On this trip I was reading the new book by Jonathan Watts entitled When a Billion Chinese Jump:  How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It.  Watts is an award-winning, Beijing-based environmental correspondent for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, and I had met him in China on a previous visit.  He told me then that he was writing an environmental book about the country, & so I’ve been keeping an eye out for it…. and anxiously bought it as soon as I saw it.

It’s an interesting & very insightful read….. but also what one top UK literary critic called “a revealing and depressing book.”  In it, Watts travels around the country, discussing the wide range of environmental concerns in appropriate settings – biodiversity and the demise of the Yangtze dolphin in Hubei Province; urban consumption in Shanghai; logging in the forests of Heilongjiang; coal and pollution problems in Shanxi; etc., etc.  Having spent the weeks of this trip talking about monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) aspects of energy/environmental conditions within the country, I readily recognized the situation when I read that:  “a political haze obscures the subject of pollution,” or later, a legal expert’s view that “only a tenth of China’s environmental laws are enforced…”

But Watts throws an interesting curve at the end:

“Having visited almost every province in the country, I am far more concerned about Shanghai’s friendly shoppers than Henan’s snarling polluters.  The latter are a recognized problem that can be cleared up with sufficient time, money and government effort.  The former, however, are hailed as potential saviors of the global economy.  Nobody wants to stop them.”