James Fallows

1) Yan Lianke, in the NYT, on "China's State-Sponsored Amnesia." Sample:

[Widespread Chinese ignorance of the "June 4 1989 episode"] reminded me of something another teacher told me. She had asked her students from China if they had heard about the death by starvation of 30 to 40 million people during the so-called "three years of natural disasters" in the early 1960s. Her students responded with stunned silence, as if she, a teacher in Hong Kong, was brazenly fabricating history to attack their mother country.

I find this an improbably compelling story. 

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems. For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development. And of course the global effects of China's rise to wealth -- through atmospheric emissions, pressure on natural resources, acceleration of deforestation and over-fishing, market demand for ivory and other body parts of endangered species -- are urgent issue to be resolved with the rest of the world. 

I mentioned yesterday that while the Chinese hacking story was, deservedly, getting headlines, the Chinese government's decision to impose a kind of carbon tax could be the more important long-term news.

There's a very good assessment by former Atlantic guest blogger Ella Chou at Dance to the Revolution of what this new policy will and will not mean for China and everyone else. Here are your talking points for the next time this topic comes up at a dinner party:

• Environmental carnage of all sorts is a truly major emergency in China, both in the short term [Beijing at right] and as a potential limit on the country's development;
  
  
• Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.
  
  
• Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries. It takes more energy to heat and cool the standard Chinese building than one in Europe or the US; Chinese farmers use more water, fertilizer, and pesticide per unit of output than is typical even with mechanized farming in the US; Chinese factories put out more air and water pollution per dollar of production than rich-country counterparts. On a per capita basis, the Chinese economy uses less energy than America's. On a per dollar (or per RMB) basis, it uses more. Simplest way to remember this point: China's economy is nowhere near as large as America's now, but it puts out more emissions.
  
  
• China's pollution problems are a subset of the larger structural challenge for the Chinese economy -- in a way that is well explained at Dance to the Revolution. For more than thirty years price controls have been set to speed/subsidize the growth of huge export-manufacturing industries, and to increase farm output. Thus all these things have been kept artificially cheap: coal and gasoline; fertilizer, pesticide, water; plus financing itself, and use of the environment as a free good. Because they're cheap, companies and farmers have of course used these things freely and often wastefully.
  
  
• Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of "real" rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions. So that's the significance of a modest carbon tax, beyond its limited immediate environmental effect. It's part of the effort to "rebalance" the Chinese economy by removing some of its most distorting factors. 

Bonus diplomatic-leverage point: Chinese officials have long used U.S. inaction on climate and carbon-tax issues as a rationalization for not taking steps of their own. On average, we're still quite a poor country, the spokesmen would say. If the rich U.S. can't "afford" to deal with emissions, how could we? Now the country is taking this carbon-tax step for reasons of its own reasons -- as a way to deal with pollution and as another step in un-distorting the economy. But as a bonus it gets talking points to prod the US to do its part.

Today's China topics:

1) Chinese hacking, as reported in the lead front-page story of today's NYT (and a fascinating story in Bloomberg Bus Week). Is this really something new? Or merely our old friend "threat inflation,"* cued both to the impending sequestration menace and last week's SOTU mentions of new efforts in cyber-security?

We're all working with limited info, but at first impression this reads to me like something new, specifically in the degree of traceability to the Chinese military.

Here's the background: Through the years, anyone who's looked into this topic has gotten used to threat inflation -- but also the reverse, in the form of caveats and cautions about how much is unclear. Yes, public and private facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere are subject to nonstop electronic probes and assaults. Yes, a lot of the attacks seem to come out of China. Still, I've heard time and again how hard it is to tell how much reflects "coordinated" military actions and how much  is from on-their-own hackers, rival corporations, or ordinary profit-seeking crooks. Apart from China, there's plenty else to worry about. When I did an Atlantic article about the problem three years ago (source of the illustration above), this is what I heard, emphasis added:

Next, the authorities stressed that Chinese organizations and individuals were a serious source of electronic threats--but far from the only one, or perhaps even the main one. You could take this as good news about U.S.-China relations, but it was usually meant as bad news about the problem as a whole. "The Chinese would be in the top three, maybe the top two, leading problems in cyberspace," James Lewis, a former diplomat who worked on security and intelligence issues and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, told me. "They're not close to being the primary problem, and there is debate about whether they're even number two."

Number one in his analysis is Russia, through a combination of state, organized-criminal, and unorganized-individual activity. Number two is Israel--and there are more on the list. "The French are notorious for looking for economic advantage through their intelligence system," I was told by Ed Giorgio, who has served as the chief code maker and chief code breaker for the National Security Agency. "The Israelis are notorious for looking for political advantage. We have seen Brazil emerge as a source of financial crime, to join Russia, which is guilty of all of the above." Interestingly, no one suggested that international terrorist groups--as opposed to governments, corporations, or "normal" criminals--are making significant use of electronic networks to inflict damage on Western targets, although some groups rely on the Internet for recruitment, organization, and propagandizing.

If you'd like to see that kind of "well, how much can we really prove here?" analysis applied to the current NYT report see this post from Jeffrey Carr, and a related article in Business Insider. 

I agree that there's a lot we still don't know; I'll also say, having seen more of the "Chinese cyber-threat" reports than most people, that this one seems more specific** than before, and the flow of recent evidence has pointed increasingly to China. It's worth reading the whole story, and the underlying Mandiant report. Also see Evan Osnos's good run-down of reasons to think this could be something new.

Two other points of context:

• First, before any readers in China write in to inform me, of course the U.S. government has its own extensive cyber-teams. In this as in most other military areas, I would assume that its capabilities are far ahead of the PLA's -- and no U.S. official I've asked has ever led me to think otherwise. 
  
  
• Second, the Chinese embassy's earnest but boilerplate response is one more reminder of the uneven level of everything involving China, including savvy in dealings with the outside world. We're told that the technical probes being sent out are extremely sophisticated. On the other hand, the language of the diplomats traces back to the era of "resolutely condemning" foreign hegemony etc: 

Contacted Monday, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington again insisted that their government does not engage in computer hacking, and that such activity is illegal .... [JF note: pirate videos are also "illegal" in China. So is speeding, bribery, etc.]

''Making unfounded accusations based on preliminary results is both irresponsible and unprofessional, and is not helpful for the resolution of the relevant problem,'' said Hong Lei, a ministry spokesman. ''China resolutely opposes hacking actions and has established relevant laws and regulations and taken strict law enforcement measures to defend against online hacking activities.''

2) The real problem for, and with, China. My friends at Danwei have a report, drawn from the Chinese media and Chinese studies, showing that groundwater in nearly all Chinese cities is polluted, and that in about two thirds of them it is "severely" polluted. That is what the big Chinese headline below says.



* For the record: I am not suggesting that the NYT reporters, whom I know and respect, are "inflating" anything. But it is a reality that certain reports, interviews, disclosures come into reporters' hands at some times -- and not at others.

ChinaFile is a new venture by the Asia Society, for which the Atlantic will be a partner and to which I will be one of many contributors.

The discussion today genuinely is worth noticing. It's about the reasons for, and likely consequences of, the "Airpocalypse" that is now evident through so many big Chinese cities. For reference: That's our old neighborhood in Beijing, in a picture shot from a 30th floor window last week.

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.



Some related notes that have come in, about a problem increasingly recognized inside China as a national emergency. From a reader in the United States:

If you don't have time to watch all 30 minutes of the "G+ Hangout" that ended an hour ago, about the current pollution emergency in China, I strongly recommend that you watch at least the last 10 minutes. Here's the background:

This broadcast is part of a weekly series on events in China, run by Fons Tuinstra, whom I knew in Beijing. The main guest is Richard Brubaker, who lives in Shanghai and teaches at a well known business school there. The topic is the recent spate of historically bad air-pollution readings in many Chinese cities, especially Beijing. The whole discussion is important and interesting, and here are some of the early highlights:

• Time 9:20+ how ordinary Chinese citizens are affected by the emergency
• 11:15+ why the respective geographies of Beijing and Shanghai usually make problems worse in Beijing (which like LA sits in a bowl where air gets trapped), but why Shanghai is suddenly "catching up" and in a worst-ever situation for air quality;
  
• 12:15+ why parents of small children must constantly worry about air quality, along with food safety
• 13:00-15:00+ why not only foreigners but increasing numbers of young Chinese say they are thinking of leaving the country to escape the air, water, and food problems.
  

That's just the buildup. What I really want you to watch is ....



... the last ten minutes of the broadcast, starting around time 20:00. Very matter-of-factly Brubaker lays out the basic realities of China's environmental/economic/social/political conundrum:

• that its pollution and other environmental strains are the direct result of rapidly bringing hundreds of millions of peasants into urban, electrified, motorized life;
• that China's economic and political stability depends on continuing to bring hundreds of millions more people off the farm and into the cities;
• that China's practices and standards in city planning, transport, architecture, etc are still so inefficient enough that, even with its all-out clean-up efforts, its growth is disproportionately polluting. In Europe, North America, Japan, etc each 1% increase in GDP means an increase of less than 1% in energy and resource use, emissions, etc. For China, each 1% increment means an increase of more than 1% in environmental burden. And, the most important part for Western readers:
• this cannot go on. Brubaker makes a point ignored in virtually every breezy prediction of the inevitable Chinese future: that environmental constraints are the most urgent of several limits affecting the famed "Chinese growth model," and because of them it is far from obvious that China will ever "overtake" the United States or anyone else.

None of this is "new," but it is useful to have it all put together so concisely. I respond so strongly to this point because it's a central argument of my recent book and other dispatches for the Atlantic. Also Brubaker explains why it's "true," but meaningless, that every industrializing country has gone through its own stage of hellish rape-of-the-land-and-air. I grew up in the Southern California of the terrible-smog era of the 1960s, and have described what that bodes for possible improvements in Beijing. (Part one, two, and three.) Alexis Madrigal recently compared China's problems to those of Pittsburgh at its worst.

Brubaker's point, which I agree with, is: the comparisons don't matter. China's scale and speed are so different that its environmental problems constitute a unique emergency, for its own people and for the world.

Happy New Year!

Through the year before the Olympics, while we were living in Beijing, I used to do daily views-out-the-window as a guide to the challenge the air-cleanup-people faced. For instance, here was a downtown area a few weeks before the opening ceremony:

Here's the headline on a Wall Street Journal story today about changes in American patterns of electricity demand:

I am still in only shaky post-hurricane connection to the Internet, so here is one update before catching up on a variety of other topics soon:

By all means read Wen Stephenson's impassioned essay* in the Phoenix today on what he views as the tyranny of complacency and business-as-usual in the media's approach to climate change.

It is one thing for politicians to decide that they simply can't touch certain issues. Politicians need to keep raising money. They're vulnerable to concerted opposition campaigns. They are acutely aware of the tiny distance they can afford to get "ahead" of the sometimes-uninformed center of public opinion on any issue.**

Thus we've come to recognize the inch-wide boundaries of political argument when it comes to anything involving guns (as I argued at length here). Stephenson says that, even if politicians have come to a similar calculation about the impossibility of discussing climate policies and therefore climate change itself, the media should not accept their definition of what "can" and "cannot" be discussed.

That is: It's the politicians' fault that neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama mentioned climate change during their debates. It's the press's fault that they weren't asked.

For cultural, commercial, intellectual, and political reasons, it is tricky for members of the press, especially those in organizations that still quaintly think of themselves as "mainstream," to decide that they, rather than elected leaders, should announce what "matters" to the public. But they do it all the time. The push-and-pull of the press "leading" versus merely "reflecting" public opinion has gone on for a very long time, on a very wide range of issues.*** In this article Stephenson admits all the difficulties but still argues, fiercely, that it's time for the established media to do more.

This is an angry, polemical piece, which says both good and bad things about many specific people in the media -- including us here at The Atlantic, where Stephenson once worked (he was deeply involved in the creation of The Atlantic's original web site) and still has many friends. At a time when both parties are saying that this is an "exceptionally important" election, yet neither will even discuss an issue that (I contend) will loom larger in historical accounts of this era than 99 percent of what is discussed in speeches, news analyses, and debates, this article is worth reading and thinking about. And after a "historic" hurricane, following a historic drought and heat wave, following historic rains .... Stephenson said in a note to friends that it was the "hardest thing I've ever written." It is not comfortable to read, and I have various things to say about the Atlantic's long-term performance on this issue; but I am glad he wrote it.

__
* The Phoenix unfortunately portions the piece out in eight separately clickable chunks, with no "single-page" option. You could support their online ad model by clicking through all eight. Or you could try the "article print" ruse.

** Still-relevant historical example: LBJ's decision to go ahead and support civil rights legislation in the Martin Luther King era, despite the likelihood that it would switch the previously Democratic "Solid South" to a solid Republican stronghold.

*** It's more than I can get into now, but in widely varying ways the press has "led," "reflected," and "lagged" on issues ranging from slavery, to worker mistreatment and workplace safety, to immigration, to environmental protection, to race relations, to today's "debt crisis." The history of press "leadership," good and ill, on the sequence of U.S. wars from the one against Mexico in the 1840s, through the Civil War and the war with Spain, through the two 20th-century world wars to Korea and Vietnam, and on to the CENTCOM wars of the moment and the open-ended "war on terror," is its own important both heartening-and-discouraging theme. 

Late last night I put up a few pictures from a flight across the parched Great Plains and cropland region. Closing-the-circle updates:

1) This morning on our site, Rebecca Rosen posted some satellite photos showing how different even the mighty Mississippi River looks from space this year, compared with one year ago.

2) The mystery river of which I posted a photo, whose bed now appears to be mainly sand surrounding a little trickle of water, has been identified by many readers in Nebraska as the Platte. (Yes, OK, that's what I thought, but I wasn't sure I'd taken that photo while passing south of Omaha, and I was living in dread of the messages coming in on the theme of, "Don't you know anything about the Midwest? You say it's the Platte, when it's actually ...." Crowd sourced fact-checking has changed life, generally for the better.*)

When I wrote back to one reader, who is a senior University of Nebraska official, to confirm that this substantial river looked different from the way it had before, he replied:

Yes, the drought has really hurt the Platte and all the surface rivers in Nebraska and Midwest - I think around June the state restricted use for irrigation of surface streams and rivers but they could still pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer which sits right below Western Nebraska - It is also drying up but that mainly affects Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas since the underground reservoir of the aquifer is much smaller in those states.

3) After a westbound trip last week, I mentioned that the center of America looked as if the rainfall line that separates well-watered farmland from arid rangeland and desert had been shifted dramatically to the east. Professor John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M, who is the State Climatologist for Texas, writes in to confirm:

The change in vegetation you see from the plane also shows up from a higher altitude.

The view from space last year: scene 1, scene 2

The view from space this year: scene 1, scene 2

P.S. Select the 250m resolution option to zoom in so close you can see every individual irrigated field.

4) On the same topic, a reader weighs in about a book I know and for which I share his high regard. The third sentence has bonus value on the "expand your vocabulary" front. (Maybe you had encountered "isohyetal" before. I hadn't.)

I highly recommend Wallace Stegner's book "Beyond The Hundredth Meridian."  It is in large part a biography of John Wesley Powell, who is believed to be the first to run the Colorado River from Wyoming through the Grand Canyon (first in in 1869 and then again in 1871-2).  The title refers to the isohyetal line of 20 inches of annual rainfall.  The line moves by a couple of degrees, but is otherwise a pretty consistent marker of where un-irrigated crops cannot grow because 20 inches generally isn't enough.  Powell was fascinated by the implications of aridity; among other things, he felt strongly that homestead laws that worked well in the East couldn't simply be transported to the West.
 
Powell became Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and then Director of Ethnology at the Smithsonian and later wrote a report for which he was roundly ridiculed called "Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States."  In the report, he advocated that government boundaries in the West be organized by water basins so as to effectively manage scarce water resources and reduce disputes.  Like Wallace Stegner, Powell was way ahead of his time in understanding the effect of aridity and scarce water supplies in the West.

5) Last night I referred to the numerous "windmills" you see through Nebraska and Iowa. A reader in the wind-energy business reminds me that the correct term is "wind turbines," a windmill implying something that pumps water or does other useful work, like grinding grain] rather than generating electricity. Good point. At 1:30 last night, when I was posting the item, I had that vague "this is not the mot juste" feeling -- but, hey, it was 1:30 am, I had started the day in central Nebraska, and it was time for a beer.

Although I forgot the right term, I know enough about the disputes over wind energy to want to stay out of that fray. But for the record, the reader says of wind turbines, like those above:

Iowa is impressive - it reached its target of 20% of its electricity from wind, I think the most for any state.  Also, over a one hour period, Excel Energy, a Colorado utility, reported that it provided more than 50% of its electricity from wind.

A few more updates and elaborations have come in, on subjects from "trona" to airports in the Great Plains, but this will do for now. Thanks all around.
__
* An example of the kind of mail that is fun to receive. I do realize that Andrew Sullivan has no doubt trained legions of people in these skills with his "View from Your Window" contests

From some Google Maps sleuthing, I think that photo of the river full of sediment is the Platte River. If you put this address into Google Maps I think you'll find it matches your shot:
     13802 Biels Dike Rd
     Gretna‎ Nebraska‎ 68028

Here is the standard Google Earth view of the west end of Lake Superior, including my beloved second-home-town of Duluth and the idyllic Apostle Islands:




And here is a satellite view after the "never experienced anything like this before" torrential rains and resultant flooding last month:


This Minneapolis Star Tribune photo from Duluth gives you an idea of the infrastructure and the weather themes combined in a non-blackout way.

No, not Wisconsin recall, European austerity-meltdown, Iranian nukes, or the next 50 items on the list.

I fear it's this report, from a scientists' group at UC Berkeley, headlined as follows on the Berkeley site:


Here's discussion on the NYT 'Green' site; you can easily find more. Original article, for pay, at the Nature site.

Forty-plus years ago, a group called the Club of Rome issued its widely-publicized "Limits to Growth" findings. These proved not to allow for or anticipate the range of ingenuity and adaptations with which individuals, businesses, and societies could work around many of the material constraints that the report emphasized.

I hope that will be the verdict forty-plus years from now about this new warning. But since its main topic is not the limit on resources for human activity but the absorptive capacity of the Earth's natural systems overall, it is harder to imagine exactly how that could take place. This is very much worth spending time with. Below, a video from Anthony Barnosky, one of the scientists involved.

A few days ago I argued that the forced, government-funded efforts to glorify China's "image" often backfired, whereas simply allowing outsiders to be part of the drama, comedy,  excitement, and vivid humanity of current Chinese life dependably created more friends than enemies. And, obviously, the same is true of America and most other countries too. One reader writes:

I surmise that Lang Lang has done more for soft power of China than the entire Chinese propaganda department or CCTV.

Here he is performing at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and some sour grapes from a British pianist:

Interestingly, even the gripe from the British pianist-reviewer -- who is mainly upset that there weren't more British performers on the Jubilee program -- is quite respectful of Lang Lang's talent and his overall charm and appeal. (For background of the improbable circumstances in which my wife ended up sitting next to Lang Lang at dinner, see this. And you can never go wrong with this video of him playing with Herbie Hancock at the White House last year.)



Similarly:

I suggest you ask readers and friends to come up with their three best examples of China's soft power.
 
My three are:
1.       Szechuan food
2.       Kung Fu
3.       Pandas

Or maybe Tsingtao Beer. [JF note: No way on this last item.]
 
My point being that much of their soft power is the way they are becoming part of the fabric of everyday life in ways that are hardly worth noticing. 

A few years ago I would have added Yao Ming and Wu Tang Klan.  I will never forget the day I saw that a Chinese beer company was paying for the signage around the Rockets' scorer's table in Houston so that viewers in PRC would see their beer in American setting. 

Finally, for some of the Chinese perspective on the PM 2.5 contretemps, see this item in Shanghaiist. I don't agree with everything it says*, but it does help explain why the Chinese officials are annoyed.
_
* The part I don't agree with is that @BeijingAir was part of a deliberate U.S. campaign to make Chinese officials lose face. On the contrary: the Twitter feed of pollution readings was launched with no publicity -- and at least at the start, the U.S. embassy officials were at pains that the location of the air pollution sensor, on the roof of the embassy in Beijing, not be publicized. Also, for reasons too obscure to go into, once the U.S. embassy started collecting this info for the benefit of its own employees, it was obliged by policy to make it available to other U.S. citizens living in the same area. Still it is worth reading the item to see the episode from the Chinese perspective. 

This is another fascinating installment in the exercise of Chinese "soft power." For my Big Theory on the nature of Chinese soft power, see this essay and this book. For a few previous installments in the Soft-Power Watch, see this, this, and this with related links.

Today's news: representatives of China's Foreign Ministry and environmental agencies have blasted foreign countries for "interfering" in Chinese domestic affairs by publishing real-time pollution readings in Beijing As the Reuters story put it:

"According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations ... foreign diplomats are required to respect and follow local laws and cannot interfere in internal affairs," Wu [told a news conference.

"China's air quality monitoring and information release involve the public interest and are up to the government. Foreign consulates in China taking it on themselves to monitor air quality and release the information online not only goes against the spirit of the Vienna Convention ... it also contravenes relevant environmental protection rules."

The "foreign diplomats" they're talking about are those in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, who for the past few years have had a monitor on the roof of the embassy to measure levels of a pollutant very damaging to human health. This is so-called "PM 2.5" pollution, or very small particles that can go deep into the lungs. Every hour, that monitor sends out its readings via a Twitter feed, @BeijingAir. Here's how it looked this afternoon:

OK, I know that may seem crabbed praise. But this is something really worth taking time to consider. It's an address by Jonathan Watts, who is winding up nine years as a correspondent in China, about what he calls "The world's most important story": how China fares in the struggle to control the forces now destroying its, and the world's environment.

I agree with his claim.

The virtue of Watts's speech, on the always-valuable China Dialogue site, is that it is sophisticated and "balanced" in the right sense. That is, it acknowledges both how dark many of the prospects for China and the world environment are -- and also how hard many parts of the Chinese system are trying to correct them. As he puts it:

My mantra [on arrival in 2003] was that in China "nothing is certain, so everything is possible".

This was true for the environment, which was horrible. I very quickly came to the conclusion that the situation was so appalling in China that this was the country most likely to make a change for the better. I told journalist friends at the time of my hopes for a green revolution here but they were more focused on politics and hopes for reform.

But when I look back at the past nine years, the environment and the economy have been bigger drivers of change....

Under president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, there has been almost zero political reform. But there have been a number of very significant steps forward in terms of environmental policy: anti-desertification campaigns; tree planting; environmental transparency law; adoption of carbon targets; eco-services compensation; eco accounting; caps on water; lower economic growth targets; the 12th Five-Year Plan; debate and increased monitoring of PM 2.5 [fine particulate matter]; investments in renewables and clean tech...

You can read more at China Dialogue, and in Watts's book When a Billion Chinese Jump. I've written to similar effect lots of times on this site and in our magazine -- and in a new story I'm proud of in Popular Science, adapted from my forthcoming book. That's not my reason for writing this item: it's to direct you to Watts's speech on a topic that can't be emphasized enough.