most frequently the size of the population. China is also raised in the context of its own environmental problems - the scale of Chinese environmental problems, whether its the expansion of desert, deforestation or the problems caused by dam building.

In his book Heat, the radical environmental journalist George Monbiot pointed out that the first of these tendencies is often "another manifestation of our ancient hysteria about the Yellow Peril". It fails to take into account, he points out, the way that emissions "per person" in China are far less than the average citizen of the UK or America.

Judith Shapiro is certainly not in this camp at all. Her relationship with China and its people is a long one, that goes back to the 1970s when she was one of very few English teachers in the country. She writes about the country and its culture with a great fondness, and while she is certainly not uncritical of the country and its government, she certainly does not fall into the trap of seeing China as the world's greatest environmental threat.

That said, one of the themes that runs through Shapiro's book is the existing environmental crises that China faces. The World Bank has found that 20 or the world's 30 most polluted cities are in China, usually because of coal being burnt for industry. The majority of Chinese cities have levels of sulphur dioxide that far exceed healthy levels, 28% of Chinese rivers are so polluted they are unsuitable for agriculture (according to the Chinese government itself). The immense size of China's population means that these environmental problems impact enormous numbers of people; 300 million people in rural China lack access to safe drinking water.

Shapiro argues that while the large population of China is a problem, there is evidence that the population growth is stabilising, as fertility rates are low. Rather the problem lies with an economic system that is in direct competition with the rest of the world, and whose turn towards the "globalized free market capitalism" since Mao's time has led to worsening environmental problems. Shapiro in no way argues that Mao was the greater leader, whose guiding hand ensured economic prosperity while protecting nature and China's natural resources. She painfully documents the experiences of millions of Chinese people under Mao, who saw the state attempt to redraw the natural world in its own interests, often with appalling consequences for ordinary people. However she sees the "limits on public participation and freedom of information" as major obstacles
to societies ability to make "wise choices". Environmental problems are one consequence of this.

Unlike many authors (and indeed many environmentalists) Shapiro argues that the Chinese government has tried to take environmental questions very seriously. Since the 1980s in particular, China has signed up to a variety of international agreements on the reduction of pollution and Shapiro says, the central government "deserves tremendous credit for trying to integrate environmental concerns into its plans, laws and policies." In part this is likely to be a recognition that a population made sick from environmental problems, pollutions, leaks and disasters is going to be unable to work in Chinese factories and farms, but it is also, she says a "response to growing public clamour about the impacts of pollution on health and quality of life." I'll return shortly to this "clamour".

Shapiro gives credit to the central government and puts lots of blame for environmental problems on problems at lower levels of the Chinese system. She contrasts the "desire for sustainability" from central government with a "pollute first, mitigate later" attitude found in branches of the government and regional leaders. Later she points out that the states own ability to implement anti-pollution laws is limited by corruption and a culture of bribery in Chinese society.

This might seem to be an argument for a more centralised state. Indeed, Shapiro herself points out that hte government is now trying to continue this "strong centralized envvironmental policy" and improve its ability to implement these laws at a time when local and regional bodies have much economic and political autonomy. While reading China's Environmental Challenges I did feel on occasion that the author was a little too soft on central government. Her own arguments point out that the real problem is that there is an enormous emphasis on growth within the Chinese economy. At all levels of society it is economic growth that is rewarded and it is this that lies that the heart of the growing environmental crisis. China may well be doing "much more on climate change than it is required to do under international law" but this is not enough and the country's economic need to catch and compete with developed nations is unlikely to over-ride this voluntary behaviour at some point. Nonetheless Shapiro is right to point out that China is ahead of the game in terms of some environmental work, being far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of renewable energy. Though while China may have the largest wind farms, the enormous quantities of solar panels manufactured and exported is less to do with a benign attitude to the planet and more to do with securing profits.

A major part of this book looks at those movements that are challenging industrial and government behaviour over the environment. It has been, and still is, enormously difficult for political activists to organise in China. Environmental questions have often been ones where there has been a space to organise and Shapiro documents the history of some of the most important campaigns and activists. In terms of today, she points out that environmental "mass incidents" are estimated to number around 5000 per year. These are frequently protests against pollution or the building of plants that might cause future damage. Sadly not enough of the book is devoted to this fascinating aspect of China's current political situation. Shapiro concentrates on the development and role of NGOs around environmental questions which might reflect a slight over-emphasis by her on the newly enriched middle class. Shapiro argues that the more affluent and educated Chinese are more likely to be able to organise (she documents the use of mobile phone networks for instance) and frequently this is, she argues, on the basis of a NIMBY attitude rather than a concern for the wider environment. This may well be true, but I feel that without a corresponding analysis of the wider political response from workers and peasants to things like pollution or dam building it is hard to know whether the "mass incidents" are large groups of middle class activists or angry demonstrations and strikes by workers and peasants.

Shapiro concludes her book by pointing out that observers of China usually fall into two camps, "critics and apologists" and she has tried instead to offer a nuanced analysis that understands there are good and bad aspects to China today from the point of view of environmental questions. This is undoubtedly true, a knee-jerk anti-China attitude from the environmental movement will get us nowhere, and will indeed weaken our own movements ability to criticise our own governments. I do however think that Shapiro's final analysis is weak, she hopes that "we can support the actors within the central government who are trying to 'green' the country's administrative patterns by acknowledging and praising them in international forums... etc".

The problem with this argument is that it does nothing to challenge the fundamental problems with any economy based on the accumulation of wealth, either because of competition between blocks of national capital (companies, state run industries and the like) or because of competition between national economies. For China to develop into a sustainable economy, will mean that the people of that country, from the bottom up will need to challenge a system increasingly run for profit and create a new system run in the interests of people and planet. That is not to argue that the solution is a return to some mythical past of Chinese socialism, but rather to see that the mass movements developing across the country, offer the beginnings of a new way of organising society. Judith Shapiro has laid out well the enormous environmental challenges facing the people of China. There will no doubt be big struggles ahead as increasingly people and planet are sacrificed in the name of competition, but if there is to be a sustainable future, the Chinese people will have to be at the forefront of fighting for it.

Related Reviews

Monbiot - Heat
Rogers - Green Gone Wrong
Pearce - The Landgrabbers

My own pamphlet, "Marxism and Ecology: Capitalism, socialism and the future of the planet" has been translated into Chinese and is available to purchase online here.