Latest Articles by Xiong Lei

China's efforts to make globalisation green

Xiong Lei — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:50:00 +0000

China may be the factory of the world, but new government approaches in areas such as forestry point the way to a greener model of growth, writes Lei Xiong.

To the environmentally conscious, recent comments by China's leaders are encouraging.

At the recent seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), CPC Central Committee general secretary, Hu Jintao, called on the Party to build an “ecological civilisation” while reiterating the “scientific outlook on development”, which features putting people first and ensuring comprehensive, harmonious and sustainable development.

At the fifteenth Economic Leaders' Informal Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Sydney, Australia, in September, Hu, in his capacity as president of China, put forward an initiative to set up an Asia-Pacific Network on Forest Rehabilitation and Sustainable Management in order to better tackle global problems presented by climate change.

Prior to this proposal, China's State Forestry Administration and the Ministry of Commerce jointly released in August the Guidelines for Sustainable Forestry Management by Chinese Enterprises Operating Overseas.

According to Chinese officials, this was the first document in the world aimed at regulating the overseas operations of a country's businesses with regard to sustainable development.

Collectively, these developments mean Chinese enterprises going overseas for new investment opportunities must be more socially responsible and conscious of their impact on the environment. More than that, they mark a departure from the conventional approach to globalisation, in which advanced industries often enrich themselves at the expense of other nations' environments.

The scientific outlook on development and the forestry guidelines push Chinese enterprises to do more than just abide by the law in their host countries. They must also contribute to local efforts to manage and preserve the environment and develop communities even if these are not provided for by local legislation.

According to the guidelines, a Chinese enterprise that has timber operations overseas must conduct an environmental impact assessment of its project before it enters the host country. It must also make sure its business will not create serious environmental problems.

To hedge against possible hazardous impacts on local people, the enterprise should also set aside funds for remedies or ecological compensation to help local residents increase incomes and engage in new environmentally friendly operations.

This represents a win-win model for all parties - Chinese enterprises, host countries and local communities. It requires managers to look beyond short-term profits. The concept of ecological civilisation and the scientific outlook on development will no doubt facilitate such a vision.

The effort to instill this vision in Chinese enterprises reflects China's commitment to being a responsible power.

As Jin Jiaman, executive director of the Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI), put it: "To be a responsible power is not a mission of the government alone. Every enterprise, every civil organisation and every member of society has a share in it."

A non-governmental organisation providing market-based solutions to environmental problems, GEI was a key presence behind the scenes of the drafting of the overseas forestry management guidelines and is working with several governmental and financing institutions to thrash out some overall guidelines balancing the economic and ecological impacts of Chinese enterprises operating overseas.

The effort to push Chinese enterprises to take the spirit of China's green policies with them overseas represents a new approach to globalisation.

People have seen China's increasing imports of raw materials like timber, ore and oil; and some people are anxious about its impact on the environments of exporting countries.

Yet this big importer of these raw materials may not necessarily be the exclusive consumer of them. Because China is something of a factory for the world, a big proportion of the imported raw materials are transformed into products that are sent to industrialised countries in Europe and America.

In other words, many end consumers of the raw materials are not in China. Yet China takes the heat for using resources at the expense of other countries' environments.

China cannot simply opt to dump "dirty" industries and become "cleaner", as many of its predecessors have done. In globalisation, there are always late-comers who step in to fill vacancies once the early birds leave the woods for a better habitat.

If China simply dumps its polluting industries without changing its pattern of development, other developing countries will easily take over.

That is why we applaud the concept of an ecological civilisation and the idea of having green policies go overseas together with Chinese enterprises. This arrangement could be the beginning of a new mode of globalisation: green globalisation.

The model of globalisation mobilized by the global capital has been too "brown" and benefited too few. It has tarnished many developing countries' air, water and land and deprived many people of their health.

Based on the concepts of an ecological civilisation and the scientific outlook on development, green globalisation is sure to become a popular way to make this planet a better place to live on for everyone.

It may require time and difficult decisions to achieve the goals of green globalisation. But we have the conceptual framework, determination and measures like the forestry guidelines on our side.

Xiong Lei is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies.

This article is reprinted with permission from China Daily

Homepage photo by Steve Webel

Two snow crises, three decades apart

Xiong Lei — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:12:00 +0000

Snow chaos hit China 30 years after the northern US suffered the effects of a great blizzard. Lei Xiong looks for the lessons both can teach us about resilience and development.

It so happens that while China mobilised to fight the worst snow disaster in recent memory, many people in the United States were commemorating the 30th anniversary of another snow crisis.

Going down in history as the “Great Blizzard of 1978,” the “white hurricane” that swept the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes in late January and early February meant many residents were left with no power, heat or transportation for days or weeks on end. People were trapped in their houses, their offices or on roads. A state of emergency was announced in many states. The National Guard was called in to aid people stranded on highways.

Many Americans who lived through the blizzard have never forgotten it, just as their Chinese counterparts will not forget the latest snow disaster to their country.

Records show that the 1978 blizzard caused US$500 million in damages to Massachusetts alone. It is unclear how much the snow disaster will have cost China, but it is almost certain to have hit us harder, since we are at our annual peak of national mobility prior to the Lunar New Year, an important festival for family reunions.

It is pointless to compare the damage, however. What is noteworthy is the similar challenge that the two crises pose to us thirty years apart.

Many agree that the recent snowstorms highlight the vulnerability of China’s booming economy. It is obvious that the extreme weather caught the Chinese government and people unprepared, worsening power shortages, traffic congestion and inflation.

Similar scenarios were seen during the Great Blizzard of 1978. Some foods were rationed, and in disaster areas many were left without heat, water, food or electricity for over a week. Schools were closed for weeks.

Yet even 30 years back, the US, as a developed superpower, was far better off than China today. The northern US states hit by the blizzard were better equipped to handle ice and snow than the south China provinces hit by the recent snow chaos.

Nevertheless, as Thomas Schmidlin, a weather historian and professor of Geography at Kent State University, remarked 25 years after the 1978 blizzard: “With our comforts of cars, electricity, and heating, we may actually be more vulnerable to these blizzards than Ohioans of the nineteenth century, who were more independent and could tolerate disruptions of a few days.”

This is perhaps an inconvenient truth for both countries. Although we are at varying levels of development, we seem equally impotent when faced with natural disasters. Our modern infrastructures seem to be paralysed by extreme weather.

People in South China are fighting the snow disaster heroically. They were only able to minimise the damage, however, rather than protect themselves in the first place. Even if infrastructure is improved after the snow crisis, we cannot guarantee that our highways are not shut down, flights are not cancelled and railways unaffected when we next have bad weather.

When the modernity we rely on so heavily is this vulnerable to the elements, do we not have to consider the extent of our reliance? When all your heating is electric, what do you do when the coal power stations shut down?

Of course, we cannot and should not return to the Stone Age, just to avoid the effects of extreme weather. But it is disastrous if we have no alternatives to the transport links and communication lines that have proved so vulnerable.

Perhaps we could get some inspiration from the role played by internal combustion locomotives during the current snow disaster. When the power failure paralyzed electric locomotives, internal combustion locomotives served as “ferry engines” to rescue other trains.

The electric locomotive would normally seem “more advanced” than its internal combustion counterpart, but not during this crisis.

Both snow crises send us a similar warning: the modernisation we are so proud of may not be as powerful as it looks. We have to find a way to develop that can sustain us in all weathers. The modernisation we seek should improve our capacity to cope with disasters like the one we recently faced, rather than increase our vulnerability to it.

Xiong Lei is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies.

Homepage photo by Jin Aili