China’s Past, China’s Future

China has a population of 1.3 billion people, which puts strain on her natural
resources. This volume, by one of the leading scholars on the earth’s biosphere,
is the result of a lifetime of study on China, and provides the fullest account yet
of the environmental challenges that China faces.
The author examines China’s energy resources, their uses, impacts and
prospects, from the 1970s oil crisis to the present day, before analyzing the key
question of how China can best produce enough food to feed its enormous
population. In answering this question the entire food chain – the environmental
setting, post-harvest losses, food processing, access to food and actual nutritional
requirements – is examined, as well as the most effective methods of agricultural
management. The final chapters focus upon the dramatic cost to the country’s
environment caused by China’s rapid industrialization. The widespread environ-
mental problems discussed include:

• water and air pollution

• water shortage
• soil erosion
• deforestation
• desertification
• loss of biodiversity

In conclusion, Smil argues that the decline of the Chinese ecosystem and environ-
mental pollution has cost China about 10 per cent of her annual GDP.
This book provides the best available synthesis on the environmental conse-
quences of China’s economic reform program, and will prove essential reading to
scholars with an interest in China and the environment.

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment,

University of Manitoba, Canada. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s
leading authorities on the biosphere and China’s environment. He is the author
of many books, including The Earth’s Biosphere, Enriching the Earth, Feeding the World
and China’s Environment.
Asia’s transformations
Edited by Mark Selden
Binghamton University and Cornell University, USA
The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural conse-
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series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global
forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the
contemporary, it also looks back to analyse the antecedents of Asia’s contested rise.

This series comprises several strands:

Asia’s transformations aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and the
titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include

The Battle for Asia Mao’s Children in the New China

From Decolonization to Globalization Voices from the Red Guard
Mark T. Berger Generation
Yarong Jiang and David Ashley
Ethnicity in Asia
Edited by Colin Mackerras Chinese Society
Change, Conflict and Resistance
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Change, Conflict and Resistance Selden
Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden
Opium, Empire and the Global
The Resurgence of East Asia Political Economy
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Edited by Charles K. Armstrong Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo

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Edited by Chien-min Chao and and Asia
Bruce J. Dickson Edited by Peter Van Ness
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city from multiple perspectives emblematic of the author’s own deep familiarity
with the distinctive faces of the city, its history, society, culture, politics and
economics, and its evolving position in national, regional and global frameworks.
While most volumes emphasize urban developments since the Second World
War, some pay close attention to the legacy of the longue durée in shaping the
contemporary. Thematic and comparative volumes address such themes as
urbanization, economic and financial linkages, architecture and space, wealth
and power, gendered relationships, planning and anarchy, and ethnographies in
national and regional perspective. Titles include

Hong Kong Beijing in the Modern World

Global City David Strand and Madeline Yue Dong
Stephen Chiu and Tai-Lok Lui
Bangkok
Shanghai Place, Practice and Representation
Global City Marc Askew
Jeff Wasserstrom

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Carl Trocki

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communication technologies are influencing politics, society and culture in Asia.
Titles include

Asia.com Japanese Cybercultures

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Edited by K. C. Ho, Randolph Kluver Nanette Gottlieb
and Kenneth C. C. Yang

RoutledgeCurzon studies in Asia’s transformations is a forum for innovative new

research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be
available in hardback only. Titles include

Chinese Media, Global Contexts Imperialism in South East Asia

Edited by Chin-Chuan Lee “A Fleeting, Passing Phase”
Internationalizing the Pacific The American Occupation of
The United States, Japan and the Japan and Okinawa *
Institute of Pacific Relations in War Literature and Memory
and Peace, 1919–1945 Michael Molasky
Tomoko Akami

Koreans in Japan
Critical Voices from the Margin
Edited by Sonia Ryang * now available in paperback

Critical Asian scholarship is a series intended to showcase the most important indi-
vidual contributions to scholarship in Asian Studies. Each of the volumes
presents a leading Asian scholar addressing themes that are central to his or her
most significant and lasting contribution to Asian studies. The series is
committed to the rich variety of research and writing on Asia, and is not
restricted to any particular discipline, theoretical approach or geographical
expertise.

China’s Past, China’s Future Women and the Family in

Energy, Food, Environment Chinese History
Vaclav Smil Patricia Buckley Ebrey

China Unbound Southeast Asia

Evolving Perspectives on the A Testament
Chinese Past George McT. Kahin
Paul A. Cohen
China’s Past,
China’s Future
Energy, food, environment

Vaclav Smil
First published 2004
by RoutledgeCurzon
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Simultaneously published in the UK

by RoutledgeCurzon
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2004 Vaclav Smil

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Smil, Vaclav.
China’s past, China’s future: energy, food, environment/Vaclav Smil.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. China–Environmental conditions. 2. Power resources–China. 3. Food
supply–China. I. Title.

GE160.C6C63 2003
304.2'8'0951–dc21
2003006064

ISBN 0-203-56320-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33853-7 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–31498–4 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–31499–2 (pbk)
For is and is-not come together;
Hard and easy are complementary;
Long and short are relative;
High and low are comparative;
Pitch and sound make harmony;
Before and after are a sequence.
Laozi, Dao de jing
Contents

List of illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xiv
List of abbreviations xvi

1 Introduction: China’s biophysical foundations 1

My Chinese experiences 1
Challenges of understanding 4
Interdisciplinary perspectives 7
2 Energy 9
Half a century of advances 9
The continuing importance of traditional energies 27
A failed strategy 42
From a new Saudi Arabia to concerns about oil security 52
A remarkable shift in energy intensities 60
3 Food 72
The world’s greatest famine 73
From subsistence to satiety 87
Dietary transitions 99
Nitrogen in China’s agriculture 109
Can China feed itself ? 120
4 Environment 141
Attitudes and constraints 142
The first of the five elements 152
China’s environment and security 168
The cost of China’s environmental change 178
Megaprojects and China’s environment 190
x Contents

5 Looking ahead by looking back 207

Failed forecasts 207
Contending trends 212

Appendix 216
Bibliography 217
Index 229
Illustrations

Tables
3.1 China’s average food per capita availability, 1930s–1970s 93
4.1 Economic costs attributable to air and water pollution 184
4.2 Economic costs attributable to land use changes and soil degradation 186
A.1 Units of measurement 216
A.2 Quantitative abbreviations 216

Figures
2.1 Growth of China’s fossil fuel extraction and hydroelectricity
generation, 1950–2000 10
2.2 China’s sedimentary basins 20
2.3 Energy flows in China’s agroecosystem in 1974 32
2.4 China’s rural energy consumption 39
2.5 An efficient stove designed in Shandong’s Wenshang county in 1986 41
2.6 Long-term trends of energy intensities in the USA, Canada, UK
and Japan, 1900–2000 61
2.7 Energy intensity of China’s economy, 1952–2000 62
3.1 Average per capita availability of food energy and dietary
protein, 1950–1980 76
3.2 Areas annually affected by drought and flood in China, 1950–2000 77
3.3 Total and per capita grain production in China, 1950–1970 81
3.4 Officially reported and reconstructed mortality in China, 1950–1990 83
3.5 Trends in average supply of food energy in China, India and
Japan, 1950–1983 97
3.6 Rising shares of synthetic fertilizers in China’s supply of
agricultural nitrogen 117
3.7 China’s dietary transition, 1980–1995 123
3.8 China’s fluctuating grain harvests and average per capita grain
supply, 1991–2001 126
3.9 Provincial differences between the availability of agricultural land 129
xii Illustrations

4.1 Past and future growth of China’s population, 1950–2050 147

4.2 Pattern of China’s average annual precipitation 154
4.3 Distribution of the annual share of summer rains 155
4.4 Expansion of China’s irrigated land, 1950–1990 158
4.5 The two South/North water-transfer routes under construction 165
4.6 LANDSAT image of the doubly bifurcated Danjiangkou
reservoir in northern Hubei and southern Henan 166
4.7 LANDSAT images of Sanmenxia reservoir 193
Preface

All but two of my books have had the same randomly methodical genesis. Months
or years after coming up with the initial idea (as far as I can recall the shortest
period was less than half a year, the longest one nearly a decade) I eventually put
together a brief proposal for a publisher, and then got down to intensive writing,
with the book’s title being usually the last thing. The first exception was The Bad
Earth, the first book on China’s environment: after reading my paper on that topic
in Asian Survey, Doug Merwin of M.E. Sharpe suggested that I write the book, and
he also chose its title. This book is the second, and even more notable, exception.
I would have eventually done a broad survey of China’s environment even
without Doug’s prompting – but I am not so self-indulgent to come up with the
idea of a retrospective volume of my China writings. In fact, if Craig Fowlie and
Mark Selden had asked me merely for that I would have hesitated, and likely
said no. But their idea of the Critical Asian Scholarship series as the combination of
rethinking and commenting on previously published work together with new, or
unpublished, material was immediately appealing – and I began working on the
book in July 2002, within weeks of finishing Energy at the Crossroads. Mark also
suggested, upfront, what I think is a very apposite title.
My thanks go also to Doug Fast, who reproduced all old illustrations and who
created a number of new ones, and to journal and book publishers who gave
permissions to reprint selections from about twenty-five different publications.
These reprints take almost three fifths of the book. The remainder is made up of
unpublished (and updated) pieces, and of new essays on China’s rural fuel use,
energy intensity of the country’s economy, the 1959–1961 famine, dietary transi-
tion, nitrogen in China’s agriculture, and on worrisome and desirable megaprojects.
Thanks to Zoe Botterill for guiding the typescript through the publication
process.
Finally, a few technical details. For the sake of consistency, all Chinese names
are transcribed in pinyin. The metric system is used for all measurements, and
because so many units, scientific prefixes and acronyms are used in the book I
have provided detailed explanations of these. The Harvard system of refer-
encing is not used only in a few instances where the reprints of complete, or
slightly abridged, articles retain their original referencing or a numbered combi-
nation of references and notes.
Acknowledgments

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for granting permis-
sion to reproduce material in this work:
The American Geographical Society for reprinting parts of “Controlling the
Yellow River”, The Geographical Review 69: 253–272, 1979.
The Asian Wall Street Journal for reprinting “China’s megaprojects for the new
millennium”, 22 April 1999, p. 8; “China’s unstable past and future”, 30
September 1999, p. 8; and “ ‘Water, water everywhere…’ ”, 22 August 2000, p. 12.
The British Medical Journal for reprinting “China’s great famine: 40 years
later”, 7225: 1619–1621, 1999.
The China Quarterly for reprinting “China’s energy and resource uses: continuity
and change”, 156: 935–951, 1998.
Current History for reprinting selections from “Food in China”, 75(439): 69–72,
82–84, 1978; “Eating better: farming reforms and food in China”, 84(503):
248–251, 273–274, 1985; “Feeding China”, 94(593): 280–284, 1995.
Food Policy for reprinting selections from “China’s food”, 6(2): 67–77, 1981.
Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation for reprinting Vaclav Smil,
“China shoulders the cost of environmental change”, Environment 39(6): 6–9,
33–37, 1997. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational
Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th St, NW, Washington
DC 20036–1802. www.heldref.org/html/env.html. Copyright © 1997.
Institute of International Relations in Taipei for reprinting selections from
“Communist China’s oil exports: a critical evaluation”, Issues and Studies 11(3):
71–78, 1975; “Communist China’s oil exports revisited”, Issues and Studies 12(9):
68–73, 1976; and “Food availability in Communist China: 1957–1974”, Issues
and Studies 13(5): 13–57, 1977.
Johns Hopkins University Press for reprinting “China’s environment and
security: simple myths and complex realities”, SAIS Review 17: 107–126, 1997.
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers for reprinting Vaclav Smil, “Energy
flows in rural China”, Human Ecology 7(2): 119–133, 1979.
MIT Press for reprinting the final chapter from Feeding the World: A Challenge for
the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 291–315.
Praeger Publishers for reprinting selections from China’s Energy: Achievements,
Problems, Prospects, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976, pp. 11–23, 31–41, 74–84, 93.
 Acknowledgments xv

M.E. Sharpe for reprinting selections from Vaclav Smil, The Bad Earth:
Environmental Degradation in China, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1984, pp. 68, 78, 79,
198–200, copyright © 1988 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc.; Vaclav Smil, Energy in China’s
Modernization: Advances and Limitations, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1988, pp. 46–54,
60–68, 71, 91–94, 162–171, copyright © 1993 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc.; Vaclav
Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development,
Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, pp. 38–51, 101–104. Reprinted with permission.
The New York Review of Books for reprinting selections from “Is there enough
Chinese food?”, 43(2): 32–34, 1996. Reprinted with permission from The New
York Review of Books. Copyright © 1996 NYREV, Inc.
Oxford University Press for reprinting a short selection from Vaclav Smil,
Energy, Food, Environment: Realities, Myths, Options, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987,
pp. 86–87.
Population and Development Review for reprinting selections from “Food produc-
tion and quality of diet in China”, 12: 25–45, 1986, pp. 27, 29, 31, 38–39.
Routledge for reprinting the complete text of Smil, V., “Three Gorges
Project”, in International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics, eds J. Barry and E.G.
Frankland, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 449–451.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission
to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from
any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged, and will undertake to rectify
any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
Abbreviations

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

BP British Petroleum
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation
EI energy intensity
EIA Energy Information Administration
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FYP five-year plan
GDP gross domestic product
ICOLD International Committee on Large Dams
IDRC International Development Research Center
IEA International Energy Agency
LNG liquefied natural gas
NBS National Bureau of Statistics (Beijing)
NCNA New China News Agency
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OPEC Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries
PPP purchasing power parity
PRC People’s Republic of China
ROC Republic of China
RWEDP Regional Wood Energy Development Program
SB Statistics Bureau (Tokyo)
SSB State Statistical Bureau (Beijing)
TPES total primary energy supply
UNDP United Nations Development Program
UNO United Nations Organization
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
1 Introduction
China’s biophysical foundations

Western writings on China have always been dominated by social perspectives as

anthropologists, economists, ethnographers, historians, journalists, linguists and
students of military and political affairs provided a wealth of interpretations
ranging from overzealous ephemera produced by instant experts to balanced and
well-argued exposés authored by long-time observers with deep and nuanced
understanding of the country. As a natural scientist with a keen interest in
history and politics I enjoyed reading many surveys, appraisals and forecasts that
were reevaluating China’s achievements and prospects during the early 1970s.
But every society is created by a complex interplay of natural and human factors
– and I felt that some fundamental perspectives concerning China’s biophysical
foundations were covered only marginally or that they were entirely absent.
In 1973 I decided to start filling some of these gaps. Energy was the first
obvious choice, as its conversions are required for every natural and human
activity; and as any nation’s fortunes, be they economic or political, are closely
tied to the modes, rates and efficiencies of its use. This focus was especially
apposite at the time when OPEC’s quintupling of crude oil prices in 1973–1974
finally led the Western world to pay more attention to energy resources and uses.
Converting my resolution into reality was not a matter of weeks, or months. My
interest in energy studies predated by a decade the sudden burst of interest in
fuels and electricity brought about by OPEC’s actions, and so by 1973 I knew a
great deal about Europe’s, Russia’s and America’s energy. But information on
China’s energy accessible in the West, or even inside China, was at that time
extremely limited, and the few available publications were authored by
Sinologists whose impeccable knowledge of the language was not matched by
the understanding of scientific and engineering realities that is needed to eval-
uate energy systems.

My Chinese experiences
For two years I immersed myself in what Alexander Eckstein labeled, so memo-
rably, “economic archaeology” as I looked for shards of energy-related information
and studied many ancillary aspects of China’s energy situation. Only then did I
write my first short China energy papers, which came out in 1975. The first major
2 China’s biophysical foundations

survey piece appeared in The China Quarterly in May 1976; and just before the
end of that year I published China’s Energy, the first comprehensive analysis of
the country’s energy resources, uses, impacts and prospects.
During the following ten years, my work on China’s energy both broadened
and deepened as I considered nearly all of its major aspects, ranging from the
use of traditional biomass fuels to the prospects of offshore oil and gas explo-
ration, and from the performance of coal-fired electricity generation to the fate
of (at that time rather fashionable) small rural biogas digesters. I did not plan to
write another book about China’s energy, but after I finished a lengthy report on
the topic that was commissioned by the International Development Research
Center, I still had so much new material that the expanded and revised report
appeared as Energy in China’s Modernization in 1988. Unlike my first China energy
book, this new book dealt with the complications and implications of rapidly
growing and no less rapidly innovating energy industries. I returned once more
to the topic in a more systematic manner to prepare a long-term retrospective
that appeared in The China Quarterly in 1998, twenty-five years after I began my
studies of China’s energy.
As a long-time practitioner of the systems approach, I found my interest in
China’s food to be an inevitable outgrowth of a broader interest in the country’s
energy supply. After all, no energy is more vital than that contained in nutrients
we produce largely through cropping, and a systems approach to human nutrition
dictates that this inquiry should not stop with the production of food, but that the
whole food chain – including the environmental setting, post-harvest losses, food
processing, access to food and actual nutritional requirements – be examined.
This is why my earliest studies of China’s food situation attempted to quantify
national food balance sheets, and why in my work published during the 1990s I
argued that China’s prospects for feeding itself would be greatly enhanced by
managing better not just the production, but the composition of the demand by
promoting the most efficient production of animal foods (carp and chicken vs.
pork and beef). Given the critical influence that China’s highly variable climate,
recurrent water deficits or excesses and much-degraded soils have on the
country’s agriculture, my work on China’s food has also always stressed the
necessity of appropriate environmental management.
At the same time, I have had always little use for naive exaltations of China’s
traditional farming based entirely on renewable resources, and I have shown
how these – albeit in many ways admirable – practices clearly limited the
country’s food output. Only a radical shift to intensive agriculture – unlike in the
West this transformation was not primarily one of massive mechanization of
field tasks but rather one of rapidly increasing reliance on nitrogenous fertilizers
– made it possible to support today’s 1.3 billion people. This dependence has
made China the world’s largest producer of ammonia, as well as the country
with the highest existential dependence on synthetic fertilizers.
And, again, as a student of complex systems it was an obvious step to move
from energy in general and food energy in particular to the study of China’s
environment. Extraction and conversion of energies and the production of food
 China’s biophysical foundations 3

are the two most important reasons for the anthropogenic degradation of the
biosphere. By the time I was ready to take a deeper look at China’s environment,
I was helped by a long-overdue, but still unexpected, shift in the country’s affairs.
Just before Deng Xiaoping rose yet again to power, some Chinese publications
began to print astonishing revelations about the parlous state of China’s land, air
and waters, and by the early 1980s there was a veritable flood of this previously
absent information.
I used these publications to write my first papers dealing solely with China’s
environment (for Asian Survey and Current History, both in 1980), then in the first
fairly comprehensive briefing on the topic commissioned by the World Bank. A
year later I completed the first, Western or Chinese, book on China’s environment:
The Bad Earth, an interdisciplinary survey of China’s ecosystemic degradation and
environmental pollution. The book not only spurred a great deal of interest
(more than forty favorable reviews in publications on five continents), but also
some disbelief rooted in the persistence of a naive Western image of China as a
civilization living in harmony with its environment and in the residual infatuation
of some Western intellectuals with Maoism.
During the following years I continued to publish papers on different aspects
of China’s environment and, exactly ten years after the publication of The Bad
Earth, China’s Environmental Crisis came out in 1993. This was a deeper inquiry
into the biophysical constraints of China’s development. Soon after completing
the book, an invitation to spend some time at the East–West Center gave me the
opportunity to complete a detailed evaluation of the economic costs of China’s
ecosystemic decline and environmental pollution. I was able to demonstrate that
this burden is equal annually to at least 10 per cent of the country’s GDP.
An extensive summary of this study deserves particular attention, as these
accounts question what is perhaps the country’s most touted post-1980 achieve-
ment, its high rates of economic growth. In addition, environmental selections in
this book will survey not only such key concerns as water supply and chronic
Northern water shortages, water and air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation,
desertification and loss of biodiversity, but also such notable failures of environ-
mental management as the Three Gorges dam and mass afforestation
campaigns; and such current concerns as the Three Gorges reservoir and the
South–North transfer of water.
From the mid-1990s my attention focused on the studies of global energy,
agriculture and environmental change. Global Ecology was followed by Energy in
World History, then came Cycles of Life for the Scientific American Library and
Energies, Feeding the World, Enriching the Earth, The Earth’s Biosphere and Energy at the
Crossroads. None of these books deals explicitly with China, but all of them drew
on my China work, and some of them contain lengthy discussions devoted to
China. This is particularly the case with Feeding the World, whose entire closing
chapter, reproduced almost completely in the third chapter of this book,
appraises China’s food production constraints and potential.
Another recent return to China-centered research arose from my interest in
the global nitrogen cycle and in the history and impacts of nitrogenous fertilizers.
4 China’s biophysical foundations

China is now their largest producer and user, and hence it is a perfect choice for
examining several key features of the dependence that makes the difference
between adequate diets and malnutrition, hunger and famine. That is why this
book’s food chapter (Chapter 3) includes a new contribution that looks at the
history and consequences of China’s uses of agricultural nitrogen. Similarly, my
recent appraisal of global energy prospects led me back to some key issues of
China’s energy use, particularly to the impressive decline in energy intensity of
the country’s economy. Most of this new work is included in this book’s energy
chapter (Chapter 2).
Finally, a paragraph on access to my publications on China. Between 1975
and 2002 I have published four books, just over 100 papers in nearly fifty
different periodicals, and about forty book chapters dealing with the three big
topics featured in this book, as well as with China’s population, economic
development and future. Roughly a third of these publications are listed in
references, and all papers and books published since 1990, including those that
do not deal with China, can be found on my regularly updated website
(http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil).

Challenges of understanding
There are several important commonalties in studying China’s energy, food
and environment, some universal and others country-specific. Perhaps the
most important universal factor is that the understanding of complex, and
inherently interrelated, matters of energy, food and the environment benefits
from interdisciplinary perspectives – but such insights cannot be gained either
from brief visits to a studied country or from cursory reviews of published
materials. Only a long-term commitment, and the combination of deeper
specific inquiries and a broad familiarity with relevant foreign circumstances
and international comparisons, will do.
Unfortunately, during the 1970s and 1980s too much information on China
came out as a result of brief visits by herded groups of experts. Until the early
1980s these trips were almost entirely choreographed well in advance, and
included such compulsory highlights as inspection of Potemkin’s communes of
Sino-Albanian Friendship or model kindergartens with flag-waving toddlers.
Eventually, the access improved – both in geographical and in personal terms –
and some collaborative studies were able to come up with unique and valuable
information. The two rounds of extensive health and nutritional surveys by the
Cornell–Oxford–China Project (Chen et al. 1990; CTSU 2002) come to mind as
an excellent example of the latter category. As for the uncritical reliance on
published Chinese materials, I could spend many paragraphs on some embar-
rassing quotations taken not just from the writings of overt Maoist sympathizers,
but also from the work of some Western academics who were convinced, among
other things, that the world’s greatest famine never took place, that China is a
model of environmental management, and that the best guidance for national
modernization can be found in Mao’s little red book.
 China’s biophysical foundations 5

Another important universal imperative is not to succumb to the fashionable

conclusions and biased stresses with which the studies of energy, food and the
environment abound. Even readers not particularly well versed in these fields
will recall that the two successive energy “crises” (1973–1974 and 1979–1980)
persuaded many energy experts that the era of readily available and inexpensive
energy is over. Yet just a few years after the Western media overflowed with dire
forecasts of the lights going out on Western civilization, the price of oil collapsed
and it is still a lot cheaper than that of the fake mineral water that has since
flooded the North American continent. A quarter-century ago acid rain was seen
as the most important cross-border environmental problem (just try to find news
references to global warming in 1977), and during the mid-1990s Lester Brown’s
sensationalist catastrophism convinced many people that China would not be
able to feed itself. I have been repeatedly involved in combating some of these
unjustified yet annoyingly persistent misconceptions, and a number of selections
in this book address some of their notable China-related examples.
By far the most important China-specific challenges to the understanding of
complex matters of the country’s energy, food and the environment are the
country’s immense natural and socio-economic diversity, and the quality of
Chinese statistics.

Natural and socio-economic disparities

Dealing with averages of any kind, and also with modes, is a perilous business,
particularly when they apply to natural conditions and socio-economic achieve-
ments of large nations. They both reveal and obscure, they are very meaningful
and rather meaningless at the same time. When measured on a human time-scale,
the environmental averages shift exceedingly slowly, governed as they are by
processes that take 102 (rapid regional climatic change) to 106 (major surficial
remodeling caused by plate tectonics) years to unfold. In contrast, human activi-
ties can move a long array of national socio-economic averages quite significantly
in just one or two generations. East Asia offers many excellent examples of this
rapid progression as the economies of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now also
China, have traversed the road from subsistence and shared poverty to incipient
or, in Japan’s case, undeniably widespread, affluence.
Rapid economic development is able to erase some traditionally embedded
regional inequities: Guangdong became just in a matter of a few years China’s
richest province, and Shenzhen, an insignificant town in 1980, was rapidly
converted into a quasi-Hong Kong. But laggard regions can be found even in the
most rapidly modernizing major economies, including the relatively highly
homogeneous Japan, where the outlying areas of the archipelago continue to
be noticeably poorer than the traditional heartland of the Kanto Plain.
Consequently, what is more notable than China’s persisting regional disparities is
the post-1980 widening of the gap that has been documented by many publica-
tions (World Bank 1996, 1997; Khan and Riskin 2000; UNDP 2001; Gustafsson
and Shi 2001; and Wei and Kim 2002 are only a small part of this output).
6 China’s biophysical foundations

This literature draws our attention to multiple widening gaps: one is

urban/rural; another is class-based; a third is the difference between coastal and
interior provinces; a fourth is related to ethnicity; a fifth, more complex, is
gender-related. Deng’s radical economic reforms have been a powerful tide that
has, indeed, lifted all boats – but, unfortunately, some much more than others.
And so while the nationwide averages of just about every important economic
indicator as well as most of the quality-of-life measures are (whatever the desir-
able direction is) either up (income, savings, access to schooling, ownership of
appliances) or down (malnutrition, illiteracy, sulfur dioxide levels in large cities),
provincial and regional disparities have actually increased considerably, and they
remain far greater than in Japan.
Energy consumption may actually be a more accurate measure of these
disparities, as China’s average income totals ignore rural subsistence production
of food and local barter. During the late 1990s China’s annual national
consumption mean was about 30GJ/capita, or about 1.5 tonnes of coal equiva-
lent (all units and their abbreviations are listed in the Appendix), but the rates in
coal-rich Shanxi (which also wastes a great deal of the fuel because of its easy
availability) and in Shanghai, the country’s richest city of some 15 million
people, were nearly three times as high, and the total primary energy supply of
the capital’s 13 million people averaged about 2.5 times the national mean
(Fridley 2001). In contrast, the mean for more than 60 million people in Anhui
province, Shanghai’s northern neighbor, was only about 20GJ/capita and for
more than 45 million people in land-locked and impoverished Guangxi it was as
low as 16GJ/capita.
And the difference was even wider for per capita electricity consumption,
with the annual national mean of about 0.9MWh/capita, and the respective
extremes 3.4 times higher in the country’s most dynamic megacity (Shanghai),
and 50 per cent lower in its southernmost island province (Hainan). Household
surveys also show that during the late 1990s urban families in China’s four
richest coastal provinces spent about 2.5 times as much on energy as did their
counterparts in four interior provinces in the Northwest (NBS 2001). There is no
need to belabor this point: what is important is to be always aware of it, even if
the use of a particular average is not (as is the case in the vast majority of
instances) prefaced by any caveat.

Chinese statistics and realities

Caution is advisable when dealing with any aggregate statistics, and particularly
those of large and rapidly modernizing nations where corruption is widespread
and where the black economy accounts for a large share of all transactions. Still,
China is in a special category. This is how I assessed the challenge in a recent
essay (Smil 2001a).
In this age of ubiquitous statistics, China is now an uncommonly zealous
contributor to the incessant flow of figures. This bounty was preceded by a no-
less-uncommon absence of any regularly published statistical volumes. Between
 China’s biophysical foundations 7

1958, the year when Mao’s delusions launched the disastrous Great Leap Forward,
and 1978, the year of Deng Xiaoping’s comeback, the world had to be thankful for a
few figures sprinkled sparsely in official press releases. Reporting resumed first on a
limited scale, but a generation later few countries can rival the amount of data issued
by the National Bureau of Statistics. The hardbound copy of China Statistical Yearbook
now weighs almost 2.5kg. With its nearly 900 pages of a large (21cm ⫻ 30cm)
format, the yearbook is now more massive than the venerable Statistical Abstract of the
United States, whose 120th edition contains 999 pages of smaller (15cm ⫻ 22cm) size.
The quality of this data flood is a different matter. Inaccurate reporting and
questionable statistics are a universal problem. But the degree of misinformation
that an average user may get by consulting official Chinese figures is exceptionally
high. Moreover, China’s dubious numbers are not only misleading about minor
realities but about key indicators. For example, official statistics claim that
between 1980 and 1999, GDP grew annually at an average of 9.8 per cent, with
four consecutive years of double-digit expansion (as high as 14.2 per cent)
between 1992 and 1995. But the numbers don’t seem to add up.
Angus Maddison, a distinguished economic historian who has done the most
extensive long-term comparisons of global economic growth, argues that the
actual average expansion was more than two per cent lower, that is 7.6 per cent
rather than 9.8 per cent (I will address this discrepancy in some detail when
dealing with energy intensities in Chapter 2). Granted, GDP figures are often ques-
tionable, but it is difficult to explain the reasons for one of China’s largest and most
persistent statistical lies: the amount of the country’s arable land. Few other factors
are as critical in determining China’s capacity to feed itself. During the late 1990s
Chinese official statistics persistently claimed that the country’s cultivated land is
only about 95 million hectares, or a mere 0.08 hectare per person. The figure gave
China less arable land per capita than Bangladesh, and it furnished one of the key
arguments for the conclusions that China would be unable to feed itself.
But for years, thousands of people in the Beijing bureaucracy knew that,
based on satellite studies and land-use surveys, the total was vastly undervalued.
Finally, in the year 2000, China admitted that it has 130 million hectares of
cultivated land. But is this 36 per cent boost enough? (in the third chapter of this
book I will show that it is not: China’s total of agricultural (and aqua-cultural)
land is most likely at least 150Mha).
So the next time you pick up that heavy tome of China’s statistics, or when you
hear a mainland official claim a particular growth rate, stop and think what may
hide beneath those, and thousands of other, figures, issued by a bureaucracy that
has reported aggregate GDP growth that was 30 per cent too large for the
preceding decade while overlooking half of the country’s food-producing land.

Interdisciplinary perspectives
One of the most effective approaches to overcome these data weaknesses is to
examine China’s record from a number of different perspectives and compare it to
the historical record of other countries at similar stages of economic development:
8 China’s biophysical foundations

absence or excess of expected interdependencies and correlations, whose magni-

tudes and ranges are reliably known from the experience of other nations, will
then more readily reveal some exaggerated or otherwise dubious claims. For
example, the expected elasticity of energy/GDP growth in low-income countries
during the last decade of the twentieth century was between 1.0 and 1.5 (that is,
their primary energy requirements were growing at least as fast as, or faster than,
their GDPs). In contrast, China’s elasticity for the decade was not just marginally
below 1.0, it averaged close to 0.5. Obviously, this is a claim that requires a close
examination – and I will do so in the closing segment of this book’s second chapter.
Keeping with the strategy of the multipronged approach to the under-
standing of China’s reality, the energy chapter will span the post-1949 era and
examine several different but interrelated topics, ranging from the largely failed
reliance on small-scale energy techniques to the two topics that attracted a great
deal of international attention during the 1990s: the emergence of China as a
major crude oil importer, and the impressive improvements in the energy inten-
sity of China’s economy, developments with important consequences for the
world’s energy supply.
Similarly, the food chapter has its retrospective and forward-looking segments:
I open it by recounting the genesis, the toll and the consequences of the world’s
largest, and overwhelmingly man-made, famine of 1959–1961, and close it by
assessing China’s prospects for feeding itself during the coming decades. And,
after a brief review of China’s environmental attitudes and constraints, in the
book’s last thematic chapter (Chapter 4) I take a closer look at the country’s
strained water resources, a possible security threat arising from nature’s abuse,
the economic cost of these degradations, and the impacts of some of China’s
controversial megaprojects. In Chapter 5, the book’s closing chapter, I will look
ahead by looking back. First, I will recount briefly some notable successes as well
as some missed opportunities that I have been advocating for decades. But most
of my attention will go to forecasting, now a ubiquitous and compelling activity,
but one whose perils, as some choice examples will demonstrate, are particularly
great in China’s case. I will not add to these failed prophecies by submitting any
date-bound quantitative predictions, but I will offer some broad probabilistic
conclusions about the future trends of China’s energy, food and the environment.
2 Energy

I open this chapter with brief surveys of China’s energy contrasting the situation
at the time of the Communist assumption of power in 1949, a quarter-century
later at the end of Mao’s era, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Those who are aware of major milestones along this journey will be reminded of
the enormous progress, as well as of many remaining problems characterizing
“Half a century of advances” of China’s energetics. The second segment will
take a different tack by paying attention to an undeservedly understudied topic.
Beyond China’s rich littoral there is still the vast interior where subsistence peas-
ants continue to burn straw and grasses and wood. The overall importance of
these inefficient and environmentally damaging practices will be covered in
“Continuing importance of traditional energies”.
The next section, “A failed strategy”, will chart the history of what once
seemed to be such a promising course to follow, as well as China’s unique contri-
bution to the expansion of the world’s energy supply: development of small-scale
energy projects and conversions including coal mining, hydroelectricity and
biogas generation. A generation ago, exaggerated claims about China’s potential
crude oil resources led to speculation about the country becoming a major
petroleum exporter; twenty years later China is on its way to becoming the
world’s second-largest oil importer. “From a new Saudi Arabia to concerns about
oil security” will analyse this unexpected shift. An even more notable post-1980
development has been an impressive decline in the energy intensity of China’s
economy: this little noted process proceeded at a rate faster than in any other
case in history. “A remarkable shift in energy intensities” will describe and
explain this encouraging trend.

Half a century of advances: China’s energy 1950–2000

When I began my work on China’s energy in the early 1970s I had to reckon –
as any other serious student of China’s affairs – with the absence of official
systematic statistics. China’s pre-1960 statistics, although never abundant, were
adequate for basic economic assessments, but their veracity became extremely
suspect as Mao launched the Great Leap. Then all statistical publications ceased
in 1960, and irregular and incomplete information became more frequent only
10 Energy

after the Sino-US rapprochement in 1972. But some major uncertainties were not
resolved until the late 1970s, when the resumption of official statistical reporting
finally started to fill a generation-long gap, and some indeed not until the early
1980s when we learned about China’s suppressed 1964 population census, got
the first results of the country’s properly conducted population count taken in
1982, and could study more data in gradually expanding editions of China’s
various statistical yearbooks.
This paucity of pre-1978 information was a challenge when writing my first
book on China’s energy (in 1975 and 1976). Diligent collection and critical
evaluation of fragmentary information that appeared in numerous press
releases, central and provincial broadcasts, interviews with leading officials and
(after 1971) in accounts of foreign observers, made it possible to form a basic
dualistic judgment about the progress of China’s primary energy supply and its
conversions during the quarter-century of the Communist rule: great quantitative
advances coexisted with inferior quality in both energy-producing and energy-
consuming sectors. Between 1950 and 1975 China’s coal extraction increased
from about 40Mt to nearly 500Mt a year, its crude oil production rose from a
mere trickle (0.2Mt) to 74Mt, and its hydroelectric generation expanded from
less than one to more than 200TWh (Fridley 2001) (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Growth of China’s fossil fuel extraction and hydroelectricity generation, 1950–2000
Source: Plotted from data in Fridley (2001) and NBS (2001).
 Energy 11

But, at the same time, this was an economy governed by the Stalinist–Maoist
dogma of quantity, where overfulfilling the plan, rather than producing useful
things, was the overriding goal. And so in the country which was the world’s
third-largest producer of coal more than 80 per cent of it was sold as raw, run-of-
the-mine fuel, unwashed, unsorted, unsized, and burned mostly in boilers whose
efficiencies were not much better than those of the steam equipment found in
Europe and North America right after World War I. And sometimes worse: in
1982 I saw in Sichuan an English boiler built in the early 1880s! As the world
admired the rise of China’s hydrocarbon industry, the lack of refining capacity
was forcing the Chinese to burn a great deal of raw crude oil in thermal power
plants. In 1964 the country joined the small group of nuclear powers, but ten
years later there were no kitchen refrigerators even in China’s largest cities, and
households were cooking, and throughout the northern provinces also heating
their rooms, with primitive stoves that wasted 90 per cent of stoked coal, wood
or straw. And the production and combustion of these low-quality fuels was
generating inordinate amounts of air pollution, making China’s cities the most
polluted in the world. This is how I appraised the state of China’s energy supply
during the last years of Mao’s regime (Smil 1976a).

Primary energy supply during the Maoist era

Coal mining was China’s only readily and abundantly available source of
commercial energy when the PRC was established in the fall of 1949. Between
1950 and 1952, seventy-seven large- and medium-sized mines were restored or
reconstructed. The long-wall method – increasing the coal output and saving
mine timber – was introduced to replace some of the traditional room-and-pillar
extraction, and the labor productivity surpassed the best prewar levels. But
essential difficulties mostly remained. The basic technical backwardness of the
Chinese coal industry had hardly been altered; serious safety problems persisted,
and the capacity of coal preparation plants was totally inadequate. A large-scale
effort was clearly needed to expand and to modernize the production.
The achievements of the first five-year plan (FYP) contributed quite signifi-
cantly to this goal. Between the years 1953 and 1957, construction commenced
on 215 shafts and open mines with aggregate capacity of 63.81Mt. The total
output of raw coal reached 130.7Mt in 1957, after growing by an average rate
of 14.6 per cent since 1952. Yet this growth rate, as well as other industrial
advances, seemed too slow to Mao’s government. Another Soviet-style FYP,
scheduled to start in 1958, was supplanted by the Great Leap Forward. Coal
played a prominent role in this spectacle. Feverish construction of primitive
small open-cast mines started all over the country. By the end of 1958 there
were some 110,000 pits in operation, engaging an incredible number of 20
million Chinese peasants. Output of large mines was to be expanded at a simi-
larly staggering pace, as more than 400 new mines were started in 1958. The
total claimed 1958 raw coal output – 270.2Mt – surpassed that of 1957 by 106
per cent.
12 Energy

After the collapse of the Great Leap in 1960 the coal industry was thrown back
almost to the 1957 level. The first half of the 1960s became a time of recovery
and consolidation. Only twenty-eight new mines with the total capacity of 14.4Mt
were opened between 1961 and 1965. Although a renewed expansion during the
second half of the 1960s was temporarily halted by the turmoil of the Cultural
Revolution, the addition of thirty-seven new mines brought the total 1970 capacity
to 300Mt. While the Chinese official coal production statistics for the years
1949–1957 are generally considered genuine, the Great Leap figures, accepted
uncritically in the late 1950s and the early 1960s by some researchers, were
doubtlessly exaggerated. When the publication of all statistics ceased in 1960, the
outside production estimates started to differ by scores of millions of tonnes.
By 1976 the PRC was the world’s third-largest coal producer, with dozens of
large, highly mechanized mines, an expanding coal-machinery industry, and
abundant reserves to support future growth. At the same time, China’s coal
industry has been facing some rather intractable problems, and new difficulties
will assume prominence in the not too distant future. Small coal pit extraction is
not, even when approached in a planned and sensible manner, without many
difficulties. Pit output is usually of a lower quality than in modern mine produc-
tion, economies of scale cannot be attained in thousands of small and quite
primitive enterprises, labor productivity is very low, and the actual cost of coal
may be unexpectedly high.
Two main problems hurting the production of large modern mines have been
the shortages of mine timber and extraction, loading, and transportation
machinery. Another difficulty has been a very low capacity of coal-preparation
plants. The key future problem and, inexorably, the ultimate limiting factor in
the expansion of coal mining, is the magnitude of the task itself. If the
1950–1975 growth had continued for the rest of the century, total coal produc-
tion would have reached at least 450Mt in 1980, 775Mt in 1990, and almost
1.34Gt in the year 2000 – more than a threefold increase in the already very
high current production in just twenty-five years.
Perhaps nothing illustrates better the backwardness of the pre-1949 Chinese
oil industry than the aggregate figures for forty-two years between 1907, when
the first well in Yanchang started to produce, and 1948. During almost half a
century there were only 123 exploratory wells that were sunk and forty-five wells
that went into actual production, and the cumulative oil output reached 2.78Mt
(that much is now extracted in about six days).The Great Leap techniques were
also tried in the oil industry. Handmade equipment was used to drill many
shallow wells, and hundreds of minuscule “distillation factories” were built near
small shale oil deposits. Needless to say, the results were useless and ephemeral.
Fortunately, the giant fields discovered during the latter part of the 1950s
(Lenghu, Karamay, and Longnüsi) were coming into full operation at the same
time. Daqing (China’s first supergiant oilfield discovered in September 1959)
went into full operation during 1963.
Very fast output increases since the end of the Cultural Revolution, initiation
of crude oil exports to Japan, large-scale expansion of oilfields and refineries,
 Energy 13

and the promising offshore potential have made China’s oil industry an object
of widespread international attention. Insufficient pipeline transportation and
tanker capacities have been major limiting factors in the expansion of China’s oil
and gas industry. Another serious difficulty has been the shortage of refining
facilities. To eliminate some of the described difficulties, China might resort to
large-scale, long-term cooperation with Japan or the United States. But whatever
the future actions might be, one fact remains certain – the high growth rates
prevailing in the country’s oil industry could not be sustained over a long period.
Had this post-1950 rate continued for the next two decades, China’s oil output
would have reached about 310Mt by the year 1980, and a patently ridiculous
total of 3.2Gt in 1990. A decline of growth rates was absolutely inevitable.
Considering the admirable tradition of high waterwork skills, it is ironic – yet
at the same time a fitting illustration of the economic weakness of the emerging
Chinese republic – that the first large modern hydroprojects in the country
(Supung on the Yalu between Liaoning and Korea, and Fengman on the Sungari
near Jilin) were built by the Japanese during their occupation of Manchuria in the
late 1930s and the early 1940s. Both plants were heavily affected by the Soviet
removals of Japanese-built Manchurian industry after 1 September 1945.
Reinstallation of Fengman units became the first large hydrogeneration project
after the establishment of the PRC – a task conducted, ironically enough, with
Soviet assistance. With a considerable Soviet and East-European (above all Czech
and East German) help, the hydroelectric capacity at the end of the first FYP
(1957) reached almost 1GW, that is 22 per cent of the country’s total electricity-
generating capacity.
By 1957 designs were finalized for a 1.1-GW station to be built at Sanmenxia
on the Huanghe in Henan province (the fate of this megaproject will be described
in detail in Chapter 4). The second-largest project was planned for Liujiaxia,
80km above Lanzhou. Grandiose as they were, the Huanghe projects constituted
only a part of a strong shift in favor of hydro power, a move contemplated for
some time and vigorously initiated in 1958. Thus the construction of a large
number of hydroelectric power plants of all sizes became one of the most distinct
features of the Great Leap years of 1958–1959. After the Leap’s demise most of
the projects had to be simply abandoned, and construction and installation was
progressing, with great delays, on only a fraction of the original program.
In 1973 the PRC sent its first delegation to a congress of the International
Commission on Large Dams, and its general paper provided the first useful
summary of developments in the eventful period between 1949 and 1972. In
those twenty-four years 12,517 dams higher than 15m were completed, of which
smaller dams (15–30m high) constituted the overwhelming majority (12,321);
there were 1,150 structures between 30 and 60m, and 46 dams were more than
60m. The largest hydroelectric station in the country, Liujiaxia, was finally
completed just at the end of 1974, and it was only in 1973 that the PRC
surpassed India in the installed hydro capacity. As with other Chinese energy
techniques, the post-1949 growth rate of installed hydro capacities could not be
sustained for the rest of that century.
14 Energy

A quarter-century later: continuity and change

Recent writings on China’s achievements during the last quarter of the twentieth
century stress, almost without exception, the enormity of change.1 But, for both
universal and particular reasons, this survey of the country’s energy resources
and uses (Smil 1998) will stress continuity as much as change. Taking the inertia
of complex energy systems as the key universal given, the most important partic-
ular explanation lies in the peculiarities of China’s resource endowment.
Historical perspectives demonstrate that it takes a long time – usually half a
century – for a new source of energy to capture the largest share of a market,
and the capital spent on implementing the necessary extraction, processing,
distribution and conversion infrastructure is a powerful reason for maintaining
the existing arrangements.2 The challenge of rising costs of extraction, trans-
portation and conversion is mostly met through technical innovations, which not
only keep most of the inflation-adjusted prices from rising but often lead to
impressive secular price declines.3
The social consequences inherent in the rapid dismantling of labor-intensive
industries (coal mining is the best example) or in depriving some regions of
their major source of income (oil and gas extraction in otherwise industrially
undeveloped locations) make it desirable to prolong the economic viability of
such operations through technical innovation (or through costly government
subsidies). These virtually universal considerations exert an expected influence
on China’s energy industries – but the country’s peculiar resource endowment is
an even stronger cause of the relative stability of its primary energy supply’s
composition.

China’s energy resources: strengths and weaknesses

Given the size of China’s territory (almost exactly as large as the US including
Alaska), one would expect to find generous amounts of fossil fuel resources. The
resource aggregate is, indeed, very large – but this is overwhelmingly because of
China’s huge coal deposits. China’s global rank in what is, by definition, an only
imprecisely known category, is – at worst – number three, behind Russia and
the USA.4 In any case, its coal resources could last for several hundreds of years
at the mid-1990s rate of extraction. Moreover, most of China’s coal has fairly
high heating content, with inferior lignites accounting for only a small fraction
of all resources.5
In terms of verified coal reserves China ranks third in the world, behind the
USA and Russia, with roughly 115Gt, or one ninth of the world’s total. This
could support nearly a century of extraction at the current rate.6 In contrast, at
the end of 1996 the total of 3.3Gt of China’s proved oil reserves amounted to
just over 2 per cent of the global total (eleventh-largest in the world), enough for
no more than two decades at the 1996 rate of extraction.7 And the country’s
proved natural gas reserves are much smaller still, amounting to a mere 0.8 per
cent of the global total, ranking only twenty-third worldwide.8 China’s poor
natural gas endowment is conspicuously out of line with the proportions of the
 Energy 15

two fuels in other major oil- and gas-producing countries.9 Both American and
British natural gas reserves hold about as much energy as their respective crude
oil reserves, and Russia has about six times as much energy in the already
discovered gas as it has in commercially recoverable crude oil. In comparison,
the energy content of Chinese gas reserves amounts to mere 30 per cent of the
country’s verified crude oil deposits.
This unusually low natural gas endowment disadvantages China in several
important ways. Natural gas is both the most convenient and the cleanest fuel for
a range of uses from residential and commercial heating to electricity generation
during periods of peak demand. In addition, it is also the best fuel and feedstock
for numerous chemical syntheses, including plastics and nitrogenous fertilizers.10
A high share of natural gas consumption in a country’s primary energy balance
thus assures lower energy intensity (total amount of energy used per unit of GDP)
while minimizing the emissions of CO2, the world’s most important greenhouse
gas.11 Because of its extensive coal deposits, China has large reserves of coal-bed
methane, but this kind of natural gas is usually much more expensive and less
convenient to recover than the resources in hydrocarbon fields.
Fortunately, China can claim global primacy in the other most desirable clean
energy resource: it has the world’s highest potential for generating electricity
from flowing water.12 This potential is never easy to develop for two major
reasons: hydro generation has inherently higher capital costs than thermal power
plants, and expensive long-distance transmission links – needed to connect
remote dam sites with populated regions – add considerably to the overall cost of
hydro power.13 These fundamental realities mean that the dominance of coal in
China’s fossil fuel consumption is going to change only very slowly in decades
ahead. In fact, coal’s share has actually increased since the beginning of China’s
post-1979 modernization: the fuel provided about 72 per cent of China’s
primary energy consumption in 1980, and it supplied just over 76 per cent of the
total in 1996. Consequently, it is most unlikely that its share will fall below 60 per
cent by the year 2010.14 This extraordinary dependence causes a number of
problems whose impact has been aggravated by the generally low technical level
of Chinese mining, inadequate coal processing, underdeveloped transportation
and irrational pricing.

Chinese coal: straddling two realms

China surpassed Soviet production to become the world’s largest coal producer
in 1989. During the 1990s its coal production continued to grow strongly, but
irregularly, by anywhere between 24 and 59Mt a year. Extraction surpassed 1Gt
in 1989 and 1.3Gt in 1996.15 But the last total does not represent 38 per cent of
the global coal output, as a simple quotient of the two figures would indicate:
Chinese totals do not refer to cleaned and sorted coal, but rather to raw fuel
which contains large, and variable, shares of incombustible rocks and clay. A
multiplier of roughly 0.7 has been used to convert this fuel to the standard coal
equivalent – i.e. fuel with 29.3 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg). Typical raw
16 Energy

Chinese bituminous coal, representing the bulk of the country’s solid fuel extrac-
tion, thus has an energy content just short of 21MJ/kg.
In reality, even this rate may be too high an average for the extraction of the
late 1990s because of the rising share of raw coal with more than 30 per cent of
incombustible waste. This qualitative decline arises from yet another long-
standing Chinese peculiarity whose enormous effects go far beyond the coal
industry: Chinese coal extraction originates from two very different kinds of
enterprises, from large collieries owned by the state and administered from
Beijing, and from a variety of local medium and small mines, most of which are
run by counties, townships, collectives or individuals.
The first kind of enterprise, each producing annually more than half a
million tonnes of coal, is now increasingly modernized and relatively highly
productive.16 This modern sector was considerably strengthened during the
1980s when mechanization became widespread in underground mines, and
when China finally began to join the other great coal powers by increasing its
share of efficient surface mining. In 1979, mechanized extraction accounted for
slightly less than one third of the total output in state mines, but by 1990 the rate
had reached 70 per cent. Before 1980 a handful of old small surface mines
contributed less than 5 per cent of China’s coal output. Then, with considerable
foreign investment and technical cooperation, China decided to open several
very large open-cast mines in Shanxi and in Inner Mongolia.17 Even with these
innovations, international comparisons reveal the continuing inferiority of China’s
large-scale coal mining. Typical coal recovery rates average no more than 50–60
per cent, compared to over 90 per cent in modern long-wall extraction. Even
though per capita labor productivity had risen from just 0.9t/shift in 1980 to
roughly 1.4t/shift in the mid-1990s, it still remains only 30–40 per cent of
European, and less than 15 per cent of average US levels. The official target of
2t/manshift by the year 2000 may not be reached.
Large Chinese mines have a long way to go in order to achieve acceptable
levels of coal dust and work safety. The current situation is truly shocking, as
chronic bronchitis and pneumoconiosis incapacitate miners in their thirties, and
fatal accidents are at least thirty times as frequent per million tonnes of extracted
coal as in the USA.18 Despite an increase of more than 50 per cent in the
capacity of coal-processing plants during the 1980s, still little less than half of all
coal produced by large mines is processed – i.e. crushed, washed in order to
separate coal from incombustible waste and sorted by size according to the needs
of different customers.19 Nothing demonstrates the inadequacy of large-scale
state-controlled coal mining in China better than the fact that it no longer
produces the bulk of the country’s coal. Its production share slipped from 56 per
cent of the national output in 1979 to one half in 1984 and to 40 per cent by
1995. Since 1987, collectively or individually owned local mines have been
responsible for virtually all output growth. This has gone a long way towards
reducing China’s long-standing coal supply shortages, as well as alleviating envi-
ronmentally undesirable cutting of trees for fuelwood and the burning of crop
residues in rural stoves.20
 Energy 17

But, in line with a frequent phenomenon in China’s development, this quanti-

tative growth has not been accompanied by qualitative improvements. The race
to open small mines, usually without any geological and technical evaluation, has
led to an enormous waste of resources in an uncoordinated and often illegal
quest for instant profits (at least at a third of some 80,000 small mines may have
been opened illegally). The combination of primitive extraction methods and
inexperienced operators results in very low recovery rates. Because of low
productivity and insufficient profits, many small mines – in some counties a
quarter or a third – have to close down within a few years, or even a few months,
after their opening.
Coal extracted in local mines, including those owned by the state, is sold
almost exclusively in raw state, without any cleaning or sizing. As a result (and in
spite of increasing capacities of washing plants attached to large mines), the
overall share of processed coal in China has remained basically unchanged
during the past twenty years, fluctuating between 18 and 20 per cent. While the
labor productivity of small mines is very low – typically just a few hundred kg of
fuel per shift per worker – occupational risks are extraordinarily high, with fatali-
ties two to five times higher than in large enterprises.21 Mine-roof collapses and
landslides are especially common in the absence of any operating regulations.
Given such a disregard for human safety, it is hardly surprising that the opera-
tors of small mines pay scant attention to the environmental consequences of coal
extraction. Predictable results include extensive destruction of arable and grazing
land, accelerated erosion of exposed topsoils, and increasing air and water pollu-
tion. A recent survey in coal-rich Shenmu county on the Loess Plateau illustrates
these perils.22 Streams filled with mine spoils and increased sediment aggravate
local floods, and erosion caused by mining adds almost another 300Mt of silt to
the Huang (Yellow) River already overburdened with eroded loess. Local air
pollution has increased twenty-four times for sulfur dioxide (SO2) and seventeen
times for particulate matter. These are extraordinary increases caused by an
unusually high concentration of inefficient coking plants and industrial boilers in
one of China’s most affected counties – but all of the country’s industrial and
urban regions have been experiencing unacceptably high air pollution levels, a
state attributable to coal’s dominance in China’s energy supply, to inadequate coal
cleaning capacities, and to inefficient combustion.
Most of the inferior fuel is burned either in the small boilers that fuel local
industries, service establishments and housing estates, or in even less efficient
household stoves (typically these are less than 30 per cent efficient). Only modern
large coal-fired power plants and a growing number of newly installed industrial
boilers are equipped with electrostatic precipitators which effectively remove
particulate matter from hot flue gases. Consequently, Chinese emission factors
per unit of delivered useful energy are extraordinarily high in comparison with
rates prevailing in Western countries. No matter which yardstick is used – Chinese
standards or the World Health Organization (WHO) levels – typical concentrations
of particulate matter in Chinese cities are excessive. Indeed, frequently they are so
high that their annual means surpass recommended daily maxima!23 And many
18 Energy

cities fare much worse: Taiyuan and Linfeng in Shanxi, Lanzhou in Gansu, and
Mudanjiang in Heilongjiang have recorded annual TSP means above 600mg/m3.
Major southern cities are somewhat cleaner, with annual averages of around
300mg/m3 – but such values are still multiples of the WHO’s guidelines (maxima
of 60–90mg/m3 as an annual average).
The average sulfur content of major Chinese coal deposits, about 1.2 per cent,
is not high by international standards, and statistics for large state mines show that
they produce coal with average sulfur content of just 1.04 per cent.24 But some
southern coals, most notably those from Sichuan and Yunnan, have unusually
high sulfur content (up to 5 per cent). Official estimates put SO2 emissions at
15Mt in 1990 and 19Mt in 1996 – but these totals do not contain a sizeable
contribution from spontaneous combustion of coal seams. Mao and Li estimated
that every year more than 100Mt of coal are lost to this difficult-to-control
phenomenon, releasing at least 1.6Mt SO2.25 Given the anticipated increase of
coal consumption, it will be extremely difficult to prevent a further substantial rise
of SO2 emissions.
Annual averages of SO2 concentrations have been above the recommended
WHO levels in every northern Chinese city and, because of high-S content of
many southern coals, also in many centers south of the Yangzi. Beijing annual
means have run between 80µg/m3 in the cleanest suburbs and twice that much
in the most polluted locations. These are low levels compared to annual means
(all in mg/m3) over 400 in Taiyuan and Lanzhou. I have estimated that at least
200 million Chinese are exposed to annual TSP concentrations of above
300µg/m3, and at least 20 million are exposed to twice that level.26 Clean coal
techniques (both combustion and conversion to liquid and gaseous fuels) are seen
as the best way of reconciling China’s high reliance on coal with the need for
environmental protection, but the short-term contributions of this approach are
rather limited. Fluidized bed combustion is not commercially available at ratings
now required for China’s electricity generation (with annual capacity installations
surpassing 15GW, in units of more than 300MW) and, as the costly and aborted
US foray into coal conversion shows, imports of hydrocarbons are preferable.
In the future, flue gas desulfurization will be thus necessary not only in parts
of southern China where highly acid rains (with pH commonly below 4.5) are
already causing serious damage to forests, but also in the north. During the next
generation that region will acquire the world’s largest concentrations of coal-
fired power plants, whose emissions will be carried eastward toward Korea and
Japan. Current emissions are already causing concerns in both countries, but
large-scale desulfurization is an expensive proposition.27
Yet another lasting challenge arising from China’s high dependence on coal is
the heavy burden which the shipment of the fuel places on the country’s railroads
and, increasingly, on its wholly inadequate road network. New electrified lines
were built from Shanxi, the largest coal-producing province, to the coast to facili-
tate growing coal exports (rising from just 6Mt in 1980 to over 30Mt by 1996), but
the main north–south lines of domestic coal transfers are chronically strained by
coal shipments amounting to slightly over 40 per cent of all transported freight.
 Energy 19

The most desirable solution of this problem – burning most of the fuel in large
mine-mouth power plants in China’s north and northwest – is already being
implemented, but high demand for cooling water needed by such plants in a
region with already serious water deficits will limit the extent of this option.28
At least one chronic problem of China’s coal industry has finally been solved.
In order to make coal readily available for expanding industries, China’s Stalinist
planners of the early 1950s priced it so low that even the best coal mines
working some of the world’s richest seams of fine bituminous coal could not
make any profit. This irrational underpricing meant that coal mining accounted
for only about 2 per cent of China’s total industrial output during the early
1990s, and a single oilfield employing several tens of thousands of people could
earn greater profits than the country’s two million coal miners. The Ministry of
Finance introduced a two-tier price system in 1984, and by 1994 the government
finally freed all coal prices. In contrast, prices of crude oil and refined oil prod-
ucts are still tightly regulated. So is the price of natural gas, which rose steeply in
March 1997 when the State Planning Commission announced a twelvefold
increase for fertilizer plants, a near fivefold increase for residential use, and a
fourfold increase for other uses.29 But it is the adequacy of domestic hydro-
carbon resources, rather than the pace of price reform, which has become the
greatest concern of China’s oil and gas planners.

Oil and gas: strategic contradictions

Chinese leaders and Chinese media like to talk and write about contradictions:
few such contradictions are as acute as those presented by the country’s need for
crude oil and natural gas. As already noted, in spite of its large territory, and no
shortage of sedimentary basins with clear promise of oil and gas deposits, China
is a relatively hydrocarbon-poor place (Figure 2.2). The absence of substantial
natural gas reserves is particularly unfortunate. More exploration may eventually
modify, if not reverse, this judgment – but so far the most promising new oil and
gas region has turned out to be a vast disappointment.
Quite a few enthusiasts had initially envisaged the South China Sea as a new
Saudi Arabia – and this promise lured all major multinational oil companies into
an unprecedented giveaway of the results of their geophysical exploration to the
Chinese.30 Disappointment came quickly once the drilling licenses were awarded
in the early 1980s. Now, after fifteen years of fairly extensive exploratory drilling,
the area has one relatively small-size natural gas field in the Yinggehai basin just
south of Hainan and a smattering of small oilfields in the Zhu (Pearl) River
Basin.31 Total output from all of China’s offshore fields (including about half a
dozen oilfields in the Bohai Basin near Tianjin) was less than 7Mt in 1995 – or
still less than 5 per cent of China’s oil extraction.
And although China is no crude oil production dwarf – in 1996 it extracted
141Mt, enough to be the world’s fifth-largest producer – its rapid rate of
modernization has already seen demand surpass domestic production. While the
country still exports crude oil to Japan and Korea, it has been a net importer of
20 Energy

Figure 2.2 China’s sedimentary basins

Source: Based on a map in CASP (1999).

liquid fuels since 1993. With exports declining (from 20Mt of crude oil in 1996
to 15Mt in 1997) and imports rising (from just 3Mt in 1990 to 22.6Mt in 1996),
China now has a growing trade deficit in its crude oil trade. In addition, its
imports of refined products are now approaching the total volume of imported
crude. Except for gasoline, China is now a net importer of all refined fuels, with
fuel oil accounting for just over half of 15.8Mt bought in 1996.
The potential for further increases in demand is very large as per capita
consumption is still only 0.14t/year, or less than 7 per cent of the Japanese
mean. Chinese projections have seen the need for at least 50Mt of imported
crude oil by the year 2000, and forecasts of annual imports of well over 100Mt a
decade later appear conservative.32 Clearly, times have changed: there is no
more boasting about China’s imperviousness to the vagaries of the global oil
market and to destabilizing threats of oil shocks. Oil security is now among the
top concerns of China’s energy planners, as rising demand (averaging 5.5 per
cent a year for the ten years before 1997), barely increasing domestic extraction
(a mere 1 per cent per year for the same period) and fading prospects for discov-
eries of giant fields combine to create a sense of urgency.33
 Energy 21

The only way to avert the need for steadily increasing imports would be to
discover large hydrocarbon deposits in Xinjiang, China’s only remaining great
hydrocarbon frontier. The region already produces almost 5 per cent of China’s
crude oil, but much of it remains to be properly explored. After years of Chinese
drilling, Exxon, Agip and several Japanese companies are now active in the area,
and recent discoveries of both oil and gas have been fairly encouraging. Still, no
supergiant hydrocarbon field has been discovered in the inhospitable deserts of
Tarim in central Xinjiang, or the grasslands of Junggar in the region’s north. As
the Xinjiang experience increasingly mirrors the South China Sea disappoint-
ment, the country could find it difficult merely to maintain its current rate of
production. Just over half of all Chinese crude comes from two aging fields
which have been remarkably successful (mainly due to improved methods of
secondary oil recovery) in maintaining a fairly steady output for nearly three
decades. Heilongjiang’s Daqing oilfields, discovered in 1959, remain by far the
largest of the country’s nearly 300 fields, producing just over a third of China’s
crude oil total. Shengli in Shandong, another old field discovered in 1962, has
recently been adding about 17 per cent.
That the Chinese oilmen do not have blind faith in Xinjiang’s potential has
been clear for some time. China now participates in oil extraction in Canada (its
first foreign involvement began in 1993), Russia, Mongolia, Thailand, Papua
New Guinea, Iraq, Sudan, Peru and Venezuela. These foreign projects were
expected to supply up to 5Mt by the year 2000, and at least an additional 15Mt
by the year 2010. In addition, China will be negotiating deals for substantial
long-term imports of oil and gas from hydrocarbon-rich regions of the former
Soviet Union. The first such deal, announced in August 1997, gave the China
National Petroleum Corporation the exclusive right to negotiate a contract for
developing a giant Uzen oilfield on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea in
Kazakhstan. Even bigger multinational deals involving Russia, China, South
Korea and Japan are planned for massive exports of Russian gas from the giant
Siberian fields to energy-deficient East Asia.34 No matter where most of its
crude oil will eventually come from, China has a great deal of work to do in
order to improve the quality of its liquid fuels. A very important step in that
direction was taken in April 1997, when it was announced that only unleaded
gasoline would be sold in all of China’s major cities by the year 2000. Beijing
was to be the first city to convert to lead-free gasoline.35

Electricity: doubling decades

A universal feature of the most intensive stages of national economic modern-
ization is the demand for electricity growing faster than the total demand for all
forms of commercial energy. Historical data show typical annual growth rates of
between 6 and 9 per cent for the former, compared to 3–5 per cent for the latter.
This means that every decade (or, to be more exact, a period anywhere between
9 and 12 years) sees the demand for electricity double. China conforms closely to
this pattern: its installed electricity generating grew by 8.04 per cent between
22 Energy

1980 and 1995, the growth was to average about 7 per cent until the year 2000,
and it is projected to remain around 6 per cent until the year 2010.36 Because of
China’s already large generating base this has meant a globally unprecedented
spell of new power-plant building activity. Annual additions of new capacity are
now averaging about 16GW, and China’s electricity generation, which in 1980 –
at 300TWh – was roughly equal to British electricity production, was to be in the
year 2000 (at 1,400TWh) the world’s third highest after the Russian and
American outputs of 2000.
Inevitably, coal-fired power plants dominate this expansion. Coal combustion
now generates about three quarters of China’s electricity, with an increasing
share coming from large modern plants, mostly equipped with units (combina-
tions of boiler and turbogenerator) rated mostly at 300MW; domestic units of
600 to 1,000MW are now under development. As a result, fuel consumption per
unit of electricity has been declining, from about 450 grams of coal equivalent
per kilowatt hour (gce/kWh) in 1980 to about 380gce/kWh by 1995.37 Given
the country’s huge water power potential it is not surprising that a massive
construction program of large hydrostations is another key ingredient of China’s
long-term plans. The initial goal was to quadruple the installed capacity between
1980 and the year 2000 by putting online some 60GW of new hydro capacity.
Actual ratings will fall somewhat short of that goal.
By far the best known, and most controversial, part of this program is the
construction of the world’s largest hydroproject, the Sanxia (Three Gorges) Dam
across the Yangzi in western Hubei.38 In order to install 18.2GW of generating
capacity and to produce 85TWh electricity a year, the reservoir will inundate
about 630km2 of land and displace at least 1.2 million people. Unprecedented
opposition to the construction of Sanxia Dam – both inside and outside China –
has been based on a variety of environmental, engineering and economic
considerations, but has failed to sway the leadership.39 Both the USA and
Canada, two of the Western world’s most experienced builders of large dams,
refused to participate in this costly project, as did the World Bank. The official
Chinese projection for Sanxia’s total cost is 200 billion of 1996 yuan, with a
quarter of that to be spent on the dam itself and a fifth on the resettlement of
one million people.40 As we have learned from other megaprojects, this cost esti-
mate is almost certainly an underestimate. Sanxia’s construction is now well under
way: the river was diverted on 8 November 1997 and completion is planned for
the year 2009. The second-largest hydroproject now under construction – Ertan
on the Yalong River in Sichuan – will have 3GW of capacity.41
Nuclear generation is China’s distant third choice for large-scale generation of
electricity. After years of delays China’s first domestically designed nuclear
power plant, a 300MW facility at Qinshan near Shanghai, was completed in
1992, and two years later the six-times-larger Daya Bay station in Guangdong,
equipped with light-water French reactors based on a US design, began
supplying Hong Kong and easing electricity supply shortages in the province.
Early nuclear expectations, much like their Western counterparts, were unrealis-
tically high, as were the latest plans calling for the building of four new plants
 Energy 23

with eight reactors by the year 2001, all in coastal provinces of Zhejiang,
Guangdong and Liaoning.42 Long-term prospects for China’s nuclear power
were given a major boost by the US decision, announced during Jiang Zemin’s
American visit in October/November 1997, allowing American companies to
sell pressurized and boiling water reactors to China. French and Canadian
efforts to sell their reactors will also continue, but forecasting the country’s
nuclear generating capacity remains a much more precarious effort than fore-
seeing its coal-fired and hydro capacities.43
The magnitude of the task, particularly when combined with China’s still
limited technical capacities, means that the expansion of the country’s modern
electricity generating capacity has been, and will continue to be, highly depen-
dent on foreign participation. By 1995, foreign investors had poured almost
US$15 billion into China’s electricity generation, participating in more than
sixty large- and medium-sized thermal and hydroprojects.44 Foreign expertise
has also been important in reducing China’s wasteful energy use.

Rationalizing consumption: efficiency gains

The question of meeting rising demand – i.e. the matter of energy supply short-
falls that have reportedly exercised near-chronic checks on the performance of
China’s economy for the past quarter-century – is more complicated that simple
comparisons of official statistics would indicate. In fact, China is using too much
energy to satisfy its current demand. Signs of this inefficient energy use abound.
There are still too many old Stalinist-style state enterprises whose managers have
never been concerned with optimizing energy use. At the same time, China has
made some impressive, and too little appreciated, advances. Certainly the most
encouraging indicator of its progress toward efficiency has been a rapid decline
of the overall energy/GDP intensity. This measure is a powerful marker of two
critical trends: lower energy/GDP ratios do not merely indicate a more efficient
economy, they also mean that the economy puts, in relative terms, less burden on
the environment by reducing the extent of land, water and air pollution.45
The long-term decline of energy/GDP intensities is expected with advancing
economic modernization, and it has been quite pronounced in both North
America and in Western Europe – but the recent Chinese improvements have
occurred at an even faster rate. If China’s energy/GDP ratio had remained at
the 1980 level, the country would have needed to burn twice as much coal in
1995 to produce that year’s GDP, and hence also generate a much larger amount
of environmental pollution. Using the State Statistical Bureau data on energy
consumption and inflation-adjusted values of the GDP, the national average of
energy intensity was about 0.7 kilograms of coal equivalent (kgce) per 1 yuan of
GDP; by 1990 the rate declined to 0.42kgce/1980 yuan, and in 1995 it was
slightly below 0.35kgce – a bit less than half the value of fifteen years ago.46
Such a rate of decline is unmatched by any other major modernizing economy.
Industrial efficiencies have improved remarkably, not only because of the
introduction of more efficient converters and processes, but also due to the
24 Energy

outright closures of many old plants and to a major shift from production previ-
ously dominated by inherently less energy-efficient heavy industries to light
manufacturing.47 The performance of China’s cement industry, which consumes
about 5 per cent of all commercial energy, is a good example of possible efficiency
gains. Its output has roughly quintupled since 1980, with more than 500Mt (nearly
a quarter of the entire global output) produced in over 7,000 plants. During the
same period, average fuel consumption in about sixty of the largest state-run plants
using rotary kilns fell from about 6.6MJ per tonne of clinker (which is then ground
to cement) to just 4.5MJ/t.48
In contrast, too many small local industrial enterprises remain highly inefficient,
and major efficiency gains are yet to be made in household energy consumption.
Hardly any of today’s Chinese apartments are built with wall and ceiling insulation
and double-glazed windows, and even fewer have any individual temperature
controls – fiberglass and thermostats in millions of newly built apartments would
bring energy savings and environmental benefits for decades to come.
The rise in electricity consumption has been driven not only by rapidly growing
industrial demand, but also by an even more rapidly spreading ownership of
household appliances – and this means that major efficiency gains can greatly
influence future demand. Many Western utilities have become increasingly
engaged in demand-side management by providing credit or offering more effi-
cient converters at subsidized rates. China’s opportunities for this kind of efficiency
improvement are immense, as the country now ranks as the world’s largest
producer of household electric appliances and gadgets. In 1995 its annual produc-
tion capacity reached 80 million electric fans, 20 million color TVs, 15 million
refrigerators, 15 million washing machines, and 8 million room air conditioners.
Even small efficiency improvements translate into large-capacity savings when
multiplied by tens of millions of various appliances.
These savings could be particularly impressive for such appliances as refrig-
erators. In 1989, China surpassed the USA to become the world’s largest
producer of refrigerators, but the insufficient thermal insulation, inefficient
compressors and poor-quality gaskets of typical Chinese-made refrigerators
makes them up to 50 per cent less efficient than for optimized redesigns which
are also chlorofluorocarbon-free.49 Similarly, better designs could cut electricity
demand for a wide variety of smaller gadgets, ranging from electrical fans –
now ubiquitous in all affluent urban households – and rice cookers to hair
dryers and curlers.

Looking ahead: difficult challenges

Even the most desirable combination of trends reducing the growth of China’s
energy demand – further industrial restructuring complemented by persistent
and aggressive energy conservation campaigns – would not prevent significant
increases of China’s primary energy consumption and electricity generation. As
always with Chinese output statistics, impressive growth rates and huge absolute
totals still hide only very modest per capita consumption rates. China’s annual
 Energy 25

per capita consumption of fossil fuels and primary (hydro and nuclear) electricity
now averages about 25GJ. This is more than twice as large as the Indian rate,
but only about one half of the global mean, and – to indicate the distance sepa-
rating China from its great East Asian rival – still less than a fifth of Japanese
consumption.50 Numerous national peculiarities – environmental, economic and
cultural – make it impossible to offer a definite value of per capita energy use
that would indicate a high quality of life in a modernized economy. However,
international comparisons show that the promise of economic security, good
health care and broadly accessible educational opportunities does not come with
annual rates below at least 50GJ/capita.51
Consequently, it is easy to make a case for yet another doubling of China’s
per capita energy use, and because of the expected addition of at least another
250–300 million people during the next two generations the fulfillment of this
goal would require a 2.5-fold increase of today’s total consumption. Even if no
insurmountable extraction and transportation problems accompanied this
growth (most unlikely if given, above all, China’s deepening involvement in the
global oil market), one trend is already causing a great deal of concern. With
about one eighth of the global total, China is currently the world’s second-
largest producer of greenhouse gases. Its emission rates are greater than Russia’s
and a little over half as large as America’s. But while Russian emissions have
actually been declining with the post-Soviet collapse of industrial production,
and while US emissions are growing only very slowly and, given political will,
could be stabilized at current levels or even cut, China’s emissions will increase
substantially during the coming generation.52
Rapid economic expansion and the continuing reliance on coal can be
expected to more than double China’s current carbon dioxide emissions, and
large increases in the other important greenhouse gases are expected as well. As
China develops its natural gas reserves, methane losses will rise. In the agricul-
tural sector, more rice will mean more methane from rice paddies, and more
nitrous oxide from denitrification of synthetic fertilizers. The question is thus one
of when, not if: China will become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse
gases, but it may be as early as 2010 or as late as 2025. At this time, official
policy offers no hope for remedial action. As expressed in the Beijing
Declaration of 1991, China believes that the rich countries are responsible for
the rise in greenhouse gases, both in terms of current emissions and in a cumula-
tive sense, and hence it concludes that the developing countries need not do
anything to limit their emissions until they reach the developed world’s level of
per capita emissions, as well as its historical cumulative emissions.53
Chinese energy will face many challenges, even if there were no signs of rela-
tively rapid global warming during the coming generation. Judging by the
Western experience, dealing with a truly runaway demand for transportation
fuels will be particularly problematic. Expected consequences will be rising
concentrations of ozone (the most aggressive air pollution oxidant created by
complex reactions in photochemical smog), excessive losses of highly productive
farmland, huge economic penalties for time wasted idling in stalled traffic,
26 Energy

further degradation of urban environments, a rising toll of deaths and injuries in

car accidents – and greater dependence on oil imports.54
Although it is not yet too late to avoid the worst and follow the shinkansen model
of transportation by developing a network of efficient rapid train links throughout
its densely populated provinces, Chinese planners are most inappropriately bent
on following the American example: the official policy is for every family to even-
tually have a car.55 This goal is not surprising, as China’s leadership follows the
Japanese and the South Korean pattern of building up auto industry into the
leading manufacturing (and later also presumably export) sector – but its environ-
mental repercussions will be considerable. The two main concerns, already clearly
discernible in and around large coastal metropolitan areas, are the effects of
photochemical smog on human health and on crop yields.
While China’s commercial energy supply is basically adequate, the country’s
noncommercial rural fuel supply remains precarious: in many areas peasants
have barely enough to support minimal existence.56 The combination of small
local coal mines, private fuelwood lots and more efficient stoves has gone a long
way toward easing widespread energy shortages in village households. Mass
adoption of improved stoves – some 100 million have been installed since the
early 1980s – has been particularly helpful,57 but this alone cannot propel rural
populations to modernity. Nor will the role of renewable energies be as helpful
as envisaged by many uninformed enthusiasts. Two of China’s showcase renew-
able programs of the 1970s – small-scale hydrostations and biogas digesters –
have been reduced to modest proportions, as technical problems and economic
realities have made clear their limited utility.58 China has considerable wind
energy (particularly in Inner Mongolia), geothermal energy (in more than a
dozen provinces, and especially in Tibet) and solar energy (everywhere in its arid
interior) potential but, so far, these sources have made only very limited, local
difference, and their future contributions remain highly uncertain.
A quarter-century of frequent long-term energy forecasts has taught us the perils
of such exercises. Even when the numbers may click, the realities do not jibe. In my
first book on China’s energy, written in 1975, my median forecast of the country’s
primary energy demand had an error of a mere 2 per cent for the year 1985, and
only 10 per cent for the year 1990.59 Yet, although I was certain that major changes
were inevitable, I could not have predicted the reality of post-1979 modernization,
with all of its complex implications for energy demand, economic expansion and
environmental degradation. Inevitably, there are more surprises ahead.
Closer looks at several developments noted in the 1998 retrospective –
changing level and composition of traditional energy uses, demise of small-scale
energy conversion techniques, expectations and realities of fossil fuel production,
and the reduction of energy intensity of China’s economy – will take up the
remainder of this energy chapter. But before starting these more detailed
reviews, I should comment briefly about the latest accomplishments of China’s
energy production and trade.
As already noted, China’s noncommercial energy supply improved during the
reform period, but it is far from abundant. A closer look at its absolute levels,
 Energy 27

composition and changes during the closing decades of the twentieth century
reveals more about the realities of everyday life for most of China’s population
than do the recitals of urban and industrial accomplishments. Traditional, and
overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) noncommercial, energy flows and uses are
much harder to study than the supplies and conversions of modern commercial
energies. But ignoring their contributions and changing patterns results in a very
misleading impression of the real state of energy supplies and uses in low-
income countries in general, and in the world’s most populous Asian countries,
still heavily dependent on muscles and phytomass fuels, in particular.

The continuing importance of traditional energies: on

muscles, wood and straw
For millennia all societies had derived their kinetic energy from human and
animal muscles for their heating and cooking needs from phytomass fuels
(mainly wood and crop residues). Gradually, water and wind flows captured by
wheels and mills supplied more mechanical energy, but, except for England,
coal use remained very limited until the nineteenth century. Although we
cannot pinpoint the date, the best possible reconstruction indicates the 1890s as
the decade when fossil fuels, mainly coal and some crude oil, began supplying
more than half of the world’s total primary energy needs (Smil 1994; UNO
1956). The subsequent substitution of animate energies and wood and straws
by fossil fuels and primary electricity (hydro, and since the late 1950s also
nuclear) proceeded rapidly. By the late 1920s wood and crop residues contained
no more than a third of all fuel energy used worldwide, and their share sank
below 25 per cent by 1950 (Smil 2003). Unlike with the well-monitored produc-
tion of fossil fuels and electricity, largely noncommercial uses of biomass fuels
cannot be quantified accurately.
The FAO (1999) estimated that about 63 per cent of the 4.4Gm3 of harvested
wood was burned as fuel during the late 1990s, implying the thermal equivalent
of about 27EJ. Because in many countries a major part, and even more than 50
per cent, of all woody matter for household consumption is gathered outside
forests and groves from bushes, tree plantations (rubber, coconut), and from
roadside and backyard trees, addition of this non-forest woody biomass raises
the total to 30–35EJ. Crop residues (mostly cereal straws) burned by rural house-
holds add about 8EJ. The most likely minimum estimate for the year 2000 would
be then close to 40EJ of biomass fuels, while more liberal assumptions, higher
conversion factors and addition of minor biomass fuels (dry grasses, dry dung)
would raise the total closer to 45EJ.
With about 320EJ from fossil fuels and 35EJ from primary electricity, this
means that in the year 2000 the global energy supplies from all sources were
roughly 410EJ, with biomass energies providing about 10 per cent of the total
(Smil 2003). Sub-Saharan Africa, where wood and crop residues continue to
supply in excess of 80 per cent of fuel in most of the countries, remains the
largest user of biomass in relative terms. China and India are the largest
28 Energy

consumers of wood and crop residues in absolute terms, with Brazil and
Indonesia ranking next. During the mid-1990s China’s annual consumption of
these traditional fuels was at least 6.4EJ, India’s about 6EJ (Fridley 2001;
RWEDP 2000). This means that China still derived close to 15 per cent of its
primary energy from phytomass fuels, compared to roughly 30 per cent in India
and Indonesia, and about 25 per cent in Brazil (IEA 2001). Obviously, this
dependence is much higher when only the total rural energy consumption is
considered, and higher still when it is expressed as the share of energy used for
heating and cooking by China’s peasants.
I became interested in global noncommercial energy supplies almost as soon
as I began studying energy systems. I understand that data shortage is the main
reason why standard energy analyses pay so little attention to these matters, but
– given the critical, indeed truly existential, importance that traditional energy
supplies (or their lack of) play in the lives of several billion people in low-income
countries – I do not accept this as a valid excuse for marginalizing these
concerns. Consequently, as soon as I began working on China’s energy I tried,
in spite of an extreme shortage of data, to gather, estimate and deduce any
information on this important subject.
My earliest work on this topic, done in the mid-1970s, was necessarily based
more on general and theoretical considerations rather than on many Chinese
specifics. This situation improved rapidly after 1980, and, as the following
excerpts from my 1988 and 1993 books will indicate, I used the new information
to present both more detailed, and more accurate, appraisals of China’s rural
energy supplies and needs. More information on China’s traditional energy
became available during the late 1990s, and I have used it in updating this
segment and suggesting some likely future developments.

Energy flows in rural China

Four fifths of the Chinese population living in villages have been until recently
only marginally involved in commercial energy flows, relying as they have for
millennia on solar energy to produce, via photosynthesis, not only the necessary
food and feed but also large amounts of fuel and raw materials. This study of
China’s rural energy flows (Smil 1979a) thus demands a different approach than
the flow analyses used in advanced economies: autotrophic conversions, human
energetics, animate power, and traditional phytomass fuels must be the main foci
of attention. I have attempted to quantify all of these important sources, conver-
sion, and use for 1974, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the PRC, and choose to
present the flows in the form of H.T. Odum’s energy circuits (Odum 1971), a
very convenient tool for such an analysis.

Insolation and primary production

Average annual radiation without clouds would range from 670kJ/cm2 in the
northernmost Heilongjiang to 980kJ/cm2 in subtropical Hainan, and China
 Energy 29

would receive about 8.4 ⫻ 1022J of solar energy annually. Actual duration of
sunshine is sharply reduced by high cloudiness associated with summer
cyclonic flows over much of the eastern half of the country, and intensity of
insolation is attenuated during late winter and spring months by large amounts
of sand and dust swept up from the arid northern regions by continental anti-
cyclonic winds (Watts 1969). Solar energy received at the surface is thus only
between 420 and 585kJ/cm2 a year for most of China, and the annual total is
not higher than 4.8 ⫻ 1022J.
More than half of the solar radiation reaching China’s surface is reflected,
absorbed and reradiated by barren or very sparsely vegetated areas, mostly in
Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and Nei Monggol. Net primary production of
all of China’s land ecosystems totaled about 65EJ in 1974, which means that
approximately 0.14 per cent of solar radiation reaching China’s surface is being
annually converted by autotrophs into new chemical bonds.

Food and human energetics

Conversion of solar radiation by edible plants is, of course, the main source of
food energy for China’s large population. In 1974 China’s harvest reached
approximately 4.2PJ of food and industrial crops, and almost twice that energy
value was gathered in crop by-products, for a total of 12.5PJ; the largely unhar-
vested roots add another 20 per cent to the annual crop phytomass. Construction
of a national food balance sheet for 1974 (for details see the next chapter on
food) reveals that out of the total fresh harvest of approximately 470Mt of food
crops, no more than 65 per cent actually becomes available for human consump-
tion (Smil 1977a). A comparison of caloric availability and need suggests that
China’s food production most likely was just sufficient to meet, on the average,
the nutritional demand of the population.
Most of the energy input is, of course, spent on the growth and mainte-
nance of body tissues and on thermoregulation, and only a minor portion is
converted to useful work. Energy available for activity can be calculated as
the residual after subtracting maintenance energy cost (about 1.5 times basal
metabolic rate for a given weight) from an average food intake, and this
method (WHO 1973) results in an average of 385MJ/year for every econom-
ically active Chinese adult. A representative average of about 400MJ of
useful energy per adult per year multiplied by 390 million economically
active persons in China’s villages would then translate into roughly 160PJ in
1974, and would imply a gross rural labor force energy efficiency of about
11 per cent.

Animal energetics
While domestic animals are only a minor source of food energy for an average
Chinese, they are of considerable importance in a predominantly solar economy
for four principal reasons:
30 Energy

1 they function well on solar energy, eating mostly phytomass unfit for human
consumption (grasses, crop residues, crop processing by-products), supple-
mented, in the Chinese case, with only small amounts of grain;
2 they provide reliable motive power for a variety of farm tasks;
3 their manure production recycles valuable nutrients and improves the
quality and the tilth of soils; and
4 they are an essential source of high-quality protein for the population.

Feed requirements for China’s domestic animals are supplied predominantly

by various roughages; these are obtained by grazing, collection of field weeds,
from many crop by-products (mainly cereal straws, legume and vegetable stalks
and leaves), and also from specific cultivation. The official Chinese recommenda-
tion is to reserve only 6 per cent of the total gross (unmilled) grain harvest,
including pulses and tubers, for feeding. The total energy equivalent of China’s
animal feed amounted to some 8.5EJ in 1974. Some two fifths of this total was
consumed by draft animals that remain an indispensable workforce in the coun-
tryside. Useful energy expended in a year of animal labor adds up to about 88PJ,
implying an average working day efficiency of roughly 9 per cent, an excellent
agreement with the best experimental studies of animal energetics (Brody 1964).
For most areas in China recycled organic matter is still the dominant fertilizer,
and the breeding of pigs is promoted officially as much for the meat as it is for the
wastes. In aggregate, the country’s domestic animals produce annually in excess of
1Gt of fresh manure (or about 200Mt of dry solids), and approximately two
thirds of this amount is gathered, fermented and returned to the fields.

Traditional fuels
For millennia Chinese civilization has been deriving its kinetic energy from
human and animal muscles and its thermal requirements from phytomass.
During the 1970s there was no official record of fuelwood use, and no forests
were maintained specifically for firewood. The fuel came from scavenging of
forest floor debris, lopping of branches, or removal of dead trees, and, unfortu-
nately quite often, from illegal cutting and uprooting of the healthy trees in
accessible wooded areas and from pruning (and damaging) of remaining or
newly planed roadside tress in deforested regions, where reeds on the stream and
canal banks and grass clippings and leaves also are collected.
Richardson (1966) estimated that at least 100 million m3 were used annually
in the early 1960s, and the FAO (1975) figures are in excess of 130 million m3 for
the early 1970s. Assuming that the annual net primary productivity of the
Chinese forests is about 18EJ, area accessibility about 60 per cent, and removal
rate about 15 per cent, the 1974 fuelwood consumption would have reached
some 1.6EJ, the equivalent of roughly 140 million m3. In deforested regions crop
residues always have been the main source of fuel. Although the principal
residues – rice, wheat, and millet straw, corn and cotton stalks, and potato,
vegetable, and legume vines – have a wide variety of uses as animal feed and
 Energy 31

bedding, in composting, mulching, thatching, fencing and packing, and as raw

materials for the manufacture of hats, sandals, ropes, bags, mats and paper
(Tanaka 1973), their consumption as fuel is extremely important throughout
China. A conservative accounting yields about 175Mt, the equivalent of some
3EJ, of crop fuel.

Rural energy flows

As the energy-flow analysis makes clear, China’s countryside of the mid-1970s
consumed annually almost 15EJ of biomass energy in food, feed and fuel (see
Figure 2.3). What, on the other hand, were the modern inputs of primary
energy – fossil fuels and hydroelectricity? Direct fossil fuel and hydroenergy use
in agriculture, predominantly in water pumping and for field machinery, reached
no more than 710PJ, and the total rural use of modern energy, including locally
mined coal and locally produced hydroelectricity consumed by small village
industries and households, did not surpass 2EJ. Using the last figure for compar-
ison, in 1974 China’s rural areas used 7.2 times more biomass energy than fossil
fuels and primary electricity.
It is thus readily apparent that most of China’s population continues to live in
solar-dominated ecosystems, largely independent of external energy subsidies.
Interestingly enough, even for the nation as a whole biomass energies are still
more important than modern inputs: about 17EJ of phytomass was consumed in
China in 1974 as food, feed, fuel and raw material, while the aggregated modern
primary energy flows reached less than 11.3EJ. For more than a decade the
Chinese have been trying to increase the flow of modern energies to the coun-
tryside. In 1974, inventories of mechanical pumps and tractors reached,
respectively, about 27 and 9.5GW (CIA 1977) and the application of chemical
fertilizers almost tripled in comparison with the year 1965 (Erisman 1975).
However, the total 1974 capability of draft animals (at least 25GW), and of
the rural labor force (roughly the equivalent of 20GW), was still some 20 per
cent greater than the aggregate rating of pumps and tractors. And although the
importance of organic fertilizers had been steadily shrinking, in 1974 they were
no less important than the synthetic ones: while some 4.3Mt of inorganic
nitrogen was available from domestic production and from imports (Erisman
1975), a conservative estimate indicates a roughly equal amount of nitrogen
returned to fields from fermented animal and human wastes.

Energy cost of rural modernization

According to the Chinese definition, basic farm mechanization would be
achieved when 70 per cent of all current major field, forestry, animal husbandry
and fisheries tasks were performed by machines. Energy cost of this endeavor
can be estimated on the basis of the flow analysis presented here. Replacing 70
per cent of some 250PJ of the current useful human and animal work by
machinery, would call for an annual direct gross energy expense (assuming
Figure 2.3 Energy flows in China’s agroecosystem in 1974. All figures, except those for nitrogen fertilizers, are in PJ (1015J)
 Energy 33

10–15 per cent conversion efficiency of small machines typically required in the
Chinese conditions) of 1.25–1.75EJ of primary energy. This is an equivalent of
40–60Mt of standard coal. Supplanting the manure and night soil by synthetic
nitrogenous fertilizers would mean doubling their 1974 production at an energy
cost of no less than 5EJ, or some 30Mt of standard coal equivalent. Lowering
the still critical dependence on forest fuels and crop residues for household use by
50 per cent would require an additional 60Mt of coal equivalent, even when
assuming tripled combustion efficiency of better stoves.
This approximate analysis makes clear the enormous energy cost of merely
the most basic rural modernization in the world’s most populous nation. Yet to
lighten the burden of heavy farm work, to enable easier multicropping (when
machinery is essential to perform the field operations speedily), to raise crop
yields through fertilization, and to improve rural living standards, the country-
side had to become more dependent on nonrenewable energy sources.
And, inevitably, it did. Deng’s economic reforms led to many far-reaching
changes in China’s countryside, and substantial increases in the flow of modern
energies to the countryside and higher reliance on synthetic fertilizers were
among the key ingredients of this sweeping change. Chinese statistics show that
rural energy consumption rose to nearly 10EJ by 1980, and to more than 15EJ
by 1990 when commercial energies (coal, liquid fuels and hydroelectricity)
began surpassing the total energy content of biomass fuels. During the late
1990s its total rose to nearly 20EJ, or more than three times higher than during
the mid-1970s (Zheng 1998; Yuan 2001; Fridley 2001). In terms of mechanical
energy, the installed capacity of tractors of all sizes, diesel engines, electrical
motors and trucks used in rural transport surpassed 500GW, more than five
times higher than before the beginning of economic reforms and roughly ten
times higher than the useful power of the still slowly increasing stock of draft
animals (NBS 2001). The increase in nitrogen fertilizer applications has been
far more impressive, from less than 1Mt in 1978 to about 22Mt by the year
2000 (FAO 2002).
A more open flow of previously suppressed information and studies –
inconceivable in Maoist China – revealed severe energy shortages afflicting
hundreds of millions of peasants, and also stressed the magnitude of the
unfinished task of rural modernization. New Chinese studies and statistics,
and my calculations based on these better sources, showed that my original
estimate of energy derived from crop residues was almost perfectly on target:
I calculated 2.9EJ for 1974; the first Chinese rural energy surveys came up
with 3.2EJ for the period 1979–1982. In contrast, my estimate of fuelwood
energy (about 1.6EJ) was too low because it referred only to roundwood
obtained by felling trees. This cut and stacked roundwood is what passes for
fuelwood in Western countries and Russia, but in early 1980s China round-
wood for fuel was available only in a few remaining heavily forested regions,
and even there it came mostly from felling trees of less than 25cm diameter.
The bulk of China’s forest fuel was obtained from any accessible woody and
non-woody phytomass that was relatively easy to gather.
34 Energy

I evaluated most of the new information on China’s rural energy supply in

my second book on the country’s energy, the first version of which was written as
a report for the IDRC (whose revised text was published in 1988), and returned
to the topic once again in 1993 in my second book on the Chinese environment.
Two fundamental changes began to improve both the supply and the use of
China’s biomass energy during the 1980s: extensive planting of private fuelwood
lots, and the state-sponsored introduction of efficient stoves. In spite of its
obvious desirability, the second initiative had a discouraging record by the time
China embraced it.
Improved stoves were one of the iconic objects of the appropriate technology
movement that arose during the 1970s to provide alternative answers to the
modernization requirements of low-income countries. Various programs aimed
at designing and diffusing such stoves tried to replace traditional open, or
partially enclosed, fires with closed or shielded stoves built mostly with local
materials. In spite of a great deal of enthusiasm and interest, the results of these
efforts were largely disappointing (Manibog 1984; Kammen 1995). Many
designs were still too expensive or were not sufficiently durable or easy to repair.
Inadequate training of local craftsmen to build and repair new stoves and, where
needed, financial help in their purchase, were other common problems.
Moreover, standards efficiency gains were hard to evaluate, given the wide range
of actual performances of both traditional and improved cooking arrangements
and lack of uniform measurement.
The Chinese tackled these issues fairly systematically, proceeding from design
competitions that were governed by a standardized set of efficiency measure-
ments, to demonstration projects in selected counties. They then turned the
program into a commercial venture, with households paying more than 85 per
cent of the installation cost to rural energy and service companies, and with
incentives for government officials whose jurisdictions met the conversion targets.
Two decades after the launch of this program the verdict must be largely posi-
tive, although there are still many inefficient unvented stoves around (and
certainly also many abandoned new designs). The combination of private fuel-
wood lots, efficient stoves and a rapidly increasing coal output from small rural
mines finally began to ease the rural energy shortages and to reduce the relative
dependence on phytomass fuels. But more work will have to be done to maintain
adequate supplies of traditional fuels during the coming generation.

Energy for the countryside

The following account (Smil 1988) benefitted from the first-ever surveys of
China’s rural energy supply. Rural energy surveys done in various regions of all
provinces in 1979 established the average daily effective energy requirements of
only 16.2MJ (Wu and Chen 1982) to 18.7MJ (Deng and Zhou 1981) per family,
or a mere 3.25–3.74MJ per day per capita. This means that the nationwide
annual need of 800 million villagers would add up to as much as 1.1EJ of effec-
tive energy. Practically, this means that a typical Chinese rural household of five
 Energy 35

people should burn each day at least 12kg of straw (14MJ/kg), or about 11kg of
woody matter (16.5MJ/kg), or any mixture of these two fuels dominating the
energy consumption in the Chinese countryside, to obtain, with average 10 per
cent efficiency, effective energy of nearly 19MJ. The 1979 consumption survey,
however, indicated that the actual daily availability of effective energy is only
14.5MJ per family, a difference resulting in an average shortfall of some 22 per
cent. Obviously, the supply differs regionally and also fluctuates with the seasons,
and different quantitative and temporal appraisals of this deficit are available.
Yang Jike, speaking at the Second National Symposium on Energy Resources
in December 1980, stated that 500 million peasants (63 per cent of the total)
suffered from a “serious” fuel shortage for at least 3–5 months, and that in the
best-off provinces only 25 per cent of all families were so affected, but in the
worst-off areas 70 per cent of villagers were short of fuel for up to six months
every year. In May 1981 a Xinhua news release estimated that “more than half ”
of the country’s 160 million peasant households were short of firewood, with the
share over 60 per cent in Xinjiang, Hebei, Hunan and Sichuan, and with the
worst situation in twenty-two counties in the valley of the Yarlung Zangbo,
Lhasa and Niamcha rivers in southern Tibet. A year later the same source
claimed that “about half ” of China’s peasant households are short of firewood
for “over three months of the year”, and in November 1982 an unsigned Renmin
ribao article put the share of such households at a curiously precise 47.7 per cent.
According to the 1982 edition of China Agricultural Yearbook, of the country’s
2,133 counties only 397 (19 per cent) in or near the forested mountains have
fuelwood supply adequate to meet all household energy demand for more than
six months, that is, for the whole heating season, and 915 counties (43 per cent)
could cover their basic household energy needs with fuelwood for less than one
month. Precise figures must be suspect and are, of course, irrelevant. Without
them it is easy enough to appreciate the staggering dimension of China’s rural
energy shortage: about half a billion people lacking enough fuel just to cook
three meals a day for three to six months a year!
The total mass of annually harvested crop residues can be estimated with fair
accuracy on the basis of newly available detailed crop output statistics and
typical crop/residue ratios. My calculations for the 1983 harvest total 458Mt, a
sum identical to a differently derived estimate by Wu and Chen (1982) and very
close to Shangguan’s (1980) 450Mt. The rural energy use survey put feeding and
raw material needs at 220Mt; consequently, I will assume that half of all crop
residues are currently used for fuel. These roughly 230Mt of dry residues are (at
14MJ/kg) equivalent to about 110Mt of standard coal, or to about one half of
all biomass fuels burned in China’s countryside in recent years. Without them
over 100 million peasant households of the long-deforested and densely popu-
lated plains and lowlands of the eastern third of China, as well as in the barren
northwest interior, could not survive.
Using the common term fuelwood would be misleading in the Chinese
context. Naturally, villagers in forested regions cut a great deal of roundwood,
both from fuelwood lots and from illegally felled trees in protected forests – but
36 Energy

the fuel comes literally from any burnable tree and forest biomass: not only
branches and twigs, roots and stumps, but also bark off the living trees, needles,
leaves and grasses, and carved-out pieces of sod. People carefully raking any
organic debris accumulated on the floor of even small groves, peasants drasti-
cally pruning the summer growth of trees and shrubs, and children gathering
tufts of grass into their back baskets are common sights in China’s fuel-short
countryside. A 1979 rural energy survey put the total firewood consumption at
181.6Mt a year.
Flows of commercial energies are on the rise throughout the Chinese country-
side, but the critical dependence on traditional biomass fuels cannot be shed for
decades to come. The best estimates calculated or cited here – 230Mt of straw
(110Mtce), 8Mt of dried dung (4Mtce), and 180Mt of forest fuels (104Mtce) –
added up to some 220Mtce in 1983. This is roughly 275kgce for every Chinese
villager, a total accounting for three fifths of all rural energy inputs.
The existing rural energy shortages are so severe, and the future needs so
enormous, that no sensible strategy can abstain from any workable option if it is to
succeed eventually. Given the country’s extensive coal deposits and hydroenergy
resources, both rural coal mining and small-scale electricity generation should keep
expanding – and getting larger in size to take advantage of economies of scale.
And, as in any other poor country where most of the burned phytomass is wasted
in inefficient combustion, improved kitchen stoves could bring impressive aggregate
savings. More efficient stoves would also moderate the rates of deforestation and
reduce the area of fuelwood plots needed to provide a continuous firewood supply.
Serious Chinese interest in improved stoves dates only to 1979, when a series
of tests was done in Shunyi county on the outskirts of the capital to establish the
typical combustion efficiencies of various traditional stoves used in northern
villages. Predictably, stoves burning crop residues (cornstalks) showed the worst
performance, with just 8–14 per cent efficiency; normal firewood stoves averaged
around 15 per cent; and their better models with forced ventilation converted
19–21 per cent of wood into useful heat. Average losses of nine tenths of the
fuel’s heat content were ascribed to five major design inadequacies: combustion
chambers were too large, as were stoking inlets, no fire grates and, in some cases,
no chimneys resulted in poor air circulation, and lack of insulation contributed
to further heat loss.
Eliminating these faults was the objective of two nationwide design competi-
tions sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture and judged in 1981 in Zhouhou
in Henan and in 1982 in Jiangxi. Fourteen winners of the forty-two entries in the
1982 contest had thermal efficiencies between 32–44 per cent for firewood stoves
and between 26–31 per cent for stoves burning crop stalks and straw. All of these
superior stoves have proper fire grates and chimneys, appropriately sized
combustion chambers and fuel inlets, and are designed to operate with 1.5–2.0
volumes of excess air for optimum burn-up; some of the stoves preheat the cold
fresh air by leading it along the hot air outlets. The Chinese, ever enamored of
numerical labels, would like to see all of their improved stoves meeting the
“three 10” challenge: boiling 10 jin (5kg) of water by burning no more than 10
 Energy 37

liang (about 400g) of straw or wood in less than ten minutes. An ambitious plan
of large-scale diffusion of improved stoves started in 1982 in ninety selected
counties around China. By the end of 1983 some 7 million improved stoves were
in use (including 3.9 million stoves in the ninety pilot counties), and the goal was
put at 25 million by 1985.
But even with outstanding stoves everywhere, elimination of the current fuel
shortages and the addition of at least 160–200 million villagers during the next
twenty years will require great increases in biomass availability, and only extensive
planting of firewood groves and forests can satisfy this need. Consequently, it is
incredible that a regime that was conducting all kinds of mass campaigns kept on
forbidding plantings of private fuelwood lots, even in dry and extremely heavily
eroded regions of the northwestern interior. Ideological rigidity saw the owner-
ship of a small woodlot as one of the “last vestiges of bourgeois mentality”, as it
forced peasants to cut out in desperation dry sod or to burn animal dung.
Reversal of this irrational policy came only in spring 1980, long after other
discredited policies had been discarded, when the State Council issued a directive
about private tree planting. The critical point of the new regulations is that house-
hold ownership of the lot should remain unchanged for decades.
By the beginning of 1983, 25 per cent of China’s peasant families were
allotted an average of 0.2ha of hilly or odd land for tree planting. The ultimate
Chinese goal has been to set aside a firewood grove for three quarters of 170
million rural households, so that by the end of the twentieth century the area
with newly planted trees would cover 27–33Mha. Available statistics show, not
surprisingly, that the densely populated East and North have, respectively, only
about 11 and 13 per cent of all barren land suitable for fuelwood planting, while
the Northeast has nearly 18 per cent, the Central South 19 per cent, and the
Southwest almost 27 per cent of the total (Huang 1982). Naturally, the best
growing conditions for various fast-maturing shrubs and trees are in the South –
but there in many areas the warmer climate and greater availability of crop
residues and slopeland grasses make the need for additional fuel less pressing
than in the devegetated, cold North.

Energy shortfall
As rural modernization was finally lifting millions of Chinese villagers well above
the subsistence level, rural energy shortfalls were still common (Smil 1993).
With a view to a good mess of pottage, all hot,
The beanstalks, aflame, a fierce heat were begetting,
The beans in the pot were all fuming and fretting.
Yet the beans and the stalks were not born to be foes;
Oh why should these hurry to finish off those?
Cao Zhi, The Brothers

The classical gem by Cao Zhi is far from being just cleverly amusing: changing
the emphasis, but not forcing the meaning, one can interpret it today as a
38 Energy

perceptive insight into the nature of sustainable farming, a revealing comment

on the tension between food and energy needs. Indeed, it would be greatly
preferable to recycle the stalks – by plowing them directly into the soil, after
fermentation with other organic matter, or as a part of animal manure – to
improve the harvest of the succeeding crop. That Chinese peasants have been
doing this less and less frequently is one of the principal disturbing signs of the
country’s extensive rural energy shortages.
The magnitude of this shortfall is hard to comprehend for anybody in
affluent, fuel-rich societies: every year for several months more than 300 million
people have difficulties finding enough fuel just to cook three simple meals a
day. In their search for anything combustible they turn to any accessible
biomass, causing serious environmental degradation – deforestation, desertifica-
tion, soil erosion, and loss of nutrients. Obviously, in the worst-off areas where
basic food supply continues to be inadequate, these shortages contribute signifi-
cantly to malnutrition, higher morbidity and higher mortality.
Coal from small mines dominates the rural energy supply in parts of
several northern provinces, but elsewhere the cooking and heating needs are
still largely covered by inefficient, and insufficient, combustion of traditional
biomass energies. Unlike in most other populous developing countries, our
knowledge of China’s rural energy supplies is based on actual surveys, done in
various regions of all provinces, that began in 1979 and continued during the
1980s (Wu and Chen 1982; Deng and Wu 1984). Figures released by the
Ministry of Energy in 1989 show that biomass supplied nearly three fifths,
and coal (including coke) about one third of all rural energy; household needs
claimed three quarters of all fuels and primary electricity; while the
expanding rural industries consumed nearly one fifth of the roughly 580Mt
total (Figure 2.4).
Household energy use is dominated by inefficient combustion of traditional
phytomass fuels for cooking and water heating (Long 1989). Roughly three
quarters of China’s crop residues, including more than two thirds of cereal
straws, are burned in cooking stoves rather than being fed to animals or, most
desirably, recycled to maintain high yields. Total combustion of woody biomass
was put by the Ministry of Energy at about 230Mt in 1987, with most of this
fuel going for cooking and water heating. Rural energy surveys found that
nearly 19MJ of useful energy is needed daily to do the basic cooking and water
heating for an average peasant family of five to six people.
As the simple stoves convert crop residues and woody biomass to useful heat
with efficiencies ranging from less than 10 per cent for straw to 15 per cent for
wood (the typical mean would be 10–12 per cent), this demand translates to
about 170MJ of fuel a day, or around 350Mtce/year for rural China. Minimum
heating of uninsulated northern housing requires about 3.3MJ/m2 a day, or
close to 20GJ/family for four months of heating for a total of at least
50Mtce/year. Traditionally there has been little house heating south of the
Changjiang, in spite of the fact that average January temperatures are just
2–4ºC in the northernmost part of the region.
 Energy 39

Figure 2.4 China’s rural energy consumption

Source: Constructed from consumption data in China Statistical Yearbook and Ministry of Energy (1989).
Typical conversion efficiencies taken from Wu and Chen (1982) and ITESA (1987).

The actual availability of around 370Mtce of primary energy for household

use in 1987 was thus nearly 10 per cent below the minimum annual need of
about 400Mtce. Given the great variability of Chinese fuel supply, this shortfall
means that large areas experience acute seasonal hardship. Precise figures are
not available, but the most frequently cited estimate is that one half of all rural
households are short of fuel for three to four months a year. In many dry interior
regions the shortage extends to six to eight months, and in many localities it is
chronic. In terms of affected population, only the Indian situation comes close to
this massive, persistent and genuine energy crisis (CS&T 1985).

Some encouraging news

Extending the story of China’s traditional energy use to the very end of the
twentieth century entails, fortunately, some encouraging news. As economic
modernization has progressed, China’s relative dependence on traditional fuels
has declined. According to my calculations, crop residues and woody phytomass
40 Energy

supplied about 90 per cent of the country’s rural energy consumption during the
early 1970s; this share fell to below 70 per cent in 1980, below 50 per cent by
1988, and to 33 per cent by 1998 (Zheng 1998; Fridley 2001). But the absolute
dependence has remained largely unchanged: while fuelwood harvests declined
by nearly 25 per cent from the peak of about 3.8EJ around 1990, China’s larger
crop harvests have been producing more crop residues, and by 1994 their house-
hold combustion was about a third higher than in 1974. As a result, at 6.5EJ
China’s total consumption of biomass fuels was about as high in 1999 as it was
in 1979. In terms of the total primary energy supply, the biomass share fell from
more than 30 per cent in the mid-1970s to 15 per cent by 1998.
But this nationwide share both exaggerates and underestimates the importance
of biomass fuels in China’s energy supply. The exaggeration is due to the fact that
combustion efficiencies of these fuels remain considerably below the rapidly
improving performance of modern industrial and household converters: although
biomass supplies roughly one seventh of the nation’s energy it probably delivers
no more than one tenth of all useful heat. The underestimate owes to the fact that
phytomass fuels are still the dominant providers of energy for cooking and
heating in more than 100 million rural households. In spite of the continuing
inroads by coal, electricity and liquid fuels, dependence on traditional fuels for
household heating and cooking remains high: crop residues continue to provide
around a third of all rural residential primary energy consumption, about as
much as coal, and fuelwood supplies more than 20 per cent (Fridley 2001).
Household combustion of crop residues peaked in 1993–1994, and a
subsequent improvement in the supply of higher-quality commercial fuels
reduced the demand for this low-quality fuel by nearly 15 per cent.
Unfortunately, this reduced demand for crop residues means that more of
them are burned in the field: in 1998 this share was close to 20 per cent, or
about 140Mt of straws and stalks (Yuan 2001). Field burning is, of course, the
least labor-intensive method of their disposal, but it generates often serious air
pollution and it lets nearly all plant nitrogen escape to the atmosphere (Smil
1999a). This is why Chinese researchers are exploring ways to use the residues
as feedstock for the production of higher-quality gaseous fuels. As these will
not make any early inroads, efficient stoves will remain the main means of
reducing the wasteful use of biomass.
Unlike many Maoist campaigns that flared up and failed, the diffusion of
improved stoves has been sustained since the early 1980s. Since 1984 their
adoption rates ranged rather narrowly between 15 and 20 million units a year,
and ten years after launching the campaign the total number of improved
stoves reached nearly 143 million by the end of 1991. By the end of 1997
about 180 million units had been disseminated to some 75 per cent of China’s
rural households (Wang and Ding 1998), and these stoves are credited with
annual savings of close to 2EJ of fuelwood and coal (Luo 1998). Details of
Chinese stove designs and construction procedures have been readily available
for any interested parties in other low-income countries (Wang et al. 1993)
(Figure 2.5).
 Energy 41

The fate of China’s expansion of fuelwood forests has not been so satisfactory.
The initial spurt of planting new fuelwood plots during the first half of the 1980s
resulted in about 5Mha of fuelwood groves and forests and in annual production
of 20–25Mt of fuelwood a year by the early 1990s (an equivalent of about 0.5EJ),
but then the pace of plantings declined rapidly, from more than 300,000ha in 1991
to just 100,000ha in 1994. Poor monetary returns, reduced state investment and
insufficient appreciation of ecosystemic benefits of fuelwood forests, are the main
reasons explaining this decline. The official total of fuelwood forests, 4.29Mha in
the year 2000, is lower than in 1985, but the State Bureau of Forestry plans to
extend their area to 12Mha by the year 2020 (People’s Daily 2000a).
In the near future we will see a further decline in demand for crop residues in
many relatively affluent parts of coastal China, but largely undiminished needs
for both straw and wood in many parts of the interior. Consequently, it would be
surprising if the country’s combustion of biomass fuels were to fall by more than
10 per cent before 2010. And, contrary to some uncritically enthusiastic reports
about the potential of new energy conversions, nearly all of these fuels will be
burned in household stoves or in small boilers rather than serving as feedstocks
for producing liquid and gaseous biofuels.

Figure 2.5 View, plan and cross-sections of an efficient stove designed in Shandong’s
Wenshang county in 1986. The concrete stove can burn wood, crop residues
or coal with efficiency of up to 40 per cent
Source: Based on illustrations in Wang et al. (1993): 17–18.
42 Energy

A failed strategy: small is not always beautiful

A generation ago it seemed that widespread reliance on small-scale energy
production and conversion techniques was emerging as a particular set of devel-
opmental strategies that would be of a fundamental importance in modernizing
China’s countryside. Small coal mines were the dominant ingredient in the first
category, small hydrostations in the second. The third notable ingredient was the
anaerobic fermentation of organic wastes in biogas digesters. As the campaigns to
disseminate these approaches took off during the 1970s they met with a great
deal of Western admiration and approbation, because they coincided with a fash-
ionable wave of interest in what was usually called intermediate or appropriate
technologies. These invariably small-scale and simple techniques and methods
stood in contrast to large-scale, high-tech approaches that were seen as badly
mismatched with the enormous and pressing needs of poor, populous countries
seeking to satisfy the basic needs of millions of often truly desperate inhabitants.
Consequently, many developmental economists and technical experts were
questioning the transfer of advanced, capital-intensive and highly efficient
Western technology to low-income countries – and argued in favor of the devel-
opmental model combining the modern and the traditional approach as the only
sensible way of modernizing poor, populous nations. Ernst F. Schumacher, with
his Small is Beautiful, became undoubtedly the most influential proponent of this
new approach, and for its worshippers a true guru of smallness. Schumacher
outlined four fundamental rules to support an economy based not on goods but
on people: “1. Make things small where possible. 2. Reduce the capital-intensity
because labor wants to be involved. 3. Make the process as simple as you can. 4.
Design the process to be nonviolent” (Schumacher 1973).
As I was definitely in favor of appropriate techniques, I thought that China’s
stress on some small-energy techniques made a great deal of sense. After all, the
Chinese were not actually doing anything that would be historically so unusual.
Small coal mines were common in Europe of the nineteenth century, and
although naive Westerners reading the Maoist propaganda might have believed
that peasants with the Chairman’s red book in their pockets invented small
hydrogeneration, that is how electricity generation using falling water had started
everywhere, beginning with the world’s first stations in 1881 in Surrey and in
1882 in Wisconsin. During the twentieth century North America, Europe and
Japan moved to progressively larger projects but, by coincidence, Western
interest in small hydrogeneration increased considerably during the 1970s in the
wake of OPEC’s series of steep oil price rises.
But three things made me uneasy about the newfound enthusiasm for small-
ness: I disliked the ideological worship of the scale, because I felt that small
techniques can be successful in the long run only if they are as efficient as
possible, and I thought it naive to believe that they could be the decisive factor in
economic modernization. That is why I resolutely rejected approbation based on
scale alone. Depending on circumstances, small may be indeed beautiful – but
there is clearly nothing inherently superior about it. And I did not see how those
of China’s small-scale energy projects that were built so shoddily and operated
 Energy 43

so inefficiently could have any long-term future. Here is a part of my verdict on

small projects in general, and on China’s experience in particular, written in
1985 and published two years later (Smil 1987): there is nothing I wish to
change. But I should add that the Chinese planners, unlike some Western enthu-
siasts who argued for a truly Gandhian retrogression, had no plans to abandon
large-scale production, and argued that the two modes are complementary.
In the real world there are inherent and predictable, as well as hidden and
surprising, advantages and drawbacks to scales small and large; judging a tech-
nique solely by its scale is neither rational nor useful. Small scale goes too often
hand-in-hand with mismanagement, inefficiencies, high energy waste, and
uncompetitive costs – as best illustrated by the prodigious Chinese experience
with small-scale industrialization between 1958 and 1978.
The Chinese, the world’s leading promoters of self-sufficient smallness,
concluded that the approach was not only wasteful, but that it was clearly insuffi-
cient to provide a foundation for the industrial advancement which is so badly
needed by all poor nations. In this respect power output considerations become
critical. Most operational techniques based on renewable resources can be, when
properly maintained and run, very helpful to a rural household or a small village
supply – but they cannot support such basic, modern, energy-efficient industries
as iron- and steelmaking, nitrogen fertilizer synthesis, and cement production.
Poor countries need it all: two hot meals a day, higher crop yields, widespread
industrialization. Obviously, going “from the ground up” by means of small
decentralized energy services would not, costs aside, be without many local bene-
fits, but a prompt and dramatic contribution to world equity would hardly follow.
After all, small-scale decentralized energy sources are still an everyday affair for
the poor world’s peasants, and while replacing today’s inefficient rural stoves or
open fireplaces with solar cookers and biogas digesters would be an important
qualitative gain, it would still be only a partial one, as growing populations, rapid
urbanization and higher food production cannot be managed without reliance
on large-scale industrial processes.
The following two selections (Smil 1976b, 1988) trace the rise of small energy
projects during the 1970s and the changes that took place during the first decade
of Deng’s reforms: a retreat of small hydrogeneration and biogas digesters, but a
rapid increase in the numbers of small coal mines. As I will explain in the last
section of this segment on small techniques, a reversal of these fortunes took
place during the 1990s, when the construction of larger and better-built small
hydrostations embarked on a steady expansion, while the state finally forced the
closure of more than four fifths of dangerous and costly small mines.

Expansion during the 1970s

China, the largest and the most populous of all developing countries, has been
forced by necessity to adopt the intermediate technology approach based on very
similar principles: any effort to modernize her vast and backward countryside is
hardly imaginable in any other way. Although the achievements have been
44 Energy

mixed, the basic soundness of the approach cannot be doubted. While energy
output of large enterprises has increased dramatically since 1949, virtually all of
this production has been destined for major industries and urban areas.
Production of fuels and electricity by small rural enterprises has thus played the
crucial role in rudimentary modernization of the Chinese countryside.

Small coal mines

Massive opening of small outcrop mines had a spectacular, though ill fated,
beginning during the years of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960). The native
pit campaign became, together with the erection of small backyard iron
furnaces, the chief embodiment of Mao’s economic delusions about instanta-
neous industrialization. Some 110,000 pits were in operation by the end of the
first Great Leap year (1958), engaging the incredible number of 20 million
Chinese peasants (Wu and Ling 1963). The increase in native pit extraction
continued in 1959 – but further expansion was obviously unsustainable. Much
of the hastily expanded and badly disorganized pit output, often of appallingly
low quality, was wasted; the lifetime of many small mines was ephemeral; a
large part of the production was consumed in an equally ephemeral iron-
making campaign.
After the collapse of the Great Leap in 1960, the coal industry was thrown
back to near the 1957 level, and small mine output declined by about 60 per
cent (from over 66Mt claimed in 1960 to about 26Mt in 1961). Production
started to climb in the mid-1960s, but most of the new small mine capacity has
been added since 1969. This new wave of small mine diffusion has differed
substantially from the aborted Great Leap expansion. The basic rationale is,
undoubtedly, the same: small mines can be opened up and brought to their full
capacity much faster than the large enterprises; they can be run at a relatively
low cost, relying on abundantly available labor. However, the actual execution is
different. Opening of new small mines is now done in a rather orderly manner,
with some essential planning and, if one is to accept official claims, with much
more real success: close to one third of China’s raw coal output originates in
small mines, a higher share than at the height of the Great Leap native pits
campaign.

Small hydrostations
Construction of small hydrostations has been perhaps the most meaningful
application of an intermediate energy conversion technique in China, especially
during the recent past. The program was originally initiated as a part of massive
water conservancy work during the Great Leap years. Construction of thousands
of small stations with the total capacity of 900MW began in 1958, and a very
ambitious plan predicted 1GW total in 1962 and as much as 2.5GW in 1967.
The reality was much less impressive. During the year between October 1957
and September 1958, 4,334 small stations with aggregate capacity of 131.5MW
 Energy 45

were put into operation, and another 200MW were finished in 1959 (Carin
1969). Then the Leap collapsed and the massive construction of small hydrosta-
tions was abandoned – to be resurrected only in the latter half of the 1960s.
General guidelines for the development of small hydrostations are quite
simple: dependence on local resources, maximum thrift and construction speed.
Stations are built with funds accumulated locally. Labor and construction mate-
rials are strictly local. Traditional mass methods of construction are used in
almost all cases. Small dams are either rock-filled or earth-filled structures,
requiring only a minimum of cement, steel and timber. Some 50,000 small and
medium hydrostations were in operation in 1973, and over 60,000 in September
1975 (NCNA 1975), concentrated overwhelmingly in the rainy southern half of
China. The Yangzi basin has about one third of all stations, approximately four
fifths are in the eight southernmost provinces, and Guangdong alone accounts
for almost 20 per cent.
Naturally, the typical installed capacities of these stations are very small: avail-
able figures for the southern provinces give the weighted average of roughly
48kW per station. Consequently, the total capacity of China’s small hydropro-
jects was around 2GW in 1973 and about 3GW in 1975. Small and medium
hydrostations have contributed immensely to the basic electrification of the
Chinese countryside. In 1974 they accounted for about one third of the total
hydrogeneration.

Biogas generation
Biogas generation has been spreading throughout some of China’s rural areas
since the early 1970s. The procedure is, at least in principle, rather simple and the
processes involved are well known. Animal dung, night soil, pieces of vegetation
(crop stalks, straw, grass clippings, leaves), garbage and waste water are sealed up
in insulated containers (digesters, pits) and left to decompose. Digestible organic
materials are broken down by acid-producing bacteria and the volatile acids are,
in turn, converted by anaerobic methanogenic bacteria into a gas which is typi-
cally composed of 55–70 per cent methane, 30–45 per cent carbon dioxide and a
trace of hydrogen sulfide and nitrogen. Besides the versatile low-pressure
medium-energy gas (between 22–26MJ/m3; pure methane has 39MJ/m3), the
process yields an organic fertilizer of outstanding quality, and can considerably
improve the sanitation of rural areas (Fry 1974; Kashkari 1975).
Small-scale, noncommercial production of biogas was tested in India and in
Europe in the late 1930s, but it has received greater worldwide attention only
during the past decade. The first Chinese attempts date from the Great Leap
period, but a massive and apparently well-organized campaign to popularize the
technique started only a few years ago in Sichuan. More than 30,000 tanks were
built throughout the province by the end of 1973, the total was 209,000 a year
later, and twice as many (410,000) digesters were reported to be in operation by
the middle of 1975 (NCNA 1975a). About 50,000 digesters were operating
outside Sichuan in the summer of 1975. The effort is supported through
46 Energy

national conferences, training of technicians (100,000 in Sichuan alone), manu-

facturing of simple gas stoves and lamps, rubber or plastic pipes and pressure
gauges, and by designing differently shaped fermentation pits. Construction of
containers is claimed now to be simpler and cheaper, and a typical 10m3 digester
is, when properly managed, sufficient to supply a South Chinese family of five
with enough fuel for cooking and lighting (NCNA 1975b).

Changes during the 1980s

China’s small-scale energy operations were clearly a part of the Maoist develop-
mental strategy that prevailed, with ups and downs and modifications, for two
decades between 1958 and 1978. As such they had to be profoundly affected by
Deng’s economic reforms. After 1978 they were no longer subject to ideologi-
cally driven promotion and construction campaigns, and as they were
increasingly seen in a purely economic perspective they could not remain shel-
tered under the protective cover of political correctness. Economic realities
asserted themselves most rapidly in the case of biogas digesters. In June 1979
their numbers reached a record of 7.1 million units, and there were plans for ten
times as many digesters by 1985. In reality, their total fell below 4 million by
1984, and although it rose a bit in subsequent years it has never again surpassed
the 1979 total.
The fate of China’s small hydrostations has been only superficially alike.
Their total had also peaked in 1979, with about 90,000 projects in operation,
and fell by 20 per cent by 1985 – but their total installed capacity kept on
increasing, as many newly built stations were much larger than the combined
capacities of dozens of abandoned mini-projects. As a result, average installed
capacity nearly doubled from 70kW in 1979 to 132kW by 1985, as state loans
became available even for projects larger than 12MW, formerly the limit for a
small hydrostation. First, an excerpt from my second book on China’s energy
(Smil 1988) will detail why these changes in biogas and small hydro construction
took place. In contrast to these two declines and transformations, the develop-
ment of small mines reached new highs during the 1980s, and their importance
continued unabated into the 1990s (Smil 1993). Then, unexpectedly, came their
massive post-1997 demise. I will describe these events by drawing on the Chinese
information published until the end of the year 2002.

Biogas redux
Chinese came to consider biogas generation to be not only an effective way of
solving energy problems in rural areas that are short of coal, fuelwood, or hydro-
electricity but, owing to its other benefits – high quality fertilizer, improved
hygiene and less air pollution – a most desirable component of rural develop-
ment throughout China (Smil 1988). Consequently, China’s second national
biogas conference, held in summer 1978, heard about plans for 20 million
digesters in 1980 and 70 million units by 1985. Yet by 1984 there were fewer
 Energy 47

operating digesters (3.76 million) than in 1977 (4.3 million), and the program
was set back especially in Sichuan, the birthplace and main promoter of the
technique: the province had nearly two thirds of China’s units in 1978, but
about two fifths of its peak number of biogas digesters were abandoned by 1982.
While it’s still possible to come across some new plans quoting fabulous
digester totals by the end of the 1980s, the skepticism must be deep, especially
when the statistics of the National Methane Production Leadership Group
showed that of the remaining digesters only about 55 per cent can be used
normally, and among these “not too many can be used to cook rice three times a
day, still less every day for four seasons” (Huang and Zhang 1980). The reasons:
the technique, so simple in principle, is rather demanding in practice. Digesters
fail for several reasons. Leakage of biogas through the covering dome, cracked
walls or bottom, improper feedstock adding and mixing practices, shortage of
appropriate fermentation substrates, formation of heavy scum, and inhibition of
bacteria by low temperatures were the leading causes.
Unless the digesters are well built (the slightest water and gas leaks ruin the
process) and convenient to feed and clean; unless careful attention is paid to
proper temperature, C/N ratios of feedstocks and pH of the fermenting
mixture; and unless the digester is frequently fed with the right kind of degrad-
able materials, the units can turn quickly into costly waste pits and are
abandoned. Not surprisingly, failures in the second year of operation were
common, and for millions of peasants digesters were a burden and a costly loss.
In many instances a small family digester was simply of no great benefit
compared with the time, effort, and investment put into producing woven
baskets, tobacco, eggs or pork. The long overdue demise of command farming,
which led to more food, resulted in the disappearance of many mass campaigns,
including the “enthusiastic” building of digesters. More fundamentally, inherent
limitations on the efficiency and expansion of the process would keep the contri-
bution of biogas to China’s rural energy supply surprisingly low, even under the
best circumstances.
If half of China’s rural families owned a small digester there would be a stag-
gering 80–90 million units for which to find proper feedstocks. Even assuming
that enough animal, human and crop wastes were available, the digesters could
properly operate for seven to eight months only in southernmost China, just
three to five months north of the Changjiang; the nationwide weighted average
based on Chinese data is seven months. With an average digester volume of 8m3
and mean generation rate of 0.2m3 of biogas per m3 of digester, this would
translate to some 29Gm3 of biogas a year, equivalent to just 25Mt of coal equiv-
alent, or some 8 per cent of China’s current biomass energy use! Even when
considering the fact that biogas could burn more efficiently than straw or wood,
the best imaginable contribution would not surpass 15 per cent of today’s inade-
quate rural biomass energy consumption.
Still, this is a worthwhile approach – but only at a slow and voluntary pace,
not in hasty campaigns leaving behind useless expense of labor and materials.
And only in locations well suited for sustained generation, that is, throughout the
48 Energy

warmer southern provinces where the biogas production can go on, although
diminished, even in winter months. In such locations it may also make sense to
build larger village-size digesters, where the gas can be used for local electricity
generation.

Larger small-scale projects

Widespread construction of small hydrostations has been perhaps the most successful
innovation transforming China’s rural energy consumption, the most realistic and
the most sensible choice for the basic electrification of large areas of isolated Chinese
countryside. Its growth during the 1970s was impressive, from about 26,000 in 1970
to almost 90,000 in December 1979. In terms of installed capacity the growth was
even more rapid, from 900MW in 1970 to 6.33GW in 1979.
Post-1978 changes affected the development of small-scale hydrostations in
several important ways, none being more notable than the abandonment of a
large number of hastily built, inefficient projects. It is not difficult to see the
reasons for this decline. Drastic lowering of water storage or a complete desicca-
tion of reservoirs during the severe droughts that afflicted large parts of China in
the late 1970s and early 1980s wiped out numerous small projects in several
northern, eastern, and south-central provinces. Accelerated silting destroyed the
usefulness of many reservoirs, and poor engineering, so common in projects built
during the past mass campaigns, has been responsible for the demise of others.
Although the numbers were declining, total installed capacity and mean size
kept rising: at the end of 1985, 72,000 stations had 9.5GW, which is an average
of 132kW per station. However, the average size of newly completed stations
rose to 218kW in 1981 and 232kW in 1982, and the 1,150 stations completed
during 1983 averaged about 250kW, with projects of several megawatts
becoming relatively common. Consequently, the Chinese definition of a small
hydrostation has shifted considerably: in the 1950s it included only projects
below 500kW; in the 1960s the limit went up to 3MW; and the current definition
of a small hydrostation embraces all single-generator projects not exceeding
6MW and group (cascade) installations up to 12MW. Moreover, at a January
1980 meeting the Bank of China and the Farmers’ Bank of China recom-
mended that in all suitable places (i.e. in locations with rich water resources,
adequate investment funds, equipment, materials and skills) the limit of 12MW
should be lifted and loans be made available to build larger small stations.
China’s newfound appreciation of costs and rational economic management are
clearly responsible for these moves.
Small as these stations are, many have rated capacities much beyond the
generation potential: “a big horse pulling a small cart” is an apt Chinese descrip-
tion of this phenomenon (Yu 1983). An average load factor of about 25 per cent
(roughly 2,200 hours a year), and the nationwide mean of around 2,000 hours
annually during drier years, 2,500 hours during the rainier ones, compares unfa-
vorably to means of 4,000–4,500 hours available for generation in larger power
plants. As for the cost, the Chinese are emphatic in stressing the economic
 Energy 49

viability of small stations, although their capital cost is mostly higher or at best
roughly the same as in large hydroprojects. Generating costs are, however, some-
what lower. Clearly, small hydros are in China to stay – and to grow larger. Their
importance goes beyond the fact that they have been producing roughly every
twentieth kWh in China: in most cases these stations have been the first source of
electricity for the villages, and have served as the foundation of the rudimentary
electrification of China’s countryside.

Continued expansion of small coal mines

Post-1978 large-scale modernization plans could have been expected to de-
emphasize the importance of small mines, but the household responsibility
system gave them an excellent boost. Of the 50,000 small mines operating in
early 1985, about 10,000 were run by individuals in yet another demonstration
of flourishing rural industrialization that has been taking villagers from the
fields. No less importantly, economies of scale are making themselves felt: 2,000
mines now have capacities of over 30,000t of raw coal a year, and the largest
ones are extracting more than ten times as much.
Most of these small mines are as simple an operation as could be imagined:
open pits or shallow shafts where coal is dug out and removed without any
special mining equipment and without even rudimentary safety rules and
precautions. During the early 1980s many small underground mines did away
with the single exit, installed some kind of ventilation, and banned open-flame
illumination and sparking blasting fuses. A Chinese coal industry journal may
not be wrong for seeing in these changes the beginning of a transformation to
normal small-scale production mines, but the task may not be completed for
decades and the inefficiencies, waste and appalling working conditions will
remain the mark of small rural mining for a long time to come.
This assessment is inevitable in view of the 1983 decision to end the state
monopoly on coal mining, aimed at relieving the country’s chronic energy short-
ages. On 22 April 1983 the State Council approved the Ministry of Coal
Industry’s recommendations to base China’s long-term coal expansion once
again on “two legs”: “While emphasizing development of the country’s uniform
allocation coal mines, to develop local state-owned coal mines and small coal
mines as well”. The new regulations permit private – individual or group –
ownership of small mines while forbidding “reckless mining and indiscriminate
digging” and “requiring the establishment of ‘minimal safety conditions’ ”.
Perhaps most significantly, “coal mines and the masses are to be allowed to use
various kinds of transportation equipment for the shipment of coal”, and they
may haul coal over long distances for sale without interference from any jurisdic-
tion. Predictably, these regulations resulted in a coal rush surpassed only by the
Great Leap mania. In March 1985, more than one million villagers were
working in 50,000 small pits.
The rush is not completely unregulated: the Ministry of Coal Industry set
aside large areas with reserves amounting to 35Gt just for small-scale production.
50 Energy

Peasants must apply to provincial coal resources commissions for permission to

start extraction, and local authorities should see to the application of essential
technical standards. Still, there is little doubt that indiscriminate, wasteful and
dangerous extraction is the norm rather than an exception in thousands of cases.
The state readily closes one eye: the new capacities and tens of millions of
tonnes of new output need very little money from its treasury. In 1984 Zhongguo
meitan bao reported that during the 1970s it cost 47 yuan to develop one tonne of
new capacity in state-run local mines, while Shanxi peasants boosted the annual
output of their small mines by 40Mt at a cost of a mere 7 yuan/t. Shanxi’s
peasant mining has been extolled as a great success story. In 1984 about 40Mt (of
70.6Mt produced) of their output was shipped out of the province, mainly to
fuel-short Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
China’s future plans are critically dependent on small-mine extraction, and
the recent Chinese writings profess no concerns about the desirability of its rapid
expansion. According to China’s leading coal-mining journal, local pit extraction
is to grow by more than 20Mt a year “to reach 450Mt by 1990, with limitless
prospects”. In 1986 the Chinese press carried stories of things that should not be
happening anymore: mining accidents with numerous casualties as farmers rush
to work in unsafe pits, and open plundering of the resources as mines continue
to be set up indiscriminately. That fundamental question about Chinese inten-
tions returns here once again: is it the quality (economically mined, cleaned, and
sorted coal suitable for a wide variety of efficient final uses) or quantity (fuel
seemingly cheap but burdened with a large proportion of uncombustibles
precluding efficient utilization) that the planners are after?
The answer to that question remained predictably orthodox for another
decade after I asked it in 1988. Extraction of poor-quality raw coal – and coal
could be really a misnomer in numerous instances when the material contained
more rocks and clay than carbon – in tens of thousands of small mines
continued to grow during the first half of the 1990s. But, starting in 1998, there
came a sudden reversal: this process, which had seen the number of China’s
small coal mines reduced by more than 80 per cent by the end of 2002, may
continue, albeit at a gentler pace, for a few more years. During the same time
there have been some signs of reviving a nationwide biogas program but, even if
relatively successful, such development would have little impact on China’s
overall energy supply. In contrast, the construction of small hydrostations
continues at a fairly steady pace, and these are the only valuable survivors of
China’s infatuation with small energy systems.

A new era
Extraction in China’s small coal mines doubled its share of overall production
during the 1980s (from 17 to 38 per cent), and then went on to surpass half of
the country’s huge coal production by 1996 (Fridley 2001; Thomson 2003). And
nothing had changed about its original circumstances and consequences. A very
large share of small mines (by some claims up to 80 per cent) operated illegally;
 Energy 51

indiscriminate exploitation of accessible seams resulting in extensive environ-

mental degradation, above all in significant local losses of farmland taken up by
mushrooming numbers of outcrop or pit mines, and by mine wastes and access
roads, was the norm; and wherever the coal from small mines fuel was burned,
unwashed and unsorted, it only added to the country’s already excessive particu-
late and sulfurous air pollution.
But, most tragically, casual neglect of even basic safety rules was responsible
for accident rates that would be intolerable in any other industrial undertaking,
indeed even in China’s own large mines. According to China’s official statistics,
between 1994 and 1998 deaths in China’s large, state-owned coal mines averaged
1.24/Mt of coal mined, while in small mines the mean for the same five years was
a staggering 8.64 (Fridley 2001). For comparison, twenty-nine coal mining fatali-
ties recorded in the USA in 1998 prorated to 0.03 deaths per million tonnes of
extracted coal (MSHA 2000), a difference of two orders of magnitude. In abso-
lute terms, the death toll in China’s small coal mines was surpassing 5,000 people
a year since 1994, and this unacceptable record became finally one of the two key
reasons for the state’s drastic curtailment of rural coal-mining enterprises. But
clearly not the most important one, because by that time extraordinary, albeit
somewhat lower, rates of fatality were tolerated for more than a decade.
The most important reason for the drastic campaign of small-mine closures
was the excessive production of coal. China’s raw coal extraction doubled
between 1980 and 1994, from 620 to 1,230Mt; it peaked at about 1.375Gt in
1996; and it remained above 1.3Gt in 1997. At the same time, the improving
energy intensity of China’s economy (to be appraised in the last segment of this
chapter) and growing supplies of hydroelectricity, natural gas and imported
liquid fuels, made much of this rising fuel production superfluous. Given the fact
that small collieries were responsible for about half (the peak rate was 52 per
cent in 1996) of all coal output, and that their poor productivity and dismal
safety record should have sufficed on their own as reasons for closing down most
of them, it did not come as a surprise that the decision to reduce China’s coal
extraction was executed largely by eliminating tens of thousands of small mines.
As China’s coal production fell by 25 per cent between 1997 and 2000 – from
1,325 to 989Mt – the total number of small coal mines was reduced by more
than 50 per cent, from 82,000 in 1997 to about 36,000 by the end of 2000; more
than 10,000 mines were shut down during 2001. About 23,000 mines were still
in operation as of May 2002, but the plan called for closing 8,000 more opera-
tions during the remainder of the year, to bring the total to no more than 15,000
mines (People’s Daily 2002). With China’s coal extraction rising once again (up by
almost 11 per cent in 2002, to 1,110Mt) it is impossible to say if further cuts in
small mine operations and their natural attrition will lower this total even further,
or if this may be a new longer-term bottom. In any case, it appears most unlikely
that China would resort once more – as it did during the Great Leap years and
then, unexpectedly, for more than fifteen years during the time of economic
reforms – to an exceptionally high reliance on such inefficient, environmentally
damaging and dangerous means of producing a low-quality fuel.
52 Energy

During the 1990s I would have said that “most unlikely” is also the best
verdict about any comeback of China’s biogas generation – but there are appar-
ently plans for its revival. The People’s Daily (2000b) cited a Vice-Minister of
Agriculture promising that “China will speed up the research and application of
biogas technology under the system of market-oriented economy”. This article
also claimed that there were 7.6 million biogas digesters in operation, while Yuan
(2001) put the total at 6.88 million units. Setting aside the usual unreliability of
Chinese data, what matters is the actual contribution these units could make to
China’s energy supply.
Even when crediting them with 50 per cent improved efficiency compared to
the units built during the late 1970s (an average of 0.15 rather than 0.1m3/m3 of
digester a day), seven million digesters would produce (assuming, liberally, 250
days of full operation) about 2Gm3 of biogas. This would be equal to about
50PJ, or less than 0.15 per cent of China’s total primary energy supply in the
year 2001, and to no more than 0.25 per cent of the country’s rural energy
consumption. Clearly, even an unlikely doubling of the current biogas genera-
tion would not make any noticeable difference to China’s energy use.
And so small hydrostations are the only enduring component of the original
triad of energy techniques embraced during the Maoist period because of their
scale, that is worthy of further expansion. This makes sense particularly because the
projects are now larger in size (averaging almost 600kW), better designed and better
built. After all, China has the world’s largest hydroenergy potential, and a significant
share of it (at least 100GW) can be tapped only by small (or relatively small)
stations. Official statistics put the aggregate installed capacity of some 43,000
projects at 24.85GW in the year 2000 when another 1.5GW were put online (IN-
SHP 2002). One third of this capacity is in stations smaller than 500kW, three fifths
in projects rated at less than 10MW. Four southern provinces (Sichuan, Guangdong,
Fujian and Yunnan) account for nearly 60 per cent of the overall capacity.
Given the facts that 75 million people still have no access to electricity and
that its rural per capita consumption averages just 280kWh (that is an equivalent
of just three 60W lightbulbs lit for about four hours a day), it is a rational
strategy to nearly double this low consumption before 2010 by building more
small hydrostations: continuation of the recent pace (at least 1.5GW of new
capacity a year) would bring the total capacity of China’s small hydroprojects to
about 40GW by the year 2010, or nearly as much as Russia had installed in 1999
in all of its hydrostations.

From a new Saudi Arabia to concerns about oil

security: the ups and downs of China’s oil industry
Crude oil prices were fairly steady during the first half of the twentieth century
and between 1945 and 1969 they actually declined in real terms. OPEC’s first
round of crude oil price increases abruptly reversed that trend as the prices nearly
quadrupled between October and December 1973, from $3.01 to $11.64/barrel
(Smil 1987). Resulting temporary supply shortages panicked not only politicians
 Energy 53

but also many energy experts: they should have known better than to tell the
world that the OPEC action was an unmistakable sign that the world was running
out of oil and that the lights were going out on Western civilization.
I belong to the minority that did not join this Cassandric chorus, and our
views have been amply confirmed by history. More than a quarter-century later,
global crude oil production is nearly 40 per cent above the 1973 level, oil prices
adjusted for inflation are lower, and the reserve/production ratio is about forty
years, compared to just thirty-one years in 1973 (BP 2002). This means that even
without any new discoveries the world could produce crude oil at the 2001 rate
until the year 2041 – but the oil industry is always diligently searching for oil,
and there is little doubt that the fuel will retain a critical, albeit declining share of
the world’s primary energy supply until well past the year 2050 (Smil 2003).
But OPEC’s ascent was undoubtedly China’s luck: the OPEC-induced crisis
arrived just as the country began its opening to the world, and one of its first
important economic acts was to offer crude oil to Japan. The Japanese, heavily
dependent on the Middle East, jumped at this opportunity, and then let wishful
thinking take over as they claimed that imports of first tens, and then hundreds
of millions of tonnes of China’s petroleum, were just a matter of years. That did
not, indeed could not, happen.
But the idea of China as a new Saudi Arabia came back to life just a few
years later, as the country opened its offshore waters for foreign oil and gas
exploration. Stratigraphy of the South China Sea bed off Guangdong and
Hainan was seen by some experts as resembling closely that of the Persian Gulf,
a promise that attracted every major Western oil company into competitive
bidding for the rights to explore it. Again, the Chinese timing was extremely
fortuitous, as the entry of multinationals into China coincided with OPEC’s
second round of oil price increases in 1979–1980, a hike triggered by the fall of
the Iranian monarchy and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to claim the
country for his theocracy of medieval mullahs. That dream, too, was short-lived,
as the South China Sea proved to be a valuable, but definitely not a major, oil
province. While definitely worthy of further exploration and certain to yield a
number of small- to medium-size oil and gas structures that will contribute to
China’s hydrocarbon supply for decades to come, the Nanhai is no North Sea
containing a number of giant oil and gas fields.
More than a decade after the Nanhai story began, the basin was producing
less than 2 per cent of China’s crude oil. By 1993 the location of the dream had
shifted far inland, into the extremely inhospitable deserts of Xinjiang’s Tarim
Basin. Incredibly enough, the story of Western involvement repeated itself. As
Paik (1997: 2) noted, “China decided to let the foreigners in, but gave them the
least desirable tracts”. As with the Nanhai, exploration in the no less geologically
complicated Tarim basin began producing oil and gas finds from medium- and
small-scale oil reservoirs – but after more than a decade of searching there is no
sign of any supergiant fields of the Middle Eastern class.
And so a reversal took place by 1993, as China became a net importer of oil
and refined products. Declining amounts of crude oil were shipped from China,
54 Energy

mainly to Japan, during the rest of the 1990s, but the net imports nearly tripled
between 1993 and 2000, and a new fashion in oil trade forecasting is now to
predict when China will surpass Japan to become the world’s second-largest
consumer of oil and, eventually, its second-largest importer behind the USA.
Not surprisingly, this has brought a new kind of worry stemming from China’s
growing dependence on imports: what this will do to the country’s perception of
economic and political security, to its role in Middle Eastern affairs, and to world
oil prices (Troush 1999; Soligo and Jaffe 1999; IEA 2000)?
As the following excerpts show, I counseled caution when the country was seen
as a new fabulous source of oil for the first time during the mid-1970s (Smil 1975,
1976c), as well as a decade later when its offshore oil potential attracted a new
wave of exaggerated expectation (Smil 1988): it was always highly unlikely that
China could become a new Saudi Arabia. And I still counsel caution when the
reverse view is now the fashion of the day, that is when the country’s increasing oil
imports are seen as one of the key reasons for accelerating competition for the
world’s diminishing oil supplies and for driving up the world price of oil: I believe
that China’s oil imports will not rise as steeply as many experts now fear.

Export dreams and realities

Mr Ryutaro Hasegawa, chairman of the Japan–China Oil Import Council,
staged an airport press conference on his return from the PRC on 15 August
1974, and announced that the country’s annual crude oil output is expected to
reach 400Mt in the near future – and that one quarter of this vast amount could
be supplied to Japan. This has been, so far, the most enthusiastic assessment of
Peking’s oil industry and its export potential, perhaps the culmination of two
years of increasingly optimistic reports emanating from the official sources and
from a growing number of Peking’s visitors and suitors. The PRC has been
portrayed as an emerging oil giant rivaling the Middle East with her resources
and with her future exports, and providing a principal alternative source of
hydrocarbons to the advanced nations in exchange for Western and Japanese
technology. Considering this state of abundant superlatives and rising expecta-
tions, the need for critical evaluation of Peking’s oil export capability is
imperative. It would seem prudent to conclude that the PRC, to build up her
technology and to increase her food production, might become a major crude oil
exporter (of the order of several tens of millions of tonnes annually) for a short,
intermediate period of time in the near future.
But it took some time before this cautious assessment was generally accepted.
Beginning in the latter half of 1974 and during 1975 many Japanese businessmen,
the world press and quite a few Western China scholars kept conjuring up the
image of the PRC as an emerging new “Middle East”, a country on the verge of
exerting far-reaching political influence and reaping vast economic benefits through
fabulously growing exports of oil. Japan, which bought 1.12Mt in 1973, 4Mt in
1974 and 8Mt in 1975, was expected to import up to 18Mt in 1976, 40–50Mt well
before the end of the 1970s, as much as 100Mt in 1980 and about 200Mt in 1985.
 Energy 55

These figures – based on the uncritical predictions of some Japanese experts,

whose wishful thinking was mistaken for a genuine critical forecasting – have been
disseminated by many press agencies and reprinted in scores of newspaper arti-
cles around the world. Unfortunately, they have even found their way into
influential scholarly publications: the PRC’s growing oil potential was seen as a
“time bomb in East Asia” and its exports as an “oil weapon”. However, recent
realities have turned to be much more prosaic – and certainly quite disappointing
for the forecasters of the PRC’s new role as an international oil giant. What could
be dismissed by many as overly pessimistic in spring 1975 had to be grudgingly
accepted by spring 1976: the PRC is not potentially another Iran or Saudi Arabia
– and its future oil exports will be restricted to much more modest totals.
The best proof has been, of course, offered by the failure of Japanese
importers to conclude any long-term oil export agreement with Peking and by a
sharp decline in Japanese oil purchases in 1976. Vice-Premier Li Xiannian told
the Keidanren’s President Toshio Doko in October 1975 that “China could not
supply as much crude oil as Japan wanted” and advised him, astonishingly
enough, that Japan should buy instead “more silk and other traditional Chinese
products” (Kyodo 1975). On 3 March 1976, Ryutaro Hasegawa signed a
contract for imports of 2.1Mt of Daqing crude in 1976 – a total identical to the
original 1975 quota (Kyodo 1976).
While it is clearly impossible to predict actual annual shipments and destina-
tions of the PRC’s crude oil in the years ahead, reasonable attempts can be made
to evaluate the country’s future export potential by considering the likely rates of
extraction and China’s growing domestic demand. The PRC may have exportable
surpluses equal, respectively, to 60 and 80Mt of coal equivalent in 1980 and 1985.
The PRC’s share of the global oil market – probably somewhere between 30 and
70Mt – will constitute barely 1.5–3 per cent of the total. “Time bomb” ticking in
East Asia is hardly going to send shock waves around the continent.
And it did not. China’s exports of crude oil rose to 36Mt in 1985, when they
accounted for nearly 3 per cent of the world’s market. Total coal and oil exports
reached the 60Mtce level in 1985, rather than in 1980, and they have remained
near, or above, that rate ever since. But the proportion of exports has shifted as
China became first a small net importer (in 1993) and then an increasingly
important buyer of crude oil and petroleum products (nearly 60Mt in 1999),
while its coal exports rose from less than 10Mt in 1985 to nearly 50Mt by 1999.
But wishful thinking is a powerful addiction and, contrary to my conclusion,
even the world’s largest multinational oil companies nursed their hopes that the
PRC might yet be another Iran or Saudi Arabia. This belief led to one of the
more astonishing episodes in the modern history of oil exploration (Smil 1988).

Offshore hopes and disappointments

During the last years of the 1970s, the Chinese were facing several frustrating
realities concerning their oil industry. Output at their two largest oilfields (Daqing
and Shengli, producing 70 per cent of the total extraction) was stagnating. With
56 Energy

the exception of the conveniently located and relatively rich Zhongyuan oilfield,
all other discoveries were yielding only smallish additions of new production
capacity, moreover, mostly in difficult-to-develop reservoirs. The geologically most
promising unexplored onshore oil-bearing basins appeared to be in Xinjiang,
thousands of kilometers from the industrialized coastal regions. Sedimentary
basins offshore were even more promising, but Chinese capacities to explore them
and then to develop them were wholly inadequate.
The way out was by breaking with the long-standing proscription of
foreigners developing China’s natural resources, and letting the Western and
Japanese oil companies find the offshore hydrocarbons and bring them to
market. The first stage of this marriage of convenience was richly rewarding to
the Chinese, who lured in the multinationals – eager to have a try at what was
perceived by many oilmen as one of the last remaining big plays in relatively
easy waters – not by contracts but merely by promises.
By July 1979, sixteen groups of foreign oil companies signed agreements to
provide geophysical surveys – bearing the entire cost, letting the Chinese sample
and learn advanced techniques, and turning over to them all results with the
hope of being invited back later for exploratory drilling and production. About
420,000km2 of the South China Sea and the southern part of the Yellow Sea
were explored by 110,000km of seismic linear surveys, and after completion of
exploration in six of the eight contract areas in April 1980, forty-six companies
from twelve countries were invited to submit exploration tenders. A model explo-
ration contract was revealed in May 1982, and of the forty-six companies that
started the dealing in 1979, thirty-three decided to take the plunge and twenty-
five opted for risk sharing in the form of twelve consortia. Finally, during 1983,
the awarding of exploration blocks got under way.
These contracts required the holders to drill 120 exploratory wells within
three years at a cost of roughly US$1 billion. During 1983 came also the first
news of foreign hydrocarbon discoveries. Total China found crude oil and
natural gas in the Weizhou 10-3-3 well, and did even better at a nearby site in
the Beibu Gulf with Weizhou 10-3-4. Clearly, 1984, the first full year of exten-
sive offshore drilling, looked very promising – although the persistent and
deepening glut on the global oil market was making foreign companies less
enthusiastic about the whole Chinese adventure. The Chinese, as always fond of
military similes, saw the year as “the eve of a massive battle”, and the general
manager of the Nanhai Western Petroleum Corporation assured a Beijing Review
reporter that “we have found another battlefield in the South and we are not
going to lose. D-day is not far away.”
The analogy was grotesquely inaccurate: large offshore oilfields are not
explored and developed by rapid, concentrated, mass assaults – but by a
prolonged, incremental process. The Chinese talked often about the South
China Sea as another North Sea. In that case they should have kept in mind that
no less than thirteen years elapsed from the first geophysical confirmation of the
undersea hydrocarbons to the time when Britain and Norway started to land
more than 50Mt of crude annually. The realities of 1984 brought a different
 Energy 57

perspective: after a year of wildcatting in the Zhujiang basin there were no

worthwhile discoveries. Perhaps most disappointing was BP’s failure after
spending $55 million on six wells in the Nanhai’s most promising offshore struc-
tures. As the best prospects yielded no commercial finds, many Western oilmen
came to share a feeling that the complex stratigraphy of the Nanhai makes the
discovery of a huge oilfiled fairly unlikely, and that the prospects lie in a multi-
tude of smaller and deeper structures.
In these changed circumstances the China National Offshore Oil
Corporation announced the second round of bidding for offshore contract areas
on 21 November 1984. Eventually twenty-three oil companies decided to partici-
pate, and by the time the first contracts came up for signing in late 1985 the
Nanhai prospect brightened, owing both to agreements on development of two
previous discoveries and to a couple of new, promising finds. But there are other
important considerations complicating development of the Nanhai’s hydrocar-
bons. First, the South China Sea play started to unfold as the global oil market
reposed on huge production reserves with soft crude oil prices and few signs that
economic recovery in the West will push oil demand soon again to its pre-1991
levels. Put simply, the Chinese are trying to enter the big league when most
paying spectators are leaving the bleachers – and when many managers are
having second thoughts about the enduring frustrations and costs of joint busi-
ness with the Chinese, while less daunting options beckon elsewhere.
In the coming years there will be more to follow than the still open fate of the
Nanhai and orderly, unexciting development of the Bohai: foreign companies are
moving onshore. How successful the Nanhai exploration and other offshore and
onshore searches will eventually be nobody can tell, but by the mid-1990s it should
be possible to say with confidence which way the country’s long-term oil fortunes
will tilt: a true superpower in the class of the United States (if not of Russia or
Saudi Arabia), a durable major producer (with extraction at least double the current
level supportable for decades), or a minor player, at, or even below, the recent flows?

China’s oil imports and security

Interestingly enough, the answer to the above question turned out to be, at least
partially, all of the above: China’s crude oil reserves put the country firmly
among the group of second-echelon petroleum powers; increased production
will not double the current output within 10–15 years, while rising domestic
demand will make China a larger buyer on the international market, but not one
to destabilize it. An unspectacular but fairly steady stream of new offshore
discoveries, both in the Nanhai and in Bohai, and the first phase of intensive
exploratory drilling in the Tarim Basin, have added to China’s crude oil reserves.
Their total at the end of 2001 was about 3.3Gt, just ahead of Nigeria’s 3.2Gt,
and not far behind the three big oil powers of Mexico, Libya, each with 3.8Gt,
and the US with 3.7Gt (BP 2002). Reserves almost in the US class are, of course,
still very far behind the four Persian Gulf leaders, Saudi Arabia (36Gt) and Iraq,
Kuwait and Iran (all of them having reserves of more than 10Gt).
58 Energy

China ranks even higher on the production list: it has the world’s eleventh
place in crude oil reserves, but in 2001 it was the eighth-largest producer, less
than 10 per cent behind Norway, Venezuela and Mexico, about 10 per cent
behind Iran, but still with less than half of Russia’s or the US rate, and about 30
per cent of the Saudi extraction. Although the growth of its production, up by
about 17 per cent since 1991, has been a bit faster than the global mean (14 per
cent between 1991 and 2001), its domestic demand has been running ahead of
this supply, and China’s net imports of crude oil and refined oil products have
increased from an equivalent of about 10Mt of crude oil in 1993 (the year
China became a net importer) to about 23Mt in 1997, and Chinese forecasts
were for shipments of 50Mt by the year 2000. These forecasts proved to be too
conservative. Net imports rose to 30Mt in 1999, and then, in a big jump, reached
69.6Mt in 2000, while the 2001 total of 64.9Mt was only about 7 per cent lower.
Consequently, China is now buying about 30 per cent of its oil consumption,
and it has suddenly become the world’s sixth-largest importer of liquid fuels, still
far behind the USA and Japan, but closing rapidly on Germany, France and
Italy. Times have changed. China does not boast any more about its impervious-
ness to the ups and downs of the global oil market; securing enough foreign oil
has become one of the major preoccupations of its energy planners – and, in a
development little noticed beyond expert energy circles, the country is now
putting in place an extensive infrastructure needed to make it the world’s second-
largest importer of hydrocarbons. After the disappointments in Nanhai and
Tarim exploration, Chinese planners could have reverted to the rationing of
liquid fuels in order to maintain maximum possible self-sufficiency – but they
decided to abandon that Maoist policy and go for large-scale imports.
Following the Japanese precedent, they opted for reducing the purchases of
refined oil products and concentrating on imports of crude oil, a decision that
will require building new oil ports and refineries that will have to include desulfu-
rization facilities required to handle Middle Eastern crudes with relatively high
sulfur content (otherwise South China’s already serious acid rain problem from
coal combustion would get even worse). Immediate plans are for building four
new terminals (eleven are in service now) able to handle 150,000-t tankers and
70Mt of crude oil a year. Recent plans range from negotiating long-term joint-
production agreements for crude oil to purchasing the most expensive fossil fuel,
liquefied natural gas (LNG). To be sure, the China National Petroleum
Corporation (CNPC) is no Exxon, but through shareholding, joint ventures and
operational and leasing rights the country now participates in oil extraction in
Canada, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Peru, Sudan,
Venezuela, Azerbaijan and Russia.
The first shipment of Chinese-drilled overseas oil arrived in Qinhuangdao
from Peru in September 1997, and foreign projects are expected to secure an
annual production capacity of 50Mt by the year 2010. By that time they could
be rivaled by planned deals for long-term imports of oil and gas from hydro-
carbon-rich regions of the former Soviet Union. In 1997 CNPC contracted for
further development of two Kazakh oilfields, and even bigger multinational
 Energy 59

deals involving Russia, China, South Korea and Japan are planned for massive
exports of Russian gas from Siberian fields. Kazakhstan has been particularly
eager to break its dependence on Russian-controlled pipelines by exporting its oil
eastward – but such hopes will take a long time to materialize.
And just before the end of 1999 the State Council approved the construction
of China’s first LNG terminal, to be completed by the year 2005 in Shenzhen,
and in August 2002 China announced two large LNG contracts. The larger one
was to Australia’s North West Shelf consortium for a twenty-five-year, US$13.5
billion contract to supply Guangdong and Hong Kong, the smaller one to a joint
BP-Pertamina operation at Indonesia’s Tangguh field to supply Fujian. China
will thus join the USA and Japan in importing this expensive fuel, and further
contracts are likely to follow, as the Chinese planners are aiming to double the
2001 share of natural gas (a mere 3 per cent) in the country’s primary supply
within a decade.
Chinese forecasts of 100Mt of crude oil imported by the year 2010 that
looked bold just a few years ago now appear distinctly low. More than 100Mt of
crude oil may be bought even before 2005, but if the Tarim fields bring bigger
discoveries, and if the necessary construction of a long and expensive pipeline
proceeds according to plan, these imports may stabilize at least for a number of
years. The potential for much higher shipments is easy to appreciate, as China’s
per capita consumption of all liquid fuels is still less than one tenth of the
Japanese mean, and as coal still dominates the country’s primary energy
consumption. The International Energy Agency forecasts that China may buy as
much as 400Mt of oil in 2020, more than a tenth of the world’s current oil
extraction (IEA 2000).
Whatever the actual annual totals will be, it is now highly likely that China
will become the world’s third-largest importer of crude oil before 2010. Will it
then go on to surpass Japanese imports to stand only behind the USA in its
foreign oil purchases? Inevitably, such development would have many interna-
tional repercussions, particularly as US oil output, now second in the world after
Saudi Arabia and just ahead of Russia, keeps declining (it fell by 17 per cent
during the 1990s), as the North Sea extraction is nearing its peak, and as the
global oil market shows recurrent tightenings, with prices spiking above
$30/barrel.
As always, it is easy to construct some scary scenarios. China will have to
depend largely, as does the rest of the oil-importing world, on shipments from
the member states of OPEC. Larger Chinese purchases will help to increase
that cartel’s share of global crude oil sales in general, and the importance of
Muslim Middle Eastern exporters in particular. China has already given moral
and military support both to Iraq and Iran, and its growing economic, diplo-
matic and military presence in the Middle East is bound to create more
friction with the United States, if not with the entire West. This would set the
stage for yet another world oil supply crisis and its unpredictable economic and
geopolitical consequences, this time with China being an unpredictable part of
the mix.
60 Energy

In contrast, one can foresee relatively early progress on major imports from
Russia (whose oil companies have made a number of offers to sell) and/or
Kazakhstan. Even more importantly, one can see China taking advantage of
Siberia’s enormous natural gas resources and becoming more of an importer of
gas rather than of oil, a shift that would further help to lower the energy inten-
sity of its economy. And it is to the country’s post-1980 achievements in this
particular area that I will turn next, looking closer at some surprising gains in
China’s energy conversion efficiency.

A remarkable shift in energy intensities: a closer look

at an unexpected achievement
The energy intensity of a nation’s economy is simply a ratio of the annual total
primary energy supply (converted to a common denominator) and the gross
domestic products (for convenience I will use the respective abbreviations EI,
TPES and GDP). National energy intensities can be calculated by using fuel
and electricity statistics issued annually by UNO (2001), IEA (2001), EIA
(2001) and BP (2001), and GDP data summarized by UNDP (2001) and the
World Bank (2001). Standardized EI values in constant US$ are now also
available for all OECD countries (OECD 2001), and the US EIA publishes the
latest annual values, as well as historical retrospectives, for most of the world’s
countries (EIA 2001). Energy intensities are used as revealing indicators of
national economic development. The heuristic appeal of this aggregate
measure is obvious, as nations with relatively low EI should enjoy several
important economic, social and environmental advantages.
A relatively low EI will help to lower total production costs, make exports
more competitive and, for countries dependent on foreign fuel, imports less
costly. Low EI is also a good indicator of the prevalence of advanced extrac-
tion, processing and manufacturing techniques, and of efficient use of raw
materials. And because production, processing, transportation and final uses of
energy constitute the world’s largest source of atmospheric emissions and are a
major cause of water pollution and ecosystemic degradation, low EI will mini-
mize many inevitable environmental impacts and help maintain a good quality
of life.
Historical trends of national EI show some basic similarities, with the
measure rising during the early stages of industrialization and then, after
reaching an often sharp peak, declining significantly as modern economies use
their inputs more efficiently. The US EI conforms to this pattern, with a sharp
peak around 1920 followed by a near 60 per cent decline by the year 2000, but
the Japanese trend shows much more modest changes and an extended plateau
(Figure 2.6). Different timing of EI peaks and different rates of ascent and
decline of national lines reflect the differences in the onset of intensive industri-
alization and the country-specific tempo of economic development and
technical innovation.
 Energy 61

During the 1950s China’s EI displayed an entirely predictable rapid rise

caused by the Stalinist-type modernization that was predicated on the expansion
of energy-intensive heavy industries (Figure 2.7). The subsequent rapid decline
of EI did not reflect any gains in efficiency but rather the collapse of the Great
Leap Forward and, shortly afterwards, the turmoil of the early Cultural
Revolution years. Once the political situation had largely stabilized, China’s EI
resumed its rise at a rate very similar to the pre-1958 trend. In 1978 nobody
could have known that China’s EI had peaked in 1977 and that it would embark
on a fairly rapid and sustained decline. During the last six years of Mao’s rule
China’s EI rose by 14 per cent – but during the first full six years of Deng
Xiaoping’s reforms (1979–1985) the country’s EI fell by nearly 30 per cent. In
1985 this could have been seen as a one-time effect of closing down the most
inefficient enterprises and bringing in advanced foreign techniques to modernize
many large-scale energy-intensive processes.
But by the end of the 1980s China’s EI was down by an additional 18 per
cent, after which the decline unexpectedly accelerated as EI fell by 25 per cent
during the first half of the 1990s. These developments lowered China’s EI by 54
per cent since 1978 – and an even more incredible decline was yet to come:
between 1995 and 2000 the measure fell by an additional 45 per cent, and by 18
per cent in the year 2000 alone, bringing the aggregate reductions of China’s EI

Figure 2.6 Long-term trends of energy intensities in the USA, Canada, UK and Japan,
1900–2000
Source: Smil (2003).
62 Energy

to about 75 per cent in twenty-two years (see Figure 2.7). A naive reaction would
be to gape at yet another Chinese first: no other country in modern economic
history has come even close to such a rate of improvement. A critical response
would be to deconstruct the measure in general, and look much closer at the
peculiarities of China’s EI in particular.

Problems with calculating EI

EI reveals and clouds at the same time. A simple division is needed to calculate it,
but both numerator and denominator contain aggregate measures whose real
values are not easy to determine. There are three major problems with the numer-
ator. To begin with, EI is invariably calculated by using only the statistically
well-documented inputs of fossil fuels and primary electricity and excluding entirely
all uses of traditional biomass fuels. This makes hardly any difference for calculating
the EI for the USA or France, but in all countries with a significant biomass energy
component the adjustment for wood and crop residues consumption would boost
the TPES and, everything else being equal, increase EI. Conversions of fossil fuels
to a common denominator (Joules, coal or oil equivalents) are usually a matter of
straightforward multiplications, but inadequate information on the changing quality
of fuel may lead to far-from-negligible conversion errors.
Finally, there is an intractable conversion problem with the primary, that is
mostly hydro and nuclear, electricity. When the primary electricity is converted
by using straight thermal equivalent (1kWh = 3.6MJ), countries relying heavily
on hydro or nuclear generation will appear to be much more energy efficient

Figure 2.7 Energy intensity of China’s economy, 1952–2000

Source: Based on data from China Statistical Yearbook and Fridley (2001).
 Energy 63

than nations generating electricity from fossil fuels. Equating primary electricity
with the heat content of fossil fuels used to generate a nation’s thermal electricity
solves that undercount, but it introduces another problem. Conversion ratios
must be adjusted annually with improving efficiency of thermal generating
stations – but then the fuel equivalent of hydroelectricity would be declining
even if its generated total remained steady.
Complications with the denominator are, if anything, even more intractable
even when leaving aside the fundamental problem of what is really measured:
after all, GDP grows even as the quality of life may be declining (e.g. greater air
pollution leads to higher incidence of respiratory diseases which, in turn, leads to
more money spent on medical examinations, drugs and hospital admissions); it
increases even as irreplaceable natural resources (old-growth forests, wetlands)
and services (e.g. the water-retention capacity of eroding soils) are being
destroyed (Daly and Cobb 1989). Standard national accounts do not include the
value of essential subsistence production and barter, and nor do they capture
black market transactions whose inclusion may raise the real GDPs of even the
least corrupt Western nations by anything between 5 and 25 per cent (Mattera
1985; Thomas 1999). The second fundamental problem arises from conversions
of national GDP values to a common denominator in order to make revealing
international comparisons of EI.
Using official exchange rates is an unsatisfactory approach, as these rates
reflect primarily the prices of widely traded commodities and may have few links
with those parts of a country’s economy that are not involved in foreign
exchange. Consequently, conversions with official exchange rates almost always
increase the real economic disparity between the rich and poor nations: in other
words, poor countries are not as poor as they appear when their GDPs are
converted by using nominal value of the US dollar (the World Bank’s highly
misleading, but endlessly repeated, claim about hundreds of millions of people
in low-income countries forced to live on US$1 a day is perhaps the most
obvious misuse of this conversion). Conversion to a common currency by using
purchasing power parity (PPP) avoids the errors of relying on nominal exchange
rates, but it can result in exaggerations whose errors may be relatively even
larger, albeit in the opposite direction, than those arising from the use of market
exchange rates.

Chinese circumstances
All of these problems must be considered when appraising China’s EI. To
begin with, during the late 1990s China still derived about 15 per cent of its
primary energy consumption from biomass, and hence its TPES in the year
2000 was at least 41EJ rather than just 35EJ, a reality that would increase
China’s EI. However, as biomass supplied a substantially higher portion of the
nation’s total energy use during the earliest period of the economic reforms
(roughly a quarter in 1980), its inclusion would actually slightly accentuate the
decline of China’s EI since 1980. China’s high dependence on poor quality
64 Energy

coal presents a conversion problem: in the Chinese official statistics raw coal
output is multiplied by 0.71 to get the hard coal equivalent (i.e. fuel containing
29GJ/t). But, as already explained in this chapter, during the 1990s as much as
half of China’s coal extraction originated from small local pits, and less than
20 per cent of all raw coal output was washed and sorted (Fridley 2001).
Consequently, the real conversion factor to standard fuel could be as much as
10 per cent lower than the official value, an adjustment that would reduce
China’s TPES.
On the other hand, unreported output from illegal small coal mines would
raise the official TPES total, as would the reported smuggling of foreign crude
oil into southern provinces. In addition, slightly different conversion procedures
result in an appreciable overall difference. For example, China’s official TPES in
the year 2000 amounted to 1,071.7Mt of coal equivalent, or 31.1EJ, while BP
(2002) puts it at 804.7Mt of oil equivalent, or 33.8EJ, or nearly 9 per cent higher.
On the money side, subsistence production and barter still represent a significant
part of economic activity in China’s countryside (although clearly much less than
a generation ago), and quantification of black market transactions (whose total
volume is almost certainly much larger than twenty years ago) is impossible in
such an extraordinarily corrupt economy. Inclusion of these transactions would
increase China’s GDP and, everything else being equal, further lower EI. In
contrast, there is widespread agreement that China’s official GDP is significantly
overestimated, and its downward adjustment, with TPES remaining the same,
would, naturally, increase the EI level.
Official statistics claim that between 1980 and 1999 GDP grew annually by
an average of 9.8 per cent, with four consecutive years of double-digit expansion
(as high as 14.2 per cent) between 1992 and 1995. Maddison (1997) argues that
the actual average expansion for the period 1978–1994 was more than 2 per
cent lower, 7.5 rather than 9.8 per cent. This makes a huge cumulative differ-
ence: official GDP for the 1990s comes to about 56 trillion in constant 1995 yuan,
the revised total is about 40 trillion yuan. Relative difference is nearly 30 per cent.
Absolute difference is more than 15 trillion of 1995 yuan, the total equal to
China’s GDP in 1996, 1997 and 1998! Standard and Poor revisions of China’s
GDP during 1990 indicate a similar gap between official claims and the real
performance.
Perhaps the only certainties here are that China’s GDP and TPES are not
what the NBS claims they are – and that there is no unequivocal procedure with
which to bring these suspect figures closer to reality. The least arguable thing to
do is to revise China’s GDP estimates along Maddison’s (1997) lines: this brings
the total GDP for the year 2000 to 5.75 trillion yuan, rather than the officially
claimed 8.6 trillion. This adjustment raises China’s EI from about 3.6 to about
5.4GJ/1,000 yuan in the year 2000, and it results in the overall 1980–2000 EI
decline of 58 per cent, rather than 72 per cent. But I would argue that the
period per cent between 1997 and 2000 should not be used for EI calculations
that are to reveal long-term trends in China’s energy use. Official Chinese data
show that between 1997 and 2000 the country’s TPES fell by 22 per cent while
 Energy 65

its GDP rose by nearly 24 per cent. One does not have to be an energy
economist to suspect the integrity of the statistical information that implies the
expansion of GDP by nearly a quarter – while eliminating about 9EJ of energy
consumption, or nearly as much as the UK uses every year. Alternatively, it is
possible to argue that an improvement close to the claimed EI drop did actually
take place, but that such an event was a singularity that arose from a unique
combination of macroeconomic policies, above all from the aggressive reduction
of coal extraction in small mines and a rapid expansion of low-energy intensity
(high value-added) manufacturing.
Consequently, it may be more meaningful to base any international compar-
isons on the years 1980–1997 before the abrupt state intervention that closed
down tens of thousands of small mines. China’s EI for that period, calculated
with adjusted GDP values, declined by 36 per cent, or at an annual rate of ⫺2.6
per cent. This is still an impressive performance, but one closer to the achieve-
ments of other countries. For example, the EI of the Japanese economy was
declining at an even faster rate of 2.8 per cent for fifteen years (1974–1989)
between the time of OPEC’s price shock and the peak year of the Nikkei index
(EDMC 2000). This feat was much harder to achieve because Japan’s EI in 1974
was already very low by international standards, and the country was at a level of
economic development that was far ahead of the conditions in post-1980 China.
And even the US economy, the world’s largest (and an order of magnitude
bigger than China), matched China’s performance as it reduced its EI by an
average 2.6 per cent a year between the OPEC’s price rise and the collapse of
high crude oil prices in 1985.
Consequently, the post-1980 reduction of China’s EI is obviously a most
welcome development and the overall achievement is impressive – but it is not
unprecedented. Moreover, as Sinton and Fridley (2000) stress, the electricity
intensity of China’s economy (kWh/yuan) has not improved since 1980. Using,
once again, adjusted GDP values, China’s economy needed about
220kWh/1,000 yuan in 1980 and the rate was approximately 230kWh/1,000
yuan in 2000. In this sense China behaves as any other rapidly modernizing
country where the demand of electricity – driven by all sectors of the economy
as well as by rising household requirements for lighting, refrigeration and air
conditioning – commonly grows by 7–10 per cent a year, far outstripping the
growth of the TPES.
Although secular reductions of EI are the norm in all rationally run
economies, China’s post-1980 record has received so much attention because of
its implications for the generation of greenhouse gases (Streets et al. 2001). Most
of the long-range energy consumption forecasts published during the 1980s and
the early 1990s did not factor-in China’s substantial efficiency gains, or at least
greatly underestimated their pace, and hence they overestimated the country’s
future energy consumption and its generation of CO2. And, of course, it was
impossible to anticipate the sudden post-1997 drop in China’s TPES that
lowered the country’s consumption by 22 per cent in three years, and that was
reversed only in 2001.
66 Energy

As a result, it is now highly unlikely that, as commonly predicted as late as

the year 2000 (EIA 2000), China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion
will surpass the US output before 2020, or shortly thereafter. Some conserva-
tive projections now foresee the difference between China’s and US carbon
generation to be actually slightly larger in 2020 than it was in 2000. This
development would leave the USA as the undisputed, and in the absence of
any effective reductions, the even more reviled, number-one producer of CO2
for most of the first half of the twenty-first century. But caution is in order.
China’s energy use has been returning to normal: although the TPES for 2001
was still below the level reached in 1994, it increased by 8.4 per cent, well
above the 1987–1997 mean of 4.7 per cent a year. Similarly high rates would
soon bring the long-term trend closer to the pre-1997 trajectory. Given China’s
murky statistics, we may never know the real extent of the 1998–2000 TPES
decline, but whatever it was, it is not going to be repeated: no modernizing
economy can support an annual 7 per cent GDP growth and accommodate
another 250 million people during the coming generation by having very large
periodical dips in its TPES.

International comparisons
Interpreting EI gets even more difficult when trying to answer an obvious ques-
tion: given its impressive achievements in lowering its EI, how does China’s
current performance compare with the world’s major economies? When the
country’s GDP is converted from yuan to US$ by using the official fixed exchange
rate the value is just short of $800/capita in the year 2000 – while the PPP value
used by UNDP (2001) gives about $3,600/capita, a 4.6-fold difference. The first
rate would yield, with China’s 2000 TPES at about 31EJ (without biomass), EI
of about 33GJ/$1,000, the other one would result in EI of less than
7GJ/$1,000. For comparison, conversions with official exchange rates produce
EI of less than 5MJ/$1,000 for Japan, more than 11MJ for the USA, about
19MJ/$1,000 for Canada, about 26MJ/$1,000 for India, more than 80MJ for
Russia, and an incredible 200MJ/$1,000 for the Ukraine. When using PPP the
intensities (all in MJ/$1,000) change to about 7 for Japan, 11 for the USA, 13 for
Canada, 10 for India and 25 for Russia.
There is something wrong with either set of conversions. In the first case, the
numbers immediately signal the dubious value of market exchange rates: Russia
and Ukraine are not that inefficient, Canada cannot be that different from the
USA – and it is most unlikely that China’s energy intensity is about 30 per cent
higher than India’s. In the PPP case, the values for all affluent countries come, as
expected, closer together – but China would be performing better than does
Sweden or the Netherlands, a most unlikely conclusion. China’s EI is obviously
somewhere between these two extremes, but until we stop relying on many
clearly misleading market exchange rates, and until we come up with a much
more reliable way to calculate truly representative PPP, we will be unable to offer
realistic international comparisons of national EI.
 Energy 67

Reasons for EI decline

But no matter how accurate or misleading, the measure does not tell us why it
has been changing and why the countries rank as they do. Not surprisingly,
China’s rapidly declining EI attracted the attention of economists who tried to
identify the sources of this improvement. Several studies that tried to measure
the relative contributions of sectoral shift (i.e. away from energy-intensive
processes) and subsector productivity change, concluded that the latter was the
single largest contributor to China’s falling EI (Sinton and Levine 1994; Lin and
Polenske 1995; Garbaccio et al. 1999). These studies looked at various periods
between 1981 and 1992, and Zhang (2001) extended this kind of analysis to
1996 by looking at twenty-nine industrial subsectors. His conclusion was that 93
per cent of the post-1990 cumulative energy savings in the industrial sector
should be attributed to real EI change, and that the efficiency improvements in
just four subsectors (machinery, nonmetal minerals, ferrous metals and chemi-
cals) accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the total gain.
Fisher-Vanden et al. (2002) confirmed the marginal importance of changes in
industry composition by analyzing a unique set of data for about 2,500 large and
medium-size industrial enterprises, working at a much greater level of disaggre-
gation than used by the studies cited in the previous paragraph. They found that
changing energy prices and R&D expenditures have been the drivers of
declining EI, and that Chinese firms are now responding to prices. That a major
share of China’s EI decline is attributable to improvements in conversion effi-
ciency is not surprising. Before 1978 China had, by any measure, one of the
world’s least efficient energy systems, and hence its modernization had to bring
some impressive results. The combination of energy price reforms and state-
driven measures to reduce the use of energy explains most of these gains.
Subsidies on energy use were gradually lowered and then entirely eliminated,
coal prices were deregulated, crude oil subsidies fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to
2 per cent in 1995, and oil prices are now set by the world market; and in 1993
electricity prices were raised for the first time since 1976, with other increases
following during the remainder of the 1990s. Energy conservation policies and
measures have included some thirty laws (capped by the Energy Conservation
Law of 1 January 1998), financial incentives (low interest rates for efficiency
loans, reduced taxes on purchases of energy-efficient products), stepped-up
management in factories (monitoring energy use, consumption quotas), funding
of demonstration projects, and setting up information networks and service
centers at several administrative levels.
Some of these measures have been recently discontinued or weakened, but it
is both desirable and realistic to maintain the reduction of China’s EI at a rate of
at least 2 per cent for another decade, and then to maintain a slightly lower rate
of at least 1.5 per cent a year. For comparison, in its long-term forecast of global
energy demand, the US Department of Energy assumes that the EI of the
world’s low-income economies will keep improving at a rate averaging 1.4 per
cent between 2002 and 2020 (EIA 2002). Fortunately, the country still has enor-
mous opportunities, be they in its industrial enterprises, fields or households, to
68 Energy

use energy more efficiently. My estimate of China’s PPP-adjusted GDP (based

largely on a basket of basic foodstuffs) is about US$2,000/capita in the year 2001.
At that rate China’s EI (calculated, as other national means with BP’s TPES, i.e.
about 35EJ in 2001) would be approximately 14GJ/$1,000, about 30 per cent
above the US level, and twice the Japanese rate, leaving plenty of space for future
improvements.

Notes
1 A good example of this widespread genre is the latest World Bank review of the
Chinese economy: China 2020: The Development Challenges in the New Century (Washington
DC: World Bank, 1997).
2 For details on this inertia and on gradual transitions, see Cesare Marchetti and
Nebojsa Nakicenovic, The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model
(Laxenburg: IIASA, 1979); Vaclav Smil, General Energetics (New York: Wiley, 1991).
3 Most notably, when expressed in constant monies, the average world crude oil price in
the late 1990s is no higher than it was a century ago. See British Petroleum, BP
Statistical Review of Energy 1997 (London: British Petroleum, 1997) 14.
4 A resource category comprises the total mass of a particular commodity present in
the earth’s crust, regardless of the technical means to recover it or the economic
viability doing so. While total resources can be only estimated, reserves are the accu-
rately known fraction of resources that can be recovered at a known price by using
commercial techniques. A combination of technical innovation and higher prices
constantly creates reserves out of resources.
5 The best hard (black, bituminous) coals have a heating content of between 27 and 29
megajoules (MJ) per kilogram (MJ/kg); typical steam coals used in electricity genera-
tion have around 22MJ/kg, with the poorest lignites (brown coals) being below
15MJ/kg. Most of China’s coal resources have an energy density between 22 and
29MJ/kg. For more details see Vaclav Smil, Energy in China’s Modernization (Armonk:
M.E. Sharpe, 1988) 31–35.
6 Mistakenly, this reserve/production (R/P) ratio is often seen as an indicator of the time
a country, or the world, will run out of a particular mineral. This would be the case
only for resource/production ratio, a quotient we cannot reliably calculate because of
the uncertain nature of the numerator. Higher prices and better techniques can raise
R/P ratios quite rapidly: for example, the global R/P ratio for crude oil was well
below 30 during the time of low oil prices in the early 1970s – but recently it has stood
above 40, higher than at any time since 1945. For the latest estimates of coal reserves,
and coal R/P ratios, see British Petroleum, BP Statistical Review, 30.
7 Ibid., 4.
8 Ibid., 20.
9 Crude oil contains 42MJ/kg, 1 cubic meter (m3) of natural gas averages around
35MJ, and it has a mass of about 720 grams (g); consequently, energy density of
natural gas is nearly 49MJ/kg.
10 This is a particularly important concern for China, the world’s largest producer of
nitrogenous fertilizers. Synthesis of ammonia needs about 50MJ of natural gas per kg
of nitrogen, and China has been recently using almost 30 per cent of its total natural
gas production for ammonia synthesis.
11 For example, burning typical heating coal (energy content of 22MJ/kg, with carbon
making up 70 per cent of the mass) in a fairly efficient (35 per cent) stove will release
about 90g of carbon (C) for every MJ of useful energy; in contrast, burning natural
gas (75 per cent C) in a high-performance (90 per cent efficient) household gas
furnace will release a mere 17g C/MJ.
 Energy 69

12 China’s total of about 380 billion watts (GW) of exploitable power is well ahead of
potential capacities in Russia, Brazil and the USA, but the more even flow of great
Siberian rivers could eventually generate more electricity.
13 Capital costs per unit of installed generating capacity are commonly only half as
much in coal-fired stations. High-voltage direct-current links are the best way to mini-
mize transmission losses.
14 For comparison, coal has a roughly 25 per cent share in the US primary energy
consumption, and it supplies 20 per cent of all commercial energy in both Russia and
Japan.
15 Because of many readily available statistical sources I will not reference individual
output numbers. Standard Chinese sources are Zhongguo tongji nianjian (Beijing: China
Statistics Publishing, annually), and Zhongguo nengyuan containing monthly production
statistics. By far the most comprehensive source in English is: Jonathan E. Sinton (ed.)
China Energy Databook (Berkeley: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1996).
16 For a review of recent reforms of the industry, see Elspeth Thomson, “Reforming
China’s coal industry”, The China Quarterly 147 (September 1996): 727–750.
17 Eventual combined capacity of these mines was to surpass 200Mt/year. Shanxi’s
Pingshuo (Antaibao) mine involved a much publicized personal deal between
Armand Hammer, the late CEO of Occidental Petroleum, and Deng Xiaoping.
18 The worst accidents in large mines are caused by coal dust explosions due to inade-
quate ventilation and poor safety practices. According to the Public Works Ministry
9,974 people died in all mining accidents in 1996. With coal mining accounting for
about two thirds of all deaths, Chinese fatalities would average about 5.0 deaths/Mt
of coal, compared to 0.15/Mt in the USA.
19 In contrast, basic coal cleaning, involving washing and sizing, is standard in Western
mining; some coal also undergoes specialized cleaning aimed at reducing coal’s sulfur
content in order to meet air emission standards.
20 Besides reducing biodiversity, deforestation contributes to higher erosion rates and
straw burning deprives soils of nitrogen which would be otherwise recycled. For a
discussion of the extent and implications of these problems, see Vaclav Smil, China’s
Environmental Crisis (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993).
21 Published estimates have ranged from 8.5 to 23 fatalities per million tonnes of
extracted coal. Rates above 20 would clearly represent one of the riskiest occupations
anywhere in the world.
22 Wei Hu and Robert Evans, “The impacts of coal mining in Shenmu county, the
Loess Plateau, China”, Ambio 26(6) (September 1997): 405–406.
23 The capital’s mean annual total suspended particulate levels are between 400 and
500mg/m3 – while the WHO’s daily maximum of 150–230mg/m3 can be exceeded
only 2 per cent of the days in a year.
24 Dai Hewu and Chen Wenmin, “Characterization and utilization of Chinese high-
sulfur coal”, Meitan kexue jishu (Coal Science and Technology) no. 5 (May 1989): 30–35.
25 Mao Yushi and Li Dazheng, Spontaneous Combustion of Coal in China and its Environmental
Impact (Beijing: China Institute of Mining Technology, 1994).
26 Vaclav Smil, Environmental Problems in China: Estimates of Economic Costs (Honolulu:
East–West Center, 1996) 19–20.
27 Desulfurization increases both capital and operating costs by at least 20 per cent.
Japanese aid offers a perfect opportunity to channel sizable amounts of money
through the country’s large chemical companies which produce and install modern
flue gas desulfurization plants.
28 Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis, 116.
29 “SPC hikes natural gas price”, China OGP no. 5 (15 May 1997): 10.
30 For details see Smil, Energy in China’s Modernization, 162–171.
31 China OGP, China Petroleum Investment Guide (Beijing: China OGP, 1994) 91–140.
70 Energy

32 Chinese imports will help to bring closer the date when OPEC will become once
again the supplier of last resort – and when the world will have to pay higher crude
oil prices. Will China’s greater involvement in Middle Eastern affairs be a stabilizing
or destabilizing influence? Plausible arguments can be made for both outcomes.
33 Xihe Yu, “Oil security risk, wolf at door?”, China OGP no. 10 (15 May 1997): 1–3.
With rising oil imports, China will also have to build sufficient storage capacity
(generally, it should equal 25 per cent of annual imports).
34 The Kazakh deal would involve not only a 3,000-km pipeline to move some 8Mt of
crude a year to Xinjiang, but perhaps also trans-shipment through Iran. Detailed
discussion of large-scale international oil and gas projects involving Russia, China,
Korea and Japan can be found in: Keun-Wook Paik, Gas and Oil in Northeast Asia
(London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995).
35 China News Digest, 10 April 1997 (http://www.cnd.org).
36 Institute of Techno-economics and Energy System Analysis, Global Electrification: The
Next Decades (Beijing: Qinghua University, 1997) 1–3.
37 Ibid.
38 For comparison, Itaipu, currently the world’s largest hydroproject on the Parana
between Brazil and Paraguay, has 12.6GW, and Grand Coulee, the largest US hydro-
station, rates 10.83GW.
39 For detailed analyses of what is wrong about Sanxia, see Grainne Ryder (ed.) Damming
the Three Gorges (Toronto: Probe International, 1990); Dai Qing (ed.) Yangtze! Yangtze!
(London: Earthscan, 1994).
40 China News Digest, 8 April 1996 (http://www.cnd.org).
41 China’s long-term hydrogeneration plans are outlined in: Smil, Energy in China’s
Modernization, 171–180.
42 China News Digest, 16 October 1996 (http://www.cnd.org).
43 Sales of Russian nuclear power plants to China are particularly uncertain.
44 This is about 40 per cent of the total foreign direct investment China received by the
end of 1995: World Bank, China 2020, 90.
45 For problems with determining and comparing China’s energy intensity see Smil,
China’s Environmental Crisis, 72–75, 126–128.
46 Vaclav Smil, “China’s environment and security: simple myths and complex reali-
ties”, SAIS Review 17 (winter–spring 1997): 107–126.
47 Lin demonstrated that energy conservation measures rather than structural changes were
the leading cause of post-1980 efficiency gains: Xiannuan Lin, China’s Energy Strategy:
Economic Structure, Technological Choices, and Energy Consumption (Westport CT: Praeger, 1996).
48 F. Liu, M. Ross and S. Wang, “Energy efficiency in China’s cement industry”, Energy
– The International Journal 20 (1995): 669–681.
49 David G. Fridley, “U.S.–China super-efficient CFC-free refrigerator project”, in LBNL
Energy Analysis Program 1995 Annual Report (Berkeley: Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, 1996) 24–25.
50 The gap is even wider for average annual electricity use: China’s 1995 rate of about
800kWh/capita was only a tenth of the Japanese mean, and only 10 per cent of that
low total was accounted for by household use.
51 Vaclav Smil, “Elusive links: energy, value, economic growth and quality of life”,
OPEC Review 16(1) (spring 1992): 1–21.
52 Vaclav Smil, “China’s greenhouse gas emissions”, Global Environmental Change 4(4)
(1994): 279–286.
53 Although China strongly objects to any imposition of binding obligations on devel-
oping countries, it is now prepared to make an (unspecified) effort to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions: China News Digest, 5 November 1997 (http://www.cnd.org).
54 The effects of ozone on China’s food-production capacity may be the most worri-
some long-term problem: Vaclav Smil, Energy and the Environment Challenges for the Pacific
Rim (Vancouver: Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, 1996).
 Energy 71

55 This unwise goal would eventually mean between 300 and 400 million vehicles –
compared to about 500 million cars registered worldwide in 1995: American
Automobile Manufacturers Association, Motor Vehicle 1996 Facts & Figures (Detroit:
AAMA, 1996) 44. Even if the average fuel consumption of Chinese cars were just
one half of the current US mean, China would need about 300Mt of gasoline a year,
roughly twice its present annual crude oil consumption.
56 For basic numbers see Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis, 101–110.
57 R. Kirk Smith, G. Shuhua, K. Huang and Q. Daxiong, “One hundred million
improved cookstoves in China: how was it done?”, World Development 21 (1993):
941–961.
58 For details on these programs, see Smil, Energy in China’s Modernization, 54–69.
59 Smil 1976a.
3 Food

Traditional Chinese farming has been widely seen as a paragon of organic agri-
culture, relying on close integration of crops and domestic animals, on recycling
of organic wastes and on often-complex crop rotations. While its achievements
made it possible for China to be the world’s first nation to surpass the 500 million
population mark (perhaps as early as the late 1920s), its performance remained
vulnerable to natural catastrophes and to productivity dips caused by wars and
other conflicts. China entered the twentieth century with the ever-present threat
of another sweeping food shortage. In the 1920s, J.L. Buck (1937) found that
Chinese peasants recalled an average of three crop failures during their lifetime
that were serious enough to cause famines. These famines lasted on average about
ten months, and they led up to a quarter of the affected population to eat grasses
and strip bark from trees, and forced nearly one seventh of all people to leave
their hungry villages in search of food.
During the first eight years of Communist control it appeared that such
terrible experiences would be, finally, left to history. But then, unexpectedly and
rapidly, the tide of the slowly improving food supply turned, and within months,
perhaps already during the last days of 1958 and then increasingly in 1959,
people were dying of hunger in more than a dozen provinces. As I will demon-
strate in the first section of this chapter, “The world’s greatest famine”, this was
an overwhelmingly man-made (Mao-made, to be exact) famine, and by the time
it ended in 1961 it left behind about 30 million dead. The second section, “From
subsistence to satiety”, will first document the persistence of barely adequate
diets during the 1970s and then a transformation that was as unexpected, and no
less rapid than, the ill-fated experiment of the late 1950s: the diffusion of the
household responsibility system. Deng Xiaoping understood that food produc-
tion had to be drastically reformed, hence his first step toward modernization
was a de facto privatization of farming.
This decision moved the country, in conjunction with market resurgence and
relaxation of population and capital controls, from subsistence to satiety (at least
in terms of statistical averages – by no means for everyone). The chapter’s third
section will detail China’s rapid post-1979 dietary transitions as the develop-
ments that elsewhere took decades to unfold – multiple increases in per capita
consumption of meats, fish, fruits, oils, sugars and alcohol – were accomplished
 Food 73

in less than one generation. Naturally, this impressive gain in China’s food-
producing capacity is the result of a complex, multifactored process, but one
input stands out because of its biochemical uniqueness and indispensability: the
abundant supply of inexpensive nitrogen applied to China’s fields since the late
1970s. China could not have reached its present (relatively enviable) nutritional
status without first becoming the world’s largest producer and user of nitroge-
nous fertilizers.
The continuous success of China’s farming is now inextricably bound to very
intensive use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. That is why in the fourth segment
of this food chapter I will take an unorthodox view of China’s history by looking
at nitrogen in China’s agriculture. Finally, an inevitable question intrudes: can
this progress be maintained, can China feed itself ? In the last section I will give a
reasoned affirmative answer to this question.

The world’s greatest famine: its origins, toll and

inexplicable neglect
On 6 April 1958 Mao Zedong invoked the most beloved, and the most unruly,
character of China’s popular mythology as he implored his comrades: “The
Monkey King disregarded the laws and the Heavens. Why don’t we all emulate
him?” (Mao 1969: 89). The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party had no
small shake-ups in mind. Two weeks later he asserted that “the destruction of
balance constitutes leaping forward and such destruction is better than balance.
Imbalance and headache are good things” (Mao 1969: 112). Mao wanted to
imbalance the whole nation in order to trump Nikita Khrushchev – the de-
Stalinizing Soviet leader who refused to share Soviet nuclear weapons with
China – and, in the process, to achieve a feat unprecedented in human history:
the modernization of the world’s most populous nation in one enormous
economic leap.
Yet in order to do so he advocated only a more intensive version of the very
method used by his Russian adversary. As Khrushchev was traveling around the
world and making speeches outlining how the Soviet Union would soon catch up
even with the USA and then go on to surpass America’s economic performance
(the attitude summed up in his famous boast that “We will bury you”), Mao
devised a much bolder version of catching up and surpassing. Starting from a
position greatly inferior to that of the already much more industrialized Soviet
empire, he envisaged an astonishing Great Leap Forward, first passing the UK
and then the USA as China dashed toward global supremacy.
His obsession with this task became delusionary. He did not (indeed his
almost nonexistent understanding of modern economies could not allow him to)
conceive the daunting goal in its multifaceted complexity, and caricatured it as
merely a specific quest for producing more steel. This Stalin-despising Stalinist
was mesmerized by the metal. In late May 1958 he was sure that “with 11
million tons of steel next year and 17 million tons a year after the world will be
shaken” (Mao 1969: 123). But the country had only a handful of modern iron
74 Food

and steel mills designed by Soviet engineers and built with Soviet help during
China’s just-completed first five-year plan – and no prospect of getting more
from the same source as the dispute between Mao and Khrushchev worsened.
The only way Mao could act on his delusions was to order China’s peasants to
make the Leap work. They faced an impossible task.

Leaping into famine

Tens of millions of people began digging up local deposits of low-quality iron
ore and limestone, destroying not just the remainders of China’s scarce forests,
but also cutting down orchards and groves in order to make charcoal. All of
these ingredients were charged into simple clay “backyard” furnaces built by
peasants and by commandeered groups of city workers and students. But such
primitive metallurgy cannot produce steel, an alloy with just a trace of carbon
whose great tensile strength makes it such an excellent material for myriad uses
(Bolton 1989). China’s “backyard” furnaces yielded merely lumpy cast iron, a
metal full of carbon, and hence brittle, and not even fit for a simple field hoe.
Urban populations were mobilized to contribute to this frenzied effort, but
most of the work was done by peasants, who instead of cultivating their fields
wasted their labor on the futile smelting. This was a catastrophic misallocation of
human energy. In 1958 China’s farming was still energized almost solely by
human and animal labor: machines began to make a difference only when oil
started to flow from the country’s first sizeable oilfield a decade later (Smil
1976a). At the same time, the area planted to grain, the source of more than
four fifths of China’s food energy, was shrinking.
Grain yields kept rising even during the early years of collectivization, which
began in 1955, not because of the success of command farming but because until
1958 everyday communal production was still largely organized on a household
basis (Kung and Putterman 1997). But the party leaders believed that this trend
meant that another Great Leap was shaping up, this time in the fields. They
called for planting less and harvesting more, a feat to be achieved by relying on
yet another item of Stalinist dogma, Lysenkoist practices of close seeding and
deep plowing. As a result, the total area sown to grain declined by 5 per cent in
1958, and by a further 10 per cent in 1959 (Crook 1988). Eager to prove that these
policies had worked, party bureaucrats began fabricating ludicrously exaggerated
reports of record harvests. They announced first that the country had harvested
an incredible 375Mt of grain in 1958, then lowered this to a still-excessive 250Mt
(compared to 190Mt in 1957) while the real harvest was no higher than 194Mt;
similarly, the initial claim for 1959 was 270Mt while the actual crop was just
165Mt (Crook 1988).
These grossly inflated claims were the basis for expropriating higher shares of
produced grain for the urban supply: peasants had to surrender 29 per cent of their
harvest in 1958 and up to 40 per cent in 1959. Inflated figures were also used to
prove the superiority of command farming, and hence to adopt further centraliza-
tion of food production in giant communes. And in a step toward a truly communal
 Food 75

living, the party decided that the peasants should eat free meals in village mess halls.
Inevitably, this led both to a sharply higher demand for food and to unprecedented
waste, as the peasants had no incentive to economize their food intakes, and as a
peculiar (and historically unprecedented) variant of the tragedy of commons
gripped the nation. Continuation of any one of these changes alone – wasting labor
on iron smelting, abandoning fields, reducing the area planted to grain, relying on
dubious agronomic practices, taking more grain away from peasants, offering free
communal meals – would have been sufficient to imperil China’s food supply.
As I will show in some detail in the next section of this chapter, my careful
reconstructions of the country’s average food energy availability and needs in
1957, the last pre-Leap year, show a very close fit between supply and demand
(Smil 1977a). Per capita supply averaged between 2,100 and 2,200kcal/day, while
the age- and sex-adjusted needs of the overwhelmingly rural population engaged
in moderate-to-heavy unmechanized fieldwork were about 2,200kcal/day.
Consequently, only a highly equitable distribution of food could have prevented
massive malnutrition. Such a distribution was largely achieved only in cities,
through the strict food rationing imposed in 1953, although there was an urban
hierarchy with respect to availability of fine grain (highly milled rice and wheat).
In the pre-1958 countryside malnutrition was widespread, and there was always
the possibility of seasonal hunger or starvation following poor or failed harvests in
the most vulnerable areas, as the country had at that time only a limited capacity
for moving large amounts of grain from better-off provinces (particularly from
the Northeast) to food-short regions.

Quantifying the toll

Given the fact that China’s food supply was precarious even in normal times, the
sudden combination of irrational changes was bound to result in a tragedy. Piazza’s
(1983) reconstruction of average food availabilities shows a 16 per cent drop
between 1958 and 1959, from 2,053 to 1,722kcal/capita, followed by an identical
percentage drop in 1960 to 1,453kcal when the countrywide grain harvest fell to
below 140Mt (Figure 3.1). As in all previous large-scale famines, peasants in the
worst affected provinces – including the populous Sichuan and Hunan in the South
and the three North China Plain provinces of Anhui, Henan and Shandong – tried
to cope by first limiting their physical activity, gathering traditional famine foods
(wild seeds and roots, grasses, eventually even tree bark), and deliberately under-
feeding girls and old people, the most dispensable members of their households.
In some counties the weakened survivors tried walking away from villages
where a quarter or a third of all people were dying, but because of police
controls and the food rationing that was tied to places of permanent residence,
there was apparently no mass exodus from the countryside to preferentially
supplied cities. And as in all such famines, people died in predictable ways: first
the most vulnerable (infants and the very old) due to age, aggravation of their
chronic conditions, or loss of immunity; and eventually even many of those who
survived for months and then succumbed to prolonged wasting. One of the most
76 Food

remarkable facts is that the famine ended while the average food supply was still
very low: the nationwide mean for 1962 was still a few per cent below the 1959
level, and the 1963 mean was just a few per cent higher. This clearly demon-
strates that even just a partial return to socio-economic normality (including the
abolishment of communal kitchens and the restitution of private plots and local
markets) was more important than a specific per capita supply, and that an early
intervention – be it reduced grain transfers from the countryside, grain ship-
ments from better-off provinces, or a request for foreign food assistance – could
have limited the famine’s extent and converted the event just to a large-scale
outbreak of serious malnutrition.
Subsequently, the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution prevented any
sustained improvement of food supply: in 1966 its per capita availability finally

Figure 3.1 Average per capita availability of food energy and dietary protein, 1950–1980
Source: Plotted from data in Piazza (1983).
 Food 77

reached the 1958 level, but then it fell once again, and did not permanently
surpass the 1958 level until 1974 (Piazza 1983; FAO 2002). Two generations
after the catastrophe, China’s Communist Party still toes the original exculpatory
line: three years of natural catastrophes caused the suffering. China’s own official
statistics make this argument untenable (SSB 1980). In 1959 the area affected by
drought and flood (with grain yields 30 per cent below the expected mean) was
nearly 10 per cent less than in 1957, the year of the previous record grain
harvest (see Figure 3.2). The situation got worse in 1960 and 1961 with, respec-
tively, 18 and 20 per cent of agricultural land affected by natural disasters – but
three decades later, in 1991 and again in 1994, with drought and floods reaching
their highest extent in modern China’s history, there was only a marginal effect
on overall food supply, as the 1994 grain harvest was less than 3 per cent below
the 1993 record (NBS 2000) (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Areas annually affected by drought and flood in China, 1950–2000
Source: Plotted from data regularly published in China Statistical Yearbook.
78 Food

There is no doubt that given the much weaker production capacity during the
late 1950s (hardly any mechanization of field tasks, almost no chemical fertilizers
or pesticides) the natural disasters of 1960–1961 would have caused much more
widespread chronic malnutrition and more acute seasonal hunger than would
the similarly widespread droughts and floods of the 1990s. But they alone would
have caused only a small fraction of the eventual toll – and most of that could
have been prevented by an early appeal for international food donations. But in
their ultimate disdain for tens of millions of starving people, the government
continued to export grain, and the famine remained publicly unacknowledged
by the rulers.
This made it so much easier for outsiders to discount eyewitness reports of
Chinese refugees reaching Hong Kong, and of Tibetans fleeing to India and
Nepal, and it helped Western apologists for Mao’s warped social experiment to
deny the famine’s very existence or to denigrate its impact. Wes Pedersen, at that
time a US foreign service officer in Hong Kong, wrote in 1960 a report entitled
Famine: Grim Specter over China for the US Information Agency, where it was
rejected as irresponsible speculation (Pedersen 2000). Cheng’s (1961) report on
famine and its repercussions was published in Taiwan, but it was ignored in the
West. Instead, Werner Klatt, writing in The China Quarterly, estimated that the
average daily per capita food energy supply in China in 1960–1961 was
1,850–1,900kcal, and that only “certain cases of malnutrition in deficit
areas…have given currency to the erroneous view that the whole of China is
suffering from conditions of starvation. There is no evidence to support such a
contention” (Klatt 1961a: 69). And in the journal’s next issue he reiterated that
“malnutrition is not a general feature of the Chinese scene”, and argued that “it
would be prudent” not to overestimate the impact of “mediocre harvests” of the
past two years (Klatt 1961b: 126). What a commendable prudence, indeed!
More than a decade after the famine’s end, a Harvard nutrition expert wrote,
after a brief visit to China, that famine was avoided even during the bad harvests
from 1956 to 1961 because of a careful distribution of food to the neediest
groups (Timmer 1976). The great famine was revealed to the world in its horrific
extent only during the 1980s. First, in 1980, China finally published the basic
results of its 1964 population census, which could be compared with the more
accurate 1953 census. But only when single-year age distributions from the
country’s first highly reliable census taken in 1982 became available, and when
adjustments were made to official fertility and mortality rates, was it possible to
estimate the total number of excess deaths (Coale 1981; Aird 1982; Ashton et al.
1984). Explicitly derived estimates of excess deaths range from 16.5 million
(Coale 1981) to about 30 million (Ashton et al. 1984; Banister 1987). In contrast,
the retrospectively reported, and undoubtedly grossly underestimated, official
mortalities result in a total of 15 million deaths, while some undocumented
Chinese estimates offer totals in excess of 40 million.
Unless the still inaccessible Chinese archives contain convincing evidence
whose free scrutiny could settle the matter, it is most unlikely that we will ever
know the actual death toll of the famine. This is hardly surprising, given the
 Food 79

well-known uncertainties in using secondary information to quantify mortality

during many past famines. And two recent African famines show how difficult it is
to come up with consensus figures, even when first-hand information is available.
There were many independent observers present in the Sahel between 1972 and
1975, as the region experienced a major famine whose toll was initially estimated
at well over a million but was eventually put at about 600,000 people (Comité
Information Sahel 1975; Franke and Chasin 1980). Even more remarkably, when
several Western agencies actually undertook field studies of prevailing mortality
during the height of the Somalian famine in 1991–1992, their crude mortality
rates for the total population ranged from 7.3–23.4 per 10,000 per day, and age-
specific mortalities for children younger than five years ranged even more widely,
from 16.4 to 81 per 10,000 per day (Boss et al. 1994).
What is surprising is that even after the extent of the famine’s toll became
known, and after a great deal of previously guarded information about China’s
Maoist past became available during the most liberal spells of Deng’s moderniza-
tion, the world has paid inexplicably little attention to the event whose death toll
stands out even against the background of the massive man-made mortality of
the twentieth century. A truly astonishing example of this indifference is the 1997
edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. All its entry on Famine has to say about modern
China is this: “famine also continued to plague China into the 20th century: more
than 3,000,000 persons starved to death in 1928–29” (Encyclopedia Britannica
1997: 674). And, on the following page, the encyclopedia claims that the “tabula-
tion below is relatively complete for the last 200 years” – yet the table does not
contain any mention of the world’s greatest famine!
Moreover, China’s great famine received only marginal attention from both
students of famines and Sinologists. This is particularly clear in comparison with
relatively well-studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian famines, espe-
cially the Bengal famine of 1943–1944 (India Famine Inquiry Commission
1945; Gangrade 1973; Uppal 1984). Incredibly, Agricola, the most extensive index
summarizing publications on food production and nutrition, does not contain a
single entry on China’s famine for the period 1970–2002. Carl Riskin was the
first Western Sinologist to review the event, in a chapter on China’s food and
development written for a book about hunger in history (Riskin 1990). In the
same year Lin published his explanation of China’s “agricultural crisis”, arguing
that it was due primarily to the changed nature of collectivization whereby the
self-enforcing contract that prevailed before 1958 could not be sustained and
productivity collapsed (Lin 1990). A year later Friedman et al. (1991) took a closer
look at the famine as part of their revealing history of a Hebei village, stressing
that “death toll was not a sudden, one-time error resulting from unique policy
blunders”, but rather “the culmination of institutionalized processses, values,
and interests that had previously generated frightening consequences”.
In contrast, Chang and Wen (1997) blamed communal dining as the key causal
factor of the famine. Yang (1996) devoted about a third of his book on calamity
and reform in China to description and analysis of the famine. And the only
compendium of articles written by Sinologists and devoted solely to the famine was
80 Food

published as a special issue of China Economic Review in the fall of 1998 (Johnson
1998; Riskin 1998; Lin and Yang 1998; Yang and Su 1998; Chang and Wen 1998).
There is also a Chinese-language famine website containing a few dozen reproduc-
tions of various public documents from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and a
slowly growing number of post-1980 publications, as well as a collection of (poor
quality) images reproduced from newspapers and posters (Chinafamine.org 2002).
As the fortieth anniversary of the famine approached I felt that a much
broader dissemination of some basic facts and questions regarding the world’s
most devastating, and overwhelmingly man-made, famine was in order. And
because I agree with Rhodes (1988) that ideologically motivated man-made
death is probably the most overlooked cause of modern mortality, I welcomed
the opportunity to publish such a paper in the world’s leading medical journal,
whose pages have been consistently open to writings and ideas far beyond the
traditional medical confines (Smil 1999b).

China’s great famine: 40 years later

Summary points
The largest famine in human history took place in China during 1959–1961.
Although drought was a contributory factor, this was largely a man-made
catastrophe for which Mao Zedong bears the greatest responsibility.
We will never know the precise number of casualties, but the best demo-
graphic reconstructions indicate about 30 million dead.
Two generations later, China has yet to openly examine the causes and conse-
quences of the famine.
Forty years ago China was in the middle of the world’s largest famine: between
the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 some 30 million Chinese starved to death
and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. The famine had
overwhelmingly ideological causes, rating alongside the two world wars as a prime
example of what Richard Rhodes labeled public man-made death, perhaps the
most overlooked cause of twentieth-century mortality.1 Two generations later
China, which has been rapidly modernizing since the early 1980s, is economically
successful and producing adequate amounts of food. Yet it has still not under-
taken an open, critical examination of this unprecedented tragedy.

Origins of famine
The origins of the famine can be traced to Mao Zedong’s decision, supported by
the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, to launch the Great Leap
Forward. This mass mobilization of the country’s huge population was to
achieve in just a few years economic advances that had taken other nations many
decades to accomplish.2 Mao, beholden to Stalinist ideology that stressed the key
role of heavy industry, made steel production the centerpiece of this deluded
effort. Instead of working in the fields, tens of millions of peasants were ordered
 Food 81

to mine local deposits of iron ore and limestone, to cut trees for charcoal, to
build simple clay furnaces, and to smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not
produce steel, but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools.
Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production, and newly formed
agricultural communes planted less land to grain, which at that time was the
source of more than 80 per cent of China’s food energy.3
At the same time, fabricated reports of record grain harvests were issued to
demonstrate the superiority of communal farming. These gross exaggerations
were then used to justify the expropriation of higher shares of grain for cities
and the establishment of wasteful communal mess halls serving free meals.4 In
reality, the grain harvest plummeted (Figure 3.3); and since supply and demand
of food before 1958 were almost equal, by the spring of 1959 there was famine
in a third of China’s provinces.
As an essentially social catastrophe, the famine showed clear marks of omis-
sion, commission, and provision. These three attributes recur in all modern
man-made famines.5 The greatest omission was the failure of China’s rulers to
acknowledge the famine and promptly to secure foreign food aid. Studies of
famines show how easily they can be ended (or prevented) once the government
decides to act, but the Chinese government took nearly three years to act. Taking
away all means of private food production (in some places even cooking utensils),
forcing peasants into mismanaged communes, and continuing food exports were
the worst acts of commission. Preferential supply of food to cities and to the
ruling elite was the deliberate act of selective provision.
These actions are perfect illustrations of Sen’s thesis about the critical link in
the political alienation of the governors from the governed:

Figure 3.3 Total and per capita grain production in China, 1950–1970
82 Food

The direct penalties of a famine are borne by one group of people and
political decisions are taken by another. The rulers never starve. But when a
government is accountable to the local populace it too has good reasons to
do its best to eradicate famines. Democracy, via electoral politics, passes on
the price of famines to the rulers as well.6

There was no such link in Mao’s China.

Weather only exacerbated the suffering. Official accounts still blame the
natural catastrophes for the suffering but China’s own statistics belie this expla-
nation.7 Undoubtedly, the drought of 1960–1961 would have lowered grain
supply in the worst affected provinces, but by itself it would have caused only a
small fraction of the eventual nationwide death toll. During the 1990s the worst
droughts and floods in China’s modern history had only a marginal effect on the
country’s adequate food supply. Only a return to more rational economic poli-
cies after 1961, including imports of grain, ended the famine.
China’s opening up to the world made a key difference. The first business
deal signed after US president Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 was an order for
thirteen of the world’s largest and most modern, American-designed, nitrogen
fertilizer plants. More purchases of such plant followed, and China became the
world’s largest producer of nitrogenous fertilizers. The first major change initi-
ated by the reformist faction of the Communist Party in 1979, less than three
years after Mao’s death, was to dissolve agricultural communes and free farm
prices. By 1984 all food rationing was lifted in the cities, and China’s average per
capita food supply rose to within 5 per cent of Japan’s comfortable mean.8

The extent of the famine

The true extent of the famine was not revealed to the world until the publication
of single-year age distributions from the country’s first highly reliable population
census in 1982. These data made it possible to estimate the total number of
excess deaths between 1959 and 1961, and the first calculations by American
demographers put the toll at between 16.5 and 23 million.9 More detailed later
studies came up with 23 to 30 million excess deaths, and unpublished Chinese
materials hint at totals closer to 40 million.10–12 We will never know the actual
toll, because the official Chinese figures for the three famine years greatly under-
estimate both the fall in fertility and the rise in mortality, and because we cannot
accurately reconstruct these vital statistics (Figure 3.4).
The lack of accuracy is as expected. All death tolls cited for major famines have
large margins of error. This is true even for events unfolding amid unprecedented
publicity. An attempt to discern a coherent picture of morbidity, mortality and
nutritional status during the 1991–1992 famine in Somalia, an effort based on
twenty-three separate field studies, ended in failure.13 Similar controversies
surround the recent estimates of the excess deaths in Iraq attributable to economic
sanctions after the first Gulf War.14
 Food 83

The need for open discussion

But no amount of additional information and no new and more sophisticated
demographic analyses can change the fundamental conclusion: Mao’s delusionary
policies caused by far the largest famine in human history. Yet in contrast to other
great famines of the twentieth century (Ukraine 1932–1933, Bengal 1943–1944),
the causes of the Chinese famine and an attribution of responsibility for its depth
and duration have never been openly discussed in the afflicted nation. Beyond a
narrow circle of China experts, the famine has also been virtually ignored by
Western scholars and politicians. The need for moral examination and historical
closure is obvious. Eventually the country will have to examine the causes and
consequences of the tragedy, whose magnitude surpasses the combined toll of all
other famines China has experienced during the past two centuries.
How could this famine have lasted so long? How tenable is it to excuse the
actions of so many people throughout the party and state bureaucracy by
blaming solely their leader? Had they no other choice but to follow orders and to
carry out, often against resistance, mindless collectivization and reduced planting
of grain, to falsify harvest statistics, and to forcibly take grain away from
evidently starving peasants? Germany has spent two generations trying to under-
stand the horrors of the Third Reich and to atone for its transgressions. Russia

Figure 3.4 Officially reported and reconstructed mortality in China, 1950–1990 (famine
period is shaded)
84 Food

began to face its dark past soon after Stalin’s death, when Khrushchev opened
the gates of the gulag and had the dictator’s embalmed corpse removed from the
Red Square mausoleum. China’s turn is yet to come.
If, as is likely, such an accounting does not happen soon, the direct memories
of survivors will be lost. Of course, the archives of the Chinese Communist
Party and of its enormous secret police apparatus will eventually be opened and
yield, much like the party and KGB archives in Russia since 1991, some of their
long-hidden secrets. Many facts we will never know. A leading Chinese demogra-
pher found that even casual surveys of villages in areas that experienced the
worst starvation show an unusually high extent of mental impairment among
adults born during the famine years (Xizhe Peng, personal communication).
Given the importance of nutrition for the development of mental capacities
during infancy and early childhood, this was a predictable tragedy.15 We will
never know how many millions of survivors throughout China have had their
lives twisted in this terrible way.
Finally, what are we to make of the Western indifference to the great famine?
Eyewitness stories of refugees who fled to Hong Kong were widely dismissed and
rarely reported during the famine years. Two generations later, a journalistic
account is the only fairly comprehensive volume on the famine published in the
West.16 Incredibly, the 1997 edition of the New Encyclopedia Britannica does not
even list the catastrophe in its tabulation of famines of the past 200 years.17 An
in-depth scholarly history of the famine has yet to be written.

Unanswered questions
Little has changed regarding our understanding of famines in general, and of
China’s great famine in particular, since the BMJ paper was published in 1999.
Recent attempts to evaluate the toll of Asia’s latest famine, one on China’s very
border, confirm how difficult it is to come up with any consensus when the offending
regime remains (although in this case not completely) in a non-cooperative
denial. Estimates of North Korea’s famine-related deaths in the period between
1995 and 2000 (based on a variety of evidence, including refugee surveys and
some assessments of child nutrition carried out by the World Food Programme
inside the country) range over an order of magnitude from less than 300,000 to
3.5 million, with the most likely total of 0.6–1 million (Goodkind and West 2001).
And I found a new book by Davis (2001) – which identifies the combination
of a series of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes and a deliberately
murderous conspiracy of “liberal capitalists” as the cause of large-scale famines
that swept late nineteenth-century India and China – relevant not for what it
wholesales (a simplistic ideological zeal), but for what it omits. Namely that the
right policies are more important in determining the outcome of food produc-
tion than even relatively severe natural catastrophes. In closing my review of
Davis’ book I used the Chinese example to illustrate what such measures can do
to combat climatic teleconnections, or any other natural disasters, in the modern
world (Smil 2001a: 645):
 Food 85

In 1980, after decades of Maoist misery, China began disbanding the

communes and privatizing the farming. Does Davis know that just a few
years later, when the powerful 1982–1983 El Niño was affecting its climate,
the country had two years of record grain harvests, which made it possible
to abolish the food rationing that had lasted since 1954? Anybody out there
willing to credit this to a Wall Street conspiracy?

As for the great famine itself, it remains one of the least studied, and certainly
one of the least known, catastrophes in modern history. Beijing’s unending
Communist gerontocracy has no interest in opening party and secret police
archives and giving permission for nationwide research that could still salvage
some of the steadily disappearing evidence of that terrible catastrophe. Western
moral judgment, so demanding of Germans, so critical of Russian and Japanese
transgressions, remains almost completely suspended, or exceedingly muted,
where the inhumanity of the Maoist regime vis-à-vis its own people, and the
apologetics of the current Chinese rulers is concerned. I believe that the magni-
tude of the suffering (in this respect it is clearly irrelevant if the toll was 40 or
“just” 15 million) demands that we see this entire matter in clear moral terms.
That is why I am both disappointed and surprised that the few scholarly contri-
butions devoted to the better understanding of the event have been so
preoccupied with searching for the purported primary cause.
I feel it is both counterproductive and distracting to argue about the famine’s
primary cause. Attempting to elevate a single, albeit very important, factor to the
primary causal role is to do disservice to a patently complex historical reality.
This is not to deny that the search for the primary cause has been often inge-
nious and painstaking – but ultimately all such calls disappoint. Several studies of
total factor productivity of China’s agriculture show convincingly the sudden
drop of the measure in 1959. But it is one thing to agree with Lin’s (1990)
hypothesis that the removal of the exit right from communes enacted in that
year triggered this productivity drop – and another to conclude that this produc-
tivity drop was the cause of the famine. After all, a comparison of total
productivity indices calculated by five different researchers, and included in Lin’s
paper, shows little difference between values for 1960, the peak famine year, and
1962–1964. Moreover, three of these series put the productivities of the early
1970s below the values prevailing during the three famine years, and much below
the performance during the years of the pre-1958 voluntary collectivization.
Communal dining, with participation rates as high as 95–98 per cent in the
most radically governed provinces (including Henan and Sichuan), clearly led to
an immense waste of food, but Chang and Wen’s (1997) thesis, that this
“consumption inefficiency” caused the famine, and that it led to its onset already
in the fall of 1958 after a record autumn harvest, is difficult to accept. As Lin
and Yang (1998) rightly point out, it is most unlikely that food that would
normally last six months would be uniformly consumed everywhere in just two
months to cause the first famine deaths before the end of 1958. A variant of this
explanation is Yang’s (1996) “loyalty compensation” hypothesis restated two
86 Food

years later by Yang and Su (1998). This hypothesis states that the communal
dining reached its highest levels in provinces with lower shares of party members
because those who aspired to join the party would demonstrate their loyalty to
the central government by becoming excessively radical. But as the rural
membership shares were very low everywhere (on the average less than 1.5 per
cent) this explanation is not persuasive.
Riskin (1998: 116), who looked critically at the attempts to find the famine’s
cause, summed up the failure of these efforts well by noting that any closer
examination leads us back “to a general set of extreme policies, rather than to
any one key component, as cause of famine”. New research will hardly add new
causes to a long list of major factors whose dynamic interaction triggered and
sustained the famine: mistaken belief in the existence of large grain surpluses;
the resulting reduction in the area planted to staple grains; massive and
prolonged transfers of rural labor into dubious industrial undertakings in the
countryside; temporary large-scale migration of peasants to cities; strong urban
bias of the leadership leading to excessive procurement of grain for the cities
(nearly 25 per cent higher in 1959 than in 1958); continuing grain exports (net
shipments reached a record of 4.2Mt in 1959 and were still 2.7Mt in 1960, the
year of the severest death rate); clearly above-average rates of natural disasters,
particularly of drought; and the absence of normal civil society with free and
rapid reporting of food shortages and first signs of famine.
Climate aside, all of these factors have, of course, a common denominator: the
ruling party whose policies triggered the crisis, whose initial denial of mass deaths
deepened it, whose inexcusably belated response prolonged the suffering, and
whose refusal to admit responsibility even more than forty years after the famine
ended prevents any historic closure. Even if all the proposed causal hypotheses
outlined above were true, a normal society would move rapidly to correct either
the sudden onset of indolence caused by forced collectivization or a runaway
tragedy of commons induced by unlimited access to food. A bad policy could
generate a problem, even a crisis, but it alone would not suffice to perpetuate such
an extraordinary, prolonged and widespread spell of dying, as a determined and
timely response would limit both the extent and the severity of suffering.
The undeniable fact that these normal corrective processes took such an inor-
dinately long time to make the difference is clearly the responsibility of the
ruling Communist regime, and as at that time that dictatorship was under the
near-total command of a single man, the most fundamental cause of the famine
is clear enough: Mao’s delusions, which could be acted out due to his near-impe-
rial command of power (Li 1994). This is not a simplistic personification of a
complex event, merely a recognition of historical reality. Productivity slumps and
communal kitchens were no more the real causes of China’s great famine than
the KGB, kolkhozes and the gulag were the causes of Russia’s post-1929
suffering. As in so many other cases in history, a pupil who despised his teacher
still learned the lessons well enough to surpass him. Accurate quantification of
the victims of the Stalinist and the Maoist terror is impossible, but their kindred
genesis is all too clear.
 Food 87

From subsistence to satiety: food supply and

agricultural transformation
More than a decade after China recovered from the world’s greatest famine and
began its opening-up to the West, we still did not know the country’s real nutri-
tional status. Official propaganda and naively uncritical visitors were supplying a
predictable stream of encouraging reports, but they did not support those claims
with any representative figures. My first contributions to a better understanding of
China’s food situation attempted to quantify the basics. My quantifications of the
country’s average per capita food supply and its basic composition in 1957, the
last “normal” pre-Leap year, and in 1974, the twenty-fifth year of Communist
China’s existence, were to show the lack of progress in feeding China’s people
over a course of nearly one generation. And a comparison of the most likely
supply rate with an estimate of approximate average food requirements of the
mid-1970s indicated the virtual absence of any nutritional surplus.
As in the case of my early energy work, these were ambitious goals given the
paucity of available data, but in retrospect my calculations of average food
supply and requirements turned out to be very representative of the actual situ-
ation in the mid-1970s. They clearly indicated the precarious nature of China’s
food supply, and hence the need for its fundamental improvement. One thing I
would have never predicted at that time is how rapidly such an improvement
would come. Being acutely aware of the fact that only a very thin, and region-
ally much tattered, safety cushion separated China of the 1970s from massive
malnutrition, I watched the de facto privatization of China’s farming – the birth
of baogan daohu (household responsibility system) in Sichuan and Anhui and its
diffusion throughout the country – first with much hope and later with a great
deal of satisfaction.
As soon as the first new statistics were published during the late 1970s I began
to evaluate them and to use them in tracing the rising supply of food.
Subsequently, as China’s average per capita food energy availability approached
that of Japan and stabilized at this fairly comfortable level, I kept returning to this
important topic regularly, and published papers or book chapters dealing exclu-
sively with China’s food supply and requirements, or pieces that set these matters
in a wider context, every two or three years for the next two decades. Selections
from these writings (Smil 1977a, 1978) trace China’s road from nutritional subsis-
tence to levels of food supply unprecedented in the country’s long history.

Food availability in 1957 and 1974

During the past few years food production in the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) has been portrayed in impressive terms. The leader of the PRC’s delegation
to the 1974 United Nations World Food Conference in Rome informed the
plenary session that the country had “ensured the supply of basic means of subsis-
tence, stable food prices and adequate food for everyone” (Hao 1974). Numerous
dispatches of the New China News Agency, radio broadcasts, newspaper and
88 Food

journal articles repeat the stories of record harvests, high stable yields, grain self-
sufficiency and food abundance.
Many Westerners admitted for a quick guided tour of the country concur
with these judgments. Remarks on healthy, well-nourished and content people
crowding the streets of the large cities and cultivating the verdant countryside
have become a trademark of visitors’ reports (Galbraith 1973; MacLaine 1975).
However, there is relatively little quantitative evidence cited to support these
statements and impressions. Information on the per capita availability of food
energy – the most essential indicator of a country’s nutritional status – is particu-
larly rare.
Persistent scarcity of reliable primary statistics is, of course, the main reason
for this paucity of quantitative evidence. Yet a quantification of the PRC’s food
availability and per capita consumption, though difficult, is possible and a range
of reasonably representative values can be obtained by incorporating plausible
alternative input estimates. The process entails the preparation of food balance
sheets and their comparison with population totals.

Food balance sheets

Construction of a food balance sheet starts with production figures for all-impor-
tant edible crops, with total counts of domestic animals and total fish catches;
these figures are then corrected for trade in raw and processed foodstuffs to
establish the gross domestic food availability. Domestic utilization of crops is
subdivided into food and non-food uses (seed, feed, industrial manufacture),
quantities wasted during storage and transportation are subtracted and appro-
priate extraction rates are used to convert the raw products into processed foods;
average slaughter rates, carcass weights and output rates are applied to animal
counts in order to derive meat, milk and egg production.
Balance sheets provide estimates of food supplies available for human
consumption at the retail level, that is either as the food leaves retail shops or
otherwise enters the household – in China’s villages mostly from communal
allotment or from a private plot. Balance sheets do not account for losses during
household storage, preparation and cooking and for any leftovers fed to domestic
animals and pets or thrown away (Schulte et al. 1973); they give no indication of
seasonal variations, diet differences in various population groups (socio-
economic, regional, religious) and consumption differences within a household
(den Hartog 1972). In general, a food balance sheet is thus to be considered as a
good, and a rather liberal, approximation, as a revealing summary of a nation’s
nutritional status.
To enable a time comparison of per capita food availability in the PRC, the
comprehensive food balance sheets were prepared for the years 1957 and 1974.
The first year marked the end of the first Five Year Plan – and it was also the last
year for which a relative abundance of reasonable statistics is available; 1974
was, of course, the twenty-fifth year of the PRC’s existence, a convenient time to
assess the country’s progress.
 Food 89

Per capita food availability

Complete food balance sheets give the country some 200Mt of plant and 13Mt
of animal food in 1957; in 1974 these totals increased to just over 300Mt and to
25Mt respectively. Depending on which of the two sets of consistent population
estimates – by L. Orleans or J.S. Aird (Orleans 1975) – is used, these aggregates
translate into 2,073–2,102kcal per day per capita in 1957 and 2,070–2,256kcal
in 1974. These differences in per capita consumption grow even larger
(1,966–2,211kcal in 1957, and 2,079–2,256kcal in 1974) when the food energy
availability is considered in terms of a range bracketed by values ⫾5 per cent
around the calculated figures.
It is quite interesting to compare these per capita values with available pre-
war averages. J.L. Buck’s (1937) rural surveys resulted in average daily supply of
2,537kcal/person. Liu and Yeh (1965) argued persuasively that a 10 per cent
reduction of this figure (i.e. to 2,283kcal) would bring it nearer to the actual
nationwide average. They themselves calculated daily supply of energy at
2,130kcal/person in 1933.
And it is also interesting to compare my mid-1970s calculations with the
best possible retrospective reconstruction of China’s food balance sheet under-
taken by the FAO once the revised official Chinese statistics for the 1970s
became available during the 1980s. FAO (2002) now credits China with
average daily supply of 2,073kcal/capita in 1974, compared to the range of
2,070–2,256kcal/capita I published in 1976. The relatively high value of the
upper rate is due entirely to the fact that in 1974 there was a gap of 76 million
(844–920 million) in the best available estimates of China’s population, and
the use of a low population total in the denominator naturally boosted the
average rate.
Absolute values of food availability that I was able to calculate in 1974 were
virtually identical with FAO’s later reconstruction, and if I had known the actual
population total for that year (908.6 million) my calculation of average daily per
capita supply (2,096kcal/capita) would have differed from FAO’s rate by a mere
1 per cent. As for the basic breakdown, the two estimates are, once again, iden-
tical: FAO attributes 94 per cent of all available food energy coming from plant
foods; my calculation showed 93.5 per cent. This proves that even at a time
when only very limited, and in addition often highly distorted, information was
coming from China it was possible to use it in a critical way and to derive
revealing conclusions.
Notwithstanding the inevitable errors in any calculations of this type, as well
as the necessity to operate with value ranges rather than with single figures, the
quantitative evidence presented demands the conclusion that very little – if any –
improvement has taken place in average Chinese per capita food consumption
between 1957 and 1974. Average food availabilities in 1957 and 1974 certainly
do not indicate any chronic, massive malnutrition – but neither do they reflect
any substantial advances in the country’s nutrition during the past two decades
or in comparison with the prewar levels.
90 Food

Food requirements
For many generations the average per capita food supply in affluent countries
has been surpassing any conceivable dietary requirements of largely sedentary
populations. In contrast, in subsistence economies where food supply is nearly
always limited and where physical exertion is the norm for a large share of the
population, it is not enough to know the average per capita energy availability in
order to appraise a country’s food status. In all such cases food supply must be
compared with energy needs that are a function of age, sex, weight and physical
activity (FAO/WHO/UNU 1985). None of this information was available for
China of the mid-1970s, but I tried my best to reconstruct these needs.
I started with standard physiological accounts based on the standard assump-
tion of moderate physical activity. Then I took into consideration large shares of
China’s population engaged in tasks that required heavy, rather than moderate,
energy expenditure: most field chores, from plowing and hoeing to mowing,
loading and canal-digging, belong to this category. This reconstruction strongly
suggested a food energy deficit in 1957, while the slightly better nutritional situa-
tion by 1974 was probably just sufficient to cover food energy demand. The
composition of the average diet (plant vs. animal origin) did not change signifi-
cantly, and “any improvement in Chinese nutrition that took place is probably the
result of more equitable food allocation rather than of increases in farm output
which have not significantly outpaced population growth” (Smil 1977a: 13).
Ruling elites aside, uniformly low incomes – the shared poverty of Maoist
China – precluded any major differences in access to food, but the most impor-
tant reason for the relatively equitable food sharing was the nationwide rationing
of all staple, as well as many minor, foodstuffs. This is how I described the situa-
tion in 1978, the twenty-fifth year of China’s food rationing.

Food rationing
For foreign visitors, the country has the best Peking duck and repeated ten-
course banquets with lean pork, poultry, seafood and maotai (Smil 1978). For the
“revolutionary masses” – when things go well – there are ubiquitous ration
tickets (tied, and tying their bearers, to the place of their permanent residence),
fluctuating allocations of grain, standing in line – pots in hand – for bean curd
when available, one egg per person per week, the black market – and an antici-
pation of the New Year festival, with its special supply of glutinous rice, melon
seeds, black mushrooms and red dates.
Rationing of all major foodstuffs has been in force since November 1953. Tickets
are issued for all staple grains, meat and sugar – and for vegetal oil, soybean sauce,
bean curd (three kinds – fresh, spiced and dried), bean sprouts, mushrooms, water
chestnuts, fish (fresh and salted), string beans, potatoes and liquor (Ch’en 1978).
Ration tickets have thus become China’s second currency, more important than
money itself, and as such they are offered for good prices on the black market, traded
in streets, stolen and forged. Rules of the involved rationing system – quantities and
 Food 91

restrictions of the purchase – change in response to local economic and political

conditions, and actual amounts of allotted food may be far below the standard levels.
Grain rationing is complex. The urban population is divided into nine cate-
gories (according to age and labor exertion) and receives four different
certificates and two kinds of ration coupons. Rural rations are structured differ-
ently (there is so-called “basic grain” and additional “work point grain”,
purchasable with accumulated commune work points), and can be changed into
urban rations only with a special permit that acts as a very efficient check on
migration. It is also much more difficult to exchange rural rations for provincial
or national grain ration coupons, which are necessary to buy meals in restaurants
or any grain products while traveling.

Monthly rations
The standardized average monthly ration for the general public and children
over ten years of age is 12.5 kilograms of rice in the south and 13.75kg of grain
products (mainly wheat flour) in the north; light laborers should receive
16–17.5kg and hard laborers 20–22kg of grain or grain products each month. In
the north, an increasing portion of this allotment has been in coarse grain rather
than in preferred wheat flour; a recent report mentions that while the privileged
Beijing rations are composed of 50 per cent wheat flour, 30 per cent rice and
20 per cent millet, kaoliang and corn, Shenyang residents receive the same cereals
in the far less palatable proportion of 20:10:70 (Broyelle and Broyelle 1978).
Meat tickets and fish tickets are issued only for urban residents. Each month,
Communist party cadres get 1.5kg of pork, people in Beijing, undoubtedly the
best supplied city in China, may purchase as much as 1kg, while the rations in
remote provincial centers are only a half or a quarter of this amount. In many
places, people eat meat only during the New Year and Qing Ming festivals or at
the time of family celebrations. Sugar rations fluctuate considerably with avail-
ability, up to no more than 0.5kg per capita per month. Vegetal oil, so essential
for deep-frying and stir-frying, is rationed in truly meager amounts: although the
privileged cadres may get as much as 1kg each month, the normal Peking rate is
only 0.5kg monthly; in most other cities, the ration is a mere 100–200 grams,
and in rural areas as little as 50g! Drastic oil shortages are also illustrated by the
fact that oil tickets are issued for quantities as small as 10 and 25g.
A comparison in easy-to-visualize units for those who have never stir-fried a
Chinese dish, indeed never cooked at all: 25g represents two scant tablespoons of
oil, while about three tablespoons are needed just to stir-fry properly one dish of
vegetables for a small family meal, and normally at least 2–3 such dishes would
be prepared. A no-less-revealing comparison can be made in annual per capita
terms. In 1978 even Beijing’s privileged rate of 6kg/capita was, for example, less
than a third of Italy’s average supply of cooking oil.
Rations are loosened or temporarily removed only to stock up for festivals.
For the 1977 New Year festival, Tianjin had 45 per cent more liquor than in
1976 (normal festival rate: 150–400g per adult); there were more candies, cakes
92 Food

and fresh vegetables in Beijing; and each Shanghai family could buy ten
preserved eggs, half a kilogram of salted jellyfish and shelled peanuts, and unre-
stricted amounts of pork and frozen shrimp, whose exports were temporarily
diverted for home consumption. After the festival, it was back to staples.
As I was writing these lines in the summer of 1978, the tide was just about to
turn. In December of that year Deng Xiaoping accomplished his final return to
power and, to the surprise of most experts abroad and to the deep gratitude of
hundreds of millions of people inside China, began his sweeping economic
reforms with the most urgent shift, the abolition of communal farming. The
man who a quarter century earlier was a leading executor of Mao’s ruthless
campaign against landlords and rich peasants (that brought death to hundreds of
thousands and that laid the foundations for the communization of China’s
farming) decided that to “get rich is glorious”. But these rural reforms actually
started even before they were sanctioned and promoted by a new regime. Yang
(1996) is undoubtedly correct when he argues that profound disillusionment with
the communal farming produced by the suffering of the Great Leap Famine
provided a powerful impetus for the rapid dismantling of command farming,
and he demonstrates that the first steps in this direction were taken well before
the policy became official in the very provinces (Anhui, Sichuan) that suffered
most during the great famine of 1959–1961.

Agricultural reforms and improved food supply

The results of this agricultural transformation were unexpectedly rapid. Between
1978 and 1984 the average annual growth rate of agricultural output rose to 7.7
from 2.9 per cent for the years 1952–1978, and decollectivization accounted for
about half of this jump and the increase in state procurement prices for most of
the rest: other factors played only a small role (Lin 1992). I have felt many times
during the past two decades that the importance of this fundamental shift has
not been sufficiently appreciated, both inside China and abroad, both as it was
taking place as well as in retrospect: a better life is so easily taken for granted. In
1981 I concluded that “new farming policies are already bringing in a greater
supply of non-staple foods and, given political stability, they should appreciably
improve Chinese diets during the next generation” (Smil 1981: 67). At the same
time, I had to reiterate that “the quantitative evidence shows an uncomfortably
small difference between availability and need”. Just a few years later I could say
with some confidence that, on the average, the Chinese had, finally, enough to
eat but I also had to point out that the adequate nationwide mean conceals
major, and widening, regional and socio-economic disparities (Smil 1985).
In 1986 I prepared a new food balance sheet for the year 1983, compared it with
a slightly higher new set of nutritional figures published by the State Statistical
Bureau, and found that even my conservative calculations put China’s average per
capita food supply less than 10 per cent behind Japan’s comfortable mean (Smil
1986). The following excerpts and comments trace these shifts over a period of two
decades, beginning with the food balance for the late 1970s (Smil 1981).
 Food 93

The food balance for China in 1978

Average per capita food supply amounted to 2,130kcal/day in 1978, and it
provided 57g of protein and 25g of lipids. The cost of this plain diet to urban
consumers is quite high. A typical urban working-class family of five spends
about 60 per cent of its income on food, and for lower-income families the
share is as much as 75 per cent. A typical worker’s hourly wage will buy 3–4kg
of cabbage in season, 0.75–1kg of medium-quality rice, 3–4 eggs, or 100–200g
of pork.
By 1985 food claimed about 52 per cent of all household spending by an
average urban family, and by 2000 the share was down to 42 per cent (NBS
2000), compared to 22 per cent in Japan (SB 2002). Food balance sheets show
that no improvement of average individual consumption took place in the past
two decades. In most of the intervening years the position was worse than during
1955–1958 and 1977–1979. Moreover, the mean food supply in 1977, or 1957,
was no higher than during the good harvest years before the Japanese invasion in
1937: average Chinese food availability has thus remained virtually static for at
least half a century (see Table 3.1).

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94 Food

Major regional and temporal differences in food availability are perhaps best
illustrated by the situation in Sichuan, China’s most populous province: in 1976
there was a famine in the relatively rich Sichuan Basin, and only large grain
transfers from other provinces prevented further starvation. Starvation in
Sichuan in 1976 was confirmed by, at that time, Vice-Chairman Deng Xiaoping,
himself a Sichuanese, in an interview with Han Suyin published in 1977 (Deng
1977). In 1980 the Chinese released the 1976 grain consumption figure for the
province: just 180kg of unmilled grain per head (Xinhua 1980)
Many places in China’s southwest and northwest appear to be especially
poorly off. In Guizhou province, average peasant grain rations were only 76.8
per cent of the country’s mean in 1976, implying an average daily food
consumption per head of around 1,700kcal, clear evidence of malnutrition
(Guizhou Provincial Service 1976). In northwestern loess areas of Gansu and
Ningxia, peasants in some counties harvested only 100kg of grain per head and,
by official admissions, are fed worse than during the war against Japan four
decades ago (Tong and Tong 1978). A document of the Central Committee of
the Chinese Communist Party (1979) admitted that in 1977 “more than 100
million people in rural areas suffered from a lack of grain”. The country is a
mosaic of regions where the population is fairly well-off, consuming little more
than their essential energy requirements, and areas of either chronic (e.g. some
parts of loess highland) or recurrent (e.g. frequently drought-stricken provinces of
Henan and Anhui) shortages where food intake is, at best, sufficient to cover
basic metabolic and activity needs but is hardly compatible with a vigorous and
healthy life. These areas have had spells of famine and major malnutrition.
In spite of inevitable inaccuracies and approximations, the quantitative
evidence shows an uncomfortably small difference between availability and need.
This must be the cause of serious concern in a nation that cannot afford to rely
on massive purchases of foreign food, and that is beset by many economic, social
and environmental problems.
And this concern was fortunately uppermost in Deng Xiaoping’s mind as he
began reforming Maoist China. His new household responsibility system was
used to dismantle communes, and while the peasants still could not own the land,
they could now begin to increase agricultural productivity by using the compara-
tive advantage of their soils or their skills rather than trying to fit them into a rigid
muster of the Maoist grain-first policy. In less than five years, Deng Xiaoping’s
radical solution brought no less radically encouraging results (Smil 1985).

Benefits of the reform

Because “food and eating are central to the Chinese way of life and part of the
Chinese ethos” (Chang 1977), the misery of Chinese life during the two decades
between the late 1950s and the late 1970s is easy to understand. Steel output was
rising, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles were tested, the
Soviet Union turned from an eternal friend to an aggressive hegemonist,
President Richard Nixon, the paragon of despicable American imperialism, was
 Food 95

regaled in Qiang Jing’s presence by revolutionary ballet, and Chinese leader

Deng Xiaoping disappeared, reappeared, disappeared and reappeared again.
But all these momentous developments did nothing to sweeten the thin
breakfast gruels, to bring in more fine wheat flour to steam tasty mantou, to
make a flavorful chicken dish more than a once-a-year delicacy for hundreds of
millions of people. Per capita consumption in 1976 or 1977 was virtually the
same as it had been in 1956–1958, and was just marginally higher than average
food availability during the years immediately preceding the start of the Sino-
Japanese War in 1937. The record looked impressive only when compared to
the depths of the massive 1959–1961 famine. And the outlook, after two
decades of campaigns, exhortations, slogans and boastful unrealistic goals, was
hardly promising.
Only a fundamental move could change those prospects. Such a move,
sustained during its early faltering years and then intensified, was by far the most
important development in China after Mao. The widespread diffusion of the
household responsibility system (baogan daohu) has brought unprecedented
average food availabilities, and has assured nutrition adequate to cover basic
growth and activity needs of a larger share of the population than at any time
since 1949. The key to this revolutionary change (the obvious question: would
Soviet leaders dare to move so boldly and so rapidly to return common sense to
farming?) was the spectacular increase in productivity; not infrequently a few
people in a specialized household now produce in a few months the equivalent of
the annual communal command farming products of dozens of peasants.
Specialized households started with relatively small-scale, short-term
contracting for grains, oil or sugar crops, pork, poultry or fish, but both the scale
and the variety of their operations expanded rapidly after 1982, and by now it
might be hard to come up with a task that cannot be contracted or a service that
is not offered to satisfy huge pent-up rural demand.
Deng’s policy of “letting peasants produce what they can do best” has been
an overwhelming success but, expectedly, its implementation was not without
problems. Most obvious is the inevitability of increasing income disparities and,
perhaps even more importantly, the “class” distribution of these benefits. Living
standards are rising across the board but the formerly privileged household
(commune leaders, managers of local enterprises, educated cadres) are bene-
fiting even more.
And in spite of all the rapid diversification, typical Chinese diets remain
monotonous, grain-dominated, and relatively rather expensive. But unlike very
recent diets, today’s diets appear to supply, on the average, enough energy and
protein for normal growth and healthy life. As for average daily food energy,
protein and lipid availabilities, these values are calculated at 2,700kcal and 85g and
40g, respectively, with plant foods supplying 95, 85 and 55 per cent of the totals.
The differences between food balance sheet averages and the value of actual
daily intakes determined by periodical dietary surveys are at least 25 per cent and
as much as 40 per cent in industrialized countries. In China one would expect less
of a difference between the two values, and the results of a 1983 nutritional survey
96 Food

of 7,605 people in Beijing municipality (Xinhua 1983) indicate that the gap is
between 8 and 15 per cent. Chinese publications have repeatedly mentioned that
2,600kcal are needed to satisfy average dietary requirements, but my calculations,
based on the age–sex and occupational distributions from the 1982 census and on
new measurements of energy expenditure levels, indicate that the most likely
mean should be around 2,300kcal. By 1983, if not by 1982, the Chinese had,
finally, enough to eat.
This is, of course, baogan’s greatest achievement. But there are at least 90
million people, mostly in the northwest and the southwest, who, according to an
official appraisal cited by Deng Xiaoping, still do not have enough to eat. While
the average diet was still of a relatively poor quality, its magnitude was rapidly
approaching the level of Japan’s supply (Smil 1986).

Closing on Japan and continuing shortfalls

By 1984 per capita availability of rice was about 30 per cent above the 1977
level, the harvest of wheat doubled, that of oilseeds nearly tripled, per capita
meat production rose by almost 89 per cent and sugar refining nearly doubled
(Smil 1986). Such changes in a mere six years would have been remarkable
anywhere; in China, coming after a generation of stagnation at levels of bare
subsistence, they were truly revolutionary.
This greatly improved performance has put China into a new category. As
shown in the comparison of principal food availability trends in China, India
and Japan since 1950, the three countries were at a surprisingly similar level in
the early 1950s, and Chinese and Japanese availabilities were virtually identical
by 1957 (Figure 3.5). Afterwards, Japan’s rapidly rising affluence and China’s two
decades of turmoil made a difference of nearly 800kcal per capita per day by
1977, and for most of that period China’s average food availability was just
marginally ahead of India’s (20-year means for 1958–1977 are about 1,950kcal
for China and 1,900kcal for India).
But after 1977 India, in spite of its recently improving performance, was left
behind, as China pulled to within about 250kcal of Japan and – as a quick look
at FAO’s global listing of food availabilities will indicate – reached the levels of
Mongolia, Malaysia and Brunei (FAO 1985). Even in terms of protein avail-
ability, China’s performance is similarly impressive, surpassed in East Asia only
by Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia.
A simple comparison of the most likely intakes (2,200–2,400kcal) and require-
ments (2,100–2,400kcal) shows a nearly perfect overlap. Were Chinese food
supplies distributed according to need, everybody would have enough. Not
equally but according to need, because the hilly and mountainous terrain of
inland provinces and the virtually nonexistent or very low levels of mechaniza-
tion in the poorest regions mean higher metabolic expenditures than in the
much more modernized coastal lowlands.
Since 1979 the Chinese have increasingly acknowledged the existence of
these regional disparities. Deng Xiaoping stated that (in 1984) “there are still
 Food 97

some tens of millions of peasants in the countryside who do not yet have enough
food” (Deng 1985: 15), and Liu (1984: 6) put their number at 11 per cent of the
rural population. Can this total, equivalent roughly to the population of Nigeria,
be verified using the recently published results of rural consumption surveys?
From sample surveys we now have provincial averages for per capita consump-
tion of unprocessed grain ranging from a mere 205.5kg in Xinjiang to 329.5kg
in Jiangxi. The countrywide mean is 260kg. Because cereals are such a decisive
portion of Chinese diets, it is logical to prorate total energy intakes according to
the grain consumption means. About 225kg of unmilled grain consumption
corresponds to 2,100kcal of actual food intake, which should be seen as the
minimum daily food energy requirement under conditions existing in China.
From provincial grain means and rural population totals, it is easy to calculate
that almost exactly 200 million people in the nine worst-supplied provinces have
average consumption equal to this minimum. If consumption had a normal
(Gaussian) distribution, 100 million people would be below that level, an excel-
lent confirmation of Liu’s figure of 11 per cent. Raising the minimum
requirement to 2,200kcal, an intake corresponding to about 470kg of unmilled
grain, would mean that as many as 210 million could be below that level.
There is a fundamental difference between these two requirements. Those
90–100 million peasants consuming on the average less than 2,100kcal per

Figure 3.5 Trends in average supply of food energy in China, India and Japan, 1950–1983
Source: Plotted from data in Piazza (1983) and from various volumes of FAO’s Food Balance Sheets.
98 Food

capita per day are undoubtedly short of food: in Liu’s words, they “still have not
resolved the problem of dressing warmly and getting enough to eat” and their
lives are certainly “still extremely bitter” (Liu 1984: 6). For the additional 100
million villagers whose average consumption may be below 2,200 but above
2,100kcal, their diet may meet most but not all of the normal growth needs and
fall short of the activity requirements of demanding rural work: they may not
have enough for a healthy and vigorous life. Smaller birth weights, slower growth,
greater susceptibility to diseases, a slower pace of field work, and a shorter life
expectation will be their lot in comparison with the better-fed villagers.
In retrospect, few developments in modern nutritional history have been so
rapid, so far-reaching and so impressive as China’s post-1978 achievements.
Until Deng’s return to power China’s food consumption pattern was one of bare
subsistence – but only a few years later there was, on average, a growing margin
of nutritional comfort. Perhaps the best illustration of the pre-1978 misery is
that the direct rural grain consumption kept steadily increasing for years after
rice and wheat flour availability became higher; indeed, it did not level off until
1985, at about 260kg per capita. The higher supply of grain was, of course, the
most important result of China’s radical post-1978 turn away from communal
command farming to the family contract system. With privatization, the nation’s
total grain output jumped from 304.77Mt in 1978 to 407.31Mt in 1984, an
astonishing 33 per cent increase in just six years. While between 1952 and 1978
the average nationwide grain consumption actually declined from 197.7kg to
195.5kg, by 1988 it was up to 259.1kg.
These gains pushed China’s average per capita food availability to within less
than 10 per cent of the Japanese mean: in 1984–1986 the Chinese supply averaged
about 2,630kcal a day per capita, compared with the Japanese mean of 2,680kcal
(FAO 2002). China’s shift from a precarious subsistence (pre-1978) to basic
adequacy of average food supply (1984–1986) was accomplished in less than a
decade. Subsequent improvements proceeded at a slower but fairly persistent rate,
and the country has been able to reduce, but not to eliminate, a significant share of
undernourished people. FAO (1996) estimated that in the early 1990s, 15 per cent
of China’s population (or at least 170 million people) were undernourished, the
second highest national total after India (21 per cent or 180 million).
The latest FAO (2002) report on global undernutrition puts the estimate of
undernourished people at 840 million, or about 14 per cent of the world’s popu-
lation, during the years 1998–2000. China, with about 9 per cent, or about 120
million, of its people undernoursihed, accounted for 14 per cent of the world’s
total. Consequently, China’s impressive food production achievement continues to
mask consumption disparities whose extent is unparalleled among the countries
with average per capita availabilities in excess of 3,000kcal/day. Perhaps only one
post-1978 development has been more remarkable than the nearly 50 per cent
increase in average food supply and the 63 per cent reduction (from about 210 to
120 million) in the total of undernourished people: rapid qualitative transforma-
tion of China’s average diet. This unprecedented, and very well-documented,
dietary transition will be the topic of the next section of this food chapter.
 Food 99

Dietary transitions: eating better, wasting more

The diets of most pre-industrial populations were highly monotonous, not very
palatable and barely adequate in terms of basic nutrients. China was no excep-
tion (Simoons 1991), and its traditional food consumption pattern persevered
during the first half of the twentieth century, and was little changed as the
country began to emerge from nearly three decades of Maoist deprivations just
before the end of the 1970s. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, about
95 per cent of all food energy in an average diet originated in plant foods, with 75
per cent of that share coming from just the three staple grains: rice, wheat and
corn. As soon as it got under way, the privatization of farming began to improve
the quality of available foodstuffs and to diversify previously monotonous diets.
Increased consumption of animal foodstuffs has been the most obvious marker of
this change: by 1986 their share of the total food energy in typical diets surpassed
10 per cent; it topped 15 per cent by 1995 and was nearly 20 per cent by the year
2000 (FAO 2002).
Although actual shares of animal foodstuffs may be somewhat lower (the cited
percentages are derived from FAO’s food balance which, as I will explain below,
almost certainly overestimate the average meat supply), all other measures of
China’s dietary transition, be it higher intakes of fruits or greater availability of
lean meat, confirm that both the pace of the process and its extent have been
definitely impressive. The following selections from my writings (Smil 1985,
1995a) trace the main advances of this transformation, and I will conclude this
section with a new assessment of potential changes during the coming generation.

Eating better
In the countryside, where heavy work demands higher food inputs, peasants
increased their average grain consumption by about 5 per cent from (in unpro-
cessed weight) 248kg in 1978 to 260kg in 1983, while in the better-supplied cities
grain consumption actually declined. However, in both cases the most important
change has been qualitative. The Chinese have always preferred well-milled rice
and wheat flour; this means at least a 70 per cent milling rate for rice and 85 per
cent for wheat, but for the country as a whole the proportion of these fine grains
did not change between 1957 and 1978. Except for the famine years of
1959–1961, when coarse grains supplied an even larger share, about 60 per cent
of nationwide grain output was in rice and wheat, often milled less than the
preferred norm, and among peasants the ratio of fine-to-coarse grain in actual
consumption averaged just 50:50 by 1978.
The subsequent change was so rapid that by 1982 even an average peasant
family consumed 75 per cent of its grain as milled rice or wheat flour, a ratio
available only with privileged urban cadre rations a few years earlier. The move
from brown rice, cornmeal, millet and potatoes has been the most far-reaching
dietary change of post-1978 China. Coarse grains and tubers now supply just 20
per cent of all food energy, and it is safe to predict that if the reforms continue
this proportion will keep falling.
100 Food

A welcome post-1978 food supply improvement has seen a more than twofold
increase in the availability of edible plant oils. For decades, the meager ration of
cooking oils meant that urban per capita consumption remained mostly below
300g a month even during good years, while rural consumption was negligible
and lard remained the leading source of fat. But once the Maoist grain-first
policy gave way to more balanced farming, areas planted in oilseeds zoomed and
the total harvest of rapeseed, peanuts, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, linseeds
and castor beans grew from just 4Mt in 1977 to 11.8Mt in 1982. This means
that, together with oil from soybeans, about 4.5Mt of vegetal oils are now avail-
able per year.
The sugar story is very similar. With cultivation of beets and cane suppressed
by the grain-first command farming, China’s 1977 sugar output was 1.9Mt lower
than in 1965 and just marginally higher than it had been in 1957 so that, even
with imports, per capita supply stayed below 2.5kg a year. But by 1983 the north-
east’s sugarbeets and, more importantly, Guangdong’s and Fujian’s sugarcane
brought in 3.7Mt of sugar, so that with imports of 1.4Mt (primarily from Cuba
and Australia) the per capita availability rose to almost exactly 5kg a year.
The other important food whose consumption had made an impressive jump
by the mid-1980s is meat (aquacultural expansion came later). Poultry produc-
tion went up especially rapidly, but it still remains very small in comparison with
red meat, whose output continues to be dominated by pork (about 94 per cent of
the total, with mutton supplying about two thirds and beef one third of the rest).
In 1977, pork output was just 7.3Mt but by 1980, 210 million pigs with an
average live weight of 89kg were slaughtered and for the first time production
surpassed 10Mt. By the spring of 1981, the Chinese media were reporting the
end of pork supply shortages as the output kept increasing. In the following
years, as the average per capita availability surpassed 12kg a year and
approached 20kg in large cities, pork rationing was gradually abandoned, only to
be reinstated in early 1985, in the wake of the country’s record grain harvest.
This incongruity tells much about the fundamental deficiencies of China’s
food production, especially its irrational pricing. The state-fixed prices made it
unprofitable for farmers to breed and feed pigs because higher and easier profits
could be realized by growing grain, keeping a flock of hens, weaving baskets or
selling rabbit hair. Only where the pricing was more sensible, as in Sichuan, was
there no need to return to rationing. And although China has the world’s largest
number of pigs, they are poor performers. In 1978 their nationwide take-off
rate (the share of animals slaughtered in one year) was a mere 54 per cent;
recently it rose close to 70 per cent, but even this means that an average
Chinese pig needs about seventeen months to reach slaughter weight, compared
to just 6–7 months for a typical Western hog. A large part of this huge differ-
ence can be explained by the energy loss sustained by tens of millions of rural
Chinese pigs running around the villages and more or less fending for them-
selves – but even those confined to modern suburban piggeries perform poorly,
because there is little properly formulated concentrate feed to turn them into
efficient meat converters.
 Food 101

Although the production of compound feed has been growing rapidly – from
a mere 1.1Mt in 1980 to 4.5Mt by 1983 (for comparison, American output in
the early 1980s was about 200Mt a year) – its share in 1983 was still only slightly
more than 10 per cent of all grain fed to livestock (Whitton 1984). Moreover, of
about 10Mt of high-protein oilseed cakes more than half are used as a fertilizer
instead of as feed. Current plans include the continued rapid expansion of the
feed industry, with capacities up to 120Mt by the year 2000, but this will be a
most challenging goal.
Finally, better, meaty breeds must be introduced to supplant the dominant
fatty breeds. Even before the reimposition of pork rationing in twenty-one large
cities in February 1985, supplies of lean pork were far below demand – in privi-
leged Beijing they made up a mere 1.4 per cent of total sales – in spite of a large
price difference. While a kilogram of standard pork – that is, an indiscriminately
hacked-off piece of lardy carcass – cost around 2 yuan, lean pork retailed in
private markets at up to 3.8 yuan (and a limited quantity of it is now available
with coupons at 2.92 yuan).
Development of a large-scale feed industry and the introduction of high-
performance breeds are also the two critical requirements for expanding poultry
production. The first-ever official disclosure of the Chinese poultry inventory put
the total at 1 billion birds at the beginning of 1983 and average meat consump-
tion at a mere 1.2kg per capita a year (compared to about 30kg in the USA).
Nationwide production of milk rose 2.4 times between 1978 and 1983 (cow milk
now accounts for 80 per cent of the total), but this rapid expansion started from
such a low base that it would take a further fifteenfold increase to reach the
current Japanese per capita consumption level.
Comparison with the Japanese milk-drinking pattern is most appropriate,
because the Chinese could never aspire to European or North American levels of
dairy consumption. In reality, hundreds of millions of Chinese never drink milk,
sales of which are heavily concentrated in large cities, where the per capita
average is now around 10kg a year and where the potential demand is far from
covered. And as with pigs and poultry, feed conversion efficiencies and the perfor-
mance of dairy cows will have to improve if increased dairy production is to be
economical. The output of aquatic products went up by less than 20 per cent
between 1978 and 1984, reflecting the substantial increase of freshwater fish
breeding and coastal mariculture, and the stagnation and even decline of high sea
catches in badly overfished waters, especially in the East China Sea. Annual per
capita fish consumption of around 4kg conceals very large regional differences,
ranging from once-a-year tasting of a few tidbits to sales of almost 30kg a year in
Guangzhou, a total not far from Japan’s uncommonly high average.
But neither fish nor poultry are, after pork, the second most important source
of food energy and protein from animal foods: eggs are now ahead of both.
Actual per capita consumption averages just 3kg a year, that is about one large
egg a week (American consumption is now about 15kg of eggs a year), which is
more than three times as much as in 1977. It is here that the private market has
made a rapid and large difference.
102 Food

There is one notable exception to the rising trends among basic foodstuffs:
soybean consumption is now far below the level of not only the late 1950s but
even that of half a century ago. In 1936 China had, at 11.3Mt, the still unsur-
passed record harvest of soybeans, which prorated to some 22kg per capita.
During most of the 1950s soybean per capita output stayed above 15kg but once
it dropped below 10kg during the 1959–1961 famine it never rebounded: in
1977 it was a mere 7.5kg, in 1983 it rose to 9.5kg but in 1984 it fell again to
9.4kg. Moreover, the Chinese stopped importing soybeans (largely from the
USA) by 1983, when they more than doubled their exports (mostly to Japan);
and because nearly half of the soybean crop has recently been used for oil, the
actual availability of this high-protein legume as food is now a mere 5kg a year
per capita, a negligible 13g a day.
With two-income, one-child families becoming the norm in cities, there is
more need and more money for a wide range of traditional and modern conve-
nience foods, with the current demand vastly surpassing the meager offerings.
For instance, less than 40,000t of instant noodles were produced nationwide in
1983 (that is, a mere 40g a year per capita), and shortages of sweet and salty
biscuits, and crackers, dried fruits, dried and pickled vegetables, processed meats,
instant soups and various traditional ready-to-eat snacks and meal accompani-
ments – crullers (youbing), sesame biscuits (shaobing), twisted fried cakes (mahuar),
steamed meat-filled buns (baozi), and fried rice flour cakes with sweet filling
(zhagao) – remain widespread.
There has been a revival of snack shops and teahouses and restaurants, but
Beijing still has less than 5 per cent of Tokyo’s eateries. In cooperation with the
French, the Chinese are making a table wine for export (Great Wall brand) but
beer production for the huge domestic market remains pitifully small. True, it
has taken off, from 690,000t in 1980 to the planned total of 2Mt in 1985, with
most of the increase coming from many expanded and newly established local
breweries. But the per capita average is just short of two liters a year, an order of
magnitude below the European average.
When measured as a share of disposable income, the cost of food in China
has declined since 1978, but it remains very high. In 1964, a survey by the State
Statistical Bureau found that urban families spent 69.4 per cent of their income
on food; in 1980 the first survey in sixteen years put the share at 60.6 per cent
(Xinhua 1981). Since then, the Chinese have published more information indi-
cating similarly high expenditures in 1983: 59.3 per cent for rural families, down
from 67.7 per cent in 1978, and 59.2 per cent for urban families (SSB 1984). A
1983 survey showed that of all the money spent on food among worker families,
55 per cent goes to purchase meat, vegetables, fruits and eggs, 21 per cent is
spent on grain, and the rest on beverages, tea and sugar. An average Chinese
worker must still labor about twice as long as his Taiwanese counterpart for the
same amount of rice and pork; in comparison with Japan, these differentials rise
to, respectively, four and six times.
But expensive as Chinese foods (and above all, animal protein) are, they
would cost much more if billions in state subsidies were removed. While the state
 Food 103

purchasing prices for farm products rose about 50 per cent since 1978 to spur
baogan’s productivity, retail prices for basic foodstuffs are now only about 25 per
cent above the level of the mid-1960s. Obviously, the arrangement of buying
high and selling low must eventually end. The first round of price increases in
May 1985 affected the twenty largest cities and applied to pork (up by over 30
per cent), chicken (almost 50 per cent higher), fish (for some species doubling,
even tripling, the price), and vegetables. At the same time, subsidies of up to 7.50
yuan (roughly a tenth of the average monthly urban wage) were issued to cover
the higher cost. Further price rises will follow, but the government has promised
to keep some subsidies for grains and oils indefinitely.

A new Chinese diet

Since the beginning of the economic reforms, the Chinese have followed the
near-universal pattern of nutritional shifts that accompany industrialization and
urbanization (Smil 1995a). Major staple grains have become less important as
legume consumption has decreased and consumption of animal foods, oil, fruits
and sugar has increased. In specific Chinese terms, this means that rice is
becoming an inferior food; that the consumption of pork and plant oils used in
stir-frying has risen rapidly; and that the domestic production of sugar cannot
meet the growing demand.
The level of meat consumption will have the greatest impact on China’s
future food self-sufficiency. So far the demand for meat has been rising faster
than anticipated. Average per capita annual consumption almost tripled between
1978 and 1994, and in 1995 it is already above the target set for the year 2000
by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The Academy also assumes
that average per capita meat demand will remain fairly stable at about 25kg per
year until the year 2020.
Developments elsewhere in the region do not give any unequivocal guidance.
Japanese GDP is, even when adjusted for purchasing power parity, more than an
order of magnitude above the Chinese mean. However, despite this high level of
affluence, average per capita Japanese meat consumption is still below 40kg per
year. But it must be also remembered that meat is not the largest source of animal
protein in Japan, and that the average Japanese also consumes more than 70kg of
aquatic products a year. Taiwanese meat consumption has leveled off at about
50kg per capita a year – but its pork share is now only about half of the total.
The Chinese will not be able to replicate the Japanese eating pattern – and it
is most unlikely that they will follow the Taiwanese one. To come closer to
Japan’s huge ocean fish consumption the Chinese would have to increase
massively their marine catches, but given the fact that as of the year 1996 the
world ocean is being fully fished, and that about 60 per cent of some 200 major
marine fish resources have been either overexploited or are at the peak level of
their sustainable harvest (FAO 1997), that is not an option anymore. In contrast,
further expansion of freshwater aquaculture is possible, but new gains will
require substantially higher inputs of mixed feeds for the intensive production of
104 Food

various pond species. Since cold-blooded carp convert feed better than warm-
blooded pigs or chicken, their production is the most efficient route to the higher
supply of animal protein – except, of course, for the higher output of milk and
dairy products.
Unfortunately, the Chinese, like all East Asian people, have a high incidence
of lactose intolerance because their synthesis of lactase, the enzyme responsible
for digesting milk sugar, declines sharply after early childhood. This means that a
large share of the affected population has difficulty digesting large quantities of
milk. Fortunately, for most people this biochemical peculiarity is no obstacle to
drinking moderate amounts of fresh milk, and none whatsoever for eating
fermented dairy products with lower amount of lactose (yogurt, soft cheeses) or
with no lactose at all (fully ripened hard cheeses). And while traditional food
preferences and biases make for interesting anthropological studies, such cultural
prejudices do not seem to pose insurmountable barriers to major dietary
changes. As far as dairy products are concerned, Japan is a perfect example of
an impressively rapid shift. In 1945, Japanese consumption of milk, yogurt and
cheese was almost zero; today their average annual per capita intake is well over
50kg, compared with less than 2kg in China.
The composition of average diets should further change by including more
animal protein produced with high conversion efficiency (freshwater fish,
chicken, dairy products), and by the provision of higher-quality non-staple foods
(legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts). And a sustained effort must also be made to
eliminate serious regional disparities in average food supply; most coastal
provinces now have a surplus of food, but in poor-weather years supply averages
in Guangxi or Gansu are still barely above the basic sufficiency level.
The magnitude of the current shortcomings permeating China’s food chain
has been stunningly illustrated by a five-year survey of grain losses. According to
the survey, about 15 per cent of total cereal yield is lost every year during
harvesting, threshing, drying, storage, transport and processing. In addition, the
waste of staple grain in factory, office and school messhalls, by excessive and
inefficient production of spirits and beer, and by poor feeding practices, nearly
doubles that total. As a result, China’s food and feed loss has recently amounted
to the equivalent of at least 60–70Mt of staple grain annually. Reducing it by
just one third would increase annual grain availability by about 20–25Mt,
enough to feed an additional 100 million people, or eliminate all grain imports –
and still be left with several megatons of wheat, rice and corn.
Raising feeding efficiency is imperative, and highly realistic. Before the begin-
ning of Deng’s reforms only about one sixth of China’s grain harvest was fed to
animals, mostly to ubiquitous pigs. In the mid-1980s the share surpassed 20 per
cent; it reached 25 per cent in the early 1990s, and plans are for feeding 30 per
cent of all grain to animals by the end of the century. Yet Chinese pigs are still
mainly fed assorted mixtures of diverse plant matter, including weeds, straw,
stalks, bran, oilseed residues, kitchen wastes, tubers, and inferior unmilled grain.
Such rations are obviously deficient in protein, and result in slow weight gain
and hence in low slaughter rates. While in North America a weaned pig is ready
 Food 105

for the market in just six months, the Chinese average is slightly more than twice
as long. At 80kg, the mean weight of a dressed carcass is about 40 per cent
higher in the USA than in China.
Finally, I should point out the declining need for average food intakes in all
urbanized societies. While available food supply in Western countries averages
around 3,500kcal a day per capita, the best surveys of actual food consumption
show daily means (weighted for age and sex structure of the studied population)
of just 2,000–2,100kcal. China’s average supply of more than 2,700kcal a day
per capita is thus clearly sufficient. Indeed, Chinese publications have recently
carried a number of articles pointing out the growing incidence of obesity
among children. Increasing average nationwide food availability would make
little sense. Instead, three modifications are necessary. China’s food must be
produced more rationally through a combination of increased yields, improving
field efficiencies of major farming inputs, and reduced post-harvest waste.

Further changes and a long-term outlook

With the actual daily food requirements of modern urban societies averaging
no more than 2,000–2,200kcal/capita it does not make any sense to supply
more than about 2,700–2,800kcal/day: wasting 20–30 per cent of all available
food is surely enough. However, among the affluent countries only Japan has
conformed to this pattern. Since the mid-1950s, once they recovered from its
postwar lows, Japan’s average daily intakes have fluctuated very narrowly,
between 2,100 and 2,200kcal/capita, while the food supply, highly dependent
on imports and hence relatively expensive, has been sensibly stable at between
2,700 and 2,800kcal/capita since the early 1970s. Average US intakes have
been similarly stable during the past thirty years, at around 2,500kcal/day for
adult males and about 1,600kcal/day for adult females, with the mean for all
individuals of all ages at just above 2,000kcal/day (US Department of
Agriculture 1997). But, in contrast, to Japan, the US supply averages around
3,700kcal/day, and similarly high rates (3,400–3,700kcal/capita) prevail in most
of the countries of the EU (FAO 2002).
China’s average food supply has also stabilized during the late 1990s, and a
simple comparison of FAO’s food balance sheets indicates, as already noted, that
it has done so at a level less than 10 per cent higher than the Japanese mean.
After reaching virtual parity with Japan in terms of average per capita food
energy supply, China’s mean rate, according to FAO’s balances, increased by
nearly 4 per cent during the second half of the 1980s; between 1990 and 1995 it
rose by almost 6 per cent; and during the late 1990s by a further 5 per cent (FAO
2002). This means that starting in 1997 the nationwide per capita mean has
been, for the first time in the country’s modern history, above 3,000kcal/day, and
per capita rates of 3,010–3,040kcal/day put China about 8 per cent ahead of
Japan. The real rates are not that high, and the main reason is not that FAO’s
food balance sheets for China include Taiwan. The ROC’s higher food supply
(in excess of 3,300kcal/capita) makes little difference: given the large disparity of
106 Food

the two populations (1.3 billion vs. 20 million) its exclusion would lower the
PRC’s mean by less than 0.5 per cent.
The main difference is due to the fact that China’s official output statistics have
been greatly overstating meat, egg and aquatic production, and that the differences
between these output figures and actual consumption have expanded rapidly since
the 1980s. Lu’s (1998) careful appraisal shows that in 1995 official output figures
overstated the actual consumption of red meat and poultry 1.9 times, and that of
aquatic products about 1.75 times. Similarly, after a global comparison of expected
and reported marine catches, Watson and Pauly (2001) concluded that the catch
along the Chinese coast in 1999 was predicted at 5.5Mt compared to officially
claimed 10.1Mt, implying a roughly 1.8-fold overstatement.
Using these shares to correct FAO’s food balance sheet (based on official
output figures) gives China about 2,700 rather than 2,874kcal/capita in 1995
and, assuming the overestimates have not grown larger, about 2,800 rather than
3,030kcal/capita in 2000. Obviously this correction also requires lowering the
contributions of animal proteins and lipids by similarly large margins.
Comparing the composition of this supply with the optimum dietary guidelines
and desirable consumption goals for the year 2000 that were formulated during
the 1980s (Chen 1991), shows that the average availability has surpassed these
targets in every category except for pulses, with the largest differences for fruits
and vegetables.
In overall energy terms, China’s per capita food availability remains almost
the same as in Japan. If demand were to be the only driving factor of food
consumption, two countervailing trends would largely determine its future level:
rising food energy intake among lower-income families and decreased food
energy consumption of high-income households (Ma and Popkin 1995). The
first factor is obviously still more powerful, but given China’s already relatively
high per capita supply level it is not going to be translated into any major abso-
lute increases. Changes in the composition of China’s diet, above all the
increased demand for animal foodstuffs, will be thus much more important
drivers of the future demand. In spite of the recent large consumption increases,
China remains a modest consumer of animal foods even when the comparison is
limited to Japan, which has access to nearly three times as much animal protein.
Contrary to some simplistic extrapolations based on erroneous data, Chinese
meat intakes will come nowhere near the Western level of consumption – with
fats supplying well over 30 per cent, and even more than 40 per cent, of all food
energy, and with the annual meat consumption in excess of 70kg, or even
100kg/capita – during the coming generation. According to the exaggerated
official figures, China’s output of red meat and poultry rose from almost 29Mt in
1990 to 61Mt in 2000, implying average per capita rates of, respectively, 25 and
48kg/capita in 2000 (NBS 2000). But the Chinese consumption surveys show
that urban meat purchases have basically stabilized during the 1990s – they aver-
aged 25.2kg/capita in 1990, 23.7kg/capita in 1995 and 25.0kg/capita in 1999 –
and that rural consumption had risen modestly from 12.6kg/capita in 1990 to
16.4kg/capita in 1999 (NBS 2000).
 Food 107

In contrast to exaggerated output data, these consumption surveys underesti-

mate the actual intakes as they leave out food obtained by employees from their
work units, as well as previously rare, but now increasingly common, dining out,
which almost invariably includes a disproportionately large consumption of meat
and fish. According to Lu (1998) these intakes would add annually at least
2kg/capita to the nationwide average. Even when taking into account at least the
15 per cent weight difference between reported output (carcass weight) and
actual meat intake and post-retail losses, there is still the already noted gap of
nearly 50 per cent between consumption and official production claims.
Rising per capita intakes of animal foodstuffs, and continuation of rapid
urbanization, are the two factors favoring further increases in meat consumption.
But, as in other countries, China’s meat demand is also highly income-depen-
dent. Nationwide surveys show urban income elasticities as high as 3.1 for
poultry and 1.7 for pork, compared to just 0.7 for both foodstuffs in rural (and
relatively rich) Jiangsu (Hsu et al. 2002). Consequently, relatively low income in
most of China’s rural areas will restrain the future meat demand. Moreover,
nationwide surveys also show that China’s urban consumers are especially sensi-
tive to prices of pork, poultry, and eggs (price elasticities of ⫺1.6, ⫺1.3 and
⫺1.8 respectively), which means that future price increases (resulting, for
example, from China’s accession to the WTO) might slow the growth in meat
demand that is stimulated by higher incomes (Hsu et al. 2002). A rapidly ageing
population that is more concerned about healthy eating is yet another factor that
will moderate the future meat demand.
At the same time, because China’s regional, provincial and rural/urban
income inequalities had actually risen during the 1990s, it means that overcon-
sumption of food in general, and high intakes of meat in particular, have
become common among the more affluent segments of the population in the
best-off large cities and in the coastal regions of the country, where tens of
millions of people now have more food at their disposal than does the average
Japanese. Chinese nutritionists were puzzled when the food consumption surveys
of the late 1980s showed an average daily adult food intake of 2,160kcal/capita,
lower than the recommended daily level of 2,400kcal/capita (Ge et al. 1991).
They realized, as did their Western counterparts a generation earlier (Smil
2000a), that they were setting their recommendations too high.
Even when assuming that hard-working rural adults average 2,600kcal/capita,
the current age–sex composition of China’s population (about 25 per cent of all
people younger than fourteen years, 8 per cent older than sixty-five years) means
that the weighted nationwide average of daily food requirements is just around
2,200kcal/day, and that the gap between the food availability and the need has
widened to about 800kcal/day, or to roughly a quarter of the total supply. This
widening gap translates into more food waste, a reality readily evident in China’s
restaurants. This waste is encouraged by an unfortunate Chinese habit of
ordering more than can be eaten by hosts desiring to gain face, and by
widespread, and often astonishingly ostentatious, dining at public expense (Wu
1996). In China’s largest city, problems with this waste are made worse by a new
108 Food

regulation forbidding farmers to collect restaurant waste for their pigs. Rising bills
for waste disposal led a Shanghai branch of Beijing’s roast duck restaurant Quanjude,
where many people ate less than half of what they ordered, to offer 10 per cent
discount vouchers to the customers who finish their food (Hu 2001).
And combined with the increasingly sedentary life of many nouveaux-riches
urbanites, this widening gap between the supply and the need induces excessive
eating and translates into an unprecedented extent of obesity, whose higher inci-
dence is eventually associated with the rise of such widespread civilizational
diseases as cardiovascular illnesses and diabetes (Ge et al. 1996). The deleterious
effects of even relatively small shifts toward the Western diet were demonstrated
by the two rounds of a large-scale survey done by the Cornell–Oxford–China
Project (Chen et al. 1990; CTSU 2002). Even small additions of animal foods
have resulted in significant elevations of blood cholesterol levels and the
increased risk of chronic degenerative diseases (cancers, cardiovascular
complaints, diabetes). This trend is almost certain to continue. The globalization
of tastes has already brought many fast-food empires into China, and, as in
other rapidly modernizing and urbanizing countries, the breakdown of tradi-
tional families, high rates of female employment and reduced willingness to cook
are fueling the purchases of fast foods full of saturated fat and refined sugar.
And before leaving the subject of China’s dietary changes, I must note the
spreading impact that China’s omnivorous foodways (and medicinal habits) are
making on the world’s diminishing biodiversity. The country’s traditionally indis-
criminate omnivory makes for an efficient way of food consumption, as nothing,
from a pig’s skin to chicken feet, and from silk moth pupae to carp eyes (both
considered a delicacy!), gets wasted. But it also entails an appetite for anything
that moves, from monkeys to dogs to snakes, and much that does not (abalones,
sea cucumbers). Rising incomes lead to rising demand for these unusual food-
stuffs, which are consumed not only by China’s suddenly rich entrepreneurs and
their cronies, but also during banquets eaten daily by legions of corrupt officials.
A rare Chinese estimate put the annual value spent on eating, drinking and trav-
eling at public expense at more than 100 billion yuan in 1992, a total thought to
be highly conservative (Wu 1996).
Many of these dietary predilections, however offensive they may be to
Westerners who do not hesitate to eat lambs and calves, are merely a cultural
concern. But a seemingly insatiable demand for snakes, turtles and frogs is a
major reason for local extinction of many of their species, particularly
throughout South China, and illegal imports of these animals, as well as rare
coral reef fish, from Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia are now extending
the reach of China’s destructive eating habits all across Southeast Asia.
According to a 1999 survey, 26 per cent of all wild animal dishes served in
restaurants contained species which are on China’s endangered list. The ecosys-
temic consequences of this perverse gluttony, augmented by the search for such
destructive and medically medieval therapies as bear galls and tiger bones, are
serious. Perhaps the most noticeable is an increase in the density of mouse and
rat populations that were previously held in check by snakes.
 Food 109

As a result, in January 2002 the China Wildlife Conservation Association

launched an unusual campaign to save disappearing animals by asking profes-
sional chefs to sign a declaration stating that they will refuse to prepare any
meals containing endangered species (BBC News 2002). The Association’s hope
was to collect at least 3 million signatures (the estimated total of China’s chefs is
at least 8 million), but its campaign faces no small challenge, given reports of 10t
of snakes consumed daily in Shenzhen, and 1,000t of snake meat served annu-
ally in Shanghai.

Nitrogen in China’s agriculture: an unorthodox history

China’s modern history has been probed from many perspectives but, as far as I
am aware, it has never been looked at through the prism of agricultural
nitrogen. Abstruse as this point of view may be to historians preoccupied with
kinships, ruling elites, commodity prices or intra-party discords, it is a perfectly
natural choice when looking at what is surely one of China’s most distinguishing
characteristics: its quest to feed the world’s largest population from a limited
amount of land. But before I plunge into the Chinese specifics, a few introduc-
tory remarks on nitrogen, and on its agricultural and nutritional importance and
its biospheric cycling, are in order.

Nitrogen in human nutrition and in cropping

Photosynthesis uses carbon, oxygen and hydrogen to construct a variety of
simple sugars, and their subsequent polymerization (combination into larger
units) produces the two most abundant macromolecules making up the plant
mass: cellulose and hemi-cellulose; lignin in woody tissues is also a polymer, but
one made up of alcohols rather than of sugars (Smil 2002a). None of these
macromolecules dominating the composition of the Earth’s plant mass contains
any other elements than C, O and H. If humans were able to metabolize cellu-
lose and lignin there would be no need for agriculture. Agriculture is primarily
after digestible nitrogen, not after polymerized sugars. Justus von Liebig (1840:
85) – one of the most famous, controversial and highly perceptive founders of
modern chemistry – was the first scientist who explicitly recognized this reality
more than 150 years ago:

Agriculture differs essentially from the cultivation of forests, inasmuch as its

principal object consists in the production of nitrogen under any form
capable of assimilation; whilst the object of forest culture is confined to the
production of carbon.

Nitrogen assimilated by plants is eventually transferred into amino acids,

which form a variety of plant proteins. Humans cannot synthesize the amino
acids essential for their nutrition – but they need them to form their body
proteins (Smil 2002a). Consequently, people must ingest all essential amino acids
110 Food

ready-made in proteins present in their food. The adequate supply of dietary

nitrogen is an irreplaceable condition of human existence – and, in turn, crops
must assimilate adequate amounts of nitrogen from their environment. This is
why an inquiry into the natural supply of the nutrient, and into the changing
means of the agricultural quest for nitrogen, addresses the very survival of our
species. Of course, nitrogen is just one of the three macronutrients, elements
needed in relatively large quantities by crops. Phosphorus and potassium are the
other two, but nitrogen is truly primus inter pares, as it is needed in much larger
amounts than any other nutrient. For example, a tonne of wheat will contain
20kg of nitrogen, but only 4kg of phosphorus and 6kg of potassium. And
nitrogen is also most often the nutrient that is in the shortest supply in soils from
which it could be drawn by growing plants.
This seems counterintuitive, given the relatively low concentrations of the
element in crops (by weight, most staple grains are less than 2 per cent N) and its
abundance in the biosphere: 78 per cent of the atmosphere is made up of nitrogen,
which means that there are some 75,000 tonnes of the element in the air above
every hectare of farmland. But atmospheric nitrogen cannot be used by plants
because it exists as a tightly bound molecule, N2 (dinitrogen), which does not partici-
pate in any reactions (Smil 1997a). Only two natural processes can perform the
difficult task of splitting the dinitrogen molecule: lightning, and enzymatic
metabolism limited to a relatively small number of bacterial genera. These two
processes sever the strong N2 bond – lightning with its enormous heat and pressure;
bacteria with the help of a unique enzyme (nitrogenase) – and release nitrogen
atoms that are free to bind with other elements and create fixed nitrogen in reactive
nitrogen compounds. In the case of bacterial fixation, the compound is ammonia
(NH3), while lightning produces nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
Subsequently, bacteria convert ammonia to nitrates that are much more
soluble in water and hence preferred by plants. Highly soluble nitrates are lost
from soils by leaching, and both ammonia and nitrates are carried away by
erosion and surface runoff. Eventually, different bacteria convert nitrates first to
nitrites and then to N2 which rejoins the huge atmospheric pool of the element.
Nitrogen taken up by crops is either removed from fields in harvested plant parts
or it is directly recycled by decomposition of dead biomass. The complexity of
the element’s biospheric flows opens up many opportunities for moving the
nutrient beyond the reach of plant roots, and hence losing the fixed nitrogen for
crop production (Smil 1997a). These losses, and the rarity of natural processes
that fix nitrogen, meant that the yields in traditional agricultures were nearly
always limited by the supply of nitrogen. That is why traditional agricultures
devised many ways to maintain adequate supplies of the nutrient – and Chinese
farming was certainly one of the classical paragons of this inventive quest.

Traditional nitrogen supplies and their limits

Traditional agricultures had two basic choices when trying to expand food
production: they could either convert more land to fields and gather relatively
 Food 111

poor harvests from a larger area, or they could raise the yields and get higher
harvests from the same, or even a smaller, amount of farmland. Both practices
soon ran into nitrogen limits. Gradual release of often rich stores of organic
nitrogen present in grassland and forest soils supplied relatively large amounts of
the nutrients for several decades after the conversion of these natural ecosystems
to fields. But once this reservoir is significantly depleted, annual cropping
depends largely on the modest nitrogen inputs in precipitation, from non-symbi-
otic nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and from recycled crop roots and stubble. The
combination of these inputs supplies commonly less than 30kg N/ha, an amount
sufficient to produce only low harvests that can feed no more than 2–2.5
people/ha on meager vegetarian diets.
This situation describes very well the early periods of grain farming in the
ancient semi-arid core of Chinese civilization in the valley of the Huanghe and
its tributaries, where the managed inputs of nitrogen (recycling of stubble and
roots left after poor harvests) amounted to less than 5 per cent of the total supply
of the nutrient. Later, when the recycling of animal manures and human wastes
added up to 30–35kg N/ha, the share of managed inputs rose to around 30 per
cent of the total. But recurrent droughts kept depressing the average multi-year
yield, and North China’s carrying capacity remained below two people/ha until
the Tang dynasty (Smil 1993).
More extensive farming in the form of slow increases in the total area of
cultivated land continued during the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, but this
trend was also accompanied by gradual intensification of cropping throughout
the Jiangnan. Conversion of natural ecosystems to crop fields reached its highest
rate during the late Qing era, but even this relatively rapid extension of culti-
vated land (roughly its doubling in a century) could not keep up with the
country’s unprecedented population growth, from about 225 million people in
1750 to 475 million 150 years later (McEvedy and Jones 1978). Intensification of
cropping had to become the decisive means of increasing food production in
most of the country.
More intensive Chinese cultivation relied on crop rotations, multicropping
and intercropping. The first practice means growing a variety of crops in a
sequence, often as simple as two alternating crops and as elaborate as multi-year
schedules involving half a dozen, or more, different food, feed, fiber or medicinal
species. The second practice entails cultivating more than one crop per year in
the same field, and the third growing two or more crops simultaneously. The
nitrogen needed for these intensive ways of cropping was supplied by extensive
recycling of organic wastes – and the only means by which peasants could
provide additional nutrient was by cultivating leguminous crops which are
symbiotic with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
Animal manures produced in confinement were collected and applied to
fields after composting. The initial nitrogen content of these wastes, largely
dependent on the quality of the feed and health of the animals, was low, rarely
above 2–3 per cent N, and because of the volatilization of ammonia and
leaching of nitrates these wastes tended to lose large shares of the nutrient even
112 Food

before they could be applied to fields. Volatilization of ammonia was also the
main reason for substantial nitrogen losses from human wastes that were tradi-
tionally collected throughout the country and fermented before application.
Animal and human wastes that eventually reached the fields contained usually
less than 1 per cent nitrogen, hence the peasants had to store, move and apply
huge volumes of these materials in order to supply crops with sufficient nitrogen.
In contrast to Europe, distribution and application of organic wastes in China
was done largely without the help of draft animals. Consequently, moving and
spreading an average of 10t of wastes per hectare (and sometimes more than
30t/ha on small farms) was one of the most laborious, time- and energy-
consuming tasks in China’s traditional farming. Detailed labor accounts show
that at least 10 per cent of all work in China’s traditional farming was connected
with fertilizers, and in parts of North China fertilization of grain crops was the
single most time-consuming agricultural task, claiming close to one fifth of all
human, and about one third of all animal, labor (Buck 1930). Still, the net energy
return on this investment was very high: the ratio between labor (food energy)
invested in manuring and additional food energy harvested in higher yields was
more than fiftyfold (Smil 1994).
Only a small part of crop residues – straws, stalks and vines usually
containing no more than 0.5–0.6 per cent N – was left in fields, as most of them
were usually removed to be used for feed and bedding as well as for fuel and
construction. Rural surveys showed that in China of the early 1930s between 59
and 74 per cent of all major cereal straws and 90 per cent of all cotton stalks
were used for fuel (Buck 1937). Most of the residues were burned by rural house-
holds, but appreciable amounts were sold by farmers in towns and cities. Some
residues were returned to fields later in composts. A huge variety of other recy-
cled organic wastes contained materials with both very high and very low
nitrogen content. Cakes remaining after pressing oil from various seeds could
have up to 7.5 per cent nitrogen, but this made them also an excellent animal
feed. Canal, pond and river mud traditionally spread on fields throughout South
China had no more than 0.2–0.3 per cent of the nutrient.
Cultivation of leguminous crops symbiotic with nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium
bacteria included above all soybeans and peanuts, then a variety of beans
(broad, red and black) and field peas. Roots of these crops, with the attached
nodules containing Rhizobium bacteria, and their partially recycled residues
would leave behind appreciable amounts of fixed nitrogen (anywhere between
10 and 60kg N/ha) to be used by subsequent non-leguminous crops. Several
leguminous species were also planted as green manures. This practice incorpo-
rates plants of various legume species into soil by hoeing or plowing, or, less
commonly, by harvesting the plants and burying them in other fields. The incor-
poration can take place after just forty, but usually after 60–120 days after their
planting. In a mild climate, green manures grown during several months added
enough nitrogen to the soil to produce a good summer cereal crop. The first
written record of Chinese use of leguminous green manures dates to the fifth
century BCE, but the practice was almost certainly more ancient (Pieters 1927;
 Food 113

Bray 1984). Astragalus sinicus (Chinese vetch, genge) was by far the leading choice;
other commonly used species included broad beans, clovers and field peas.
Thanks to John L. Buck’s (1930; 1937) exceptionally comprehensive surveys
conducted during the 1920s and 1930s, we have an incomparable quantitative
record of traditional farming practices in China. After combining this unique
information with modern understanding of nitrogen flows, it is possible to
reconstruct nitrogen inputs in Chinese traditional farming with a relatively
high degree of accuracy. I have used this information to prepare nitrogen
balances for a number of agroecosystems, ranging from single-cropping with
extensive fallowing in the Huanghe valley to intensive cultivation of irrigated
farmlands which had supported higher population densities than any other
purely organic agriculture.
My detailed reconstructions of nitrogen flows on several Sichuanese and
Hunanese farms show that the highest nitrogen inputs in traditional Chinese
farming amounted to between 120 and 150kg N/ha. Managed inputs of
nitrogen – that is organic recycling and planting of leguminous species –
accounted for anywhere between 50 and 80 per cent of the total supply of the
nutrient. For example, double-cropping in a complex Sichuanese six-year rota-
tion consisting of summer rice followed by broad beans in the first years, and
rapeseed, field peas, wheat, barley and tobacco in subsequent winters, received
about 150kg N/ha, with 120kg originating in managed inputs. With the effi-
ciency of nitrogen utilization ranging between 50 and 60 per cent, total inputs in
excess of 120kg N/ha could produce 200–250kg of food protein per hectare,
enough to feed 10–14 people from a hectare of arable land – providing they
were subsisting on an overwhelmingly vegetarian diet enriched only occasionally
by some animal foods.
Yet another traditional Chinese agroecosystem was managed with even higher
nitrogen inputs, but as it involved a major component of aquaculture its perfor-
mance is not directly comparable with crop-based schemes. The dike-and-pond
region in the Zhujiang Delta in South China’s Guangdong province evolved over
many centuries into the world’s most productive traditional food production
systems: carp polyculture in ponds and continuous cropping of a wide variety of
species on dikes (sugar cane, rice, vegetables, mulberries, fruit) were nourished
by annual inputs of 50–270t/ha of organic wastes (Ruddle and Zhong 1988;
Korn 1996).
But carrying capacities in excess of ten people per hectare of arable land could
not prevail over large areas. The mean was lowered even in the most productive
farming regions by the necessity to grow non-food crops (above all fibers), and on
regional and national scales it was greatly reduced by climate, above all by the
limits on multicropping and by inadequate water supply. A stunning comparison
illustrates this depressing effect. Calculations based on the History of the Han Dynasty
records show that during the fourth century BCE in the state of Wei, a typical
peasant was expected to provide each of his five family members with nearly half a
kilogram of grain a day – a total identical to the mean per capita supply of grain
in North China during the early 1950s (Yates 1990).
114 Food

Consequently, the early twentieth century mean of agricultural carrying

capacity for South China was no more than 7 people/ha, and Buck’s surveys
indicate that the national average, depressed by northern dryland farming, was
about 5.5 people/ha during the early 1930s (Buck 1937). Still, this rate was
higher than the contemporary mean for Java, Indonesia’s most densely popu-
lated island; it was at least 40 per cent above the Indian mean; and it came very
close to the Egyptian average (Smil 1994). The last comparison is not entirely
appropriate as at that time virtually all of Egypt’s farmland was irrigated and a
part of it was already receiving inorganic fertilizers.
The traditional pattern of China’s cultivation persevered largely intact into
the 1950s. A detailed reconstruction of nitrogen flow to China’s fields (Smil
2001b) shows that in 1952 all managed inputs accounted for about half of the
nutrient reaching the country’s cropland, and that the traditional practices were
able to feed, much like during the early 1930s, no more than 5.5 people/ha.
Because little change had occurred in China’s nitrogen supply by 1957, the culti-
vated area had to increase to accommodate the growing population – but by that
time, after centuries of converting natural ecosystems to farmland, there was
little cultivable land of good quality left (Crook 1988).
Only marginal gains were possible with even more assiduous recycling of
organic wastes. Planting more pulses would have made the average diet even less
palatable, and while more green manuring would have produced more fixed
nitrogen, it would have also pre-empted cultivation of additional food crops.
Both the extensive and the intensive mode of China’s traditional farming had
reached the limits of their performance. The only way to break through the
nitrogen barrier was to turn to inorganic fertilizers based on synthetic ammonia.
After nearly a century of unsuccessful experiments by several generations of
inorganic chemists, ammonia synthesis from its elements was finally demon-
strated by Fritz Haber in 1908. Haber’s brilliant invention was rapidly translated
into a commercial process by Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF), at that
time the world’s largest chemical company, under the leadership of Carl Bosch.
The first commercial ammonia plant began synthesizing in 1913, but the
Haber–Bosch process diffused slowly after World War I, and large-scale fertiliza-
tion took off only after 1950 (Smil 2001b). A number of countries with
traditionally intensive cropping preceded China in taking the inevitable step of
augmenting organic nitrogen supplies by increasing applications of inorganic
fertilizers: Dutch, British, German, Japanese or Egyptian staple crops were
already receiving appreciable amounts of ammonia-based nitrogen before World
War II. Unfortunately, this fundamental shift did not come in China as a result of
deliberate, far-sighted policies – but largely as a response to the greatest famine
of the twentieth century.

Modern China: famine and its consequences

When it came to power in 1949, the Communist regime inherited just two small
fertilizer plants producing annually about 27,000t of ammonium sulfate (CIA
 Food 115

1975; Chang 1977). Intensive recycling of a large variety of organic wastes and
cultivation of green manures remained the mainstays of the country’s nitrogen
supplies during the first two decades after the establishment of the Communist
regime. Historical reconstructions of nitrogen inputs into China’s agriculture
show that synthetic fertilizers provided only about 5 per cent of the nutrient
during the late 1950s and that the share was still less than a third of the total by
1970. Construction of small, coal-based ammonia plants producing ammonium
bicarbonate began in 1958, the year Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap
Forward. Ignorant of economic and technical complexities, but obsessed with
the idea of making China a great power, the Chairman of the Chinese
Communist Party followed a primitive Stalinist model of development that
equated economic modernization with the large output of steel produced in
small plants by mass mobilization of the country’s huge population.
The catastrophic consequences of this decision, combined with other fateful
blunders in agricultural policy, have been described in the opening section of this
chapter: in the three years between 1959 and 1961 some 30 million Chinese died
in the greatest famine in human history. More pragmatic policies favored by Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping finally put the end to that tragedy. One of their
measures was the purchase of five medium-sized ammonia-urea plants from the
UK and the Netherlands between 1963 and 1965. By 1965 synthetic fertilizers
supplied about 20 per cent of all nitrogen reaching China’s fields. Then this
more normal development was cut short, once again, in 1966 with the launching
of Mao’s destructive spell of ideological frenzy, political vendettas and localized
civil war that became known, most incongruously, as the Cultural Revolution.
In a state of anarchy, China’s population grew without any controls from 660
million people in 1961 to 870 million by 1972. The addition of more than 200
million people in a single decade represented the fastest population growth in
China’s long history, and the highest absolute decadal increment ever recorded
by any nation (and not to be surpassed by India’s growth during the coming
decades). At the same time, industrial and urban expansion and Maoist policies
of agricultural mismanagement were shrinking the extent of China’s arable
land, and the traditional organic agriculture had reached its production limits set
by the availability of recyclable nutrients.
In just two to three years after the end of the great famine average yields of
staple crops recovered to the pre-1959 level – but then they began to stagnate. By
the end of the 1960s China’s harvests could not keep up even with the basic food
needs of the country’s growing population. By 1972 China’s average per capita
food supply was below the levels of the early 1950s, the time when the country
was emerging from decades of instability and war. As described earlier in this
chapter, all food in cities was strictly rationed, and peasants subsisted on a
monotonous and barely adequate vegetarian diet. Moreover, it was obvious that
even an unprecedented degree of population controls – at that time contem-
plated by the ruling gerontocracy, and soon put into effect in the world’s most
drastic and personally intrusive program – would not prevent the population
total rising to at least 1 billion by the year 1980 and to 1.2 billion during the
116 Food

1990s. The doubling of China’s population between 1960 and 2000 would then
result (after taking into account land losses to urbanization and industrialization)
in more than halving the per capita arable land in just two generations. But there
was no way to double that land’s productivity with traditional ways of farming.
The only effective way out of this existential predicament was to intensify the
performance of China’s agriculture, that is to boost its average staple crop yields.
In a country where already nearly half of all farmland was irrigated, this meant
one change above all: the rapid increase in applications of nitrogen, the nutrient
critical for raising yields. China’s fertilizer-production capacity had to increase as
rapidly as possible, and the best way to achieve this was to get access to the
world’s most advanced process of ammonia synthesis. And so the very first
commercial deal, immediately following Richard Nixon’s February 1972 visit
that reopened China to the Western world, was Beijing’s order for thirteen of the
world’s largest and most modern ammonia-urea complexes, the biggest ever
purchase of its kind.
Such an order was best filled by turning to M.W. Kellogg of Texas, the
world’s leading designer and builder of such plants: eight of the thirteen
ammonia plants came from this company – and their product is fed directly to
urea plants built by Kellogg’s Dutch subsidiary (CIA 1975; Chang 1977). Output
from these newly completed plants soon surpassed the country’s pre-1972 fertil-
izer nitrogen production. More purchases of ammonia-urea complexes followed
during the 1970s, as did more fertilizer imports (mostly urea from Japan).
From the US perspective, Kissinger and Nixon’s opening of China to the
world was a matter of grand Realpolitik, of forging a new strategic alliance.
Undoubtedly this was so – but, no less assuredly, from Beijing’s perspective it was
also a matter of basic survival, a shift dictated by the need to secure a key to the
nation’s very existence. Without higher yields the country would have to face the
very real prospect of yet another famine by the late 1970s or the early 1980s.
Conversely, because it acquired the means to break through the nitrogen barrier,
China’s population is now better fed than at any time during its long history, in
spite of the fact that it now stands at more than 1.3 billion. This reality has,
inevitably, broader implications: without the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers,
humanity’s total count would not currently be surpassing 6 billion (Smil 2001b).

China’s dependence on the Haber–Bosch process

In 1979 – the year in which Deng Xiaoping finally consolidated his control of
the central government and began turning into reality his bold plans for national
modernization – China surpassed the USA to become the world’s largest
consumer of nitrogen fertilizers; ten years later it surpassed the USSR to become
also the world’s largest producer of these compounds (FAO 2002). In 1976, the
year of Mao’s death, Chinese farming derived about 40 per cent of all nitrogen
inputs from synthetic fertilizers; a decade later, after the country’s peasants set
new harvest records and after all food rationing was abolished, synthetic fertil-
izers supplied 60 per cent of nitrogen reaching China’s crops (Figure 3.6). And
 Food 117

the importance of nitrogen fertilizers has continued to rise: by 1990 they

supplied 65 per cent of the nutrient reaching China’s crop fields, and by the year
2000 the share was close to 75 per cent (Figure 3.6).
This means that the mean nationwide application of inorganic compounds is
now almost 175kg N/ha of arable land, a rate about 75 per cent higher than the
declining Japanese applications, whose mean fell from about 160kg N/ha in
1985 to about 100kg N/ha by 2000 (FAO 2002). And as no less than 90 per cent
of the country’s dietary protein supply is derived from domestically grown crops
(the rest comes from aquatic food, meat and dairy products derived from grass-
lands, and from grain imports) this also means that roughly two thirds (0.9 ⫻
0.75) of all nitrogen in China’s current diet originated in the Haber–Bosch
synthesis of ammonia.
Or, to make the point even more impressively, in the year 2000 about 850
million Chinese were consuming food whose proteins were synthesized by crops
from inorganic nitrogen applied in synthetic fertilizer. A historical comparison
confirms this estimate. During the early 1950s traditional organic farming
produced, on the average, no more than 90kg of plant protein per hectare of
farmland (including the protein in animal feed); in 2000 China’s plant protein
output averaged about 250kg/ha, or about 2.8 times above the early 1950s rate. As
virtually all of the 1950–2000 increase in protein output (160kg/ha) came from
inorganic fertilizers, this implies that nitrogen fixed by ammonia synthesis is now
indispensable for producing about two thirds (160/250) of all dietary protein.

Figure 3.6 Rising shares of synthetic fertilizers in China’s supply of agricultural nitrogen
Source: Plotted from data in Smil (2001b).
118 Food

Predictably, the importance of inorganic nitrogen varies among crops and

among provinces. Where the Hunanese rice is still grown in rotations including
green manures, the non-fertilizer inputs remain relatively high. The three-year
cropping sequence of rice, wheat, rice, green manure, rice, and rapeseed would
receive annually 300–320kg N/ha as urea and another 150kg N/ha from biofixa-
tion, organic recycling and atmospheric deposition: synthetic nitrogen would thus
supply at least 67 per cent of the total input. But China’s cultivation of green
manures has been in retreat: it peaked at 9.9Mha in 1975, and subsequent steady
decline brought their total plantings to less than 4Mha. In contrast, in Jiangsu –
where green manuring is virtually absent, biofixation may supply just 25kg N/ha,
and organic recycling, irrigation and atmospheric deposition will add no more
than 80kg N/ha compared to 380kg N/ha applied to rotations of rice and wheat
– inorganic nitrogen will supply almost 80 per cent of the total input.
This high dependence could be lowered a bit, but no fundamental changes
are possible. Even if the Chinese were willing to forgo their recent, and much
welcome, dietary improvements, and reduce their protein intake to the barely
adequate level of the mid-1950s, they would still have to rely on synthetic
nitrogen fertilizer to produce at least half of their food protein! These reductions
would entail not only large (more than 50–80 per cent) cuts in average consump-
tion of meat and fish, but also much lower intakes of plant oils and fruits. And in
the long run the dependence on inorganic nitrogen will have to increase. Even
with its greatly reduced fertility, China will add another 300 million people by
the middle of the twenty-first century before its total population may level off at
somewhere between 1.5 and 1.6 billion people.
Moreover, this much larger population will expect continuing improvements
in the quality of its diet. Opportunities for expanding cultivated area are very
limited, and higher food imports can never play such a large role in China’s case
as they did in the development of its smaller Asian neighbors. South Korea has
been recently importing 65 per cent of its cereal consumption, and nearly 90 per
cent of its oil crop consumption; Japanese imports have supplied nearly 75 per
cent of all cereals, all but a few per cent of oil crops, as well as 40 per cent of all
fish. If China were to buy two thirds of its recent annual grain consumption
(averaging about 450Mt during the late 1990s) abroad, all of the grain recently
traded on the world market (250–270Mt/year during the same period) would
not suffice. Consequently, all but a relatively small fraction of China’s greatly
increased demand for food will have to come from further intensification of
cropping. As it is most unlikely that other sources of nitrogen (mainly organic
recycling and atmospheric deposition) will rise above the recent level of less than
9Mt N/year, there will have to be further substantial increases of average
nitrogen applications to China’s crop fields during the coming generations.
Their magnitude will depend above all on the future share of animal foods in
China’s average diet, and on the typical efficiency of fertilizer use. Animal feeding
always entails considerable protein losses, with typical feed protein to meat protein
conversion efficiencies ranging from 25 per cent for chicken to 10–15 per cent for
pork and a mere 5–8 per cent for beef (Smil 2000a). A China that consumes twice
 Food 119

or three times as much meat as today, eating it mostly as hamburgers or steaks, and
losing 50–60 per cent of all applied nitrogen, can exist only in wishful thinking. A
China that consumes twice as much meat per capita as it does now, and does so as
a mixture of carp (herbivorous fish is the best converter of feed to meat protein),
chicken and pork, and with substantially reduced fertilizer losses, is a practical
proposition achievable in a matter of a generation or two.
As higher applications of nitrogen fertilizers bring declining yield response,
China is rapidly approaching, and in coastal provinces almost reaching, the
economic limits of more intensive fertilization. And with such massive applica-
tions, even a fairly efficient use of the nutrient will lead to some unwelcome
environmental consequences. Indeed, no other region in the world uses as much
nitrogen as the four coastal provinces in East and South China: Jiangsu,
Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Using the official statistics of nitrogen
consumption and farmland areas derived from MEDEA’s satellite study, their
1995 application rates ranged from about 275kg N/ha in Jiangsu to 350kg N/ha
in Zhejiang, and the region’s mean was almost exactly 300kg N/ha.
The experiences of other regions that have been receiving high nitrogen fertil-
izer applications for many decades – particularly northwestern Europe – give us
good previews of what to expect. Increased leaching of nitrates into drinking
water is already widespread, and we can expect large areas of the Jiangnan to
have nitrate concentrations in drinking water well above the WHO limit of
50mg/L. While the health consequences of elevated nitrate levels in drinking
water are disputed (l’Hirondel and l’Hirondel 2001), we are much more certain
about the effects of excess nitrogen on aquatic life. Because nitrogen commonly
limits the growth of phytoplankton and algae, increased escapes of nitrogen fertil-
izers to China’s lakes, ponds and rivers, as well as into shallow coastal waters (the
process called eutrophication), will support more abundant growth of these
aquatic plants, whose eventual decay consumes oxygen and creates hypoxic or
anoxic waters, kills bottom-dwelling molluscs and crustaceans and drives away
fish (Rabalais 2002). Algal blooms can also produce dangerous toxins.
Further afield, higher rates of fertilization mean inevitably more denitrifica-
tion and hence more nitrous oxide. China is already the world’s largest emitter of
this gas, whose atmospheric concentrations are low (at 310ppb they are equal to
only about 0.08 per cent of the current CO2 level) but which is a much more
potent absorber of the outgoing infrared radiation: compared on a 100-year
basis, each molecule of N2O will absorb 310 times more outgoing infrared radi-
ation than a molecule of CO2 (Houghton et al. 2001). Given the gradual
decarbonization of the world’s primary energy supply, the future importance of
the anthropogenic output of N2O will only increase (Smil 2002b).
Because China does not have the option of following its much smaller East Asian
neighbors and to import most of its staple foodstuffs, its continuous intensification
of crop production, predicated on higher inputs of nitrogen derived from the
Haber–Bosch process of ammonia synthesis, will have to pay much more attention
to the overall efficiency of the country’s agricultural nitrogen cycle. There is no
shortage of effective means that can be widely used to increase the uptake of
120 Food

nitrogen by crops (Fragoso 1993; Prasad and Power 1997; Smil 2001b) – but
post-harvest actions are no less necessary: cutting grain losses in transport and
storage (excessively high in today’s China), reducing food waste at retail and
household level (this is surprisingly large for such a poor country), and rational-
izing food consumption by promoting healthy diets (obesity is becoming a
problem in Chinese cities) would help to moderate the undesirable environ-
mental effects of high nitrogen applications. China’s increasing dependence on
the Haber–Bosch synthesis of ammonia is inevitable – but its economic, environ-
mental and nutritional consequences are not preordained. They could be all
impressively improved – or they could become a source of rising concern.

Can China feed itself ? Concerns and solutions

China’s burgeoning economy and improving food supply were perhaps the best
news coming out from the post-Tian’anmen China of the early 1990s. But in
1994 Lester Brown, at that time the president of Washington’s Worldwatch
Institute, wrote an article arguing that China was rapidly losing its capacity to
feed itself, that its grain output had already reached its peak and would fall by at
least 20 per cent by the year 2030, and that only massive grain imports could
make up for the anticipated deficit (Brown 1994). The following year he
published an expanded version of this paper as a short book entitled Who Will
Feed China? and subtitled, melodramatically, Wake-up Call for a Small Planet (Brown
1995). The following passages, from my review of the book in the New York
Review of Books (Smil 1996a), summarize my basic reactions and set Brown’s
claims into a wider context of unreconstructed catastrophism.

A catastrophic vision
Brown’s analysis of China’s food prospects rests on a series of assumptions about
what, to him, appear to be irrevocable trends: China’s consumers are “moving
up the food chain”, the country is losing arable land, running out of water, and
exhausting its opportunities for further major increases in yields. Because Brown
considers all these trends to be virtually unstoppable, his conclusion is that China
is heading toward catastrophe. As incomes rise, China’s demand for feed grain to
produce meat and fish will keep growing. Since there will be no conceivable way
to satisfy this demand through domestic grain production (which will be actually
declining), the only recourse will be vast, and increasing, imports of grain. This
will lead not only to a global increase in food prices but – because Brown does
not see any possibility for a major expansion of export supplies – also to world
shortages of staple cereals.
How valid is the reasoning behind these apocalyptic predictions? Lester Brown
is, of course, a professional catastrophist, a persistent doomsayer who has been
turning out forecasts of dire food shortages, crippling energy crises, and planetary
environmental collapse since the early 1970s. Only Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich can
rival him in his long record of prophesying doom. Brown notes with satisfaction in
 Food 121

the foreword to Who Will Feed China? that his latest doomsday scenario has brought
him more attention than anything he has published. No small achievement.
To Lester Brown, problems, setbacks and complications are not merely
normal facts of managing – or often just muddling through – an unruly and
ever-changing reality. Rather, they tend to be harbingers of an immense global
trauma. In the short run this gets him attention – but in the long run he has,
much like his confrère Paul Ehrlich, repeatedly been shown to be wrong.
A single example will illustrate this point. In 1974, when OPEC’s oil price
increases were for a while dramatically misrepresented by energy “experts” as
unmistakable signs of the world’s running out of fossil fuels, The Futurist magazine
noted that Brown “refuses to own an automobile and uses public transportation, so
that more energy can go into food production”. Brown’s fear of oil “running out”
was so great that he urged us to conserve precious energy for only the most essential
of all uses, growing food. Even readers completely uninterested in energy matters
know what in fact happened. A generation after Brown’s sacrifice, the world’s crude
oil ratio of reserves to production is at a record high and, adjusted for inflation, oil
prices are barely higher than they were before OPEC’s first extortionate hike.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss Brown’s China predictions as just another
scare. Concerns about China’s long-term food production capacity are valid.
What is so exasperating about Brown’s treatment of this topic is his masterful use
of highly selective evidence. Brown’s book, to use Chinese imagery, badly needs
an infusion of yang, light and possibility, to contrast with his unmitigated yin of
darkness and decline, especially since he ignores or hardly mentions factors that
undermine his view.

I expanded my critique of Brown’s claims, and explained a number of realistic

solutions and adjustments, in the fourth annual Hopper Lecture (Smil 1996b).
The final, and the most extensive, elaboration of these arguments became the
last chapter of Feeding the World (Smil 2000a), the book I wrote to assess the
achievements and prospects of the global food supply. The rest of this chapter’s
closing section represents a slightly abridged version of that chapter.

If China could do it…

China is a near perfect embodiment of the concatenation of worrisome changes
that complicate and undermine the quest for higher food production. The
combination of realities that weaken its food-production capacity – its (in abso-
lute terms) still very high population growth, limited (and declining) availability
of farmland, widespread and intensifying shortages of water, serious air and
water pollution and extensive ecosystemic degradation, reduced growth rates of
staple grain yields, and rapid dietary changes – is behind the recent questioning
of the country’s ability to feed itself (Crook 1994; Brown 1995; Smil 1995a).
At the same time, China’s entire food system offers some of the world’s most
convincing examples of widespread inefficiency and waste. Even a relatively
modest effort to eliminate these failures would go a long way toward securing
122 Food

adequate food for coming generations. If a conservative assessment can show

that China should be able to meet the challenge, then we may feel much more
confident about most of the rest of the world.

China’s predicament
The same factors that have made the task of feeding China an uncommon chal-
lenge in the past will remain influential during the coming fifty years. First is the
necessity to feed the world’s largest population (China’s 1.25 billion people in
2000 represented just over one fifth of the global total). Second is the limited
availability of farmland exacerbated by losses of cultivated land to urban and
industrial expansion. The third decisive factor is the deteriorating state of
China’s agroecosystems, including growing shortages of water and spreading
environmental pollution. Two new concerns also matter: dietary transition
driven by much higher disposable incomes, a trend particularly pronounced in
China’s richest coastal provinces; and the declining productivity of farming
inputs, above all the falling response of staple cereal yields to intensifying appli-
cations of synthetic fertilizers.

The rising demand for food

The country’s relative population growth, averaging just 1.1 per cent during the first
half of the 1990s, is quite low in comparison with the mean for all modernizing
nations (1.77 per cent during the same period), and considerably below the rates for
either Southeast Asia or South America, which stood, respectively, at about 1.7 and
1.6 per cent. But the huge absolute increase of China’s population during the past
generation means that this relatively low growth still translates into a historically
high level of nearly 25 million births a year and to net additions of more than 13
million people. These totals will not decline appreciably at least for another decade,
and some 200 million people will be added during the next two generations, about
as many as Indonesia’s total population of the late 1990s.
Obviously, merely maintaining the existing food consumption rates would call
for a miniumum 1.1 per cent increase in annual grain harvests; during the last
years of the 1990s this would mean adding about 5Mt every year. But if the food
supply were to keep up with rising expectations, the actual rates would have to
be much higher. Since the beginning of economic modernization in the early
1980s, China’s average intakes have moved very rapidly up the food chain, as
major per capita consumption increases have brought the typical dietary pattern
much closer to those of Japan and Taiwan.
By 1985 – just five years after the beginning of farming privatization –
China’s average per capita food availability rose to 2,700kcal/day, a rate less
than 5 per cent behind the Japanese mean food supply, and it has remained just
slightly above that clearly adequate rate ever since (Smil 1985, 1995a). This
quantitative rise has been accompanied by major qualitative gains. Consumption
of coarse grains and tubers declined as intakes of more finely milled wheat and
 Food 123

rice increased. Milling rates for rice returned to 70 per cent or less, compared to
the 85 per cent typical of pre-1980 years.
Per capita intakes of traditional non-staple favorites have multiplied several-
fold. Between 1980 and 2000, average annual consumption of plant oils nearly
quadrupled, while the consumption of eggs and fruits rose sixfold (Figure 3.7).
Pork purchases tripled nationwide – with per capita consumption of pork among
the highest-income groups in coastal cities surpassing the Japanese national
mean – and drinking of alcoholic beverages rose more than fourfold (SSB
1978–1999). Future rates of consumption increases will slow down, but given the
still low rate of China’s urbanization (about one third of the country’s popula-
tion was urban in 1999) and great urban/rural disparities of food intakes, the
pattern will not stabilize soon. Consumption surveys show that the expenditure
elasticities for rice and coarse grains are declining, but those for wheat, meat,
alcohol and vegetables are increasing.

Figure 3.7 Between 1980 and 2000 China’s dietary transition followed a universal pattern
of declining tuber and pulse consumption, and increasing intakes of animal
foods, fruits, plant oils and alcoholic beverages
Source: Per capita rates calculated from data in China Statistical Yearbook.
124 Food

The rising demand for meat and alcohols allows us to foresee easily a
doubling of grain demand during the next generation. The advancing
Westernization of urban diets will push up the demand for wheat, sugar and oils.
At the same time, increased grain harvests will have to come from the shrinking
amount of farmland, and to cope with a precarious availability of irrigation
water as well as with a more widespread environmental pollution.

Environmental constraints
According to official claims, the country lost about 15 per cent of its farmland
between 1957 and 1990 (Smil 1993). Given the country’s intervening population
increase, the average farmland availability was thus more than halved, from
about 0.18 to just 0.08ha/person. Rapid post-1980 modernization brought a
spate of new rural and urban housing construction and unprecedented expan-
sion of export-oriented manufactures and transportation links. New peasant
houses are rarely built on the sites of old structures, new factories usually take
over highly productive alluvial land, and government policies promote multilane
freeways instead of rapid trains. Not surprisingly, annual farmland losses have
been averaging at least 0.5Mha since 1980, and they have been mostly concen-
trated in the rapidly developing coastal provinces where intensity of farmland
use is highest.
During the past decade water shortages have become seasonally acute
throughout most of the North China Plain. Large-scale irrigation of the plain
began only in the 1960s with the introduction of the first shallow tube wells, and
by the late 1980s the plain had more than two million tube wells irrigating over
11Mha of farmland (O’Mara 1988). Initially, pumping helped to lower the
formerly high water table and hence to reduce the extent of soil salinization, but
soon it began causing excessive exploitation of aquifers accompanied by
spreading ground subsidence (Smil 1993).
During the early 1980s roughly a third of irrigation water on the plain came
from the Huanghe, but the combination of recurrent droughts and higher agri-
cultural, urban and industrial demand began exhausting the stream long before
it reached the sea. The river’s total runoff has recently fallen to as low as two
fifths of the long-term mean, as the normally very low summer flow has repeat-
edly ceased altogether for hundreds of kilometers from its mouth for a period
lasting between one and four months. Diversion of Huanghe water, amounting
to more than a quarter of its total flow during dry years, also reduces the silt
transport to the ocean; a heavy sediment load is thus deposited on the river’s
bed, particularly in Henan and Shandong provinces. Irrigation thus aggravates
the elevation of the river’s bed above the surrounding countryside.
Water shortages in the North now affect an area extending over some
600,000km2, an area about 10 per cent larger than France. But water shortages
are not limited to the plain: they have become a near-chronic reality in every
northern and northwestern province. At a basin level the Hai–Luan basin has
the highest water stress, followed by the Huai River basin (Nickum 1998). On a
 Food 125

provincial basis Shanxi (particularly its southern part) and peninsular Shandong
face the greatest water shortage; in Shanxi even drinking water is often scarce,
and about 10 per cent of the province’s peasants suffer chronic shortages of its
supply. The planned expansion of surface coal mining and the construction of
large coal-fired power plants will further strain this inadequate supply. And
although expanding cities are now claiming substantial volumes of water used
previously in agriculture, urban water shortages have become the norm in the
capital and 200 other municipalities in the region.
Environmental pollution accompanying China’s industrial and urban expan-
sion is both widespread and severe (Smil 1993). With about 1.2 billion tonnes
extracted annually, China is now the world’s largest consumer of coal, producing
more SO2 and particulate matter than all of Europe outside Russia; more than
80 per cent of its waste water is discharged without treatment; and irrigation
waters in the most intensively cultivated periurban areas have been polluted by
industrial wastes. An even greater water pollution threat comes from hundreds of
thousands of new village and township enterprises that have been absorbing
rural surplus labor. China’s Environmental Protection Agency can only guess at
the total amount of untreated waste leaving those factories.
Degradation of ecosystems has an even greater impact, with worsening short-
ages of water, extensive soil erosion (causing silting of reservoirs and irrigation
canals, and aggravating annual flooding), salinization and waterlogging of farm-
land, overgrazing and pest infestation of grasslands, and disappearance of the
remaining mature forests. Huang and Rozelle (1995) estimated that erosion,
salinization and losses of farmland may have cost China recently 6Mt of grain a
year, more than the additional output needed to keep up with the country’s
population growth. My more comprehensive, but still incomplete, survey of the
economic costs of China’s environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation
shows that these are equivalent to at least 10 per cent of the country’s annual
GDP, and that roughly one fifth of that cost is attributable to losses of agricul-
tural production (Smil 1997b).
While some problems have been eased by higher investment in environmental
protection – above all through waste water treatment in large cities, installation
of effective particulate-matter controls at large stationary combustion sources,
and private afforestation of slopelands – others are worsening. The two most
notable examples of the latter category are the rapid expansion of the area
affected by acid deposition in Southwestern China (caused by burning high-
sulfur coals in the region’s rainy climate), and rising concentrations of
tropospheric ozone from more frequent, and more concentrated, episodes of
photochemical smog (resulting from the rising intensity of automobile traffic in
rich coastal provinces). And, as anywhere else, rising rates of fertilization bring
lower yield responses, and a higher demand for urban and industrial water uses
is now competing with limited supplies for irrigation.
To some observers, the combined effects of these changes were already demon-
strated by the post-1984 stagnation of China’s grain output (Brown 1995). That
year’s record grain harvest of 407Mt was followed by five years of stagnation, and
126 Food

although a new record, 446Mt, was set in 1990, it was followed, again, by two
years of lower harvests (Figure 3.8). A continuation and intensification of these
trends could result in annual grain supply deficits amounting to tens of millions
of tonnes during the coming decade, and surpassing 100Mt, possibly even
200Mt, before the year 2025.
Climate change could make China’s quest for higher yields even more diffi-
cult, and its dependence on imports even greater. There are indications that the
twentieth century has already brought greater aridity to eastern and north-

Figure 3.8 China’s fluctuating grain harvests and average per capita grain supply,
1990–2000
Source: Plotted from data in China Statistical Yearbook.
 Food 127

western parts of the country, and higher temperatures in the North. Chinese
studies of the long-term effect of global warming suggest possibilities of lower
rice yields in the South, lower corn yields in the East, and lower soybean harvests
everywhere except in the Northeast (Smit and Cai 1996).
The implications of China’s inability to feed itself would be global. Even if
a relatively rich China could afford to buy increasing quantities of cereals on
the world market, such purchases would not just lead to price rises in a handful
of remaining countries exporting food, they would also gravely reduce, or
virtually remove, the access of many poorer nations in Africa and Asia to grain
deliveries from the four producers with virtually assured long-term export
potential: the USA, Canada, Australia and Argentina (the contribution of
Russia’s and the Ukraine’s exports, potentially quite large, remains highly
uncertain).
Pressure on international grain prices would rise as the country’s unmet
demand moved substantially above the level of recent Japanese purchases (at
almost 30Mt a year, now the largest in the world). Annual imports of 100Mt
would be equivalent to one half of the recent global grain shipments, and given
the fact that future import demand in other populous Asian, African and Latin
American countries will almost certainly grow, it is difficult to see that the
country could actually secure such a large share. And if its shortfall were to
amount to more than 200Mt a year, China could not hope to make this up by
imports at any price: a doubling of global grain sales during the next generation
is extremely unlikely.

Available resources
Realistic appraisals of agricultural possibilities must rest on reliable informa-
tion. Unfortunately, not a few analyses of China’s agricultural prospects have
relied on inaccurate figures or interpreted undeniable realities in misleading
ways. To begin with, China’s population may stay well below the 1.6 billion
people assumed by Brown for the year 2030. In fact, the medium variant of the
latest UN revision of long-term forecasts foresees stabilization around 1.5
billion after the year 2030, and the low variant does not even reach 1.4 billion
before the total levels off (UNO 2002). In addition to a further significant slow-
down of China’s population growth, overall demand for food might be
appreciably lowered by a combination of ageing (with low fertilities in place
since the early 1980s, China will experience one of the world’s fastest demo-
graphic transitions), more sedentary lifestyles, and concern about healthy diets
(traditionally strong in China).
As in many countries around the world, China’s official figures have been
substantially underestimating the country’s arable land, which means that the
official yields must be adjusted downwards, and that there are greater unrealized
possibilities of increasing future harvests. China’s farmland scarcity is thus
nowhere near the level observed in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, the
128 Food

country’s neighbors that have increasingly relied on imports of grain, edible oil
and meat. During much of the 1990s, China’s Statistical Yearbook has contained a
note warning that “figures for the cultivated land are under-estimated and must
be further verified”. This is not news: many students of Chinese affairs have
known since the early 1980s that the official total of China’s farmland – 95Mha
listed by the State Statistical Bureau, putting China’s per capita mean of arable
land below the Bangladeshi average – is wrong.
Even the earliest remote sensing studies based on imagery with inadequate
resolution (the LANDSAT Multiple Spectral Scanner with resolution of 80m)
indicated that figures used by the State Statistical Bureau, and hence by virtually
all misinformed foreigners, were too low. They came up with a total as high as
150Mha, and detailed sample surveys of the late 1980s came up with the range
of 133–140Mha (Smil 1993). More recently, Wu and Guo (1994) put the total at
136.4Mha plus an additional 7.4Mha devoted to horticulture. Heilig’s (1997)
application of land survey data for 1985 to correct the official claims of total
cultivated area ended up with 137.1Mha for the year 1995.
The most extensive, and the most accurate, remote sensing evaluation used a
stratified, multi-stage area estimation approach: samples of the higher-resolution
classified imagery from the Keyhole (KH) series of intelligence satellites (whose
latest models return images with resolution of 15cm or better) were used as
surrogates for in situ data to correct estimates derived from much coarser
commercially available images, including Advanced Very High Resolution
Radiometer and LANDSAT. This analysis yielded the total of 143.3Mha for the
year 1992; with a variation of 5.6 per cent at the 0.95 confidence interval, the
actual area could have been as low as 135.4Mha and as high as 151.4Mha
(Figure 3.9) (MEDEA 1997). This estimate was subsequently revised to the range
of 133–147Mha for the year 1997: failure of the initial appraisal to account
properly for fallowed land and intervening conversions of farmland to nonagri-
cultural uses were the main reasons for the reduction.
I believe that even MEDEA’s total may be too low, as it does not include
aquacultural ponds and orchards, the two intensive land uses which make very
significant contributions to the country’s balanced diet. Moreover, a large share
of today’s orchards and ponds has been converted from crop fields since 1980:
land use has changed but the land has not only remained devoted to food
production as it keeps supplying high-quality protein and desirable micronutri-
ents, but its new uses also provide a variety of environmental benefits. Even
when assuming an annual yield of no more than four tonnes of fish, a hectare of
carp pond will yield about 800kg of protein, twice as much as the average grain
harvest (including the 1.5 multicropping rate) from the same area – and, unlike
cereals, carp has adequate amounts of all amino acids. And a hectare of citrus
orchard will produce 50 per cent more vitamin C and twice as much food energy
as the same area planted to cabbages.
With the inclusion of ponds and orchards, China’s farmland is thus anywhere
between 140 and 160Mha, and the country’s 1998 per capita mean is at least
1,100m2, compared to 490m2 in South Korea, 430m2 in Taiwan, and 420m2 in
 Food 129

Japan. China’s per capita farmland availability is thus at least two and almost
three times larger than that of its East Asian neighbors. And unlike in those
three countries, there are still appreciable opportunities for reclamation of farm-
land in China. According to official estimates, the country has at least 33Mha of
uncultivated but reclaimable land categorized as wasteland, whose eventual
development (perhaps a third of that land could be converted to fairly produc-
tive fields, the rest is suitable mostly for planting trees) would result in
appreciable food production gains and environmental benefits.
Conversions to appropriate food production uses could be speeded up by
large-scale auctioning of rights to long-term (50–100 years) private use of such
land. Hanstad and Li (1997) describe the keen interest shown by peasants
bidding for the rights to wasteland, and the relatively high investment of labor
and cash they subsequently undertake to use the land for planting trees for fruits,
nuts, fuelwood and timber. The fruit and nut production potential of large-scale
wasteland cultivation is obviously substantial, but environmental benefits – above
all reduced soil erosion on previously barren slope lands – may be of equal, or
even greater, benefit for the country’s agroecosystems.

Figure 3.9 Provincial differences between the availability of agricultural land according to
the official statistics and to the MEDEA study
130 Food

In addition, much of the farmland in South China can be cropped continu-

ously, yielding three harvests of staple crops, or up to five harvests of vegetables a
year. The cold climate in northeastern China allows for only a single crop, while
in northern provinces winter wheat commonly follows a summer crop. China’s
overall multicropping ratio (sown/cultivated area) in the mid-1990s was 1.56,
compared to Japan’s 1.03 and Korea’s 1.14. With proper rotations, further inten-
sification of China’s crop cultivation, raising the multicropping ratio to 1.6–1.65,
is possible without damaging the affected agroecosystems.
Underreporting of farmland means that the official figures on China’s
average grain yields are exaggerated. The difference is smallest for rice (less than
10 per cent) and largest for corn (in some provinces more than 40 per cent).
Contrary to Brown’s assertion, Chinese yields are not exceptionally high by
advanced world standards, and could be increased substantially by higher inputs
and better agronomic management. Corn, the principal feed grain, averaged
officially 4.9t/ha in 1995, but the actual mean is just below 4t/ha, or no more
than half of the average US yield in a good year. Even the average official rice
yield of about 6t/ha is more than 10 per cent behind the Japanese mean. This
means that the country has more room to improve crop yields by using addi-
tional inputs, better agronomic practices and price incentives.
Another important consideration is that China’s undoubtedly substantial
farmland losses have been exaggerated. Since 1980 the net farmland loss in
China has fluctuated between less than 100,000ha (in 1989–1991) and 1Mha (in
1985), with the period of fastest decline between 1992 and 1994. Mean annual
loss has been nearly 500,000ha a year since 1980, but this does not mean that
the land devoted to food production simply shrank by that much every year. A
large part of the reported loss, over 50 per cent in some years, has been due to
the restoration of land converted to fields during the years of extremist policies
of the Maoist era back to their original, and environmentally much more appro-
priate, use as orchards, grasslands and fish ponds (Smil 1999c). This change has
clearly helped China’s nutritional balance, and it has enhanced agroecosystemic
diversity. Consequently, it is misleading to treat this changed land use as a loss of
food production capacity.
The Chinese authorities recognize the necessity to protect the country’s farm-
land. New rules to control illegal land use changes came into effect on 1 March
1996, designed to improve the enforcement of stricter regulations. Although it
would be naive to expect easy compliance in many regions, it is not unrealistic to
foresee an appreciable moderation of annual losses. Ke (1996) put the net reduc-
tion of farmland between 1978 and 1994 at 4.5Mha, and he projects a similar
loss (4–5Mha) during the fifteen years between 1995 and 2010. Even if China
were to lose 0.5Mha a year for the next twenty-five years, it would still have more
than 800m2 of farmland per capita in the year 2020 (when its population will be
about 1.45 billion people), or twice as much as Japan has today.
A realistic appraisal of China’s water availability is also more complex than
conveyed by basic, and in this case quite reliable, precipitation and runoff statis-
tics, and less certain data about water stored in aquifers. To begin with, all
 Food 131

nationwide means concerning water are not very meaningful, as the country’s
monsoonal regime results in pronounced annual and seasonal precipitation and
evapotranspiration differences progressing along the southeast/northwest
gradient. The 500-mm isohyet (running from the central Heilongjiang in the
northeast to the Sino-Bhutanese border in the southwest) forms an approximate
divide between the dry northern and western interior and wet coastal east and
inland south (Domrös and Peng 1988).
China’s water supply is thus determined by a strong seasonality of monsoonal
precipitation, by a high frequency of droughts north of the great divide, and by
large fluctuations in the distribution of annual and seasonal moisture. Densely
inhabited parts of northern China, covering about one third of the country’s
territory, have about two fifths of the total population and grow the same share
of staple grains – but they receive only about one quarter of the country’s
precipitation, and because of high summer evapotranspiration they can access
less than 10 per cent of the nationwide stream runoff. Not surprisingly, these
northern provinces rely heavily on underground water reserves, yet they possess
no more than 30 per cent of all water in China’s aquifers (Smil 1993).
A higher frequency of dry years since the mid-1980s has undoubtedly
contributed to northern China’s water shortages. At the same time, the extent of
this natural precipitation shortfall is not unprecedented. Official statistics on
areas affected by drought (where yields are reduced by at least 30 per cent in
comparison with years of normal precipitation) show large fluctuations of
between 1–18Mha a year (see Figure 3.2) (SSB 1978–1999). Risks of flooding
are also considerable inasmuch as about a tenth of China’s territory, inhabited
by nearly two thirds of the population and producing roughly 70 per cent of all
agricultural output, is below the flood level of major rivers. Flooding serious
enough to reduce crop yields by at least 30 per cent has recently been affecting
4–9Mha of farmland annually (Figure 3.2).
Any serious cutbacks in China’s irrigation would have major repercussions for
the country’s food production. In 1950 China irrigated no more than 16 per cent
of its farmland, but now the officially quoted share is 46 per cent (SSB 1997).
Assuming that the figures on irrigated land are fairly accurate, the actual share
(with 140Mha rather than just 95Mha of arable land) would be just above 30 per
cent. This would make China no more dependent on irrigation than India,
which irrigates nearly 30 per cent of its farmland. In spite of so many obvious
signs of water shortages, existing Chinese practices do not reflect the growing
scarcity of the resource. Inexpensive water is primarily responsible for unsustain-
able and wasteful irrigation, which would be greatly curtailed with the
introduction of realistic water fees. (For more on water prices and savings, see
the second and the third sections of Chapter 4.) The high potential for water
savings is the main reason why Nickum (1998) concluded that China’s “water
crisis” is localized, and is economic and institutional rather than a matter of a
disappearing resource.
China is now the world’s largest producer and user of nitrogen fertilizers –
but it still has a large potential to increase its fertilizer inputs. Assuming the
132 Food

country has at least 140Mha of farmland, its mid-1990s nitrogen applications

were around 170kg N/ha, a rate higher than the declining Japanese average
(about 120kg N/ha in 1997). But with an average multicropping ratio of 1.5 this
prorates to about 110kg N/ha per crop, a rate lower than the mean applications
to single high-yielding crops of US corn or European winter wheat. And while
average nitrogen applications in China’s coastal rice-growing provinces are just
about the highest in the world, large parts of the interior receive considerably less
of the nutrient than is the nationwide mean. Clearly, China still has considerable
room to increase its average nitrogen applications – and even greater opportuni-
ties to combine them with appropriate quantities of phosphorus and potassium.

Post-harvest losses
A key argument of this book – that nearly all assessments of long-term food
prospects have been preoccupied with exploring the possibilities of increased
supply instead of reducing waste along the whole food chain – is persuasively
illustrated by China’s enormous post-harvest losses resulting from improper
storage of crops, low efficiency of animal feeding and very high waste of cooked
food. China’s antiquated storage methods cost the country roughly one seventh
of its cereal harvest every year (Liang et al. 1993). Better storage could make a
huge difference because of China’s extraordinarily large amount of grain held in
state and private reserves. The total, long considered a state secret, was claimed
to be 458Mt in 1994, more than the harvest of all cereals and tubers, and more
than five times as large as standard expectations for setting aside slightly less than
one fifth of annual grain consumption (Crook 1996).
Inefficient feeding of animals, table waste in hundreds of thousands of labor-
unit eateries, and wasteful fermenting to alcohol almost doubles the total grain
loss to more than 50Mt of staple grain equivalent a year. Current Chinese
feeding rates are anywhere between 10 and 50 per cent above the norms
prevailing in Western countries. The overwhelming majority of China’s pigs
(pork accounts for no less than 90 per cent of the country’s meat output) is still
not fed well-balanced mixtures but just about any available edible matter, hence
it is commonly deficient in protein. Not surprisingly, an average Chinese pig
takes at least twice as long to reach slaughter weight than a typical North
American animal (12–14 months rather than just six months) – and its carcass is
still lighter and more fatty (Simpson et al. 1994). And hundreds of millions of
chickens roaming the country’s farmyards take three times as long to reach their
(again lower) slaughter weight than do North American broilers.
Production of alcoholic beverages is a particularly fine example of waste that
could be sharply reduced by relatively simple technical improvements. Brewing
beer and fermenting a variety of Chinese liquors (usually rice- or sorghum-
based) consumed almost 20Mt of grain a year in the early 1990s, and the
demand has been rising by about 20 per cent a year. But drinking more is only a
partial explanation for this huge total: most of China’s 40,000 distilleries and
breweries are small, inefficient enterprises whose grain consumption is typically
 Food 133

40 per cent higher than in the state-of-the-art factories (Liang et al. 1993). And
losses during consumption – particularly in labor unit eating halls and the now-
ubiquitous banqueting at public expense – are staggering. On 13 December 1994
an official China News Agency report put the annual total of wasted grain at
almost 83Mt, and attributed about three fifths of this total to losses during
consumption. Articles in the Chinese press have repeatedly noted large quantities
of leftovers disposed of by restaurants, hotels and canteens every day (Wu 1996).
Finally, a closer look at the causes of the post-1984 stagnation of grain output
reveals that a relative neglect of agriculture, rather than a combination of inex-
orably degradative changes, has been the most important reason for that trend.
As the country, and the world, became mesmerized by the high rates of China’s
industrial growth, the proportion of state investment in agriculture had been
declining, falling by a third between 1991 and 1994 (SSB 1992–1996). Rises in
procurement prices paid to farmers for grain delivered under the compulsory
quota system lagged behind the high rate of inflation, and often the farmers
were not even paid, but issued IOUs. Not surprisingly, peasants responded by
planting less grain and more cash crops.
One of Brown’s main conclusions, that the country faces the prospect of
continuously falling grain harvests, was thus quickly disproved. In 1994, when
Brown widely publicized his alarming appraisal, China’s harvest fell by 2.5 per
cent compared to the record output of 1993 – but it set yet another record in
1995 by reaching almost 467Mt. And in 1996 – in spite of the fact that large
parts of the Yangzi valley (particularly Hunan province, which normally
produces about 13 per cent of China’s rice) experienced some of the worst
flooding recorded in modern China – the country’s grain harvest reached yet
another record of 485Mt (4 per cent above the 1995 level), an increase far ahead
of the country’s rate of population growth.

Realistic solutions
No single efficiency improvement, likewise no single policy change – even if
carried to its technical and economic limits, or even if representing a radical
departure from old, irrational ways – has the potential to alter fundamentally a
country’s long-term food production outlook. Only a combination of such
changes, and sustained attention to their diffusion and performance, will make
an appreciable difference. Fortunately, in China’s case, as in every other large
agricultural system, there are many opportunities for addressing the key twin
inefficiencies of water and fertilizer use, for improving the management of
agroecosystems, for using pricing to promote efficiency, and for investing in
research. And although the country’s rapidly unfolding dietary transition – above
all the rising consumption of animal foodstuffs – results in substantially higher
demand for natural resources, long-term adjustments of China’s dominant nutri-
tional pattern could make a substantial contribution toward reconciling the
demand for better eating with the capacity of agroecosystems to provide the
requisite environmental goods and services.
134 Food

Investment in more efficient forms of irrigation, and more realistic prices for
delivered water, could yield surprisingly large water savings. Water prices paid by
Chinese peasants on the drought-prone North China Plain are about as realistic
as those enjoyed by California farmers growing alfalfa and rice in the semi-desert
climate of the Central Valley (O’Mara 1988). During the late 1980s, a decade of
extensive drought and chronic urban water shortages, the typical price of
China’s irrigation water was mostly between 5 and 20 per cent of the actual cost.
Higher prices should bring better matching of crops with available moisture and
introduce more efficient irrigation.
But higher prices alone may not be sufficient: some regions will also need
changes in basic water allocation arrangements. Total distribution, seepage and
evaporation losses in China’s traditional ridge-and-furrow irrigation amount
commonly to 50–60 per cent of carried water. Using an appropriate mixture of
water-conservation techniques – such as irrigating every other furrow, carefully
scheduling water applications, or replacing corn (an increasingly popular crop in
arid North China) with sorghum – could result in additional, and nearly cost-free,
supply gains. Fertilizer applications offer equally impressive examples of great
efficiency opportunities. Two important approaches – popularization of “fertil-
izing by prescription”, and optimization of applications based on soil analyses
and cropping practices – are becoming increasingly popular among China’s cost-
conscious farmers. Besides the variety of universally applicable approaches
aiming at higher fertilizer use efficiency, two measures would greatly improve
China’s use of nitrogen fertilizers: major efficiency gains would result from a
gradual dismantling of small fertilizer factories making ammonium bicarbonate,
and from adjusting the nutrient ratio.
Ammonium bicarbonate still accounted for about a third of China’s total
output of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers in the mid-1990s, but its high volatility
combined with shoddy packaging means that a large share of the nutrient is lost
even before it is applied to fields. This, and the underestimated farmland, means
that actual applications of nitrogen are much lower than implied by official
statistics – hence the potential to raise yields by higher fertilization is commensu-
rably higher. Getting the N:P:K ratios right is a long-overdue goal of Chinese
fertilizer applications. Whereas the worldwide mean is now about 100:18:22 (and
the United States average is roughly 100:16:35), Chinese applications have been
chronically deficient in both phosphorus and potassium, with the nationwide
ratio of 100:14:8, and with much higher imbalances in many intensively culti-
vated regions (FAO 2002). This chronic excess of nitrogen diminishes the
efficiency of nitrogen applications and promotes unnecessarily high losses of the
nutrient, resulting in a higher nitrate burden in China’s waters, and in higher
denitrification rates producing more N2O (China is already the world’s largest
emitter of N2O from farming).
Raising efficiencies of meat production is another area of potentially large
rewards. Widespread availability of mixed feeds and better breeds could lower
today’s feed/meat ratios, not only for pigs but also for poultry and for carp and
other freshwater fish. This should not mean giving up the traditional feeding of
 Food 135

a great variety of waste organic matter. These feeds are more important in
China than in any large livestock-producing country. They range from plain and
treated cereal straws and root crops to aquatic plants, leucaena leaves and
poultry litter, and they may have contributed as much as 35 per cent of all feed
energy used in China’s animal food production in the early 1990s (Simpson et al.
1994). This share is expected to decline, but it may be still around 30 per cent a
generation from now, as properly prepared and upgraded (urea-treated straw is
already common in China) waste feeds will keep reducing the demand for high-
quality concentrates.
By far the most important way in which long-term dietary transitions could
contribute to the higher efficiency of the food system would be by producing
animal foodstuffs requiring less feed per unit of final product. Animal foods in
the average Chinese diet of the late 1990s – dominated by pork (accounting for
almost half of energy content), with rising fish, poultry and egg consumption,
and negligible intake of dairy products – take about 3.2 units of grain feed per
unit of live weight output. If the shares of animal food were split equally among
pork, fish, poultry and eggs, while typical feeding rates were lowered by just
10–15 per cent, feeding would require no more than 2.5 units of grain per unit
of live weight output, a 20 per cent improvement compared to the current state.
A diet consisting of equal parts of pork, poultry, eggs, fish and milk, and
produced with feeding efficiencies another 10 per cent higher (this would still
leave them well behind the best Western levels of today), would require just
2.0–2.1 units of concentrate feed. As we have already seen, the Japanese
example shows that dairy products, traditionally absent in East Asia, could even-
tually become a relatively large source of food energy and dietary protein.
The level at which China’s meat consumption will eventually saturate is yet
another critical variable. A mechanical transfer of Taiwan’s experience to China
is definitely inappropriate. Taiwan’s combination of very high average per capita
meat intake (more than 70kg) and very low direct cereal consumption (less than
110kg) is exceptional in Asia, and the island’s mean per capita cereal intake is
even below the OECD’s mean of some 130kg! Differences of scale between the
two countries (1.3 billion vs. 20 million people) is another obvious matter to
consider. Recent high forecasts of China’s meat consumption have been also
undoubtedly influenced by erroneous official statistics of average meat supply.
FAO’s food balance sheets, based on China’s official output statistics, put the
average per capita meat consumption at 38.1kg in 1995. The China Statistical
Yearbook puts per capita purchases of urban households at 23.7kg in 1995, and a
two-year national nutrition survey conducted between 1992 and 1994 found an
average daily meat consumption of 58g, or 21.2kg a year (Cui 1995). This means
that an eventual doubling of average nationwide per capita meat consumption
would result in a rate only marginally higher than the current value claimed by
official statistics!
If China’s harvest and postharvest grain losses could be lowered to a rate still
somewhat higher than is common in Western countries – say to no more than
8–10 per cent – the country would gain more than 30Mt of grain a year, a total
136 Food

1.5 times higher than its exceptionally high cereal imports in 1995, and enough
to provide an adequate diet for 75 million people! Building modern grain stores
capable of handling China’s fluctuating harvests will be the key to solving this
problem: during the years of bumper harvests millions of tonnes of grain are left
out in the open.

Encouraging perspectives
The impacts of possibly rapid climate change must be seen in a proper perspec-
tive. Given the size of China’s territory and the variety of crops grown, global
warming would not only bring risks of lower yields but also possibilities for
increased harvests. Where adequate moisture could be provided, Chinese studies
forecast higher winter wheat yields throughout the North, better corn yields on
the North China Plain, better soybean harvests in the Northeast (the crop’s main
producing area), and benefits for tea and citrus fruits (Smit and Cai 1996). Other
benefits might include northward and westward expansion of the wheat-growing
districts, and northward expansion of corn growing. In addition, a long-term
view of history would lead Chinese researchers to recognize such shifts not only
as threatening changes – but also as useful stimuli for adjustments in farming and
for spatial shifts in cropping.
While it is unrealistic to expect that the China of the coming generation
could appreciably lower the extent and the intensity of its environmental prob-
lems, it could substantially reduce the rate of new impacts, and even turn around
some degradative trends. Encouragingly, China’s investment in environmental
protection is now relatively higher than in any rich nation during a comparable
stage of its economic development – and by the year 2000 it should rise to at
least one per cent of total GDP (Smil 1997b). Government spending on environ-
mental protection in rich countries began to make a difference only after their
average per capita GDPs passed US$10,000, about five times as high as the
Chinese GDP mean today. Most of these changes will require a greater commit-
ment to agricultural research, whose findings are necessary to sustain a variety of
technical and managerial innovations. The importance of these innovations for
China’s agriculture has been quite large. Research by Huang and Rozelle (1996)
showed that these advances were at least as important in raising food output
even during the early 1980s, when most observers interpreted the sharply higher
production as the result of newly privatized farming – and during the latter half
of the 1980s and in the early 1990s they accounted for almost all of the growth
in agricultural productivity.
As there is a significant time lag in application of research findings, China
should be spending increasing amounts now to enjoy the benefits during the
coming decades. Unfortunately, as the country became rapidly richer the real
annual expenditures on agricultural research fell between 1985 and 1990, and
they surpassed the peak 1985 level only by 1994 (Fan and Pardy 1992; Huang
and Rozelle 1996). Currently they amount to less than 0.2 per cent of the total
gross output value of Chinese agriculture; in contrast, US federal funding
 Food 137

alone has been equal to about 1 per cent of the value contributed by agriculture
to the country’s GDP. Finally, the purchasing power of Chinese consumers is
still limited. The International Monetary Fund’s exaggerated estimates of the
purchasing power parity (PPP) of average annual per capita GDP at nearly
US$3,000 in the early 1990s were recently scaled down by the World Bank to
about US$(1992)1,800, or a mere three fifths of the Indonesian mean (World
Bank 1996). Consequently, the rate of dietary transition will not be as rapid in
the poor counties of China’s interior as it has been in the country’s large
coastal cities.
Considering this evidence of potential capacity for improving harvests,
reducing losses and managing demand, it is not surprising that virtually all
researchers who have spent a long time studying China’s agriculture agree that
the country can do it: that it can feed itself during the coming generations, and
that its grain, oil, sugar and meat imports will not destabilize the global food
market. The tenor of these conclusions is remarkably similar. Alexandratos
(1996) uses a wide range of revealing international production and consumption
comparisons to make the persuasive case that China’s growing grain imports will
remain only a fraction of those depicted in the panicky scenarios offered by
Brown. He also notes that East Asia’s decline of cereal food consumption
reflected above all drastic falls in rice consumption – but as a smaller share of
China’s population consumes a mainly rice-based diet (rice dominates grain
output only in fourteen of China’s thirty provinces) this trend cannot be dupli-
cated in China (Alexandratos 1997). China is also still much poorer than its
smaller neighbors, and populations living in poverty will increase their grain
intake in early stages of their modernization. And so it is much more likely that a
generation from now China’s direct annual grain consumption will be still closer
to 200kg rather than 100kg per capita.
Frederick Crook (1994) expects “Chinese farmers to feed their own popula-
tion, supplemented by modest quantities of imported grain”. Scott Rozelle and
his colleagues believe that “China will neither starve the world nor become a
major grain exporter. It does seem likely, however, that China will become a
much bigger importer in the coming decades” (Rozelle et al. 1996). The president
of China’s new Agricultural University has an unequivocal answer buttressed by
detailed technical explanations: “China should and can feed itself today and in
the future” (Ke 1996). Hence I conclude this appraisal in the same fashion that I
summed up my previous assessments of China’s ability to feed itself (Smil 1995a,
1996b). There do not seem to be any insurmountable biophysical reasons why
China should not continue feeding itself during the next two generations. Were
this not to happen it will not be because meeting this challenge requires reliance
on as yet unproven bioengineering advances or on unprecedented social adjust-
ments. A combination of well-proven economic and technical fixes,
environmental protection measures, and dietary adjustments, can extract enough
additional food from China’s agroecosystems to provide decent nutrition during
the coming generations without a further weakening of the country’s environ-
mental foundations.
138 Food

New realities
China’s post-1994 grain production has certainly not conformed to Brown’s
catastrophist forecasts, but nobody could have predicted its rapid swings. As the
total 1994 grain harvest fell below 400Mt the government decided to stimulate
grain production through increased procurement prices and mandated
minimum production and reserve levels. These decisions brought a succession of
record harvests, with the peak in 1998 (456Mt) more than 12 per cent above the
1993 level, and with the 1999 harvest only a few megatons lower. These huge
outputs combined with a falling demand for grain – between 1990 and 2000
intakes of rice and wheat fell by 13 per cent – to fill China’s storages beyond
capacity, to push grain prices down, and to bring a sharp retrenchment in 2000.
The total area sown to cereals declined by 7 per cent, and a widespread drought
further reduced the harvest to just over 400Mt; and the 2001 harvest, after
further reduction of the planted area, was even a few megatons lower.
In spite of a production level equal to the early 1990s, when China’s popula-
tion was 11 per cent smaller, there have been no grain shortages. Lower
demand accounts for only a small part of this discrepancy: China’s enormous
grain stocks explain most of it. The size of these stocks has been always a state
secret, but a variety of new fragmentary information led USDA to re-evaluate
drastically its previous estimates of these stocks: instead of about 66Mt of
stocks at the end of the 2000/2001 crop year, USDA now believes that the total
was about 230Mt, and other estimates are as high as 360–500Mt (Hsu and Gale
2001). This is why, at the time of its lowest harvests in a decade, China was
selling large amounts of corn while it was reducing its grain imports to a few
megatons. Brown (1995) made a great deal of the fact that China’s net grain
exports of 8Mt in 1993/1994 turned into net imports of 16Mt a year later, and
he saw it as an indisputable fact that the country had emerged as a major
permanent importer of grain. What would he make of the fact that during the
three crop years between 1998–1999 and 2000–2001 China’s corn, wheat and
rice imports totaled 2.8Mt while exports of these cereals reached nearly 30Mt
(FAO 2002)?
And Brown’s dire predictions could not accommodate the fact that China’s
food balance sheets have shown no decline in average per capita food avail-
ability. FAO’s (2002) calculations show that between 1997 and 2000 China’s
average food availability remained almost perfectly steady, with year-to-year
fluctuations being less than 0.5 per cent, and that shifts in diet composition
continued within this stable overall supply. Following the trend established at the
very beginning of the post-1978 agricultural reforms, the average per capita
food supply now contains less cereals but more sugar, plant oils, vegetables,
fruits, poultry, milk and aquacultured fish than it did in the mid-1990s. I would
expect both of these trends – stable per capita food availability and continuing
slow shifts of average dietary make-up – to continue during the first decade of
the twenty-first century. Urbanization in general, and higher incomes of many
city residents in particular, will be the primary drivers of these shifts. The latest
urban household survey shows that high-income urban households purchased
 Food 139

18 per cent less wheat and 4 per cent less rice than did the low-income families
– but that their purchases of poultry, fruit and milk were, respectively, 1.9, 2.2
and 3.4 times higher (NBS 2000).
Obviously, the dramatic reduction of post-1999 grain harvests has not signi-
fied any loss of China’s productive capacity, and in no way does it confirm
Brown’s forecasts of permanently declining cereal production: it merely reflects
adjustments resulting from changing demand and grain prices, and China’s
entry into the WTO. Direct per capita grain consumption is falling, but demand
for higher-quality wheat (suitable for baked goods and noodles) and rice is rising
(Gale et al. 2001). At the same time, the need for feed grains is not increasing as
rapidly as anticipated because of the stabilized demand for meat and eggs.
Barring any protracted nationwide natural catastrophes, grain production levels
during the coming years will thus be determined by government policies
regarding grain stocks, WTO obligations and prices of flour, milled rice and
animal foodstuffs – and not by any agronomic or environmental limits on
China’s harvests.
As for the more distant future, I agree with Huang et al. (1999) that China will
neither empty the world grain markets nor will it become a major grain exporter.
Depending on meat prices, perhaps as much as 40 per cent of China’s grain
demand by the year 2020 may be for feed, but a combination of improved
productivity and imports no higher than 25Mt a year should be able to cover
even that eventuality. Such a mundane conclusion is the most welcome reality
about the future of China’s food supply: it clearly signifies the country’s maturity
and unprecedented security.

Notes
1 Rhodes, R., “Man-made death: a neglected mortality”, JAMA 260 (1988): 686–687.
2 Yang, D., Catastrophe and reform in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
3 Smil, V., “China’s food: availability, requirements, composition, prospects”, Food Policy
6 (1981): 67–77.
4 Chang, G.H. and Wen, G.J., “Communal dining and the Chinese famine of 1958–1961”,
Economic Development and Cultural Change 46 (1997): 1–34.
5 Macrae, J. and Zwi, A., “Famine, complex emergencies and international policy in
Africa: an overview”, in War and hunger (London: Zed Books, 1994) 6–36.
6 Sen, A., “Nobody need starve”, Granta 52 (1995): 217.
7 State Statistical Bureau, China Statistical Yearbook (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau,
1978–1998).
8 Smil, V., “China’s food”, Scientific American 253(6) (1985): 116–124.
9 Aird, J., “Population studies and population policy in China”, Population and
Development Review 8 (1982): 85–97.
10 Ashton, B., Hill, K., Piazza, A. and Zeitz, R., “Famine in China, 1958–61”, Population
and Development Review 10 (1984): 613–645.
11 Peng, X., “Demographic consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s
provinces”, Population and Development Review 13 (1987): 639–670.
12 Banister, J., China’s changing population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
13 Boss, L.P., Toole, M.J. and Yip, R., “Assessments of mortality, morbidity, and nutri-
tional status in Somalia during the 1991–1992 famine”, Journal of American Medical
Association 272 (1994): 371–376.
140 Food

14 Lopez, G.A. and Cortright, D., “Pain and promises”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54
(1998): 39–43.
15 Pollitt, E. (ed.), “The relationship between undernutrition and behavioral develop-
ment in children”, Journal of Nutrition 125(suppl. 8) (1995): 2211–284S.
16 Becker, J., Hungry ghosts (New York: Free Press, 1996).
17 Encyclopedia Britannica, New Encyclopedia Britannica Micropedia, vol. 4 (Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1997) 674–675.
4 Environment

The veneration of nature is an ancient ingredient of China’s admirably long-

lived civilization – but the presence of this attitude has not provided a sufficient
counterweight to all those much less admirable forces of environmental destruc-
tion whose cumulative effects bequeathed modern China with extensively
degraded landscapes. To these old problems were added insults committed in the
name of a superior ideology during Mao’s years, as well as all the new environ-
mental assaults that have taken place during the post-1980 era of economic
modernization guided by a peculiar mixture of state (party) control and no-
holds-barred private enterprise. And all of these developments have been
unfolding against China’s complex geologic, geomorphologic and climatic condi-
tions, which include a vulnerability to major earthquakes, extreme droughts and
no less extreme monsoon downpours. I will outline some of these attitudes and
constraints in the opening section of this chapter.
Any list of major manifestations of China’s environmental degradation that
could be chosen for a more detailed appraisal should include widespread defor-
estation, recurrently intolerable air pollution, ubiquitous water contamination,
excessive losses of arable land, and a drastic decline of biodiversity. Space limita-
tions make it impossible to survey all of them, and when a more detailed
examination must be limited to a single item, then I have no doubt that what the
ancient Chinese called “the first of the five elements” – China’s water – is the
most appropriate choice. Problems with water are far from being the only diffi-
culties complicating China’s quest for modernization. As the consequences of
environmental change were added to a longer, well-established list of other
factors that might contribute to the political destabilization of a country, or even
help trigger violent conflicts, China’s worsening ecosystemic degradation and
spreading environmental pollution came to be seen as prime candidates for such
unwelcome roles. I will assess the possibilities of such developments in the third
section of this chapter, “China’s environment and security”.
The qualitative appraisal of environmental degradation that has been
presented in many publications over the past two decades is not enough to assess
the impact of these changes. Difficult as it may be, there is a need to establish
the cost of China’s environmental change. I will present some fairly detailed esti-
mates of its magnitude and impacts, based on a variety of Chinese evidence
142 Environment

published during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Finally, the
chapter closes with a recounting and an appraisal of what has been perhaps the
most contentious Chinese approach to developing its economy: the pursuit of
extraordinarily sized schemes, ranging from the new Great Green Wall of trees
to the world’s largest hydro dam. I will review the history and perils of these
choices in “Megaprojects and China’s environment”.

Attitudes and constraints: constancy and change

Human transformation of the Earth’s environment is obviously the most
remarkable, and perhaps the most disturbing, sign of the accelerating evolution
of our species. Natural ecosystems are replaced by human constructs, releases of
greenhouse gases are now changing even the long-term composition of the
atmosphere, and biodiversity is in decline everywhere. The consequences of
human actions reached a surprisingly large scale long before the advent of high
civilizations with their intensifying agricultures and expanding cities. For
example, Alroy’s (2001) ecologically realistic simulation of the end-Pleistocene
megafaunal extinction in North America demonstrates that even low population
growth rate and low hunting intensity would have made the anthropogenic
extinction of large herbivores, including woolly mammoths, inevitable, and his
model correctly predicts the terminal fate of thirty-two out of forty-one
megafaunal Ice Age species.
And as soon as we reach the historical period, that is the time of about 5,000
years ago, we cannot find any better examples of human impacts on the environ-
ment than those provided by China’s long quest to accommodate its growing
population. The manifestations of these impacts, some of them of remarkable
antiquity, range from sweeping deforestation to bold hydroengineering projects
(irrigation systems, navigable canals), and from painstaking terracing of sloping
land to many technical inventions and innovations (including the humble wheel-
barrow and ingenious percussion drills), whose deployment made it much easier
to harness resources and to transform natural environments into new landscapes
whose physical features were so obviously dominated by human design. At the
same time, these powerful forces of transformation and subjugation coexisted
with feelings of awe and admiration of nature, and with the advocacy of
nature’s supremacy.
Perhaps most notably, Laozi’s Dao de jing, the cornerstone of the Taoist belief,
advocates taking no action contrary to nature as the best way to have everything
properly regulated: weiwuwei, zewubuzhi. Or, to express the same sentiment in the
words of the book’s very next segment, in Raymond Blakney’s (1955: 117)
translation,
Doing spoils it, grabbing misses it;
So the Wise Man refrains from doing
And doesn’t spoil anything.
 Environment 143

But this view was never shared by more than a tiny, and reclusive, minority lost
in the sea of generations bent on refashioning everything natural around them.
Inevitably, these transforming patterns that marked the country’s long
history remained recognizable in its post-1949 developments, as many new
designs, and delusions, began to guide China’s treatment of its (by that time
considerably degraded) environment. I sketched these old and new attitudes
in the four paragraphs with which I closed the opening chapter of The Bad
Earth, and in half a dozen paragraphs with which I closed the book. Although
twenty years have passed since these lines were published, their sentiment and
their verdict stand. Perhaps the only, and not unimportant difference, is that
the Party’s heavy hand, albeit still very much in evidence, is now felt less
intrusively in a number of ways. Unfortunately, this change, so welcomed by
hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese as it eases their lives, has not been
necessarily good news for the environment: new destructive forces of blind
consumerism have filled the void left by the old destructive forces of the
retreating rigid ideology.
At the same time, it must be realized that China’s environment would present
extraordinary challenges even to a state organized on the most rational princi-
ples and pursuing the best-laid plans. Modern history does not lack for great
examples debunking the myth of a simplistic geographic determinism – but, at
the same time, it would be naive to dismiss many constraints imposed by specific
climate regimes, by a country’s endowment with arable and forested land, with
water and mineral, particularly energy, resources and, obviously, by the size and
growth rates of its population. That is why, before taking a closer look at some
specific challenges, I will outline these constraints in a “crowded stage” analogy.

Environmental attitudes: constancy and change

A reverence for nature runs unmistakably through the long span of Chinese
history (Smil 1984). The poet, always ready to pour full goblets of wine and
“drink three hundred cups in a round”, found the mountains his most faithful
companion; emperors, between wars and court intrigues, painted finches in
bamboo groves and ascended sacred mountains; Buddhist monks sought their
dhyana “midst fir and beech”; craftsmen located their buildings to “harmonize
with the local currents of the cosmic breath”; painters were put through the
rigors of mastering smooth, natural, tapering bamboo leaves and plum
branches; and who wouldn’t admire the symphony of plants, rocks, and water in
countless gardens?
Attitudes, poetry, paintings, habits, common sayings, and regulations
abound with images of nature and a view of man as a part of a greater order
of things. Old trees are prized for their antiquity and dignity: ancient pines,
frost-defying plum blossoms, elegant bamboo. Flowers are loved and admired:
magnolias, lotus, chrysanthemums, peonies. There are birds of exquisite
plumage – mountain pheasants, finches, ducks, magpies; animals ordinary –
horses and oxen – and extraordinary – dragons and unicorns. There is a
144 Environment

universe of peaks and clouds, snow and wind, waterfalls and ponds, reeds and
shores, hills and dense forests. The titles of old paintings envelop the mind in
the magnificence of nature and induce reverence: Light Snow on the Mountain
Pass; Brocaded Sea of Peach-Blossom Waves; Summer Retreat in the Eastern Grove; Ode on
the Red Cliff; Listening to the Sounds of Spring Under Bamboo; Peaks Emerging from
Spring Clouds.
To stop here, however, as many an uncritical admirer might, would be telling
only the more appealing part of the story. There has also been a clearly
discernible current of destruction and subjugation: the burning of forests just to
drive away dangerous animals; massive, total, and truly ruthless deforestation to
create new fields, to get fuel and charcoal, and to obtain timber for fabulous
palaces and ordinary houses, wood for cremation of the dead, and (to no small
effect) for making ink from the soot of burned pines (one of history’s many
ironies: glorious accounts of civilization underwritten by the destruction of its
natural foundations); the erection of sprawling rectilinear cities (fires would rage
for days to consume the vast areas of wooden buildings) eliminating any trace of
nature, save for some artificial gardens.
This traditional discrepancy between the environmental ideal and reality
could not cease on that October day in 1949 when Mao Zedong spoke from the
Tian’anmen to proclaim the founding of a new China. The environmental
record of this new China thus carries clear parallels with the past as well as,
inevitably, marks of the ruling ideology and advancing modernization. To
describe it unequivocally is impossible: what a mixture of some excellent inten-
tions and notable achievements with much casual neglect, astonishing
irresponsibility, and staggering and outright destruction! If a simplifying verdict
were still sought, I would summarize the record, without being alarmist, as
genuinely disquieting.
In general, the attitudes of people who have just emerged from long years of
privation to the threshold of life promising a bit more freedom and little more
prosperity are not conducive to conservation, savings, and the eschewing of
immediate consumption; just the opposite is likely to be true, putting further
accelerated pressure on the environment. Indeed, here is a perfect illustration of
a key ecological concept well known as the tragedy of the commons, or killing
the goose that lays the golden egg.
And as always, in a country where to pass a qualifying examination for the
imperial civil service was the dream of millions for millennia, there are
complex and uncoordinated bureaucracies always good at promulgating new
laws and regulations and holding grand conferences (disguised banqueting,
mostly) but much less adept at getting things done. Nor are the provincial
interests unimportant, or the considerations of the still heavily militarized
economy.
And finally, there is the pervasive state ideology, that political worship, that
unpredictable ever-twisting party line that one day makes a capitalist criminal
out of a man planting a handful of trees in his backyard while rewarding a
county secretary who orders the massive destruction of trees, lakes, garlic
 Environment 145

patches, and pond ducks – only to turn around the next day and instruct that
self-same secretary that he should gain the enthusiasm of the masses for back-
yard garlic growing, tree planting, and duck feeding; the party line that
encourages a “hundred flowers to bloom” so that the “poisonous weeds” of
intellectual independence, courage, and honesty can be more easily identified;
the party line that has turned everything into politics and left only the single
arbiter to determine merit.
Only a naive mind could not be overwhelmed by this state of affairs. The best
outlook is for some gradual localized improvements, and for the prevention of
further major degradation in key sectors and areas. That, I maintain, would be a
grand success. On the implications of the failure to do so I will not speculate:
that they are grim is all too clear and, unfortunately, this outcome is at least as
likely as the other.
To believe otherwise would be to perpetuate the fatuous naivety of Western
admirers of the Central Kingdom in Communist clothes, at a time when some
responsible Chinese are themselves all too acutely aware that many of the devel-
opmental policies of the past three decades have led to unprecedented
destruction and degradation of the country’s environment, and that this poses a
real threat to the nation’s physical well-being, and hence to its social stability.
And all of these informed Chinese who have exposed the country’s environ-
mental debacle are also aware of, but don’t write about, another critical issue –
the cloud of political uncertainty that hangs over the future.
In a recent paper, the Policy Research Office of the Ministry of Forestry
(1980: 31) concluded starkly but forthrightly: “If we do not take firm and deci-
sive action now…the dire consequences are unimaginable”. Such is the state of
the Chinese environment as viewed by knowledgeable Chinese, and it provokes
an unorthodox conclusion: it is not the large population per se, nor the relative
poverty of the nation, nor its notorious modern political instability, but rather its
staggering mistreatment of the environment that may well be the most funda-
mental check on China’s reach toward prosperity, a hindrance also the most
intractable and difficult to deal with.
The record of the past two decades would seem to indicate that my concerns
were misplaced, as nothing seems to be able to slow down the country’s remark-
able economic expansion. But this would be an unacceptably hasty judgment.
China has been undoubtedly successful in dealing with some of its daunting
environmental challenges and, as a result, many important indicators have
either shown encouraging improvements or at least no signs of further deterio-
ration. Perhaps the most welcome example is that, although many of the new
plantings are in thinly spaced, fast-growing species, the country’s total area
covered by trees (159Mha in 1999) is now about 30 per cent larger than it was
at the very beginning of Deng’s reforms a quarter-century ago (NBS 2001).
And the most obvious improvement benefiting the largest number of people has
been the decline in urban concentrations of fly ash and sulfur dioxide, as many
cities have been aggressively substituting clean-burning natural gas for ash- and
sulfur-laden coal.
146 Environment

At the same time, many indicators of environmental quality have been getting
worse, and a significant share of economic advances has been bought with
further impoverishment of China’s already strained resource base: water tables
on the North China Plain have been sinking ever faster, longer stretches of many
rivers have been converted to open waste conduits, the biodiversity of the
extraordinarily species-rich southern ecosystems is disappearing. China’s many
natural constraints do not make a better management of these challenges impos-
sible, but they surely make it much more difficult. Countries in less constraining
circumstances have the benefit of larger gaps between the immovable natural
supply and rising demand; in China the two aggregates are already uncomfort-
ably close in some instances, and will get inevitably closer in the future. Being
aware of these realities, which are surveyed briefly in the following subsection, is
not a reason for despair, but merely an essential antidote to the hubris of
omnipotent technical fixes.

China’s environment: a disquieting analogy

Analogies concentrate our thoughts, and thus trouble our minds. Imagine China
as a crowded stage, and Westerners as fascinated spectators. Some onlookers can
be seen running across the proscenium, and paying rather large sums for the
packaged experience. A few outsiders can be seen well inside the podium,
lingering a bit, asking questions, even leaving behind some brand-new props
before descending back to the auditorium where they interpret some details of a
largely incomprehensible script either to those spectators with a craving for
exotica or to some ambitious impresarios present in the audience who think that
they could provide a better direction to the whole confusing piece.
Even though some of these outsiders get to play bit parts or get invited to
temporarily direct some marginal scenes, none of them truly partakes in the
existential happenings on stage. Not only do these walk-on participants read
from a different script, but their real interests are either in the decor, make-up,
phrasing and the gestures of the actors, or in getting the local production
managers to buy as many new and expensive props as possible. They do not
really understand how hard life is for most of the actors, and most of them do
not want to discover the extent to which the boards and pillars hidden by newly
colorful facades are rotten. But what is it we all are watching? The longevity of
the stage, its strange adornments and its extraordinary crowding have always
cast their spells on the spectators – but to assume that the play can go on as an
endless series of repertory reruns is to delude ourselves.
A tragedy, then? The relentless progression toward a feared outcome would
seem to make it so. Shortly after 1949, when Westerners lost their access to the
stage for about two decades, and could observe the unfolding drama only from
a distance, it packed in about 550 million people. That number had doubled by
1989, and demographic imperatives make it virtually certain that, after passing
the 1.3 billion mark in 2003, at least another 200 million will be added before
the population peaks during the fourth decade of the twenty-first century
 Environment 147

(UNO 2002) (see Figure 4.1). Is not the stage getting ever closer to collapsing?
Even from afar, many of its boards look shaky. But this is not a classical tragedy.
There will be no sudden resolution with a plaintive chorus in the background,
no cataclysmic collapse. The simple reality is that some parts of that large stage
have caved in already: farming has had to be abandoned on deeply eroded
slopelands, on cropland claimed by deserts, and in areas where the water table
has sunk below the acceptable cost of pumping. People have had to move else-
where, adding to the crowding. Other boards are so worn-out that treading on
them is exceedingly risky – but where else can the actors go? That question
becomes even more acute as millions have been already displaced, and more
will follow, by the construction of reservoirs, canals and transportation links.
Only a privileged or lucky few can leave the stage, most must stay and move
around as best as they can.
But are not parts of the stage much brighter than a generation ago, do not
many actors look more prosperous? True, but this is only a superficial decor, and
beneath its dazzle the boards are rotting faster than ever, and too many shabby
figures can be seen in the background. And the stage gets shakier not only
because the crowding increases, but precisely because the actors’ lots are getting
better. But there will be no classical crisis in this peculiar tragedy, no turning
point of the drama – and hence no liberating catharsis. Greater crowding,
spreading decay and intensifying pollution will keep on combining into more
prominent scenes of degradation, hardship and pain. This process has been
unfolding for a long time: the numbers of the suffering actors are already
counted in many millions, and they are bound to increase. Can the spectators
remain unaffected?

Figure 4.1 Past and future growth of China’s population, 1950–2050

Source: Past totals from various issues of China Statistical Yearbook; the three variants of long-range
forecast from UNO (2002).
148 Environment

La longue durée
Some forms of environmental degradation are noticeable almost instantly, but
the consequences of other changes can be fully appreciated only when using
very long-term perspectives. As so many events in human history, they are
perfect examples of what Fernand Braudel (1972) classed in his la longue durée
category: complex processes unfolding gradually over very long periods of time,
changing reality almost imperceptibly in their early stages and only later at a
worrisome pace, and finally resulting in a profoundly different world. The appro-
priate model is a protracted, multifocal, multicausal decline, rather than acute
and generalized collapse brought about by a single decisive factor: China’s envi-
ronmental realities fit this model in every respect.
Impressive improvements of human existence have been paid for by world-
wide environmental degradation. The concurrent increase of population and
individual well-being does not represent, as Julian Simon (1996) would have us to
believe, the triumph of human intellect and organization over the raw forces of
nature. The very phrasing betrays a profound ignorance of the biophysical
fundamentals of civilizational progress. In order to be more than an ephemeral
phenomenon, the process cannot be a contest of forces. Human ingenuity can
succeed over a very long run only when it preserves irreplaceable environmental
services – from the stratospheric ozone layer shielding the Earth from UV radia-
tion, to the soil bacteria driving the nitrogen cycle – which make life possible.
The biosphere’s finite resources, and even more so its life-sustaining services,
cannot be taxed indefinitely beyond their self-renewing limits (Smil 2002b).
This means that long-term civilizational development is incompatible with
what modern economists love to call a “healthy growth”, a 3, 4 or 5 per cent
annual addition to the gross economic product. To act on this understanding in a
civilization whose modus operandi, if not its very raison d’être, is the fastest possible
economic growth, will require an unprecedented transformation of human
affairs. Western nations, owing to their combination of very slow population
growth, high affluence and technical prowess, have, if they choose to use it, an
excellent chance to effect this grand transition during the next two generations.
The margins for maneuver are wide: conservation and innovation have the
potential of cutting our resource needs by half without lowering our quality of
life; adopting more modest – but still fairly affluent – lifestyles could cut resource
use even further. In contrast, China’s expanding population and its huge devel-
opmental needs will put enormous additional claims on all kinds of natural
resources. Even when undertaken with unprecedented care, such an expansion
will further degrade the country’s environment.

Contrasting realities
Only four key parameters need to be quantified in order to appreciate the
country’s precarious position and to understand the reasons for its prospective
decline: the population, and its food, water and energy consumption. During the
first quarter of the twenty-first century, the affluent Western nations will add
 Environment 149

only about 25 million people to their current total of less than 700 million.
China will add – using the medium variant of the latest UN forecast (UNO
2002) – nearly 200 million to its 2000 total of about 1,275 million. Western
nations, with some 12 per cent of the global population in the year 2000, had
nearly a quarter of the world’s farmland, or an average of about 0.5ha/person.
But this is really an irrelevant figure, because about three quarters of our staple
grain harvests are fed to animals in order to provide diets high in animal food-
stuffs. The West could easily give up the cultivation of a large share of its
farmland merely by moderating its high intakes of meat and dairy products.
In contrast, China, with 21 per cent of the world’s population in the year
2000, had only nine per cent of the world’s farmland, or just a little over
0.1ha/capita, an equivalent of one third of the Mexican rate and one seventh of
the US rate. The only two poor populous countries with less farmland per capita
are Egypt and Bangladesh: Egypt, where two out of three loaves of bread are
baked from imported US flour; Bangladesh, whose continuing existence as a
nation is so patently questionable. Moreover, nearly 300 million Chinese live in
provinces where the per capita availability of arable land is already lower than in
Bangladesh. And although China’s average food supply is now, as demonstrated
in some detail in the previous chapter, above the typical need, regional disparities
perpetuate the relatively large-scale extent of malnutrition. In order to erase the
deficits for at least 80 million people who still do not have enough food to meet
FAO’s primary nutritional objective of a healthy and vigorous life, and to
produce adequate food for its additional 200 million people, China will have to
expand its food output by at least 20 per cent during the next two generations.
China’s annually renewable water resources represent less than 7 per cent of
the global total, and, moreover, they are disproportionately concentrated in the
South, and are scarce north of the Changjiang, the area containing about two
fifths of China’s population and producing a commensurate share of the grain
harvest. Even if it were possible to use every drop of the northern stream runoff,
per capita water supply would be less than a quarter of America’s actual per
capita water consumption. Actual per capita northern supply for all uses – agri-
culture, industry, services and households – amounts to little more than the
Americans use just to flush their toilets and wash their clothes, dishes and cars.
The combination of prolonged drought spells and heavy water demand has
repeatedly dried out the Huanghe, northern China’s principal river, before it
reached the sea. This happened for the first time in recorded history in 1972, and
starting in 1985 the river dried up in some sections every year until 2000 (People’s
Daily 2000a). In 1997 the river did not reach Bohai Bay for a record 226 days, and
the dry bed extended for more than 700km from the river’s mouth (Liu 1998). In
2000 and 2001 the river kept flowing even during the dry season (November to
late June), in spite of the fact that a severe drought reduced the volume to just
16.4Gm3 along the river’s middle course, the second lowest rate on record (People’s
Daily 2001). Yet the necessity of feeding an additional (approximate) 8 million
people every year, to satisfy the rising urban demand and to secure water for
150 Environment

growing industries, means that the North’s already much overused resources will
be under even more pressure during the next two decades.
Western nations also consume over 40 per cent of the world’s fuels and primary
electricity. This is more than three times their share of the global population,
giving them an annual average of more than four tonnes of crude oil per capita.
Again, we could give up a large share of this so often wasteful use – SUVs, extrav-
agantly sized overheated and overcooled houses, long-distance flights to gambling
casinos, and the amassing of material possessions far beyond anybody’s conceiv-
able need – without compromising the real quality of life (i.e. good health care,
longevity, access to education, a clean environment). Obviously, our reduced
energy use would dramatically lower the pressure on the global environment.
In contrast, in the year 2000 China’s consumption of primary commercial
energy amounted to about 9 per cent of the global total, again much less than
the country’s population share. And less than 15 per cent of the low per capita
rate, equivalent to about half a tonne of crude oil a year, is used by households,
compared to about 40 per cent in the West. I have shown in great detail that a
purposeful society can guarantee the combination of decent physical well-being,
good nutrition and fair education opportunities only when per capita energy
consumption reaches about one tonne of oil equivalent a year (Smil 2003). In
order to join the ranks of developed nations, China’s per capita energy
consumption would have to be at least twice the current mean. But real national
modernization is impossible without near-universal literacy and greater access to
higher education. Nations with literacy in excess of 90 per cent and with at least
20 per cent of young people enrolled at post-secondary institutions use at least
1.5t of oil equivalent per capita, three times China’s current mean.

Looking ahead
China’s development during the next two generations will thus require massive
increases of food and energy output merely to maintain the existing per capita
rates, and unprecedented increments if the country is to approach incipient
affluence. Consequently, even if the requisite inputs of resources – be it fertilizer
and irrigation water or timber and coal – were used with greatly improved effi-
ciencies, there would be a net increase in their total extraction and hence in
environmental degradation and in the generation of pollutants. Feeding nearly
200 million additional people by the year 2025 will require an incremental food
supply roughly equivalent to the total current food consumption of Brazil – yet
the food production will have to come from a smaller area of farmland. The
combination of a larger population and land claims resulting from environ-
mental degradation (erosion, desertification, salinization), and urban, industrial
and transportation construction, may reduce the per capita availability of farm-
land to just 0.08ha/person by the year 2025.
The only way to produce substantially higher harvests from a declining area of
deteriorating land, is further intensification of China’s already highly intensive
crop farming. Yet the country is already relatively more dependent on fossil fuels
 Environment 151

to grow its food than the USA. This is because it uses on the average four times as
much nitrogenous fertilizer per hectare (whose synthesis needs natural gas, coal
and electricity), and irrigates a third of its fields (three fifths with pumps). But the
crop response to high applications of nitrogen has been declining, while their
leaching contaminates waters, and more frequent multicropping and sharply
lower recycling of organic wastes contribute to a steady decline of soil quality. As
already explained in Chapter 2, a very large share of crop residues is burned by
fuel-short rural households rather than being composted and returned to fields.
Urban wastes, increasingly polluted with chemicals and heavy metals, are unfit for
recycling. And unsustainable rates of erosion (in excess of 15t/ha annually)
prevail over at least a third of China’s fields.
These natural constraints can be partially negated by bioengineering
advances. Genetically modified crops may accelerate the growth of average
yields and hence be able to support higher population densities. But more
productive crop varieties could not eliminate further farmland losses, halt the
erosion and degradation of arable soils, or actually reduce the rates of fossil-fuel-
dependent inputs. Indeed, all of these problems have been exacerbated as
China’s successful adoption of high-yielding rices and wheats has boosted the
country’s food supply since the 1970s. And only the eventual development and
diffusion of nitrogen-fixing grain crops could eliminate further increases in
China’s dependence on synthetic nitrogen. Such a breakthrough is no nearer to
field applications today than it was a generation ago.
Given the absence of readily deployable alternatives, and the need for greatly
increased energy use, the dominance of coal in China’s energy consumption will
continue. Although the fuel’s share will gradually decline, as will particulate
emissions from large sources equipped with better controls, numerous small
sources (now burning more than half of all China’s coal) will remain largely
uncontrolled, as will nearly all sulfur dioxide emissions, a principal cause of
dismal air quality and high respiratory morbidity in China’s cities. Accelerated
development of hydrogeneration would reduce the environmental effects of coal
combustion – but it would magnify other problems which have accompanied the
development of China’s water power, above all extensive flooding of high-
yielding farmland, mass population resettlements, and rapid reservoir silting
caused by deforestation and slopeland cultivation.
To believe that alternative energy sources will cover a large share of China’s
fuel and electricity needs within the next 10–20 years is to ignore the gradual
and costly realities of energy transitions (Smil 2003). Recall that after two
decades of vigorous and expensive technical innovation the West has increased
the efficiency of its energy converters – but its reliance on fossil fuels has
remained remarkably stable. A major international complication will be intro-
duced by China’s rising share of carbon dioxide generation. The late 1990s
reduction of these emissions was an exceptional departure from a long-term
trend of rising contributions. Even if China does not surpass the US level during
the coming generation, it will be a close second, and as such it will have a crit-
ical, but very likely also a contentious, role in any effort to stabilize and reduce
152 Environment

the global generation of greenhouse gases. Moreover, emissions of methane

from paddy fields and nitrous oxide from intensified fertilization will also rise.
The combination of demographic imperatives and rapid economic growth
means that China’s already much degraded environment will suffer even more
during the next generation. The best outlook for the next generation is that the
rate of this environmental decay can be slowed down. Such an achievement
would be an essential precondition for first stabilizing, and eventually reversing,
the degradative trends, so that China’s great stage survives in a tolerable state.
And yet, with all of these worrisome trends in mind, there is no preordained
progression here, no automatic reason for advocating what most people think of
as the classic Malthusian outcome.
That is because human futures, while not infinitely alterable, are amazingly
malleable. Malthus (1803: 543–544) himself reflected on this reality in the
second, and so inexplicably neglected and unquoted, edition of his famous book
when he concluded that

On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitiga-
tion of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so
bright as we could wish, yet they are far from being entirely disheartening,
and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in
human society.…And although we cannot expect that the virtue and happi-
ness of mankind will keep pace with the brilliant career of physical
discovery; yet, if we are not wanting to ourselves, we may confidently
indulge the hope that, to no unimportant extent, they will be influenced by
its progress and will partake in its success.

The first of the five elements: China’s water

There are, naturally, other specific segments of China’s changing environment
deserving of closer examination – but water makes the most compelling choice, both
because of its deep historical links to the rise of Chinese civilization, and because of
its critical role in the far-from-accomplished modernization of the country’s society.
The combination of irreplaceable demand for at least the minimum volume of this
resource, of its widespread, and in some regions worsening, shortages, and its indis-
pensability for securing more affluent lives for the still growing as well as rapidly
urbanizing population, make water management both the most urgent and the most
enduring environmental challenge for China’s leadership.
Fortunately, concerns about the strained and diminishing northern supply
have brighter counterweights, not just in the southern water surplus but in large
water conservation opportunities everywhere: China is not only the world’s most
water-stressed largest economy, it is also the most water-wasting one. Fortunately,
there are clear signs of this understanding: easing the current crisis will require
not only new supplies, namely inevitable long-distance water transfers, but also
the maximum practicable reduction of existing waste. An encouraging shift has
already taken place during the 1990s: in 1990 the total volume of waste water
 Environment 153

discharged by China’s industries was nearly 25Gm3; by 1999 this rate was
reduced to about 20Gm2 (NBS 2001). Given the huge intervening increase in
China’s industrial output, this means that average water intensity (m3/yuan of
production) fell by at least 60 per cent. But first let us take a more systematic look
at China’s water resources and uses (Smil 1984, 1993).

Water: resources, uses, waste

Art mirrors, succinctly and admirably, the human perception of the environ-
ment. When European painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries looked at a landscape, various elements would prevail: light from the
high clouds in Jacob van Ruisdael, majestic trees in John Constable, shimmering
colors in Claude Monet. In contrast, Chinese painters have always seen their
landscapes as shan shui – mountain-water – the term containing all the tension
and harmony of yang and yin, evoking whole sets of analogies, lending to land-
scape painting “a worshipful attitude, making it a ritual act of reverence in
praise of the harmony of Heaven and Earth” (Sze 1959). Water, the first of the
ancient five elements, the Black Tortoise of the Five Regions of the Heavens, has
thus always had a pivotal place in the Chinese culture – and in everyday Chinese
life (Smil 1979d). One does not have to agree with Karl Wittfogel’s (1957) histor-
ical thesis about the emergence and institutionalization of hydraulic despotism in
China, to appreciate the close relationship between water and the country’s civi-
lization, a link both beneficial and destructive, and a link very much enduring.
Vagaries of precipitation, drought and flood still determine the size of
harvests; the arid north still has to endure month after rainless month, while
typhoons may be smashing southern dikes. And new dimensions have been
added with rapidly progressing industrializaton and urbanization and with
expanded irrigation and chemicalization of agriculture: much higher uses of
water in general, frequently straining the available resources and leading to
shortages of even drinking water; drastically increased extraction of ground
waters followed by sinking water tables and surface subsidence; and widespread
water pollution of all major rivers, lakes and coastlines. All of these problems are
often related to those critical Chinese environmental constraints – the relatively
small volume and irregular distribution of the country’s water flows.

Yin–yang of waters

When drinking water think of the spring.

Chinese proverb

The real springs for most of China’s waters are thousands of kilometers away from
the country’s shores, in the Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines and in the equato-
rial Indian Ocean, where the two mighty cyclonic flows drenching China with
154 Environment

seasonal monsoon rains originate every spring (Smil 1993). The dominance of these
flows in the precipitation regime of the country imparts the inescapable yin–yang
quality to China’s water supply. The simile extends not only to the contrast between
negatives and positives – destructive floods and droughts have molded the course of
Chinese civilization as much as the extensive irrigation and reliance on water trans-
port – but also to the abrupt shifts between the two entities. The sharply divided
curvilinear shapes symbolizing egg yolk and white in the yin–yang diagram have
recurrent parallels in sudden transitions between lack and surfeit of water.
The spatial distribution of China’s precipitation also shows a relatively abrupt
decline of annual and seasonal totals along the southeast/northwest gradient.
The 500mm isohyet – running from central Heilongjiang in the Northeast to the
Sino-Bhutanese border in the Southwest, and roughly coinciding with the direc-
tion of several major mountain chains – may be seen as a convenient
approximate divide between the dry northern and western interior and the
wetter coastal East and inland South (Figure 4.2). Strong seasonality of precipi-
tation, high probability of prolonged droughts, perils of recurrent fluctuations

Figure 4.2 The pattern of China’s average annual precipitation displays a rather regular
southeast/northwest gradient reflecting the dominance of monsoon rains. A
more detailed map would show many more singularities of increased or
reduced precipitation caused by South China’s mountainous terrain
Source: Based on Domrös and Peng (1988: 140).
 Environment 155

between droughts and floods, and large spatial disparities in the distribution of
annual and seasonal moisture, are the keys to appreciating China’s water supply:
looking at long-term averages and nationwide totals is highly misleading.
Because all of the densely inhabited area of China is within the domain of
the East Asian monsoon, which brings moisture between May and October, it
has distinct summer precipitation maxima, strong and early (May and June) in
the South, strong and later (July and August) on the North China Plain, and
somewhat weaker at the same time in the North. Summer rains bring at least
70 per cent of annual moisture in regions north of Beijing, and 60 per cent on
the North China Plain (Figure 4.3). The two wettest months contribute 50–60
per cent of annual moisture, compared to just 25 per cent in Guangzhou.
Frequently, much of this rain comes in spectacular downpours. All of China’s
recorded short-term precipitation maxima come from the North, including the
one-hour record of 267mm from Shanxi, and the incredible one-week rain of
2,051mm, amounting to more than three times the mean annual precipitation in
the area, between 2 and 8 August 1963 in Hebei (Domrös and Peng 1988).

Figure 4.3 The distribution of the annual share of summer (June to August) rains shows
their dominance throughout northern China
Source: Based on Domrös and Peng (1988: 169).
156 Environment

Throughout history, China’s precipitation records also reveal relatively long

and pronounced periods of either abundant or scarce precipitation. Thirty-year
running means for Beijing for the years 1724–1980 show annual maxima around
750mm and minima down to about 450mm, a 40 per cent variability.
Calculations of dryness/wetness indices for Eastern China between 1470 and
1977 show a long dry spell up to 1691, followed by a wet period until 1890, and
a new predominantly dry regime during the twentieth century (Zhang 1988),
while a similar study for the North indicates that the region has been relatively
dry since 1680 (Zhang and Lin 1985).
Of the 6Tt of precipitation falling on China during an average year (the mean
precipitation is 630mm) about 45 per cent, or 2.7Tt, ends up as stream runoff.
About 40 per cent of this flow, or 1.1Tt, is potentially usable, and the actual
annual withdrawals for agricultural, industrial and household uses during the late
1980s amounted to just over 500Gt, or less than half of the available potential
(Smil 1984). Recent actual per capita use has thus been less than 500t/year, a
withdrawal equal to less than a quarter of the US value, about 20 per cent below
the Indian level, but roughly equal to some European (e.g. Swedish and Polish)
rates (WRI 1988).
But China’s rate is boosted by the relative southern abundance: the northern
values are only a fraction of the national mean. All of China north of the
Changjiang, occupying 60 per cent of the country’s area, has only 20 per cent of
its water resources. A more sensible comparison is to leave out the vast and arid
Xinjiang and Qinghai and limit the contrast just to the densely inhabited North:
while the region, covering about one third of China’s territory, has about two
fifths of China’s population, grows the same share of staple grains and accounts
for nearly 45 per cent of all industrial output, it receives only about one quarter
of the country’s total precipitation, and its high summer evapotranspiration
means that it has access to less than one tenth of stream runoff.
In the basin of the Huanghe, the region’s principal river, less than 1,500m3 of
water runoff is available for each hectare of cultivated land, and no more than
about 600m3/person; comparable rates in the Changjiang basin are, respectively,
about 6,000m3/ha and 2,800m3/person. The Huanghe had its flows drastically
reduced during the dry 1980s. In 1981 the river’s flow into the Bohai was 48.5Gt,
almost exactly its long-term average; by 1986 the runoff dropped to 26.1Gt, and
in 1987 it was just below 20Gt, only two fifths of the mean (ZXS 1988a). The
river’s normally very low early summer flow had repeatedly ceased altogether
downstream from Jinan for as long as thirty-seven days, causing reduction of crop
yields, disruption of industrial production and enormous difficulties for oil extrac-
tion at Shengli, China’s second-largest oilfield, near the river’s estuary.
This necessitates a high degree of reliance on underground water reserves, but
here, too, the northern provinces are disadvantaged. Aggregate underground
water resources are now put at 870Gt, of which about 70 per cent is south of the
Changjiang. Perhaps as much as 230Gt (an equivalent of less than 9 per cent of
stream runoff) can be used annually, but the recent withdrawals are close to 60Gt,
with the North accounting for three quarters of the total. As in any semi-arid and
 Environment 157

arid setting, most of North China’s water is used in agriculture, but the growing
difficulties with urban supplies became a more acute concern during the 1980s.
The situation was particularly tight in the capital Beijing, whose minimum annual
industrial and household needs reached 800Mt by the late 1970s, and then kept
on increasing by about 7 per cent a year during the 1980s. This would bring the
1990 need to about 1.6Gt, but the city’s eight waterworks supplied by large reser-
voirs could deliver no more than 700Mt (Dong 1990).
Urban consumption is far surpassed by the municipality’s vegetable and grain
fields, which use about 3Gt, so Beijing and its environs need about 4.6Gt a year.
But the recurrent droughts of the 1980s cut the supply capability of the city’s
two large reservoirs – Miyun and Guanting, which were also serving Tianjin – to
as little as 500Mt, or to less than one tenth of their design capacity of over 6Gt.
In August 1981 the State Council decided to stop supplying Tianjin (which
needs at least 600Mt a year) with water from these two reservoirs, an order
necessitating a huge long-distance diversion of water from the Huanghe. Yet this
sacrifice made little difference to the capital, whose surface water supply of
between 4.22 and 4.49Gt (of which about 3Gt is practically recoverable) during
normal precipitation years fell to just 2.5–3.2Gt during the years of prolonged
droughts, causing excessive withdrawals from Miyun and Guanting, the
complete disappearance of scores of smaller storages, and the intensifying deple-
tion of underground reserves.
Chinese estimates put the maximum annual supply of Beijing’s ground water
at 2.5Gt. In the 1950s the water table was in places just five meters below the
surface, but today the city’s more than 40,000 wells draw water from depths of
around 50m. During the 1980s the annual drop during the driest years surpassed
two meters, and the surface subsidence extended over more than 1,000km2.
During the early 1990s, annual water shortages during dry years will fluctuate
between 600 and 900Mt, and the deficit is forecast to be at least 1.3Gt by the
year 2000 (ZXS 1988b). Except for the new Zhangfang reservoir on the Juma
He (on the municipality’s southwestern border with Hebei) which will supply up
to 800Mt a year, there are no nearby exploitable sources of water. Not surpris-
ingly, Beijing’s worsening water shortages have become a matter of anxious
scientific and public debate, which has even included a questioning of the city’s
future viability as capital of China (Xinhua 1988).
Beijing and Tianjin are no exceptions: a look at China’s northern urban
water supplies reveals a repetitive pattern of progressing inadequacy of local or
nearby rivers or reservoirs to satisfy the rising demand (aggravated by recurrent
droughts), overuse of underground reserves (resulting in sinking water tables,
higher pumping costs and extensive surface subsidence), and repeated recourse
to long-distance water transfers (often involving the construction of conduits
longer than 100km). In 1985, 188 Chinese cities were short of more than 10Mt
of water a day, and in forty of these – including Beijing, Tianjin, Taiyuan and
Xi’an – these shortages were serious enough to limit economic development. By
1988, frequent news reports claimed that more than half of China’s 200 large
cities had difficulties with water supply, that the shortages were serious in about
158 Environment

fifty of them, and that the average daily deficit had risen to about 12Mt. By 1990
this deficit reached 15Mt, and some of the estimates for the year 2000 went as
high as 88Mt (Wang 1985).
Urban water shortages tend to attract a disproportionate share of attention,
but, as in any other populous Asian country, China’s water use is heavily domi-
nated by irrigation requirements, creating a number of extensive environmental
impacts. Among the populous (more than 50 million) countries, only Egypt
(where all farmed land is watered), and Pakistan and Japan (each with about 75
per cent watered land), surpass China in their relative dependence on irrigation
(Nickum 1990). But this high dependence – according to the official statistics
about 46 per cent of all arable land in the late 1980s – is of recent origin. In
1950 the share of China’s irrigated farmland was no more than 16 per cent
(16Mha); by 1965 this share doubled, mainly thanks to extension of surface irri-
gation in the rice-growing parts of the country during the 1950s. The second
period of expansion came during the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a massive
drilling of tubewells on the North China Plain: the total figure peaked at
45.5Mha in 1976 (Figure 4.4). (After a period of decline and stagnation, the irri-
gated area continued to increase steadily during the 1990s, surpassing 53Mha by
the century’s end.)
The subsequent decline, amounting to about 3 per cent of the peak area by
1988, has been interpreted as a worrisome sign of weakening crop production

Figure 4.4 The expansion of China’s irrigated land, 1950–1990

Source: Plotted from data in China Statistical Yearbook.
 Environment 159

capacity caused by declining state investment and by baogan-induced neglect

of irrigation facilities. But Nickum (1990) argues persuasively that the aggre-
gate figures obscure more than they reveal about China’s complex and diverse
state of irrigation. The basis of China’s accounting, the effectively irrigated
area, is defined as level land with water resources and irrigation facilities
capable of providing an adequate volume of water for crops under normal
conditions. During a rainy year, such a plot of land may need no irrigation,
while during a prolonged drought it may receive far from adequate moisture.
Nor does the aggregate figure tell us about the number of yearly irrigations
and their effectiveness.
What matters is the sustainability of irrigation, and its economic effectiveness.
Current Chinese practices do not reflect the scarcity value of irrigation water;
this leads, on the one hand, to the continuation of unsustainable and wasteful
irrigation, which would be greatly curtailed with the introduction of realistic
water fees; and on the other hand, to the absence of irrigation in growing crops
that bring unrealistically low returns. Nowhere are these problems more
apparent than on the North China Plain. This 300,000km2 in the watersheds of
the lower Huanghe, Huaihe and Haihe is a rather recent newcomer to extensive
irrigation, but one whose crop yields are now critically dependent on it (O’Mara
1988). The region’s almost nonexistent slope (1:10,000), the rivers’ unreliable
summer flow, and the enormous sediment load carried by the Huanghe and
deposited in shallow canals, militated against any expansion of surface gravity
irrigation: in 1949 less than 10 per cent of farmland in Hebei, Henan and
Shandong was irrigated.
The fundamental change started only in the 1960s with the introduction of
the first shallow tubewells. Their drilling peaked between 1971 and 1974,
spurred by the increasing availability of fuel from the Daqing oilfield. By the late
1980s the plain had more than 2 million tubewells irrigating over 11Mha of
farmland, with slightly more than three quarters relying only on the under-
ground water and the rest irrigated in conjunction with surface water. In the
early 1980s the total pumping volume fluctuated between 25 and 35Gm3 a year,
and about 10Gm3 of the Huanghe was being diverted annually for irrigation in
Henan and Shandong. River water irrigated about 17Mha, groundwater about
8Mha. Pumping helped keep down the formerly rather high water table, limiting
the spread of salinization and reducing its former extent in Hebei and Shandong
by about one quarter between 1960 and 1980.
But it also caused considerable local overexploitation of aquifers during
prolonged droughts. Hebei province has been most affected by overpumping, with
thirty-one separate depression cones formed over an area of some 1,200km2, or
roughly a fifth of the province’s alluvium (Hebei Provincial Service 1986). The
scarcity of irrigation water on the plain is best illustrated by the average annual
distribution of water per hectare: in 1985 the national mean was about
9,400m3/ha; the most intensively cropped southern areas received more than
30,000m3/ha – but Shandong’s and Henan’s irrigated land averaged less than
160 Environment

4,300m3/ha (Nickum 1990). However, the growing water claims of the plain’s large
cities and industrial areas will tend to lower even these modest irrigation rates.
Surface irrigation on the North China Plain has another troublesome envi-
ronmental effect. Diversion of the Huanghe’s water, amounting to more than a
quarter of the total flow during dry years, reduces the silt transport to the Bohai:
up to a quarter of the high sediment load, that is about 400Mt, is now deposited
each year on the river’s bed in Henan and Shandong. Surface irrigation on the
plain thus aggravates the principal long-term threat for its habitation – the inex-
orable elevation of the riverbed above the surrounding countryside.
There is an important qualitative dimension to China’s irrigation prospects:
irrigation waters in all of China’s intensively cultivated periurban areas, as well
as in regions with large numbers of rural and town manufactures, have been
increasingly contaminated by industrial waste, in addition to carrying higher
concentrations of leached fertilizers and insecticides. The official nationwide
total for 1990 waste water discharges was 36.7Gt – the equivalent of the
Huanghe’s total flow in a moderately dry year – of which less than 20 per cent
were treated. Late-1980s estimates of the annual economic loss attributable to
water pollution were at least 30 billion yuan.
Compared to the huge volumes of water used in irrigation, household water
supplies for the rural population are almost negligible, but the extension of an
adequate and safe water supply to most of China’s population remains a distant
goal. Running water is now available to just over 80 per cent of all urban residents
in 300 large cities, and in less than a third of small cities and towns. By the end of
1990 about a quarter of the rural population had access to tap water, although
only a fraction of this population had the water actually piped into their homes
(Xinhua 1989). Even during years of normal precipitation, at least 50 million
people in China’s rural areas have to live with the extreme scarcity of even
drinking water, necessitating long trips to the nearest water source and minuscule
per capita availabilities. The droughts of the 1980s worsened this situation: even in
the capital, about 90,000 people had difficulty in getting water in 1986.
Chinese planners have been favoring increasingly more voluminous water trans-
fers as the most expedient solution to urban and regional supply shortages: much
capital and labor was invested in these schemes during the 1980s. The first major
long-distance diversions expressly undertaken to ease critical urban water shortages
were the temporary transfers of the Huanghe’s water to Tianjin in 1972, 1973 and
1975, when up to 50m3/s was diverted from the river via Henan’s Shengli Canal,
Weihe and the Grand Canal, for a total length of 850km. In the winter of
1981–1982 this diversion was repeated, with the addition of two more links
between the Huanghe and the Grand Canal, necessitating extensive emergency
dredging of these conduits and the relocation of some villages (Zhang 1982).
Of the total diversion of 701Mm3 Tianjin actually received 451Mm3. The
need for these costly emergency projects ended only with the construction of a
permanent 233km-long diversion from Panjiakou reservoir on the Luanhe in
Hebei. Luanhe waters were also diverted to Tangshan (a large mining city in
Hebei destroyed by the 1976 earthquake) and to Qinhuangdao (the country’s
 Environment 161

largest coal port on the Bohai in northern Hebei). Other notable diversions
include water for Dalian (China’s third largest port in Liaoning at the tip of
Liaodong peninsula) from the Biliuhe, for Qingdao (Shandong’s largest port city
on the Yellow Sea) from the Huanghe, and for Xi’an (China’s ancient capital in
Shaanxi) from the Heihe. But all of these diversions will be greatly surpassed, in
length as well as in diverted volume, by the transfer of the Changjiang’s water
through the Grand Canal to northern Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and Tianjin.
During most years, water shortages and drought will be the country’s most
extensive environmental stress, affecting commonly one tenth of the densely
inhabited territory: since 1970, areas disastrously affected by drought fluctuated
between 1 and 18 million hectares a year (see Figure 3.2). But the obverse threat
is still far from negligible: after a period of relatively limited flooding during the
1970s, the 1980s saw between 4 and 9 million hectares affected by floods (Figure
3.2). During that decade the average area disastrously affected by floods rose to
about 5.5Mha/year, an almost 2.5-fold increase compared to the 1970s – and
the risks of catastrophic flooding have been growing almost everywhere.
About one tenth of China’s territory, inhabited by nearly two thirds of the
population and producing roughly 70 per cent of all agricultural and industrial
output, is below the flood level of major rivers. Throughout history, China’s
maximum floods have brought enormous water surges (Cheng 1989). The
Huanghe at Sanmenxia had a flow of 36,000m3/s in 1843, nearly twenty-five
times its average; and the Changjiang, the world’s third most voluminous river,
carried 110,000m3/s as it entered the plains of Hubei in 1870, about four times its
enormous normal flow. In spite of the absence of flooding for nearly half a
century, potentially the most dangerous situation is along the lower course of the
Huanghe in Henan and Shandong. Improvement of dikes, construction of the two
large flood-retarding basins in Henan and Shandong (storing about 5Gm3 of
water), and progressively lower runoffs have appeared to lower the risk of catas-
trophic natural flooding. But there has been no extensive dredging along the river’s
lower course, between Zhengzhou in Henan and the estuary, where it remains
confined between about 1,400km of dikes which are at least 3–5m, and up to
11–15m, above the surrounding countryside, protecting roughly 250,000km2 of
the North China Plain.
The highest reported elevations are 20m above the surrounding plain near
Xinxiang in Henan, 13m near Kaifeng and 5m near Jinan; estimates of the
annual rise range between 3 and 10cm a year (Mei and Dregne 2001).
With higher erosion on the Loess Plateau, the river’s silt load has increased from
about 1.3Gt in the early 1950s to 1.6Gt in the early 1980s, the annual riverbed
build-up has amounted to about 400Mt, and the average riverbed rise has been
1m per decade. The latest Chinese estimates are that a breach south of Jinan (in
the most vulnerable area) would flood up to 33,000km2, affecting 18 million
people and cutting all north/south railways and highways (Xinhua 1987).
Counterintuitively, the recent period of northern drought has also contributed to a
higher risk of flood damage, as dry riverbeds in many northern cities and villages
were used for planting crops, dumping garbage, and even building houses.
162 Environment

Unlike the Huanghe basin, parts of the Changjiang valley experienced

several major floods during the 1980s. The principal reason for extensive
flooding has been the increasing silting. In the late 1970s it was estimated that
serious erosion affected about 20 per cent of the Changjiang basin (Wang and
Zhou 1981); a decade later the share was put at 560,000km2, or just over 30 per
cent (Chang 1987). Between 2.2 and 2.4Gt of silt is carried every year through
the river’s gorges, raising the riverbeds and lake levels in Hubei and Hunan. Four
fifths of all lakes in the famed area of thousand lakes in eastern Hubei disap-
peared owing to the combination of excessive silting and conversion to
farmland, reducing the natural flood-storage capacity of this key rice-growing
region. Dongtinghu, formerly China’s largest freshwater lake in northern
Hunan, has fallen to second place beyond Poyanghu: of the annual influx of
160Mm3 of silt, only a quarter is discharged, and the bottom of the lake is rising
by an average of 2.5cm a year (Chang 1987).
The lake’s water level during the rainy season is approaching the height of
the catastrophic flood of 1954, and exceeding the danger level in sixty-eight
different places. Elevation and strengthening of dikes cannot be an effective
permanent solution. Moreover, most dikes and spill-over basins along the
Changjiang are now able to withstand floods of only a 10–20-year frequency: a
repeat of the 1954 flood, assessed by Chinese water-management experts as one
of 40-year probability, could lead to the displacement of up to 7 million people,
and to unprecedented economic losses (Lampton 1986). And, as always in
China’s long history, the fear of southern floods continues to be accompanied by
concerns about northern water deficits (Smil 2000b).

North China’s water shortages

Once again, severe drought is covering a large part of China’s north-central
heartland, and once again the environmental catastrophists are predicting a
massive drop in industrial production, and harvest failures, with global repercus-
sions. Indeed, the overall annual economic loss to industry and agriculture
attributable to water shortages has been surpassing $2.4 billion per year. For two
thirds of China’s 600 largest cities, shortages are a recurrent problem. Is this the
beginning of an inevitable environmental crisis? Or is it a matter of natural
scarcity made much worse by economic mismanagement?
In absolute terms China is not short of water. It ranks sixth in the world in
total water resources. But the country’s large population reduces its per capita
water resources to just a quarter of the global mean. A highly uneven distribution
of precipitation makes China’s northern provinces, which lie beyond the zone of
vigorous monsoon rains, exceptionally water-poor. Although the region normally
receives just enough precipitation to get by, like the prairies of the United States
and Canada, dry years come frequently. In fact, large swathes of the region may
not see any rain or snow for many months or even for more than a year.
Below-average rainfalls for the period between 1978 and 1986 were followed by
a fairly good precipitation, but drought returned in 1997, and this year (2002) it is
 Environment 163

nearly as bad as at any time during the past generation. Beijing’s reservoirs now
contain less water than at any time since the early 1980s, when the city had some
3 million fewer people and only a small fraction of its current number of water-
gobbling skyscrapers, hotels and restaurants. In early June, Beijing introduced
“strict and obligatory” water quotas for industries, restaurants, hotels and univer-
sities, and residential and irrigation water was rationed on an experimental basis.
Reservoirs cannot fully compensate for such shortfalls, particularly at a time
when China’s rapid urbanization multiplies per capita water demand: moving from
village to city doubles or triples personal water consumption. Overuse of under-
ground water, accompanied by serious ground subsidence, is thus the norm in all
northern cities. Beijing’s water table, for example, has dropped by more than nine
meters since the early 1980s; as a result, city ground levels are sinking by 1–2cm
every year. Even higher subsidence rates are common in parts of the North China
Plain, where pumps draw water from increasingly deeper wells for crop irrigation.
Yet even by the mid-1980s many Beijing residents were billed a flat fee (per
household) for their water, paying less than 10 per cent of the actual cost of
delivered water. That was until April 1996, when the State Council approved
increased water prices in Beijing. However, better pricing alone cannot be the
solution for complex environmental problems, although in this case it is obvi-
ously an essential ingredient of any effective action. More realistic water pricing
would certainly prompt greater reuse of inevitably more expensive, treated waste
water, while reducing China’s appalling water pollution.
Furthermore, water for irrigation, which accounts for about 80 per cent of
northern China’s use and nearly 50 per cent even in the Beijing municipality, is
still largely given away. Prices for irrigation water are rarely more than one US
cent per ton, typically no more than 5–10 per cent of the delivered cost. But
cheap irrigation water provides no incentives for making its use more efficient. At
the March 1997 Forum Engelberg in Switzerland, Song Jian, chairman of
China’s State Science and Technology Commission, claimed China’s agricultural
water-use efficiency averaged a mere 10 per cent. The appropriate choice of
crops (as well as grain-fed animals) would also help alleviate water-use problems.
None of these proposed changes and adjustments will come easily or inexpen-
sively. Yet all of them are effective; they have been proven to work elsewhere in
similar conditions. They can therefore make the difference between recurrent
crises and adequate water supplies. It’s not fundamentally a matter of economic
and technical resources: China has enough of both, but to solve the north-
central heartland’s water crisis, there must be a determined commitment to
allocate them to the challenge.

Searching for solutions

Nihil novum sub sole: certainly not as far as China’s grand-scale patterns of water
supply are concerned. Parts of the country are repeatedly submerged by flooding
waters, while in other provinces peasants drill ever-deeper wells to reach receding
aquifers. As I write this, in August 2002, the rising waters of the Dongtinghu,
164 Environment

China’s second largest lake, are once again spilling onto surrounding rice fields and
into the villages and towns of the lakeside lowland that house more than 10 million
people. At the same time, many places on the North China Plain have recently
recorded the most rapid decline of water tables in their history. The Ministry of
Land and Resources reported that in the year 2000 the average level of Hebei’s
deep aquifer receded by 2.91m, and that a super-funnel of decreased water tables
has formed over some 40,000km2 by the coalescence of water funnels underneath
Beijing, Tianjin, northern Henan and western Shandong (Ma 2001).
Most of the new figures are merely more worrisome versions of the older
ones. Official statistics indicate that China’s water consumption rose from about
100Gm3 in 1949 to 557Gm3 in 1997, and forecasts see the need for 664Gm3 by
2030 and 750Gm3 by 2050, bringing the annual requirement uncomfortably
close to the total available volume of perhaps as little as 800Gm3 (and no more
than 950Gm3) (China Daily 2002). About 27Mha of farmland now experiences
drought each year, the annual deficit of irrigation water has reached 30Gm3,
while the water shortage in urban areas amounts to about 6Gm3. Looking well
ahead, Chinese experts voice concerns about the third and fourth decades of the
twenty-first century, when the highest forecast totals of China’s population (in
excess of 1.6 billion people) could bring down the nationwide average of per
capita availability of water to just marginally above 1,700m3, the volume that is
generally recognized as the mark for water shortages on a national scale.
But a closer look also shows a few encouraging signs. As high as the recently
claimed water shortage is, the aggregate of 36Gm3 in the year 2000 is considerably
smaller than the forecast made just a decade ago. Although the rate is still below the
delivered costs, Beijing saw two more water price rises in 1999, to 1.3 yuan/m3 for
domestic, and 1.6 yuan/m3 for industrial use – but as the true cost of water in north
Chinese cities averages 5 yuan/t, even with that rise the Beijingers get their water at
nearly 75 per cent below cost! The central government is definitely paying more
attention to the northern water shortages, with the Minister of Water Resources
promising to put the conservation and protection of water resources high on the
state’s investment agenda. The State Environment Protection Administration has
been working on large-scale projects to reduce river pollution.
But there is now a fairly broad consensus, although certainly no unanimity,
among China’s water experts that demand-side management alone – conserva-
tion measures (water-saving faucets, showers and toilets), waste water treatment,
higher prices and outright limits on water use – will not be sufficient to secure
enough water for the provinces north of the Huanghe.
The only viable, albeit still controversial, means of expanding the supply is the
long-distance transfer of water. The idea of South/North water transfer (nan shui bei
diao) goes back to the 1950s (Greer 1979; Biswas et al. 1983; Smil 1993; Liu 1998).
Possible routes for the transfer were identified and preliminarily surveyed in 1959,
and the project was revived in 1978 as a part of the ten-year plan of economic
modernization (Figure 4.5). A surprisingly strong public challenge based on envi-
ronmental considerations, a new force in China’s policy-making, and the old
problem of the enormous cost of such a project, led to a temporizing decision.
Figure 4.5 The two South/North water-transfer routes under construction. The eastern
route, about 1,130km long, follows the ancient Grand Canal, and it will
require pumping until it crosses the Huang He. The central route, 1,241km
(or 1,267km) long, will carry water by gravity from Danjiangkou reservoir, and
eventually from Sanxia
166 Environment

Instead of approving the full-scale project transferring 30Gm3 of water along the
eastern route, from Jiangsu via Anhui and Shandong, the State Council chose a
greatly scaled-down version to move only about 2Gm3 and even then not all the way,
but only to the Donping Hu in Shandong, just south of the Huanghe. The principal
economic argument against the full-scale version of the eastern route that takes the
advantage of the Grand Canal has been the necessity of raising the water by a total
of 40m along the way, a feat necessitating at least 1GW of pumping capacity, as well
as major widening and dredging of the ancient, and now also heavily polluted, canal.
Detailed studies of the middle route resumed in 1990, and this alternative came
to be seen by many experts as both economically and environmentally more accept-
able. Water would be taken from an enlarged Danjiangkou reservoir on the Han
River in northern Hubei (Figure 4.6). Its capacity would be boosted by 11.6Gm3 to
29.1Gm3 by raising the dam from the present 157m to 171.6m (Liu 1998; Xinhua
2002). The middle route’s main advantage is that no pumping would be required,
as the water would be carried by gravity in a canal snaking along the southern and
western edges of, respectively, the Funiu and Taihang Mountains all the way to

Figure 4.6 LANDSAT image of the doubly bifurcated Danjiangkou reservoir in northern
Hubei and southern Henan. The central route of the South/North water-transfer
canal will start from the enlarged easternmost bay of the reservoir’s largest part
just north of the dam
 Environment 167

Beijing’s Yuyuantan Lake; a spur from Xushui in Hebei would carry water across
the Haihe Plain to Tianjin. Moreover, water delivered by the middle route would be
much cleaner than the flow traveling through the Grand Canal (Figure 4.5). The
main disadvantage is the necessity of displacing large numbers of people. These
would total about 50,000 along the canal’s route, but 200,000 people would have
their houses and fields flooded because of the raised Danjiangkou dam, whose orig-
inal construction has already displaced some 380,000 people (Liu 1992).
A surprising decision taken in November 2001 calls for both the first and
second phases of the eastern route (from the lower Changjiang to Shandong,
and then to Tianjin), and the first phase of the middle route from Hanjiang to
Beijing and Tianjin – carrying initially 9.5Gm3, and 13–14Gm3 by the year
2030 – to be completed by 2010. The total cost of these two segments, shared
60:40 by central government and local authorities, will be more than 180 billion
yuan (or US$22 billion when converted at the official exchange rate), and Beijing
may receive the first deliveries of 1.2Gm3 of Changjiang water as early as 2007.
Laudably, the project also includes more than 40 billion yuan to be invested
concurrently into improved irrigation and widespread adoption of water-saving
equipment in northern households and industries. Moreover, clear water
passages and about 100 new sewage plants are planned to sharply reduce water
pollution in the Grand Canal, which is now heavily contaminated in parts.
Water-saving measures should reduce the consumption in the areas that are to
receive the diverted water by 4.1Gm3 a year. This would be equal to about one
tenth of the eventually anticipated annual transfer of 38–48Gm3 (with the
middle route carrying about 15Gm3), making it clearly the world’s most volumi-
nous diversion of water. China’s largest previous water transfer was the
gravity-driven 286km-long diversion of the Luanhe to the Beijing and Tianjin
areas: completed in 1984, the project has an annual capacity of 19.5Gm3, while
the pumped diversions from the Huanghe to Qingdao and from the Dong River
to Shenzhen and Hong Kong have capacities of, respectively, 6.85 and 6.2Gm3
(Liu 1998). The only Western water diversions that compare in their scope with
the South/North transfer – the nearly 1,100km of canals and pipelines of
California’s State Water Project, taking water from the northern part of the
state, and the diversion of the lower Colorado river to California, Arizona and
New Mexico – have the capacity to move, respectively, 5.2Gm3 and 9.3Gm3
every year (CDWR 2002; Gelt 1997).
Inevitably, there are many technical and environmental concerns with a
project of such unprecedented magnitude. These range from the basic questions
of supply adequacy to some engineering challenges. Perhaps the most important
consideration in the first category is the highly variable rainfall in the basin of
the Han River, which results in recurrent low water levels in Danjiangkou reser-
voir. What will happen if there is an unusually long spell of low precipitation
surpassing the dry periods of 1965–1966 and 1991–1995? This problem should
be solved by building a connection between the Danjiangkou and Sanxia reser-
voirs, a relatively short link of about 150km to the Du River, the Han River’s
southern tributary, but one requiring considerable pumping to cross Daba Shan.
168 Environment

How to cross the Huanghe – just north of the Dongping Lake with the
eastern route, and near Zhengzhou in Henan with the middle route – may be
the most challenging engineering problem. Siphoning under the river’s bed is the
favored solution, but it will require some controls of silt deposition. Another
major uncertainty is the fate of the aqueduct crossing the flood-prone Henanese
plain: will the Sanmenxia and Xiaolangdi dams be able to moderate a catas-
trophic flood traveling down the Huanghe and threatening the new aqueduct?

China’s environment and security: simple myths and

complex realities
Growing concerns about China’s long-term water supply have also become
one of the most prominent examples used by a newly influential school of
thought that sees a clear and direct connection between the state of the
country’s environment and its broadly defined security. Most of the proponents
of this view appear to be unaware that their thinking has roots in the classical
geographic determinism of the late nineteenth century, and, as I will explain in
the following section, its relatively rapid public acceptance owes a great deal to
its fortuitous timing as a successor to, and clearly a partial substitute for, the
fortunately lessened concerns about the risks of a thermonuclear conflict
between two global superpowers.
During the early 1990s I was asked to prepare several China-based contribu-
tions to this interesting research genre (Smil 1992a, 1992b, 1995b). But the fact
that I diligently searched out some important links between China’s deteriorating
environment and its long-term security did not mean, to the disappointment of
some of my catastrophically-minded colleagues, that I subscribed to a simplistic
deterministic notion that saw, to caricature it by hyperbole, an inevitable regime
change behind every eroding slopeland. All those new securitarians who were
inclined to argue along these lines would not approve of the following analysis
(Smil 1997b) – but I feel that it remains a fair appraisal of a concern that does
not have to turn inevitably into a catastrophe whose impacts would go far
beyond China’s extensive borders.
The Chinese language abounds in sayings and proverbs so succinct that they
vex even the best translators. They are often so illuminating that they provide
perfect encapsulations of countless realities. When asked to contribute again to
the currently fashionable literature on environment and security,1 I found myself
once more a reluctant participant in a quest whose main thrust can be most
appropriately described by the ancient saying xin yuan yi ma. The four characters
stand for heart, gibbon, idea and horse. It means you have an idea in mind, but
the essence of your thoughts is really somewhere else.
So it is, I feel, with the recent spate of studies on environment and security.
After the sudden demise of the superpower confrontation deprived political
scientists of their ultimate security concern, apocalyptic nuclear war, they made
a nimble readjustment. With no small help from Robert Kaplan, whose none-
too-subtle visions of the future world became required reading for Washington
 Environment 169

bureaucrats, they discovered a worry perhaps almost as impressive.2 While envi-

ronmental degradation does not happen in a blinding flash, it does share two
important characteristics with nuclear exchange. First, its spatial reach could be
truly global; and second, its social and economic effects could be highly devas-
tating. The precipitous loss of a large share of stratospheric ozone would
endanger all higher living organisms that have evolved in the biosphere
protected from UVB radiation by the oxygenated atmosphere. Rapid climate
change with a substantial rise of average temperatures could have effects ranging
from new precipitation patterns to northward diffusion of malaria. These are, of
course, the best-known, and potentially very worrisome, examples of environ-
mental transformations.
In thinking about the new horse of environmental degradation, it is really the
old gibbon’s heart of national security that many of the new securitarians want
to preserve. They alter, dilute, and extend the meaning of security beyond any
classical recognition, but they never give up on its original idea, which embodies
conflict and violence. This is because that idea carries them to the heart of exis-
tential anguish and mortal peril, fears without which their message would not
merit such an anxious hearing by politicians, the military, or the mass media.
The new securitarians must be aware that the challenges posed by environmental
degradation are not manageable by a well-established national security appa-
ratus geared to preventing and fighting violent conflicts. Yet they wish to have
that apparatus to embrace their ideas. They promise not just diffuse, incremental
deterioration, but potentially violent conflicts whose “management” should
become a matter for the highest levels of national policy-making.
Inevitably, policies guided by the fear of environmental catastrophe would
affect the armed forces and intelligence-gathering organizations called on to
fight this new global threat. These institutions, no matter what their real belief
may be, have nimbly recognized the political value of these new fears – and
hence the potential for funding.3 Many new securitarians have gone much
further and redefined security in a totally all-encompassing manner. The United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) now maintains that security is
concerned “with how people live and breathe”.4 With such a definition, one
would expect security studies to be preoccupied with absolutely everything, from
nutrition and unemployment to pollution and drug trafficking. The UNDP actu-
ally lists all these variables. It seems that the only ingredients it excludes is
clinical depression, a feeling that makes millions of people very insecure indeed!5
A very politically incorrect question arises: why should anyone take this method-
ological farce seriously?
Of course, there is an obvious answer. Individual scholars, granting agencies,
policy-makers and politicians all need to see suitably frightening concerns on their
horizons; worries that provide a rich substrate for papers, meetings, consultations,
commissions and strategic initiatives; and actions that make their participants full
of the most satisfying feeling that they are helping to save the world.
Consequently, environmental security has become a veritable growth industry,
bringing together such unlikely confrères as Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)
170 Environment

analysts and Greenpeace activists. In spite of their considerable differences, they

share many unmistakable commonalties, as illustrated in recent alerts on environ-
mental security.
Most of these studies display the simplistic bent common to recent converts to
great causes. Many natural scientists must be amused, if not appalled, by the
often crass environmental determinism of the securitarians (eroding slopelands =
environmental refugees = overcrowded cities = political instability = violence; or
water scarcity = civil or interstate war). Any thoughtful historian, and especially
those fascinated by the complex relationships between civilizations and their
environment, must be astonished by the utter neglect of long-term historical
perspectives. The two most obvious weaknesses are, first, an apparent ignorance
of the history of environmental pollution and ecosystemic degradation in
affluent nations; and second, a lack of appreciation of the quintessential role
played by scarcity and crises in stimulating technical and social innovation.6
Even the most eager promoters of these new perils find it difficult to make
connections between the environment and national security. Moreover, some of
the political scientists who refused to board the new security train have been
waging a war of ideas, almost to the point of denying any links at all between
the two supervariables. Exaggeration, hesitation, meandering, tedious defini-
tional debates and recriminations have been an inevitable result of this state of
affairs.7 As a natural scientist, albeit one keenly interested in the socio-economic
implications of environmental change, I will not attempt to add to the suspect
canon of theoretical generalizations regarding the peculiar relationship between
the environment and security. Unique combinations of environmental settings,
economic (mis)fortunes, cultural expectations and social cohesion make any such
generalizations highly suspect. Instead, my goal is to examine critically current
Chinese realities, as well as the most likely short-term trends, in order to identify
any links between China’s environment and its security.

What security?
Ullman’s expanded definition centers on the presence, over a relatively brief
span of time, of drastic military or non-military security threats to the quality of
life. In so doing, it captures both individual and policy-making concerns and
significantly narrows the range of practical policy choices.8 But even when
working within this broad framework, one must make a distinction between truly
drastic new threats and serious, but recurring, old patterns which are better
publicized. Appraising the available policy options requires distinguishing what
appears alarming, but is in fact ephemeral, from what is truly worrisome and
long-lasting. The dynamic nature of both technical and socio-economic fixes
continually expands and alters the realm of these choices.
With nearly 1.25 billion people by the end of 1996, China is the world’s most
populous nation. It possesses nuclear weapons, borders more than a dozen other
countries, carries a burden of historical myths, and is prone to radical upheavals.
Its security obviously matters. The state of China’s environment matters not just
 Environment 171

to the Chinese but to its neighbors as well. Ecosystems which have been much
abused for millennia must now endure an extraordinarily large and rapid quest
for modernization.9 While the concept still finds only a very few supporters
among economists, economies are nothing but complex subsystems of the
biosphere. Hence, any degradation of a nation’s environment inevitably weakens
its long-term capacity for sustaining individual well-being and high levels of total
output.10 Given China’s size, any major failure on the road to modernization
would have wide-ranging international repercussions.
Although these matters are exceedingly difficult to quantify, my detailed and
fairly comprehensive economic estimates suggest that environmental degradation
costs China about 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product every
year, a conclusion echoed by a recently published, independent Chinese study.11
Does this indisputably serious burden affect China’s security? If so, in what way?
Were it to grow further, could it be restricted to merely a marginal aggravation,
barely consequential in comparison with the traditionally present forces of disin-
tegration, raging from the centrifugal tendencies of distant provinces to
recurrent outbursts of violence, and from touchy nationalism to vicious
infighting within the gerontocratic elite? Or could it become China’s major
contribution to a world disintegrating into Kaplanesque anarchy? These ques-
tions are best answered by a closer look at the most important components of
environmental change in China.

Environmental pollution
Maintaining that the only effect of more intense environmental pollution over a
much greater area is to degrade the quality of life, the new securitarians ignore
the process of industrialization and urbanization as a whole. Furthermore, they
do so without a proper historical perspective. Deteriorating quality of air, water
and soils; increasing background noise; foodstuffs contaminated by long-lasting
residues of wastes and synthetic chemicals; and exposure to aesthetic blight have
accompanied economic modernization around the world. They are all in abun-
dant, and often revolting, evidence throughout China. However, when viewed in
historical perspective, these degradations could be seen as merely regrettable,
and often surprisingly temporary by-products of changes that have allowed
impressive declines in infant mortality, a steady increase in life expectancy, larger
disposable incomes and greater social mobility. China has quickly developed
some of the world’s worst environmental quality indicators, but it has also expe-
rienced unusually impressive improvements in major quality-of-life indicators – a
benefit also enjoyed by other late modernizers, notably South Korea and
Taiwan. These two major differences – the speed of environmental degradation
and the rate of improvement in certain quality-of-life indicators – have been
dictated by the extraordinarily rapid pace of the recent modernization effort.
China is now the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, an inherently
dirty fuel requiring efficient combustion and advanced emission controls to prevent
high levels of air pollution. Even the most efficient form of coal combustion
172 Environment

produces a great deal of particulate matter as well as sulfur and nitrogen oxides,
and it is a leading source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the most important
anthropogenic greenhouse gas. Particulate controls using electrostatic precipitators
are relatively cheap and highly effective, but desulfurization is expensive and
nitrogen oxide removal even more so. Most of China’s coal is burned without
any controls in tens of millions of small coal stoves and in small and mid-sized
boilers providing heat, steam and hot water for millions of small enterprises,
offices and public facilities. Coal is also by far the most important fuel for gener-
ating China’s electricity, but only the largest power plants commissioned during
the past decade have satisfactory particulate emission controls, and there is no
commercial desulfurization of flue gases.
Not surprisingly, this brings recurrently heavy episodes of classic (London-
type) smog to most Chinese cities, and it creates semi-permanent hardship in all
northern urban areas during winter. In addition, the recent rapid multiplication
of passenger cars and trucks has been responsible for no less objectionable and no
less recurrent episodes of heavy photochemical (Los Angeles-type) smog. China’s
cities and the surrounding countryside are thus blanketed by very high levels of
particulate matter, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides, volatile organic
compounds and ozone, with concentrations of some of these pollutants being
commonly of an order of magnitude above the recommended hygienic means.
China’s SO2 air quality limit is 60 micrograms per cubic meter (mg/m3) an
annual mean, while actual average concentrations in Beijing range from 80
mg/m3, in the cleanest suburbs, to 160mg/m3. In the worst polluted northern
cities they commonly surpass 300mg/m3.12 The inevitable consequences of this
combination include a higher incidence of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases
and premature mortality among the most sensitive individuals.
The news on water pollution is no better. Even according to official – and
very likely too optimistic – statistics, less than half of all waste water is treated,
mostly in the simplest way, before it is returned to streams, lakes and ponds.
More importantly, during the early 1990s, only about a quarter of all treated
industrial waste water conformed to acceptable standards after discharge.
Chinese environmental journals abound with reports of high waterborne
concentrations of heavy metals, phenols and waste oils. Stream monitoring
shows rising levels of dissolved nitrates.
These trends are nothing unexpected, as they replicate those the Western
world experienced during the earlier – and not so distant – stages of its industri-
alization. For example, until their substantial reduction, beginning in the late
1970s, US per capita SO2 emissions were more than ten times as high as the
recent Chinese mean. In fact, the absolute level of Chinese SO2 emissions is still
no higher than US totals were during the 1980s. Furthermore, even though total
North American and European SO2 emissions have declined appreciably since
the late 1970s, Central European rates are still considerably higher than those in
China, both in terms of per capita and per square kilometer (km2). Atmospheric
concentrations of particulate matter and SO2 were commonly as high in
London during the early 1950s as they have been in Beijing during the 1990s.
 Environment 173

During London’s infamous episode of heavy smog pollution in early December

1952, average levels of SO2 stayed above 1,000mg/m3 for four consecutive days:
together with extremely high levels of particulates, they were responsible for
some 4,000 premature deaths.13
Moreover, some environmental degradations remain more intense in the West
than in China. For example, the average annual concentration of nitrates, origi-
nating from synthetic fertilizers, manures and nitrogen oxides from combustion,
has recently been between 15 and 20 milligrams per liter in the lower basin of
Germany’s Rhine River, roughly twice as high as in the lower Huanghe, and
four times as high as in the Yangzi River as it flows through Jiangsu province.14
At the same time, an important and rarely appreciated difference is that, little as
China spends on environmental protection, these outlays are relatively higher
than those of Western nations, or of Japan, at a comparable stage in their
economic development. Government spending on environmental protection in
these countries did not begin to make a difference until after their average per
capita gross domestic products (GDP) passed US$5,000, nearly three times as
high as the Chinese mean today.15
Perhaps the most encouraging indicator of China’s environmental progress,
of which securitarians of the catastrophic bent appear to be quite unaware, has
been a rapid decline of the country’s energy-to-GDP intensity. This measure is a
powerful marker of two critical trends. Lower energy-to-GDP ratios indicate
greater economic efficiency, and also suggest that the economy is putting a rela-
tively lesser burden on the environment. A long-term decline in this indicator has
been pronounced in both North America and in Western Europe, but Chinese
improvements are occurring at an even faster rate (for details see the last section
of Chapter 2). In addition, the average intensity of water use by industry has
also declined, reducing the output of waste water. Both of these trends should
continue during the coming years, since China’s energy and material intensity
efficiencies remain far below their potential.
While industrial efficiencies have improved remarkably, major gains are yet to
be made at the household level. Hardly any Chinese apartments are built with
wall or ceiling insulation or double-glazed windows, and even fewer have indi-
vidual temperature controls. Fiberglass and thermostats in millions of newly
built apartments would bring energy savings and environmental benefits for
decades to come.
The state of China’s environment has become a focus for both international
aid efforts and for extensive transfer of advanced pollution prevention and clean
manufacturing techniques. The United States, Japan and the European Union
are all eagerly proffering their considerable advisory and technical capacities to
deal with China’s energy and environmental challenges. Japanese involvement
has been by far the most notable. Japan’s New Energy Development
Organization is introducing better coal cleaning, more efficient combustion, and
simplified flue gas desulfurization.16
Inevitably, the rapid pace of China’s modernization will bring higher invest-
ment in environmental protection. The official target is to double the rate of
174 Environment

current investment in environmental protection by the year 2000. At present, it is

still short of 1 per cent of GDP. Among the most encouraging specific plans for
the near future is the project aimed at cleaning up three heavily polluted rivers in
the densely populated eastern coastal region (Huai He, Hai He and Liaohe), and
three major lakes (Tai Hu, Chao Hu and Dianchi).
What has been gained by the recent environment-degrading dash toward
modernization is surely impressive. Quality-of-life gains have been quite substan-
tial, both in terms of improvement rates and absolute levels achieved. The
country’s infant mortality is now well below 30/1,000, comparable to Argentina.
Life expectancy is now very close to seventy-one years, slightly ahead of Russia.
Average per capita GDP, expressed in terms of purchasing power parity, was
close to US$2,000 in 1995, comparable to Japan in the mid-1950s and to many
countries in pre-World War II Europe. And per capita food availability rose to
within less than 5 per cent of Japan and is now equivalent to about 112 per cent
of the rate needed to satisfy nutritional needs compatible with a healthy and
active life. Judged by these principal quality-of-life indicators, China should no
longer be bundled with the low-income developing countries.17
Clearly, these are not indicators of a country on the brink of a catastrophic
collapse. While incomes will continue to rise fairly rapidly, other indicators may
rise only slowly or level off. Major changes will take place among environmental
indicators. For example, overall life expectancy will increase, but the causes of
death will reflect a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases and malignan-
cies, as opposed to infectious disease. Consequently, I would argue that China’s
environmental pollution, while undoubtedly objectionable and certainly
harmful to millions of individuals, will not lower the overall quality of life for
the average Chinese citizen. Many of its worst excesses will almost certainly be
reduced. While its impacts will still be widespread, they are likely to be compen-
sated for by other gains, at least in the judgment of the average citizen if not in
the feelings of Western visitors working with ahistorical assumptions and unre-
alistic expectations.
Perhaps the most helpful way to think about the road ahead is to realize that,
in terms of income, China will be traversing ground covered by most of today’s
affluent countries between 1930 and 1970; in terms of pollution control, the
country’s experience will more likely resemble the rich world’s achievements
between 1955 and 1975 (albeit with strikingly different ratios of resources/popu-
lation when compared not just to North America but also to most European
countries). Consequently, I do not foresee circumstances in which mounting envi-
ronmental pollution would threaten the country’s (broadly conceived) security
interests to such an extent that either an appreciable decline in the quality of life
or increase in civil violence might occur. The historical lessons are clear. As a
society’s standard of living increases, environmental pollution is a major stimulus
to higher efficiency of energy and material conversions, and, through stricter
regulations, eventually to an improved quality of life. There is no reason why
China should not replicate this experience.
 Environment 175

Ecosystemic degradation
The problems encompassed within this broad definition of ecosystemic degrada-
tion are too intractable to rectify via straightforward technical solutions.
Reducing and eliminating ecosystemic degradation requires constant and skilled
resource management, ranging from appropriate agronomic techniques to on-
going planting, and nurturing of trees. As with environmental pollution, China’s
record in this area is clearly worrisome on a number of fronts. Not all aspects of
ecosystemic degradation are amenable to monetization. Most notably, we have
no satisfactory means of valuing biodiversity, the key outcome of evolution and
the guarantor of biospheric viability. As it happens, China’s pre-modern biodi-
versity was exceptionally high.
Excessive erosion now affects about one third of the country’s soils. Even
when using official criteria, forest coverage remains below 15 per cent.
Cumulative losses of arable land during the past forty years have been larger
than all of Germany’s farmland, and the annual loss rate of around half a
million hectares is still unacceptably high. Conversion of wetlands to crop fields
has severely damaged one of the major stores of biodiversity and reduced water
storage capacity. The deforested and overgrazed regions of northern China are
threatened by desertification. Conservative estimates show that these degrada-
tions already cost China the equivalent of at least 5 per cent of GDP annually,
and none of these trends can be radically reversed in a matter of years. But, as
with the pollution effects, these developments have their obverse in encouraging
changes. Perhaps most notably, the quality of afforestation efforts has improved
significantly. Survival rates are now well over 50 per cent, compared to approxi-
mately 10 per cent a generation ago. Since the mid-1980s, the government has
been limiting the allowable cut in state forests, and turning to substantial imports
of wood. Recently, China has been spending about a billion dollars per year to
import logs, pulp and paper from North and South America, Europe and Russia.
Although China is still losing its mature trees, the total forest area has been
stabilized, and it may have actually grown a bit during the past few years – the
first reversal in modern Chinese history. According to figures issued by the
Ministry of Forestry, China’s forested areas rose from a low of 115.28 million
hectares in 1981 to 124.65Mha by 1988, and reached 128.63Mha by 1992. The
annual increment in new timber was 366 million m3, and annual consumption
was 327 million m3, yielding an annual surplus averaging 39 million m3 of
timber during the period 1989–1991, the first such gain in many generations. In
December 1993 it was announced that total annual growth had surpassed 400
million m3, while consumption had declined further to 320 million m3. If true,
this would mean a fundamental reversal in a single decade, with the 1989–1993
annual surplus being equal to exactly one quarter of all tree felling.18 Even when
heavily discounted, there is little doubt that the precipitous decline of China’s
forests has stopped, and perhaps even been slightly reversed.
New surveys show that the country has actually at least 30 per cent, and
perhaps as much as 45 per cent, more arable land than is listed in official statistics,
176 Environment

and tougher new regulations are being put in place to limit losses of the most valu-
able farmland. For more on China’s farmland, see the last section of Chapter 3.
Besides the scare over “Who will feed China?”, the other event related to the
environment that has attracted a great deal of recent attention has been the
record floods during the summer of 1996. Not surprisingly, the flooding in
China is already interpreted as the beginning of a worsening trend directly
attributable to ecosystemic degradation. This does not appear to be very likely.
Saying this is not to claim that excessive rainfalls, or other unpreventable natural
extremes, cannot be aggravated by human actions. In China’s case, there is no
doubt that misguided environmental policies have contributed to the severity of
catastrophic flooding by encouraging deforestation and the destruction of lakes
and wetlands. Deforestation opens the slopes for direct impact by raindrops
which, together with accelerated runoff, strips away most of the protective
layer, reduces the water-storage capacity of the watershed, and increases soil
erosion. The difference can be dramatic. While a forested terrain in central
China will lose no more than a few tonnes of topsoil per hectare annually, a
clear-cut slopeland will lose more than 30, or even 50, tonnes per hectare annu-
ally, and in north China’s highly erodible Loess Plateau, the rate may easily
surpass 100 tonnes per hectare per year.
The destruction of wetlands has affected the central part of the Yangzi valley
in the province of Hubei, the area formerly known as the land of thousand
lakes, particularly hard. I still remember my astonishment when, some twenty
years ago, I compared the first cloud-free satellite images of Hubei with the US
and Japanese maps prepared during the early 1940s. While the maps showed a
score of medium- and large-sized lakes and numerous smaller water surfaces,
LANDSAT images in the 1970s revealed that the lake area had been reduced by
half. After the beginning of de-Maoization, official sources revealed that of
nearly 1,100 lakes larger than 1,000 mu (approximately 66.6 hectares) fewer than
400 remained by 1978. The province’s lake water surface had fallen by 75 per
cent! Needless to say, such a drastic loss of water storage must be reflected in
more intensive flooding.
Given ever-higher population densities and the rapidly rising economic
product, the damage caused by an identical volume of water in the mid-1990s
must be at least two to three times as high as it would have been in the mid-
1970s, and a high multiple of the mid-1950s level. However, given China’s vastly
increased level of economic activity, such damage may be a smaller fraction of
annual GDP than in the past, and the overall effects may be surprisingly limited.
For example, in 1995 natural disasters affected crops on about 4.5 million
hectares, roughly 5 per cent of the officially claimed farmland, and reduced
output to as little as one fifth of normal yields. Yet China still proceeded to
produce a record harvest of cereals.
Moreover, careful chronicling of areas affected by floods shows no obvious
trend. Although there was an increase in the total area affected between 1970
and 1986, annual totals were substantially lower than during the worst flooding
of the 1950s and 1960s. The obverse situation to China’s recurrent flooding –
 Environment 177

the commonly cited warnings about water shortages so severe that they could
cripple urban life of drought-prone northern provinces, where some two fifths of
China’s population live and an equal share of industrial capacity is located –
offers a perfect example of the ignoring of economic realities, both by Chinese
and Western environmental doomsayers. I will illustrate this by comparing
Beijing’s pre-1996 water prices with those of the city where I live.
Winnipeg, a city of some 700,000 people with no heavy industrial production,
gets its water from Lake of the Woods, one of the large glacial lakes left behind
by the last Ice Age. This water requires hardly any cleaning, and no pumping is
needed as the water flows to the city by gravity. Yet with sewerage rates included,
we are charged about US$1.30/m3. Until the State Council approved increased
prices in April 1996, the inhabitants of Beijing – a city of 11 million people
where half of all water comes from expensive underground pumping and where
Stalinist planners located many water-guzzling, heavy industrial enterprises –
were paying 0.3 yuan/m3, that is a mere $0.035/m3 at the official exchange rate,
and only around $0.15/m3 when using a liberal purchasing parity rate. Even
more remarkably, in comparison to Winnipeg a cubic meter of Beijing water
costs less even as a share of average disposable family incomes! The approved
rate increase for water will boost the new rate to about $0.25/m3, still only a fifth
of the cost in Winnipeg, a city enjoying one of the most abundant water supplies
in the world.
Rather than being an exception, China’s urban water prices have followed
the world norm in undervaluing limited natural resources. Alarms about
imminent and crippling resource scarcities thus appear in a very different
light when one recognizes that the commodities in question have been, until
recently, largely given away, using enormous government subsidies that have
eliminated incentives for efficient use or substitution. There are other factors
behind water scarcity in Beijing. Until recently, many households did not have
a water meter and were charged a flat monthly fee. While this has been
largely remedied, rice, a crop traditionally not grown in the area, is still
planted in the Beijing municipality and in the surrounding Hebei province, a
choice about as smart, and about as heavily subsidized, as growing rice in the
semi-deserts of California.
Once again – without in the least trying to denigrate the extent or intensity
of China’s environmental degradation or the challenges facing a rapidly
modernizing country with relatively limited amounts of key natural resources –
I simply do not see why sensible policies, now increasingly in evidence, should
not bring incremental improvements and prevent the kind of deterioration that
might seriously affect the country’s socio-economic security or even push it into
external conflicts.

Different future
Undoubtedly, today’s China is full of unrealistic expectations. Its large popula-
tion means that its rich natural endowment translates into relatively modest
178 Environment

per capita resource availability, and its huge potential demand for all kinds of
resources means that the country will not have the option of relying on
imports of basic commodities to the extent Japan or the USA have done.19
Inevitably, a modernized China will not be a copy of North America. It will
have to find a new consumption equilibrium, but so will the affluent nations, as
too many of our demands are unsustainable. However, this reality does not
have to translate into any objectionable declines in real quality of life. We have
come to understand that improvement of health and educational indicators
and the realization and maintenance of a comfortable standard of living do
not keep pace with rising incomes or material consumption. J-bends, or
saturation levels, often form at surprisingly low rates of energy use or dispos-
able income.
Admittedly, it will take some time to get used to this profound lesson and to
reorient economies accordingly. Yet the task is eventually unavoidable. We
cannot keep increasing energy conversion and material output without serious
environmental consequences. Managing this challenge will be a major task for
the first half of the twenty-first century. In this sense, China’s predicaments
are simply more circumscribed and more demanding versions of the tasks
that will face every nation. Fortunately, there appear to be no insurmountable
biophysical reasons why even China cannot achieve a great deal of incre-
mental advances along this demanding path. Extremist policies that have
plagued so much of China’s modern development may yet undermine much
that has been already achieved. However, if China were to enjoy a generation
of political stability, widening personal freedoms, and cooperative relations
with the other four fifths of humanity, there is no reason why the state of its
environment should not become a catalyst for further socio-economic
advances, rather than a factor contributing to instability, conflict or even
violence.

The cost of China’s environmental change: quantifying

the economic impact
Those environmental catastrophists who were disappointed by my criticism of
exaggerated claims of new securitarianism as it applies to China, found plenty of
material that was more to their liking in my comprehensive evaluation of the
economic impacts of China’s environmental change. This detailed report,
prepared originally for the East–West Center in Hawaii (Smil 1996c), made it
clear that those economic costs of China’s environmental mismanagement that
can be at least partially quantified are not trivial, and that the real toll must be
considerably higher.

We have been valuing natural goods for millennia: as categories and intensities of
our desire change – fossil fuels instead of furs, silicon instead of copper – so do
the outputs and prices. But one underlying reality has helped us make the
growing populations more affluent in spite of the obviously limited amount of
 Environment 179

natural riches: a remarkable substitutability of most of the natural resources

made possible by even more remarkable human inventiveness. And so the recur-
rent worries about running out are repeatedly relegated to forgotten cases of
mistaken thinking. Here is just one example among many: in the age of wired
communication we worried about running out of copper, but now most our
messages run through glass (optical fibers) whose main ingredient is just clean
sand – or through the air.
But we rely on nature not just for goods, but also for environmental services
that include benefits ranging from pollination of crops by bees to soil formation
by earthworms; from insect pest control by birds to decomposition of organic
wastes by bacteria and fungi; and from oxygen release by photosynthesizing
plants to nitrogen return to the atmosphere by denitrifying microbes (Smil
1997). There are no viable, biosphere-wide substitutes for these services:
without them all our civilizing efforts would almost instantly fall apart.
Consequently, these natural services are in many ways truly invaluable, and
hence any monetization of human environmental impact is bound to be inher-
ently incomplete.
Nevertheless, even the exercises limited to quantifying damages and degrada-
tions that are more amenable to monetization are helpful and revealing. The cost
of air pollution can be measured indirectly by declining crop yields or by the
increasing number of visits made by asthmatics to hospital emergency depart-
ments. The cost of soil erosion can be at least partially captured by quantifying
the burden of additional cleaning of excessively silted canals, and of the disap-
pearing water storage capacity in reservoirs. Even when they are based on fairly
conservative assumptions, these valuations show that much of the vaunted
modern economic growth is an illusion, as a substantial part of its undoubted
benefits is erased by pollution and ecosystemic degradation, whose costs are
never considered by standard economic accounts.
All quantifications of the economic costs of environmental change are
inherently uncertain and open to adjustment and argument. But their goal is
not – in any case unattainable – exactitude. They call our attention to those
impacts of human activities that the traditional economic calculus leaves out:
unabashedly, economists call them “externalities”, but ecological economists
and ecologists are appalled by this treatment. That is why I dared to enter this
tricky realm of environmental accounting: to bring a more realistic – though
necessarily imperfect and in many ways flawed – assessment of the impact that
China’s modernization is having on the country’s already much damaged envi-
ronment (Smil 1997b).
As their shared ancient Greek root attests, economics and ecology are just two
great branches of the same tree – but today’s mainstream protagonists of
economical and ecological thought appear to have little in common. A closer
look reveals a great deal of intellectual cross-pollination and creative ferment at
the disciplinary edges20 – but, generally, there is still that distinct feeling that
ecologists have too few numbers to make irrefutable arguments about the extent
and the intensity of appropriate environmental management.
180 Environment

Of course, ecologists can offer a great deal of quantitative evidence

concerning degradative processes, ranging from coastal eutrophication to trop-
ical deforestation, and they have come to understand the intricacies of such
anthropogenic changes as acid deposition or heavy metal accumulation. But
nothing would help to make their argument stronger than the availability of
realistic assessments of the economic impacts of environmental pollution and
ecosystemic degradation. Persuasive figures on economic losses caused by these
changes would make it possible to offer revealing cost-benefit analyses and to
reorient public policies, as well as environmental laws and investors’ thinking,
toward more effective preventive actions.
Converting this need to acceptable results is an extraordinary challenge, even
for affluent economies with long traditions of good statistical services and with a
deepening interest in environmental matters in general, and in ecological
economics in particular. Major difficulties complicate the task. As yet, there are
no generally accepted standard procedures for such evaluations.21 These
methodological uncertainties mean that individual researchers have no choice
but to use subjective judgments about which variables to include and how to
treat those inclusions.
For example, if a researcher is to quantify the health effects of chronically
high urban air pollution, the approach may range from a minimalist account,
limited to the value of labor time lost due to higher upper-respiratory morbidity,
to the all-encompassing valuation monetizing every individual discomfort and
including the cost of premature death. In the first case, it is not too difficult to
work out the productive time lost to respiratory illness through sample surveys of
major employers or health care providers, to compare it with a similar popula-
tion living in a clean city, and to multiply the excess total by typical wage rates.
When pursuing the second choice, an enterprising researcher will uncover
relatively rich, and fascinating, literature on the monetization of personal
suffering and the value of life – but no objective criteria for putting monetary
value on the respiratory discomfort, physical limitations and anxiety induced by
recurrent asthmatic attacks provoked by rising levels of photochemical smog.
And as far as the value of life is concerned, actuarial practice, economic consid-
erations and moral imperatives will present choices whose totals may differ by up
to an order of magnitude.22
But even a standard set of procedures would not make the challenge much
easier: specific figures are needed as basic inputs in such calculations are
commonly unavailable, even in affluent countries with extensive statistical
services.23 Again, simplifying assumptions and subjective choices becomes
unavoidable, weakening the persuasiveness of the eventual bottom line.
Although some very ingenuous estimating procedures may have been employed
in the process, the cumulative effect of even small departures from reality can
easily halve, or double, the final figure!24
But perhaps the most limiting factor is the impossibility of any meaningful
monetization of degraded or lost environmental services. If a peasant on a tree-
less plain removes straw from the field in order to cook or to heat the house, how
 Environment 181

can we value that loss? The value of plant nutrients in removed straw can be
expressed rather easily by equating it with the cost of synthetic fertilizers needed
to replace them. But the recycled straw would have improved the water-retention
capacity of the soil, and it would have also provided feed for myriad bacteria and
fungi, as well as for numerous soil invertebrates, without which there can be no
living, productive soils, and hence no sustainable farming. How does one mone-
tize those irreplaceable ecosystemic services?
But none of these obstacles should prevent us from trying. As long as we
understand the limitations – that the valuations provide useful ranges of approxi-
mations and never any correct single-figure answers, that all of them are
incomplete, and that even the most comprehensive ones will almost certainly
undervalue the real impact of human actions on the long-term integrity of the
quality of the environment – we can interpret the results.
Still, getting to that point is difficult, and the challenges are particularly great
in countries where such evaluations may be needed most: in large, populous and
still growing nations engaged in rapid socio-economic modernization which puts
enormous demands on the integrity of their environment.
China’s recent record is remarkable in every one of these aspects. This nation
of more than 1.2 billion people adds at least 13 million people a year, or the
equivalent of France in less than five years;25 during the 1980s its GDP growth
was surpassed only by that of South Korea, and during the early 1990s it was
the world’s highest, with annual rates up to 14 per cent.26 But this unprece-
dented growth and modernization goes on in landscapes previously much
abused by irrational industrial and agricultural practices, on a territory endowed
with absolutely large but relatively limited natural resources, and in environ-
ments whose air, water and land are already much polluted.27
At the same time, China is a country abounding in dubious statistics and
unverifiable claims, and peopled by masses of uncooperative bureaucrats prone
to treating any unflattering figure as a deep state secret. If the Dutch or
Germans try to express the economic cost of their environmental degradation,
that may be one thing28 – but doing the same for China may seem overly ambi-
tious. Surprisingly, a Chinese study was actually among the earliest attempts of
its kind: it was initiated in 1984, and when published in 1990 it put the cost of
the country’s environmental pollution at about 6.75 per cent of its 1983 annual
GDP.29 Soon after I learned about this study I began to gather materials for a
more comprehensive assessment, one that would also quantify at least some
major consequences of ecosystemic degradation.
I eventually did most of the work on this project at the East–West Center in
Honolulu,30 but even before this assessment was completed I thought it would
be interesting if a small group of Chinese researchers were to make, quite inde-
pendently, a similarly comprehensive evaluation. I hoped that a comparison of
the two studies would show both the usefulness and the limitations of these
valuations. When The Project on Environment, Population and Security
directed by Thomas Homer-Dixon at the University of Toronto provided the
necessary support, I was able to ask Professor Mao Yushi, a noted Chinese
182 Environment

economist, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and

now the director of Unirule Institute of Economics in Beijing, to commission
studies on the economic costs of China’s environmental pollution, deforestation
and land degradation.31
With both assessments now available,32 the opportunity to appraise the
economic impact of China’s environmental change is better than in the case of
any other large modernizing nation. Readers interested in detailed assumptions
will have to refer to the two studies; here I will just review some of China’s most
important environmental concerns, highlight the conclusions of both studies,
and explain the reasons for some major differences in their results.

Air and water pollution

A small, pioneering opinion survey done in China a few years ago found that
the public ranked air and water pollution only behind earthquakes and floods
on the list of environmental hazards – but that people with science or engi-
neering degrees put the two pollution risks ahead of natural disasters.33
China’s severe air pollution problems are all too obvious, a result of the
country’s traditionally high dependence on coal (whose combustion produces
the classic smog, made up of suspended particulates and SO2) and of the
recent rapid increases of vehicular traffic (whose emissions of volatile organic
compounds, nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, take part in complex reac-
tions resulting in photochemical smog).
While Chinese coals are of fairly good quality, only about a fifth of them are
cleaned and sorted before combustion, and typical conversion efficiencies in tens
of millions of household stoves and in thousands of small industrial and
commercial boilers remain very low, resulting in extraordinarily high emission
factors per unit of delivered useful energy.34 High urban densities, common
commingling of residential and industrial areas, improperly vented household
stoves, and use of smoky biomass fuels in rural areas, are additional factors
aggravating the situation.
The combustion of fossil fuels now produces close to 20Mt of SO2 and about
15Mt of particulates a year, and monitoring shows the long-term averages of
both pollutants to be multiples of maxima recommended by the World Health
Organization.35 For example, for SO2 these limits are no more than
40–60mg/m3 for the annual mean – but in Beijing even the cleanest suburbs
average 80mg/m3 a year, and the annual mean is double that value in the most
polluted locations. Still, these are low levels compared to annual means (in
mg/m3) of over 400 in Taiyuan and Lanzhou, and over 300 in Linfeng,
Chongqing (Sichuan) and Guiyang (Guizhou).
In accordance with European and North American experience, particulate
and SO2 damage to crops is relatively small, with most of the yields losses expe-
rienced in suburban vegetable farming. Damage to materials is considerably
higher, and it is bound to grow with intensification of acid deposition in the
rainy South.36 But it is the damage to human health that is most worrisome. I
 Environment 183

have estimated that at least 200 million Chinese are exposed to annual particu-
late concentrations of above 300mg/m3, and at least 20 million are exposed to
twice that level. In addition, the diffusion of new industries means that
100–200 million rural inhabitants may already breathe air nearly as polluted
as in cities.
These very high exposures resemble urban values that prevailed in West
European and North American cities two to four generations ago, and they
contribute to higher incidence of respiratory diseases, ranging from upper respi-
ratory infections to lung cancer. But assessing the share attributable to outdoor
air pollution is particularly difficult in China, because most people are also
exposed to very high levels of indoor air pollution from inefficient stoves, and the
nation abounds with smoking addicts.37
Water pollution is even more ubiquitous in China than air pollution. Several
years ago a survey of nearly 900 major rivers found that more than four fifths of
them were polluted to some degree, over 20 per cent so badly that it was impos-
sible to use their water for irrigation.38 As for the drinking water, its quality
meets state standards only in six of China’s twenty-seven largest cities drawing
on surface sources, and in just four out of twenty-seven instances where under-
ground sources are used.
Municipal wastes are commonly released untreated, even in large cities. Half
of Shanghai’s waste is discharged into the Yangzi and into Hangzhou Bay; and
the Songhua River and Ji Canal in Jilin and Heilongjiang still contain tens of
tonnes of mercury, the legacy of pre-1977 uncontrolled releases which caused
waterborne Hg concentration higher than in Japan’s Minamata Bay.39 And the
recent multiplication of small and medium-sized rural and township enterprises
outside large cities has brought a variety of water pollutants into China’s coun-
tryside. In Jiangsu province (the one surrounding Shanghai) there is now about
one such enterprise per square kilometer! Unknown volumes of untreated waste
from these plants goes into streams and networks of canals, contaminating
waters used for drinking (about half of China’s population draws its drinking
water from surface sources), animals and irrigation.
Besides such common industrial pollutants as industrial oils, phenols and
heavy metals, China’s waters are now receiving much higher levels of nitrates
leached from heavy fertilizer applications. The country is now the world’s
largest consumer of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, with annual applications
averaging around 200kg N/ha, and surpassing 300kg N/ha in the most inten-
sively cultivated provinces. With the addition of animal and human wastes,
such nitrogen loadings will eventually lead to serious nitrate contamination.40
The economic burdens of water pollution range from declining fish catches in
streams and reservoirs, and a growing frequency of red tides affecting China’s
shrimp aquaculture, to increased mortality and a higher incidence of tumors
among livestock, and steadily growing rates of cancers of the liver, stomach
and esophagus. Studies in the worst-affected localities found the incidence of
cancers of the digestive system to be 3–10 times higher than in unpolluted
places; other findings included enlarged liver, anemia, skin diseases, premature
184 Environment

hair loss and a higher incidence of congenital deformities. Water pollution also
helps to make viral hepatitis and dysentery the two leading infectious diseases
in China.
Waterborne pathogens and parasite eggs in organic wastes recycled to crop-
land continue to be a major problem in China’s countryside. The frequency of
ascariasis, ancylostomiasis and trichuriasis among China’s vegetable farmers
has been in excess of 90 per cent in some regions.41 Substantial economic
losses also arise due to the impossibility of using polluted water in industrial
and agricultural production, and due to additional costs incurred in tapping
new resources.
My conservative calculations put the total cost of China’s air and water pollu-
tion at roughly 30–45 billion of 1990 yuan, while Xia’s total came close to 100
billion of 1992 yuan. Even when increasing my estimate by about 20 per cent in
order to account for China’s high rate of inflation during the early 1990s, Xia’s
estimates are considerably higher. As shown in Table 4.1, most of the difference
is explained by the treatment of impacts on human health.
Differing assumptions about population totals exposed to particular pollution
levels, and different costs ascribed to typical treatments or lost labor hours, are
major factors. For example, while Xia and I do not differ that much as far as the
total urban population exposed to excessive air pollution is concerned, his aver-
ages for treatment costs of chronic bronchitis and lung cancer are, respectively,
2,100 and 12,700 yuan, compared to 800 and 5,000 yuan used in my estimates.
Such disparities are typical of many previous studies attempting to capture
pollution’s toll on human health.42

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 Environment 185

Land use changes and soil degradation

This broad category ranges from the desertification of China’s extensive interior
grasslands to the disappearance of its coastal marshes but – given the combina-
tion of China’s relatively low per capita availability of agricultural land and
continuing population growth that will add at least 300 million people during the
next twenty-five years – losses of farmland and qualitative decline of arable soils
are the most imminent concerns. China’s arable land area is substantially larger
than the total of 95 million hectares claimed by the State Statistical Bureau: best
values based on sample surveys and remote sensing are in the range of
120–140Mha.43 This means that in per capita terms the country still has more
than twice as much farmland as South Korea and Japan, its truly land-short East
Asian neighbors.
At the same time, official totals of China’s recent farmland losses may err on
the low side. Cumulative losses of arable land during the past forty years have
been larger than Germany’s total farmland, and the annual loss has averaged
about half a million hectares since 1980. In addition, much of the lost area has
been of good quality, alluvial soils in coastal provinces experiencing the fastest
rate of urban and industrial expansion.
In addition to farmland losses, China’s agriculture is also affected by lowered
soil quality, a change due mostly to greater soil erosion and to a decline in both
the extent and the intensity of traditional recycling of organic wastes; improper
irrigation, and more intensive cropping relying on higher applications of agro-
chemicals, are the other leading causes.
A nationwide survey conducted on almost half of China’s farmland identified
various degrees of excessive soil erosion on 31 per cent of the land. Erosion rates
are not high only on the naturally highly erosion-prone Loess Plateau. In
Sichuan, China’s most populous province with more than 110 million people, 44
per cent of fields were eroding during the late 1980s beyond sustainable level (a
fourfold increase compared to the early 1950s), and 2Mha of cultivated
slopeland (or nearly a third of the province’s total) had annual erosion losses
averaging 110t/ha.44 For comparison, recent US water erosion rates averaged
just over 9t/ha, and wind erosion amounted to over 7t/ha for a total of about
17t/ha.
I quantified the economic costs of farmland losses and soil quality deteriora-
tion by calculating the value of lost harvests, decreased yields (or lower livestock
production) and nutrients lost from eroded soils, as well as by estimating the
burdens of faster reservoir silting, cleaning of silted canals and urban water
supplies, and increased damage due to flooding. I also added approximations of
key ecosystemic services provided by lost paddy fields and wetlands and by
degraded grasslands. Ning’s coverage of detrimental effects arising from land use
changes and soil degradation closely resembled my line-up. Given the nature of
this accounting exercise, there is an excellent agreement between the two sets of
calculations: my median value, adjusted for inflation, differs from Ning’s total by
less than 10 per cent (Table 4.2).
186 Environment

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China’s deforestation
By far the greatest disparity between the two studies concerns estimates of the
economic consequences of deforestation – but the huge difference is not due to
irreconcilable assumptions concerning the resulting soil erosion, stream silting, or
the loss of water-retention capacity. Indeed, a closer look shows great similarities
on all of these accounts. The reason lies in a fundamentally different approach
to the scope of the problem. Professor Wang took what I would label a deep
ecological perspective. First he estimated that China had lost a total of about
290Mha of forest since the beginning of the country’s history. Roughly half of
this loss was due to conversion to farmlands, settlements and transport networks,
an environmental change unavoidably exacted by the growth of an ancient civi-
lization – while the other half represents excessive deforestation, an area that
could have, with proper management, remained forested and been harvested on
a sustainable basis. Then he proceeded to calculate the impact of this excessive
deforestation on the desiccation of northern and northwestern China, as well as
on accelerated erosion that results in stream and reservoir silting, and in
increased damage during flooding.
In contrast, my estimates of the environmental cost of deforestation are based
on the current extent of the excessive cutting of mature growth. Curiously, that
approach could not be followed if China’s official statistics were taken at their
face value. According to recent claims, China’s total wood increment has been
surpassing the annual cut during most of the early 1990s: if true, this would
mean no net deforestation. Even if we were to accept this obviously exaggerated
statement, its impact appears in a different light once we put it together with the
changing composition of China’s forests.
 Environment 187

During the early 1990s no less than three quarters of China’s timberlands
were young or middle-aged stands, while the growing stock ready for harvesting
in mature forests amounted to less than a fifth of all standing timber, a total
which could be cut in just seven to eight years. Forests approaching maturity will
decline from almost a third of all timber in the late 1980s to less than a seventh
by the year 2000.
Ministry of Forestry figures show that of the 131 state forestry bureaus in
the most important timber production zones, twenty-five had basically
exhausted their reserves by 1990, 40 could harvest up to the year 2000 – and
by that time almost 70 per cent of China’s state forestry bureaus would basi-
cally have no trees to fell.45 In addition, the official figure for the average
growing stock in forest plantings – 28.27m3/ha – makes it quite clear that the
new plantings, whose growing stock may be yielding a statistical wood surplus,
offer little hope for replacing the felled mature forests, whose growing stock
would be at least 70–80m3/ha, for many decades. Consequently, even if real,
the recent quantitative growth of Chinese forests hides a major qualitative
decline.
In any case, estimates of the economic cost of China’s deforestation should be
based on figures realistically representing long-term trends, rather than capturing
short-term aberrations. A careful appraisal of available evidence indicates that the
overcutting of China’s mature forests – that is harvests above the average annual
increment of wood in stands storing the largest volume of phytomass harboring
the greatest biodiversity, and able to provide various ecosystemic services incom-
parably better than recent plantings – has been recently proceeding at a rate of at
least 50 and up to 100 million cubic meters a year.
With harvestable wood volume averaging around 90m3/ha this loss would
translate to an annual disappearance of 0.5 to 1 million hectares of mature
forest. In terms of lost sustainable supply of timber alone, this overcutting
would cost between 13 and 26 billion yuan a year. Weakened, or destroyed,
ecosystemic services include diminished water-storage capacity, reduced protec-
tion against both wind and water erosion (its rates are likely to increase by two
orders of magnitude), and – effects which are most difficult to quantify –
changes to local and regional climate, contributions to changes in the biospheric
carbon cycle and possible planetary warming, and consequences for national
and global biodiversity.
Monetization of these effects remains highly uncertain, with multipliers
ranging from 1.5 to more than 20 times the value of the cut timber.46 Chinese
foresters have put the combined ecosystemic benefits of mature forests between 8
and 25 times the profit from harvested timber sales. For example, a detailed
study done for Changbaishan natural reserve in Jilin concluded that if the
forest’s water-storage capacity were to be replaced by a reservoir, if the soil-
erosion control were to be achieved by terracing of slopes, and if pesticides were
used to control insects instead of forest-sheltered birds, the reserve’s worth would
be equivalent to about 49,000 yuan (1990) per hectare, more than twenty times
the value of sustainably harvested timber from the same area.47
188 Environment

Naturally, that ratio would rise with the inclusion of the forest’s contribution
to local and regional climatic controls and to its preservation of biodiversity.
Considerable value could be also imputed to future recreational worth and, in
the long term, to the value of forests as potentially major carbon sinks. But even
using 1.5 as the minimum multiplier value would result in between 20 and 39
billion yuan for lost ecosystemic services from 0.5–1.0Mha of excessive cutting.
The value of timber lost due to unsustainable harvest and to forest fires brings
up the grand total of forest mismanagement to roughly 40–70 billion yuan.
While I based my calculations on annual losses of 0.5–1.0Mha, Wang’s
cumulative total of excessive deforestation comes to about 140Mha – but his
calculations, amounting to 245 billion yuan, did not include any adjustments for
lost ecosystemic services, which represented the highest share of my estimates. If
such costs were included, Wang’s unusual historical approach, calling attention
to the true extent of human impact on forests, would have ended up with an
even higher total. On the other hand, some costs estimated by Wang were also
considered by Ning (above all the effects of soil erosion), so a simple addition of
the two sets of estimates would involve some double counting.

Wider perspectives
Although we tried to make our accounts as comprehensive as possible, we had
no choice but to leave out a number of critical effects. Major impacts that could
not be quantified due to the lack of basic information include such diverse cate-
gories as the increasingly important effects of photochemical smog in and near
China’s large cities; damage attributable to China’s nuclear weapons sector;
declining fish catches in China’s seas; and the foregone recreation value of lost
forests, wetlands and beaches. Even more importantly, neither set of calculations
tried to attribute any monetary value to human discomfort and suffering, reac-
tions arising not only from excessive morbidity and premature mortality, but also
from chronic exposures to high noise levels in China’s cities.48 Finally, neither
study could ascribe any definite value to China’s loss of biodiversity, and to the
country’s already huge, and rising, contribution to emissions of greenhouse
gases, a highly worrisome source of potential biospheric instability.
Consequently – Wang’s estimate of deforestation costs aside – both sets of
calculations are based on clearly conservative assumptions. As a result, there can
be no doubt that the economic burden of China’s environmental pollution and
ecosystemic degradation was no less than 5 per cent of the country’s GDP in the
early 1990s. A range of 6–8 per cent is the most likely conservative estimate, and
values around 10 per cent would be in line with a more comprehensive, although
still far from all-inclusive, coverage. Eventual monetization of a number of
elusive valuations could raise the rate to around 15 per cent of the country’s
annual GDP.
These burdens greatly surpass China’s recent spending on environmental
protection: during the 1980s and early 1990s the annual investment in this area
was equal to just 0.56–0.81 per cent of the country’s GDP. Only in 1996 came
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an official promise to raise this figure to just over 1 per cent by the year 2000.
Even so, that would be an order of magnitude lower than the most likely
economic cost.
What these burdens mean in international comparison is much more difficult
to say. Unfortunately, it is much easier to note what currency conversions should
not be used in order to express these costs in US dollars; to facilitate interna-
tional comparisons rather than to choose the right value. Conversion using
official exchange rates, the method favored until very recently by the World
Bank, greatly underestimates real values (it puts China’s GDP at less than
US$500 per capita), while the purchasing power parity (PPP) method favored by
the International Monetary Fund (resulting in a per capita GDP of nearly
US$3,000 in 1995) clearly exaggerates.
The latest World Bank study argues that China’s actual GDP was about
US$2,000 in 1995, a rate implying PPP roughly four times larger than the
exchange rate.49 Using this conversion, the annual burden of China’s environ-
mental pollution would be about $50 billion (using Xia’s total), that of land
degradation around $20 billion, and excessive deforestation would carry an
annual price tag of no less than another $20 billion (my lowest estimate), but
possibly over $100 billion (Wang’s historical appraisal). Even the lowest likely
grand total of about $(1992) 90 billion is a huge sum, a total slightly larger than
the value of all of China’s exports in 1992.
In closing, I must stress the dual nature of these valuations. These were
exploratory exercises based on a necessarily limited amount of information, and
requiring repeated assumptions; as such, they make no claims of accuracy, they
can give no more than basic approximations, and they are open to easily justifi-
able critique. At the same time, all of their inherent weaknesses and
uncertainties cannot negate their undeniable bottom line: the presented evidence
is sufficiently robust to allow a number of practical conclusions.
First, there can be no doubt that China’s recent environmental changes
already carry economic costs of roughly an order of magnitude higher than the
country’s annual spending on environmental protection: tripling, or quadrupling,
these outlays would easily meet even the strictest cost-benefit criteria. Second,
given the fact that the economic burden of China’s environmental pollution and
ecosystemic degradation may already be in excess of one tenth of its annual
GDP, the country’s recent aggressive quest for modernization must be a matter
of serious national, and international, concern.
Perhaps the most obvious cases of contrasting economic benefits and envi-
ronmental damage arise with the construction of modern megaprojects,
engineering structures of uncommonly large size or processing capacity – be
they large dams or steel mills, huge surface mines or massive offshore oil-drilling
platforms. Cost-benefit appraisals and environmental assessments now routinely
consider at least some of the environmental costs of these megaprojects, but
unanticipated or underestimated impacts have been common, resulting in often
truly tragic or economically burdensome consequences. I will close this chapter
by describing just two of China’s notable megaprojects: one whose failure is
190 Environment

now a matter of indisputable record, the other one still under construction, but
perceived to be creating more environmental problems than any other project
in China’s long history.

Megaprojects and China’s environment: a tale of two

dams and rapid trains
Large-scale environmental degradation is a ubiquitous reality of the modern
world. So is the fact that big events and spectacular effects power modern media
and generate widespread public attention. The daily deaths of 125 people in
motor vehicle accidents across North America is not news; a bus crash that kills
thirty-five people instantly is. This principle is generally applicable. Using an
example previously discussed in this book, building of tens of thousands of small
dams across China, of which thousands had to be soon abandoned because of
rapid silting or shoddy construction, was not worthy of any front-page attention;
China’s decision to build the world’s largest hydroproject, whose reservoir may
silt much faster than was anticipated by the original design, is.
Megaprojects are responsible for a small share of overall ecosystemic degra-
dation and environmental pollution, but they attract attention to these
regrettable phenomena, and they symbolize the frequent failures of our designs
to minimize environmental damage, to anticipate risks and to approach the
harnessing of natural resources with at least some humility. During the 1990s
China’s Sanxia (Three Gorges) dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project,
came to exemplify these shortcomings as it received enormous media attention
around the world. But we will have to see first the project’s completion and then
years of operation before we will be able to tell which of today’s many worries
will have materialized, and to what extent. But we already have an example of a
spectacular failure of what was at its time China’s largest hydroproject:
Sanmenxia on the Huanghe.
And so in this section on megaprojects I will deal first with Sanmenxia,
whose failure I helped to bring to a wider Western attention during the late
1970s by combining Soviet sources from the 1950s, newly released Chinese
materials, and satellite images of the reservoir acquired by LANDSAT,
launched in 1972 (Smil 1979b, 1979c). Only then will I take a closer look at
some aspects of Sanxia, and I will contrast these two cases of worrisome devel-
opments with suggestions for highly desirable megaprojects whose completion
would make China a better place.

Sanmenxia
The poetically named Gorge of the Three Gates (Northern Gate of Man,
Central Gate of the Soul, and Southern Gate of the Devil), located in Henan
approximately 12km downstream from the rectangular river bend near
Tongguan, was to be the largest and the most important of the original Huanghe
cascade (Berezina 1959). Designs made with Soviet aid were finalized in 1957 for
 Environment 191

a 110m-high and 839m-long concrete gravity dam with 121m-wide base and
32m-wide top, which was to create a 3,500km2 reservoir and to retain as much as
36Gm3 of water, 1.5 times the average annual volume of flow at the site.
The giant project (at the time of its planning second only to the Soviet
Kuibyshev storage facility) was to control 98 per cent of the annual runoff of the
Huanghe, to cut the heaviest summer flood flow from 37,000 to between 6,000
and 8,000m3/s, to provide irrigation for 2.6Mha, and to enable the installation
of 1.1GW of electricity-generating capacity. The total expenditure was to be a
staggering 1.6 billion yuan, or approximately US$700 million at 1957 values. The
main problem envisioned in building Sanmenxia dam was the flooding of
numerous villages and the displacement of a large number of peasants.
Originally, the highest reservoir surface was to be at 350m above sea level, a
height that would have caused the flooding of 130,000ha and the evacuation of
600,000 people. To lessen the immediate impact, the reservoir was to be filled
initially to only 335.3m above sea level so that only 215,000 villagers would be
displaced; the remaining impounded area was to be flooded during the next
15–20 years, and the affected peasants gradually resettled.
The planners were, of course, aware of another serious difficulty – the
danger of extreme silting. However, they thought that this could be controlled by
a variety of measures. The master Huanghe plan of 1955 foresaw the enormous
construction of 215,000 works to protect the heads of gullies, 683,000 check
dams, and 79,000 silt-precipitation dams, as well as extensive afforestation,
grassing and terracing to curtail erosion. The combined effort of these projects
was to extend the life of the reservoir to at least 50–70 years. As the experts
confidently concluded, any “difficulties that may arise in power generation, irri-
gation and navigation as a result of silting up the reservoir…will be
comparatively easy to deal with” (Teng 1955: 15).
Although Soviet hydroelectrical engineers had at that time considerable expe-
rience of large and complex projects, their appraisal of silting at Sanmenxia
turned out to be an astonishing and potentially extremely dangerous miscalcula-
tion. But the Soviet engineers were withdrawn just before the dam was
completed in September 1960, after three and a half years of construction. The
Chinese had to face the serious problem alone. Not only had the silting of the
reservoir greatly exceeded the original projection – more than 90 per cent of
incoming mud and sand was being retained in the lake – but the accumulation
became especially worrisome as these deposits started to extend rapidly
upstream to the Wei He above Laotongguan, elevating the inlet channel and
gravely endangering the densely populated agricultural plain and the city of
Xi’an, China’s ancient capital and now her eleventh-largest urban area.
The first turbines were already installed, but power production had to be
stopped because the lowest water intake for a generation was still higher than the
natural river level at Dongguan, allowing rapid silting of the lower Wei He to
continue. The removal of turbogenerators and the abandonment of water
storage did not solve the problem, because spillway intakes were too high and silt
kept accumulating. The only solution was a major reconstruction of the dam to
192 Environment

increase the silt-discharging capacity of the reservoir. This difficult and lengthy
process started in February 1965. During its first phase, one that lasted four
years, two tunnels with a width of 11m and a total length of 900m were cut
through a rock cliff on the left bank of the dam, and four of the eight penstocks
were turned into discharging outlets in order to double the discharge from
3,080m3/s to 6,000m3/s at 315m above sea level. The second phase raised the
discharge to 10,000m3/s at 315m by opening eight outlets at the bottom of the
dam and by lowering the remaining steel penstocks and one of the new silt-
discharge tubes by 13m.
By the end of 1973 the reconstruction was finished, and the Chinese engi-
neers had installed the first small 50MW turbine, specially coated with two layers
of epoxy resin and corundum to withstand the sandy-mud abrasion. Two more
50MW sets were later added, and the total capacity will be eventually only
200MW, less than 20 per cent of the original design. Two other key roles of the
reservoir – storage of water for irrigation, and, above all, guarding against floods
and prevention of damage to dikes downstream in Henan and Shandong – have
been no less compromised by the reconstruction. Minimum discharge had to be
raised. Because the floodwaters between July and October carry more than 80
per cent of the annual silt load passing through Sanmenxia (although the volume
constitutes only 60 per cent of the average flow), summer flood impoundment
had to be cut drastically to minimize silting.
Consequently, water is now stored only between flood seasons when the river
carries some 40 per cent of its average annual flow but only 10–20 per cent of its
silt load. The Chinese strategy of “storing clear water and discharging muddy
water” is well confirmed by satellite monitoring. Winter and spring LANDSAT
images show the gorge segment of the reservoir between the dam and the
Huanghe’s confluence with the Wei He filled with relatively clear water, swelling
in the least confined place to a width of more than 6km and covering as much as
approximately 250km2 (Figure 4.7). On the other hand, at the peak of the flood
season the reservoir below Tongguan shrinks to a narrow ribbon of silted water
with an area as small as 90km2 (Figure 4.7). Conditions upstream from
Tongguan are almost the reverse. When the summer floodwaters burst from the
confines of Longmen (Dragon Gate), they create a shallow, muddy lake approxi-
mately 120km long and 3.5–7km wide. In contrast, the winter flow meanders
erratically in numerous channels amid silt deposits.
What has been the effect of Sanmenxia reservoir in Shaanxi, Henan and
Shandong? The reservoir has very likely worsened the danger of flood in
Shaanxi, and, as the Chinese also admit, the reduced version cannot eliminate
the risk of flooding in the lower reaches. However, Sanmen reservoir can at least
alleviate the summer flood by moderating the rate and the force of the flow; the
Chinese claim that the reservoir did halve the force of the 1977 summer flood,
the worst high water in the river’s upper and middle course in forty years.
Only a few corrections and additions should be made in 2002, based on the
most comprehensive Chinese description of the project and its history published
in 2000 as a part of China’s review of major dams for the International
Figure 4.7 LANDSAT images (spectral band seven, in the near infrared) of Sanmenxia
reservoir. The first image (1 May 1978) shows a relatively clear (black), wide
and deep lake below Laotongguan. Only five weeks later just a narrow ribbon
of deeper water remained in the reservoir as a highly silty flow (grey) was
discharged through the dam
194 Environment

Committee on Large Dams (ICOLD 2000). Sanmenxia’s second reconstruction

was not completed in 1973 as originally claimed. Its first stage lasted from 1969 to
1979, and it included the reopening of eight diversion outlets, the excavation of
five penstock intakes, and the installation of five 50MW generators; the second
stage (1984–2000) involved the conversion of bottom outlets #1–8, and the
reopening and conversion of bottom outlets #9–12. Not surprisingly, there is no
information on the cumulative cost of this thirty-five-year-long reconstruction.
Every year Sanmenxia makes 1.4Gm3 of water available for spring irrigation
downstream, servicing up to 2.67Mha of fields; the reservoir’s water is also used
by several major cities, including Zhengzhou, Xinxiang and Kaifeng, and by the
Zhongyuan oilfield. With additional turbogenerators installed in 1994 and 1997,
the total capacity is now 400MW, a third of the original design, but the load
factor remains very low. The operation mode of storing clear water and
discharging muddy flow (xu qing pai nun) limits the hours of generation to a few
hundred a year, compared with an average of nearly 2,900 hours for all of
China’s large hydrostations. The Chinese, making a virtue of the costly necessity,
now describe the project as a great learning experience and a training ground for
the construction, operation and management of large dams: “Sanmenxia is
considered as the cradle of high dam construction in China” (ICOLD 2000: 4).
But the pride and approbation go only so far: when ICOLD met in 2000 in
Beijing, Sanmenxia was not on the list of more than forty hydrostations that
participants could visit after the conference on tours roaming all over China.
And, unfortunately, it appears that the key blunder in Sanmenxia’s design –
underestimating the future rate of reservoir silting – is to be repeated as the
Chinese builders are nearing completion of the Sanxia dam, the world’s largest
hydrostation, and undoubtedly its environmentally most controversial megapro-
ject. But before I turn to this now-infamous megaproject, I should briefly
describe what could be best termed Sanmenxia’s bigger twin, the Xiaolangdi
dam, built during the 1990s (Power Technology 2002). The dam, 1,667m long
and 154m high, is just 130km downstream from Sanmen Gorge and 40km north
of Luoyang in Henan. When fully filled its reservoir should create a 130km-long
lake of 12.8km3. Its hydroelectric capacity of 1.836GW is the largest on the
Huanghe (and as of the year 2000 the fourth largest in China, after Ertan,
Gezhouba and Lijiaxia), and the project’s other long-term purpose is to control,
in conjunction with other dams, a once-in-a-thousand-years flood.
Unlike the original Sanmenxia that was to store water and block silt (xu shui
lan sha), Xiaolangdi was designed with silt-discharge tunnels to store clear water
and discharge the muddy flow, but the deposition behind the dam will still be
considerable: its is estimated that over the next fifty years the reservoir will
reduce the amount of silt deposited downstream of the dam by the equivalent of
about twenty years’ normal accumulation. Electricity generation began in
January 2000, but it had to stop on 20 May as another severe drought forced the
central government to order the release of water in the reservoir to relieve down-
stream shortages (Becker 2000). The likely recurrence of such episodes will make
it impossible to reach the planned generation target of 5.1TWh a year that
 Environment 195

would imply nearly 2,800 hours of operation, almost equal to China’s average
that includes southern rivers with dependable water flows.
The Three Gorges (Sanxia) project is undoubtedly the greatest cause célèbre of
the now worldwide anti-dam-building movement that gathered both breadth
and intensity during the 1990s. Spectacular gorges in western Hubei and
eastern Sichuan – whose plunging cliffs and rushing waters were admired and
feared by generations of poets, nature connoisseurs, river boatmen, merchants
and travelers – suddenly became a symbol for the destruction and desecration
of rivers by megaprojects. And in this case it was to be the largest project of
them all. Not the highest or the longest dam – those primacies belong, respec-
tively, to the Rogun dam on the Vakhsh in Tajikistan (325m tall) and to the
Yacyreta-Apipe dam on the Parana between Paraguay and Argentina (69.6km)
– nor the most voluminous lake (39.3Gm3 compared to the 170Gm3 of Bratsk
reservoir on the Yenisey). But the dam will house turbogenerators with 18.2GW
of installed capacity, making it 44 per cent larger than the next largest hydrosta-
tion, Itaipu on the Parana between Brazil and Paraguay, rated at 12.6GW. And
the dam’s peak flood discharge will be 124,300m3/s, another world record
(ICOLD 2000).
In my first book on China’s energy (Smil 1976a) I noted, when reviewing
China’s plans for hydroelectricity expansion, that the largest of the Changjiang
projects, the 15–20GW Sanxia dam, might be built before the year 2000. As
plans to start the construction intensified during the mid-1980s, I was asked by
my Beijing colleague and friend Mao Yushi, acting in this instance on behalf of
the China Energy Research Society, to contribute to a collection of papers that
would provide comprehensive reasoning why Sanxia should not be built. I wrote
my brief contribution by approaching the problem from a general systems point
of view (Smil 1989), and leaving the details to my better-informed Chinese
colleagues. The piece was written in 1987, when the project was to have the
capacity of “only” 13, rather than 18.2GW, and when the Economic
Construction Group of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee
(1987) surprised everybody by publishing its call against proceeding with the
Sanxia project in the short term.
The book came out during the period of relatively free speech just preceding
the Tian’anmen killings (Tian and Lin 1989) and these were my principal argu-
ments why Sanxia should not be built (Smil 1989).

After decades of studies and scores of expert appraisals, it is hardly possible to

come up with new technical details in order to spare China the unnecessary and
multiply unprofitable endeavor of building the world’s largest dam. Instead of
recapitulating various well-appreciated particulars, I will make just one funda-
mental argument against the construction.
This overriding argument concerns the very size of the project. Undoubtedly,
it is unnecessarily large – and as such it is unforgiving and excessively demanding.
Sanxia’s 13GW will require an unprecedented level of investment and concentra-
tion of skilled labor – but these challenges can be met by a combination of
196 Environment

domestic and foreign expertise and funding. The project can be obviously built,
but why should it be so huge? If China is to learn from the West it should not
copy its outdated strategies. During the 1950s and 1960s, post-World War II
reconstruction and the quest for higher individual affluence favored the construc-
tion of ever-larger engineering projects, be they power plants, steel mills or car
factories. But since then all of the leading Western economies have come to
recognize the perils of such projects: their inordinate demand for financial and
human resources, their negative environmental side effects, and, above all, their
inherent inflexibility.
Clearly, the optimum levels have been overshot on numerous occasions, and
adjustments during the past fifteen or so years have been setting new, more
manageable standards. Perhaps the best way to generalize this important trend is
to say that we have discovered the advantages of being complexifying optimizers
rather than simplifying maximizers. A simple assessment may show the purely
economic benefits of a very large project – but a complex evaluation of its indi-
rect costs makes these investment gains doubtful, and a consideration of possible
long-term risks that cannot be quantified in the project’s planning stages defi-
nitely sways the optimum toward a smaller, albeit still relatively large, size. In the
case of large hydroelectric projects, the greatest long-term concern is certainly
about their environmental consequences.
Whatever the eventual negative effects of Sanxia may be – and they could
include such sudden dangers as massive rockslides in the reservoir area, and such
gradual degradation as the loss of coastal fishing in the East China Sea (China’s
richest fishing grounds off the coasts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang obviously depend
on the influx of nutrients in the Changjiang waters) – these risks would be
unnecessarily heightened by the large size of the project. If China had little
choice in siting large hydrostations Sanxia would become at least more under-
standable. But the country abounds in excellent sites suitable for building
hydroelectric projects that, while large, could be more manageable than Sanxia.
The construction of six or seven plants of 2GW each, instead of the 13GW
Sanxia, would have a much more positive influence on the country’s economy,
owing to the diffusion of regional economic multiplier benefits in a nation that
must encourage decentralization in order to prosper – while minimizing any
long-term environmental complications. Multifocal development of large, but
not gigantic, energy capacities is thus a sounder strategy than an extreme
concentration of resources on one project whose eventual long-term environ-
mental consequences may transform its simplistically seen economic benefits into
an overall loss for the society.

Remarkably, one month after the Tian’anmen massacre, a previously scheduled

and unusually long article by Sun (1989), detailing his opposition to the Sanxia
project, nevertheless appeared in the Beijing Review. Afterwards, all domestic
publications questioning the merits of the projects were suppressed. Meanwhile,
I explained in greater detail in my second book on China’s energy (1988) why
the project was not a desirable choice from a number of perspectives.
 Environment 197

When Probe International was putting together a critique of the Three Gorges
Water Control Project Feasibility Study (Ryder 1990), a government-funded
Canadian undertaking that basically rubber-stamped the Chinese desire to build
the dam, I was asked to contribute a chapter from an energy perspective.
I did so (Smil 1990), but my contribution was overshadowed by a quote from
me that the editors chose for the back cover: “This is not engineering and
science, merely an expert prostitution paid for by Canadian taxpayers”. But by
the time that opposition to the dam had become fashionably international, I was
not writing about Sanxia any more. By the early 1990s all key arguments against
the dam had been identified and appraised, ranging from the human cost of
massive forced resettlement to both upstream and downstream environmental
impacts and safety concerns. I had been aware of most of these arguments for
many years, I had articulated many of them at a time when the project was a
matter of concern only for a small group of energy experts – and I was
convinced that nothing more could be done.
I believed this, above all, because of Li Peng’s key position: China’s premier at
that time was an electrical engineer trained in Stalinist Russia, and it was clear
that he would do anything to ensure that the project was approved and built. If
there ever was a battle lost long before it commenced, it was the opposition to
Sanxia. So I decided that no more could be done, but recently I agreed to write
a short entry on Sanxia for the International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics,
whose partial reprint brings the story up to date (Smil 2002c).
The Three Gorges (Sanxia) area of the Changjiang (Yangzi) is a spectacular
section of China’s largest river in western Hubei province, beginning about
40km west of Yichang where the river leaves the mountains and enters the
Hubei plain. The three gorges (Xiling, Xia and Qutang) confine the river to a
narrow channel by tall, steep rocky slopes extending more than 100km westward
into eastern Sichuan. The gorges appear to be an obvious location for a very
large dam, and the first mention of such a project was contained in Sun Yatsen’s
1919 plan to develop China’s industry. In 1932 the Nationalist government
announced its intention to build a dam in the region, and in 1944 the US
Bureau of Reclamation prepared a preliminary construction plan.
After the worst ever flood in the river’s middle and lower basin in 1954,
Soviet hydroengineers helped China to conduct necessary surveys, and silting
and design studies, and the Beijing government set up the Changjiang Valley
Planning Office which became the project’s principal, and steadfast, promoter
during the next three decades. The dam was also favored by the ministries of
water resources and electric power, which also saw the gargantuan project as an
outstanding mark of China’s technical maturity. The world’s largest electricity-
generating capacity, effective flood control in the heavily populated Yangzi basin,
and improved navigation as far inland as Sichuan were to be the project’s prin-
cipal benefits.
But the enormous cost of the project was the principal cause for repeated
postponement of the final decision to proceed with the construction of the
Three Gorges dam. In 1984, after the country’s economic situation began
198 Environment

improving with the progress of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the State
Council approved the construction of a 175m-high dam to start in 1986. But a
more relaxed political situation in China of the mid-1980s led to unexpected
public debate about the merits of the project – and to its wide-ranging criticism.
In 1986 the Economic Construction Group of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Congress recommended to the State Council and to the
Communist Party’s Central Committee that the project should not go ahead. A
year later an edited book published in Hunan gathered a wide range of argu-
ments against the dam, and in February 1989 an unprecedented alliance of
journalists, engineers, scientists and public figures organized a press conference
to launch a new book vigorously arguing against the dam.
None of these arguments swayed the leadership. Not long after the
Tian’anmen massacre of June 1989, any criticism of the project in the Chinese
media was strictly forbidden, and Dai Qing, the editor of the 1989 book and
the country’s best-known female journalist (who trained as an engineer and
became an environmental activist), was jailed for ten months (Dai 1994).
Although no criticism of the project appeared in the Chinese media until 1999,
Dai Qing continued her campaign against it, both in China and abroad,
throughout the 1990s.
The final decision to proceed with construction was taken on 3 April 1992,
when a motion approving the project was put to the National People’s Congress
(China’s normally docile version of a parliament) and was passed with an
unprecedented third of all delegates either abstaining or voting against. At that
time the bureaucracies in favor of the project had, as I already noted, the
strongest possible ally in Li Peng, the country’s Prime Minister, who thought the
dam was a most desirable proof of the country’s technical prowess.
Some preparatory work at the site had been already done before the final
vote; work on the main construction site and on the river’s diversion began in
1993. The world’s third most voluminous river was diverted from its main
channel on 8 November 1997. The completed dam should be 175m tall, its
reservoir will inundate about 630km2 of land and displace at least 1.2 million
people. The dam will have about 18GW of generating capacity and produce
annually 84TWh of electricity. Sanxia will thus become by far the world’s largest
hydrostation: the Itaipu project on the Parana between Brazil and Paraguay has
12.6GW, and the largest Russian and American plants generate about 6GW, as
does Egypt’s Aswan dam across the Nile.
But the project’s progress has done little to eliminate the widespread opposi-
tion, in China and abroad. A long list of arguments against the dam embraces
human, engineering, economic and environmental considerations. The human
impact of the project is unprecedented, as the dam’s 600km-long reservoir will
displace anywhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million people. Because there is very
little suitable (i.e. flat and fertile) land available for their resettlement in the dam’s
immediate vicinity, reclamation has been proceeding on slopes steeper than 25º.
In the spring of 1999, Zhu Rongji, Li Peng’s successor as China’s premier and a
 Environment 199

man who has not shown any enthusiastic support for the project, urged an end to
such dangerous practices.
The lagging pace of resettling hundreds of thousands of people, together
with chronic construction problems (including the collapse of a bridge in the
resettlement area), led to other official expressions of concern in the spring and
summer of 1999. The original plan to resettle most of the displaced people close
to their former towns and villages is proving to be quite impractical, and more
than half a million peasants will have to be moved far from the site, most of
them even into other provinces.
The key engineering argument against the Sanxia dam questions the neces-
sity of such a gargantuan project in a country which has the world’s largest
hydroelectricity-generating potential and hence no shortages of sites where
smaller (although in absolute terms still very large) dams could be built at a
lesser financial, environmental and human cost. By concentrating on more
manageable projects, China could rely much more on her domestic engineering
capability, while most of the electricity-generating equipment needed for the
Three Gorges project will have to be imported. And with smaller projects there
would be a welcome diffusion of regional economic multiplier effects, an impor-
tant consideration in a nation which must encourage decentralization in order
to prosper.
The official Chinese projection for Sanxia’s total cost is 200 billion (1996)
yuan, or close to US$ (2000) 25 billion when converted by the official exchange
rate. A quarter of this sum is to be spent on the dam itself and a fifth on the
resettlement. But, as we have learned from numerous megaprojects inside and
outside of China, this total is almost certainly a substantial underestimate, and
the final cost may be easily twice as high.
While engineering and economic considerations are undoubtedly important,
concerns about the environmental effects of this unprecedented undertaking
came eventually to dominate the surprisingly widespread opposition.
Environmental risks that have been discussed most frequently include exces-
sively rapid siltation of the reservoir caused by extensive deforestation in the
river’s upper basin; loss of silt deposition downstream from the dam and
possible coastal erosion of the river’s delta; flooding of sites containing toxic
wastes; fluctuation of water levels at the reservoir’s upper end, exposing long
stretches of the riverbed loaded with untreated waste from Chongqing, a city of
more than 10 million people; risks of reservoir-induced earthquakes in the seis-
mically active area; dangers of massive rock slides causing the overtopping of
the dam; and effects on the river’s biota, including such rare species as the white
river dolphin. Other concerns range from the loss of one of the world’s most
spectacular landscapes and tourist attractions to the encroachment of salt water
into the Yangzi delta during periods of low water flow.
While the environmentalists lost the fight in China, their arguments were crit-
ical for shaping Sanxia’s perception abroad. Probe International, the
International Water Tribunal and the International Rivers Network have been
among the dam’s most outspoken opponents (Ryder 1990). The governments of
200 Environment

the USA and Canada, two of the Western world’s most experienced builders of
large dams, were initially rather enthusiastic supporters of the project. In 1985 a
US consortium made up of government agencies and private companies began
laying the ground for a joint project with China to build the dam, and in 1986 a
feasibility study undertaken by a consortium of Canadian and Chinese institu-
tions and paid for by the Canadian taxpayers through the Canadian
International Development Agency, endorsed the official Chinese design (CIPM
1988). But both governments eventually refused any direct participation in this
controversial project, as did the World Bank.
Completion of the project is planned for the year 2009, but delays are
almost certain. Disclosures made in 1999 about the use of substandard concrete
in the dam’s foundations, and the necessity to invite foreign quality-control
engineers in order to circumvent widespread corruption at the site, confirm
such a conclusion. But abandoning the project at this relatively late stage is very
unlikely. Although opponents of the dam still feel that the government may
decide to build a lower dam (165m), such a decision, while reducing the
flooding and population displacement, would halve the amount of planned
electricity generation. Only one thing remains certain: Sanxia dam will
continue to be a highly controversial project and a great environmental cause
célèbre for many years to come.
There seems to be no end of bad news regarding Sanxia. As I close this review
of China’s most spectacular and most controversial megaproject, I read about the
problems facing the massive cleanup of settlements, animal sheds, cemeteries and
garbage and toxic waste dumps that will be submerged by the reservoir. The orig-
inal budget for this cleanup was a mere $1 million compared to $1.4 billion for
the resettlement of people. But without an effective cleanup of the reservoir bed
the water quality could be compromised for decades to come. Moreover, large
numbers of rats not killed during the cleanup would move to higher ground and
infest new settlements (TGP 2002). Another greatly underestimated problem is
the cleanup of more than 1Gt of industrial and 300Mt of urban waste water
discharged into the Changjiang, and shortly into the uppermost part of the
Sanxia lake, by the new supermunicipality of Chongqing, now administratively
the world’s most populous city. While Zhang Guangduo, a Qinghua University
expert and a lead examiner of the project’s original feasibility study, concluded
that $37 billion was needed for this cleanup, only $5.37 billion was committed by
early 2001 for a period of ten years (TGP 2001).
Far more intractable is the problem of excessive silting. Recently announced
plans for the construction of two more megaprojects in the Changjiang’s upper
basin – Xiluodu (11.4GW) and Xiangjiaba (5.7GW) on the Jinshajiang in
Sichuan, whose combined capacity will be just 6 per cent smaller than that of
Sanxia – have been prompted more by the need to trap sediment before it
reaches the Sanxia reservoir rather than by any immediate need for more
hydrolectric power in the region. Pre-1985 monitoring put the mean annual
sediment load in the Three Gorges at 521Mt – but about 710Mt actually passed
through the site in 1998 (TGP 2001).
 Environment 201

But I should end this megaproject story on a more upbeat note. A few years
ago I did actually write an editorial for the Asian Wall Street Journal arguing that
China needs megaprojects – but only those that will improve the environment
even as they are providing great economic and social benefits. What follows is
the essence of those suggestions (Smil 1999d)

Environmentally desirable megaprojects

The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River, now in its second phase of
construction, is reportedly running into problems. This past week the authorities
announced that foreign firms would take over supervision duties because the
local overseers couldn’t guarantee quality. The dam’s other problems are already
well documented: it is simply too big, it is taking too long to build, it costs too
much and it will cause too many environmental problems. Wobbly foundations
are not the dam’s only problem – top-level support for the project also appears to
be weakening. In a clear contrast to his predecessor Li Peng, who remains the
dam’s biggest supporter, Premier Zhu Rongji did not even mention it in his
annual report on the work of the government. Opponents of the dam hope that
this may be the beginning of the project’s end. The best solution at this point –
after so much money has been spent, the river diverted and hundreds of thou-
sands people already uprooted – would be to fix the structural problems and
proceed with a substantially scaled-down version of the project.
But this experience should not dampen China’s enthusiasm for more appro-
priate megaprojects. Their days may be over in affluent countries, but China,
like any other modernizing country, needs them. That is, China needs the right
kind of megaproject in order to put in place many essential, long-lasting and
highly beneficial infrastructures. There is no shortage of excellent examples from
elsewhere in the world. Cold War fears were the proximate reason for US
President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to construct an interstate highway
system, but the resultant web of multilane roads makes the country the safest
place to drive. The French decision to build large nuclear power plants has been
both an economic and an environmental success. And long before it became a
rich country, Japan took a bold step with its bullet trains, which were twice as fast
as any scheduled service at that time.
China’s greatest challenge during the coming generation will be the move-
ment of tens of millions of people into its rapidly growing cities. Maoist policies
basically froze China’s urbanization until 1984, the year when food rationing
tied to place of residence ended. Since that time China’s cities have added
about 100 million people, and at least 150 million more will move in during the
next quarter-century. Three kinds of megaproject will help the country meet
the challenge.

A much more aggressive program of widespread, state-of-the-art subway construction Huge

numbers of people will have to be moved within the cities, and subways are the
fastest, most efficient means to do this. In every metropolitan area of more than
202 Environment

2–3 million people, China should be planning or building the first few links of
gradually expanding networks. It is counterproductive to wait until the city tops
10 million, as in Shanghai’s case. Beijing, too, has lost a great deal of ground –
new radial connections augmenting its circular line would have benefited the city
much more than the construction of multilane ring roads, now the major source
of chronic photochemical smog and generator of clogged-up traffic.

A bold commitment to build the world’s most extensive network of high-speed trains, traveling at
more than 300 kilometers per hour, throughout the eastern third of the country Official
Chinese policy envisages that eventually every family in China will have its own
car – and practical steps in that unfortunate direction have included numerous
joint ventures with foreign automakers, and the construction of multilane high-
ways. This is a mistake in a country which has relatively modest crude oil
resources – but already one of the world’s worst problems with smog.
A network of rapid intercity trains would limit the loss of China’s precious
high-quality periurban and alluvial farmland, and would go far toward reducing
the country’s rising ozone concentrations, the worst product of photochemical
smog. These transport systems should be electricity-driven, helping to maximize
the country’s energy conversion efficiency.

A massive effort to put in place the world’s largest, most advanced and most efficient system of
municipal and industrial water-treatment plants Two thirds of China’s rivers, the
sources of water for daily use, are seriously polluted. Advanced recycling would
create new water supplies throughout North China, where more than half a
billion people experience recurrent and even chronic water shortages.
Appropriate pricing of the recycled water would raise the ridiculously low rates
paid for water by China’s urban dwellers, farmers and industries, and hence
compel more efficient water use. This would obviate the need for a massive
south-to-north water transfer from the Yangzi to the Yellow River basin. This
interbasin transfer, contemplated since the 1950s, could have even more disas-
trous environmental effects than the Three Gorges dam.

At his recent Washington press conference, Premier Zhu boasted of his country’s
more than $100 billion in foreign reserves. It would be a sign of a farsighted
policy – of a vision commensurate with his wish to see China among the leading
nations of the world – if he committed a share of this wealth to these three “no-
regrets” megaprojects.
As this book goes to press, four years after the above comments were written,
there has been no wholehearted embrace of the three suggested no-regret priori-
ties, while the Sanxia dam, the paragon of China’s questionable megaprojects, is
moving toward its completion and work has begun on China’s other question-
able megaproject, the South/North water transfer. The history of every nation
offers many examples of unwise choices and missed opportunities, some only
marginally important, others truly fateful. Politicians may use these facts for
recrimination or for defining their own agendas; historians may take them as
 Environment 203

bases of what-if scenarios to construct alternative pasts. I view them with the
mixture of regret and frustration. “Better late than never” is a poor consolation
when knowing that the right decision could have been making a difference for
many years.
Some steps I have advocated for two decades were finally taken during the
1990s. The first link of Shanghai’s metro light-rail system (north–south line)
opened in April 1995, the first phase of the first Guangzhou subway line began
running in summer 1997, and the Ministry of Railways completed initial design
work for a Beijing–Shanghai high-speed train in June 1998 (Railway Technology
2002). The Ministry of Construction, and a number of other central institutions,
are now engaged in developing and implementing standards for energy-efficient
buildings and appliances. All laudable, but all mere beginnings: China has a very
long way to go before putting in place modern, energy-efficient and environ-
ment-sparing infrastructures.

Notes
1 My previous writings touching, or confronting, matters of environment, conflict, and
security have been: “Environmental change as a source of conflict and economic
losses in China”, occasional paper series of the project on Environmental Change and
Acute Conflict 2: 5–39 (Cambridge MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1992); “Some contrarian notes on environmental threats to national security”,
Canadian Foreign Policy 2(2): 85–87, 1994; “L’environnement et la politique interna-
tionale”, Etudes internationales 26(2): 361–371, 1995; “China’s environmental refugees:
causes, dimensions and risks of an emerging problem”, in K.R. Spillmann and G.
Bachler (eds) Environmental Crisis: Regional Conflicts and Ways of Cooperation (Berne: Swiss
Peace Foundation, 1995) 75–91.
2 R. Kaplan (1994) “The coming anarchy”, The Atlantic Monthly 273(2): 44–76. Kaplan
preaches with conviction and with the simplistic zeal of a prophet. His conclusions
are based on unqualified generalizations unmindful of enormous environmental and
socio-economic peculiarities; he does not hedge his remarks and he sees no detours or
surprises on the road ahead. He knows the environment will be “a terrifying threat”
to our security, and not satisfied with some local skirmishing, he predicts a frightening
array of wars driven by the disappearance of fish and appearance of refugees.
3 See, for example, K. Butts, “National security, the environment and DOD”, Environmental
Change and Security Report 2: 22–27, 1996. And one can have no doubt about a speedy
bureaucratic appropriation of the concern when reading that the first conference on
“Environmental security and national security” organized by the US Department of
Defense in June 1995 called on various governmental agencies “to prioritize interna-
tional environmental security issues in order to enhance US national security”.
4 UNDP, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See
also UNDP, “Redefining security: the human dimension”, Current History 592:
229–236, 1994.
5 As a former citizen of the Soviet empire, I draw an obvious analogy with politics in
Communist states, where even the most mundane affairs became matters of political
import, requiring guidance, vigilance, struggles, and campaigns waged by the ever-
alert Party. The how-people-live-and-breathe school of security studies goes even
beyond that. Communists had an obsessive interest in my class background, and the
ever-present informers in my casual remarks, but with breathing they left me pretty
much alone. Obviously, conceiving politics or security in such a fashion robs the terms
of any real meaning.
204 Environment

6 Among many relevant recent contributions, see: “The liberation of the environ-
ment”, Daedalus summer 1996; J.L. Simon, The State of Humanity (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995); V. Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview, 1994).
7 For a sampling of these arguments, see: D. Deudney, “The case against linking
environmental degradation and national security”, Millennium 19: 461–476, 1990; G.
Porter, “Environmental security as a national security issue”, Current History 592:
218–222, 1994; T. Homer-Dixon, M. Levy, G. Porter and J. Goldstone,
“Environmental security and violent conflict: a debate”, Environmental Change and
Security Project 2: 49–71, 1996.
8 R. Ullman, “Redefining security”, International Security 8: 129–153, 1983.
9 For detailed analyses of the state of China’s environment, see: V. Smil,, The Bad Earth:
Environmental Degradation in China (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1984); Smil, China’s Environmental
Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993); and
R.L. Edmonds, Patterns of China’s Lost Harmony (London: Routledge, 1994).
10 These concepts are discussed, for example, in H. Daly and J.B. Cobb, For the Common
Good (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1989); V. Smil, Global Ecology (London: Routledge,
1993).
11 V. Smil, Environmental Problems in China: Estimates of Economic Costs (Honolulu: East–West
Center, 1996); V. Smil and Mao Yushi (coordinators) The Economic Costs of China’s
Environmental Degradation (Boston MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998).
12 For details see Smil (1996), note 11 above.
13 P. Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke (London: Routledge, 1987).
14 For more on nitrates in the environment see V. Smil, Cycles of Life (New York:
Scientific American Library, 1997).
15 I am using a conversion based on the most plausible purchasing power parity value,
not on the official exchange rate. While the latter calculation puts China’s per capita
GDP at only some US$500, a misleading underestimate, the former valuation puts
China’s 1995 GDP at about US$1,800/capita. For the latest reappraisal of China’s
GDP, see World Bank, Poverty Reduction and the World Bank: Progress and Challenges in the
1990s (Washington DC: World Bank, 1996).
16 I.Yamazawa, S. Nakayama and H. Kitamura, Asia-Pacific Cooperation in Energy and the
Environment (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1995).
17 All of these figures are readily available in: World Resources Institute, World Resources
1996–97 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), or at http://www.wri.org/wri.
18 For a critique of these figures see V. Smil, “China’s environment: resilient myths and
contradictory realities”, in K.K. Gaul and J. Hiltz (eds) Landscapes and Communities on
the Pacific Rim (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000) 167–181.
19 For example, if China were to import 70 per cent of its total grain demand, the share
corresponding to recent Japanese imports, it would absorb more than the total mass
of corn, wheat and rice sold annually worldwide.
20 Even when limited to English-language books, the comprehensive list of relevant
writings would be too long. The following volumes will give a wide-ranging introduc-
tion to recent thinking: F. Archibugi and P. Nijkamp, Economy and Ecology (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1989); R. Costanza (ed.) Ecological Economics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991); H. Daly and K.N. Townsend (eds) Valuing the Environment (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1993).
21 For a detailed survey of possible valuation techniques see: J.A. Dixon et al., Economic
Analysis of Environmental Impacts (London: Earthscan, 1994).
22 A.M. Freeman, The Measurement of Environmental and Resource Values (Washington DC:
Resources for the Future, 1997); S.E. Rhoads (ed.) Valuing Life: Public Policy Dilemmas
(Boulder: Westview, 1980).
23 This is obvious by looking at the analytical framework recommended for national
assessments of environmental impacts by the United Nations: UNO, Integrated
Environmental and Economic Accounting (New York: UNO, 1993).
 Environment 205

24 For example, estimating that 80 per cent of people in a region are exposed to exces-
sive concentration of a pollutant whose effects cause a 40 per cent rise in the
incidence of upper respiratory morbidity, and that a typical illness event is associated
with a 30 per cent increase in absence from work, there will be roughly a 10 per cent
rise in lost labor hours. Changing the fractions marginally to, respectively, 70, 30 and
20 cuts the total by more than half.
25 Thanks to a generation of fairly strict birth controls, China’s relative population
growth, recently at just around 1.1 per cent a year, is much lower than in any other
populous modernizing nation (India’s rate has been about 1.9 per cent, Brazil’s 1.6
per cent) – but the huge base makes the absolute additions still highly taxing.
26 China’s inflation-adjusted GDP averaged 9.4 per cent a year between 1980 and 1991,
compared to South Korea’s 9.6 and India’s 5.4 per cent. Since 1991, China’s growth
rate of just above 10 per cent has been unmatched worldwide.
27 Two comprehensive surveys of China’s current environmental ills are: V. Smil, China’s
Environmental Crisis (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993); and R.L. Edmonds, Patterns of
China’s Lost Harmony (London: Routledge, 1994).
28 The two country studies – the Dutch one calculating pollution costs in the year 1985
and the West German account for the years 1983–1985 – ended up with very
different conclusions. The Dutch study put the annual cost of air and water pollu-
tion and noise at just 0.5–0.9 per cent of the country’s GDP, while the German total
was 6 per cent, an order of magnitude higher: J. Nicolaisen, A. Dean and P. Hoeller,
“Economics and the environment: a survey of issues and policy options”, OECD
Economic Studies spring 1991: 7–43. The main reason for the higher German value
was in accounting for the disamenity effects of air pollution and for the impact of
noise on property values.
29 National Environmental Protection Agency, Environment Forecast and Countermeasure
Research in China in the Year 2000 (Beijing: Qinghua University Publishing House, 1990).
30 V. Smil, Environmental Problems in China: Estimates of Economic Costs (Honolulu:
East–West Center, 1996).
31 Mao Yushi chose Professor Wang Hongchang of the CASS to prepare a paper on
deforestation, Professor Ning Datong of the Beijing Normal University to write about
land use changes, and Xia Guang of the National Environmental Protection Agency
to evaluate costs of air and water pollution.
32 V. Smil and Mao Yushi (coordinators) The Economic Costs of China’s Environmental
Degradation (Boston MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998).
33 Zhang Jianguang, “Environmental hazards in the Chinese public’s eyes”, Risk Analysis
14: 163–167, 1994.
34 Conversion efficiencies range from just around 5 per cent for steam locomotives and
10–15 per cent for poorly designed traditional stoves to 30–40 per cent for better urban
stoves and 50 per cent for small boilers. In contrast, the best household natural gas
furnaces have efficiencies in excess of 90 per cent, as do the largest industrial boilers.
35 For comparison of recent air pollution levels in the world’s largest cities, see:
Earthwatch, Urban Air Pollution in Megacities of the World (Oxford: WHO/UNEP/
Blackwell, 1992).
36 Zhao Dianwu and H.M. Seip, “Assessing effects of acid deposition in southwestern
China using the MAGIC model”, Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 60: 83–97, 1991.
37 On indoor air pollution see: K. Smith and Youcheng Liu, “Indoor air pollution in
developing countries”, in J.M. Samet (ed.) Epidemiology of Lung Cancer (New York:
Marcel Dekker, 1994) 151–184.
38 China is now the world’s largest producer of cigarettes, and its total of 350 million
smokers is growing by 2 per cent a year; the average number of cigarettes smoked
rose from 10 per person per day in 1994 to 14 in 1996: China News internet files,
25 November 1996.
206 Environment

39 D. Gao et al., “Mercury pollution and control in China”, Journal of Environmental

Sciences 3: 105–11, 1991.
40 For details on nitrogen enrichment of the biosphere see: V. Smil, Cycles of Life (New
York: Scientific American Library, 1997).
41 Ling Bo et al., “Use of night soil in agriculture and fish farming”, World Health Forum
14: 67–70, 1993.
42 Recent cost-benefit studies of controlling air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin are a
perfect example. Total annual health benefits from reduced morbidity were found to
be as low as US$ (1990) 1.2 billion, or as high as US$ (1990) 20 billion: A.J. Krupnick
and P.R. Portney, “Controlling urban air pollution: a benefit-cost assessment”, Science
252: 522–528, 1991; J.V. Hall, A.M. Winer, M.T. Kleinman, F.W. Lurmann, V. Brajer
and S.D. Colome, “Valuing the benefits of clean air”, Science 255 (1992): 812–817.
Given the cost of US$ (1990) 13 billion which may be required to clean up the basin’s
air, morbidity costs alone can either easily justify the effort, or make it economically
quite unappealing.
43 For more on China’s changing farmland, see: F.W. Crook, “Underreporting of
China’s cultivated land area: implications for world agricultural trade”, China
Agriculture and Trade Report RS–93: 33–39, 1993; V. Smil, “Who will feed China?”, The
China Quarterly 143: 801–813, 1995.
44 Han Chunru, “Recent changes in the rural environment in China”, Journal of Applied
Ecology 26: 803–812, 1989.
45 Li Yongzeng, “Chinese forestry: crisis and options”, Liaowang (Outlook) 1989(12): 9–10.
46 See, among many others: D. Heinsdijk, Forest Assessment, Wageningen: Center for
Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1975; R. Repetto, R. Solorzano, R. de
Camino, R. Woodward, J. Tosi, V. Watson, A. Vasquez, C. Villalobos and J. Jimenez,
Accounts Overdue: Natural Resource Depletion in Costa Rica (Washington DC: World
Resources Institute, 1991).
47 Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and the Environment in China (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 1994).
48 For more on noise in China’s cities, see V. Smil, Environmental Change as a Source of
Conflict and Economic Losses in China (Cambridge MA: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 1992).
49 World Bank, Poverty Reduction and the World Bank: Progress and Challenges in the 1990s
(Washington DC: World Bank, 1996).
5 Looking ahead by
looking back

When thinking about the future of large nations – and particularly those
burdened by a long and recently highly traumatic history – most prognosticators
and judges of national fortunes find it very difficult not to succumb, largely if not
completely, to extreme scenarios. Perhaps the most prominent example from the
last generation is the judgment of Western “experts” of the USSR/Russia’s
importance. First the USSR was seen by too many experts as an invincible state
whose military might and international influence would only grow; after its
demise other experts quickly wrote off Russia – with its alcoholic pandemic,
falling life expectancy and shrinking population – as a country largely, if not
entirely, irrelevant to the course of modern history. And perhaps the most
obvious post-9/11 example is the US attitude to the Saudi royal family: officially
still valued, if a reluctant, time-tested ally, but in the eyes of families of 9/11
victims a particularly odious enemy being sued for $1.2 trillion as an accomplice
of terror.
Hence it comes as no surprise that we have been told about China as an
inevitable superpower whose aggressively pursued interests will soon clash
perilously with those of the USA and recreate a new Cold War-like contest –
as well as about China beset by a combination of challenges (coping with its
ageing population, trying to secure enough food, water and energy, and
keeping in check various centrifugal forces) that will make it preoccupied with
its internal affairs and amenable to international cooperation. I will not add
to these dubiously extreme judgments. Instead, I will close this book by
stressing first our dismal record in forecasting, and then outlining some key
contending trends.

Failed forecasts
During the second half of the twentieth century, forecasting has grown from a
relatively infrequent activity to a ubiquitous enterprise that is eagerly embraced
by institutions ranging from universities to governments, and from multinational
companies to NGOs. Its topics range from short-term forecasts of business
performance to long-term explorations of international security, and its tech-
niques include highly formalized quantitative models as well as a variety of
208 Looking ahead by looking back

probabilistic approaches. All of these efforts share one outstanding feature: at

best a mediocre, and typically a dismal success rate. Here is a simple test of this
conclusion. Choose a major national or international event of the last three
decades of the twentieth century, go back ten, or even just five years, and try to
find out if anybody’s forecast fits.
You will immediately start piling up a long list of hugely important events that
were entirely unanticipated only five years before they took place. A handful of
examples will suffice. Who in 1967 forecast Nixon’s tête-à-tête with Mao; in 1974,
Shah Reza Pahlavi’s flight from Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent; in 1985,
the collapse of the USSR; in 1989 the Nikkei index plunging to below 10,000
(when it had peaked at nearly 40,000); or in 1996, US troops in Afghanistan?
Indeed, at least three of these five cases were utterly unforeseen just a year before
they took place, the last one not until 9/11. And China’s modern history
contains so many surprising policy reversals that I singled them out (in an edito-
rial I wrote for the Asian Wall Street Journal on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of the Communist state) as one of the most important characteris-
tics of the post-1949 era (Smil 1999e).

China’s unstable past and future

Reviewing Communist China’s accomplishments and failures, one important
characteristic of the country’s eventful history during the latter half of the
twentieth century emerges: numerous and abrupt reversals of the most funda-
mental public policies. This is a sign of China’s underlying instability, and a
good reason to be wary of future shifts. Some of these dramatic reversals have
been welcome, and indeed essential, ingredients of Deng Xiaoping’s post-
1978 reforms. In less than five years Deng turned the world’s most
communalized, rigidly planned and badly underperforming agricultural
system into tens of millions of small private enterprises. The farmers’ enthusi-
astic response to new market opportunities lifted China’s average per capita
food availability, after two decades of at best subsistence stagnation. The
doors were opened to the arch-villains of Maoist ideology, the despicable and
ruthless capitalist exploiters in charge of multinational corporations, who
suddenly became valued foreign friends and were given permission to make a
profit in China.
But unanticipated abrupt reversals of key policies marked the Maoist years.
During the first decade of Mao’s reign, China’s attitude toward the Soviet Union
went from friendly deferral to an “elder brother”, to abusive tirades against an
overbearing hegemon. And in 1957, not long after he exhorted the country’s
intellectuals to speak boldly and critically – to let 100 flowers bloom and 100
schools of thought contend – the Great Helmsman used the resulting outpouring
of criticism to identify “poisonous weeds” and launched a generation-long perse-
cution of scholars and artists.
Of course, Mao’s worst series of reversals came in 1958 when, after the
country completed its first Stalinist five-year plan, he abruptly jettisoned what he
 Looking ahead by looking back 209

thought to be a too ponderous economic advance in favor of the grassroots-

driven Great Leap Forward, a move of unprecedented economic delusion and
disdain for the fate of his subjects. But in the standard Western judgment Mao
is now remembered not for the deaths and suffering he brought to his own
people – but for his later “good” reversal, for chatting sagely with Henry
Kissinger and for giving Richard Nixon the unforgettable experience of seeing
a revolutionary ballet.
Shortly before the great opening-up to the USA, the Maoist leadership
came up with yet another abrupt reversal, this time in population policy. In
1957, after Ma Yinchu, an eminent economist and the president of Beijing
University, cautioned the leadership about the rapid growth of China’s popu-
lation, he was dismissed from his post and became a non-person for the next
twenty-two years. The faster the population growth the better, Mao concluded
in 1957.
When the Party realized that Mr Ma was right, it responded with the world’s
most aggressive and highly intrusive program of population control, including
birth quotas, reporting of menstrual periods and forced abortions. Today,
however, the pendulum is again swinging back. The Party is starting to worry
about the prospect of supporting a rapidly ageing population. So the govern-
ment is officially retreating from its draconian one-child policy.
One recent abrupt reversal with enormous socio-economic impacts has been
the total ban on logging in the Yangzi River’s upper basin. The logging in those
areas had long made the destruction of the Amazon forest seem a tame affair.
Some of the world’s highest deforestation rates could be found in the region,
particularly in Sichuan, where millions of people came to depend on the activity.
After the great floods of the summer of 1998 – in which the tree cutting
undoubtedly played a role, but was not, as is often misunderstood, their main
cause – the central government issued a hasty total ban.
In short, contrary to the current Beijing leadership’s mantra of maintaining
stability, China’s undemocratic political system is still prone to abrupt lurches
from one extreme to another, bringing huge economic costs as well as disruptions
to people’s lives. And this phenomenon is hardly confined to domestic policies.
In foreign policy, friendly overtures to the Dalai Lama are soon followed by
scornful dismissals of the man as an unworthy partner in any talks. Taiwan is
lured by promises of a Hong Kong-like arrangement, and then threatened with
imminent military attack. Beijing’s top generals are now openly talking about
joining with Russia to form a counterbalance to the aggressive and never-to-be-
trusted USA, yesterday’s great strategic partner.
While the Chinese people have benefited from some of these shifts, like the
Deng-era reforms, their frequency and impact over the last fifty years have
largely served to disrupt China’s economic development and destroy lives. For
outsiders they carry one lesson: until China embarks on political reform, there is
very little likelihood that the country’s future will be a linear extension of the
recent past, a matter of continuity and stability. The lessons of the past tell us to
anticipate more great reversals.
210 Looking ahead by looking back

Are there any good forecasts?

But examples from the world of politics and international affairs can be seen as
unfairly difficult tests of forecasting success, as they deal with developments
suffused with emotions and irrationality, and hence largely outside the realm of
rational prediction. Stock market valuations might be seen in a similar light.
Forecasts of total energy consumption and grain harvests (national or global), of
global crude oil prices, of new electricity-generating capacities or emissions of
greenhouse gases, should be much more successful. After all, all of these develop-
ments depend on the performance of infrastructures that are already in place, the
most likely fluctuations can be judged on the basis of past experience, and long
periods of planning and financial commitment are needed to effect many of these
changes. All true, but not necessarily all that helpful – as forecasts of energy, food
and environmental affairs offer some of the best examples of failed predictions.
And it is not just that the absolute forecast values are significantly off, but that
their uselessness, for forecasts looking 5–50 years ahead, often becomes obvious in
just a matter of months or a few years after their publication.
Moreover, this conclusion is true for every kind of forecast – be it about tech-
nical innovations, available natural resources, gross outputs of particular
commodities, their prices or their final consumption. I have gathered many such
examples in a paper for Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Smil 2000c),
whose substantially expanded version became the third chapter of Energy at the
Crossroads (Smil 2003). An interested reader may find there astonishing dismissals
of key technical inventions published just years or months before those innova-
tions began their triumphal conquest of global markets; baseless worries about
the imminent exhaustion of this or that mineral resource; and price forecasts
that would have been easily beaten by entirely random guesses.
More importantly, there may be no reason for satisfaction even when some
forecasts are substantially vindicated. I have no better example in this category
than my own predictions of China’s aggregate energy demand, which I
prepared in 1975 and published in 1976. In retrospect, my median variants for
the years 1985 and 1990 turned out to have errors of, respectively, a mere 2
and 10 per cent (Smil 1976a; Fridley 2001). But this record is no reason for
self-congratulation, as the overall setting and countless details of the system
whose performance I tried to forecast have changed beyond mine, and indeed
anybody’s, expectations. I had no doubts that major changes would follow
Mao’s death, but I could not have predicted either the speed or the extent of
China’s post-1979 modernization, and all of its complex implications for energy
demand and economic expansion.
My forecasts assumed that between 1980 and 2000 China’s economy would
grow most likely by 6 per cent a year, and I derived the long-term trend of
energy intensity from the regression for the 1949–1974 period. In reality, China’s
official statistics translate into an average exponential growth of more than 9 per
cent in constant monies – but at the same time, as shown in detail in Chapter 2,
the country had been dramatically reducing its relative need for energy.
Consequently, my rather successful forecast of China’s primary energy needs in
 Looking ahead by looking back 211

1985 and 1990 was the result of being doubly wrong, as my underestimate of
average GDP growth rate was almost perfectly negated by my overestimate of
energy intensity. And the continuing decline of the average energy intensity of
China’s economy means that even forecasts less than a decade old are already
substantially off. Six foreign and domestic forecasts issued between 1994 and
1999 put the country’s total primary energy consumption in the year 2000 at
1.491–1.562Gtce (mean of 1.53Gtce) while the actual use was 1.312Gtce,
making those forecasts 12–19 per cent too high in a matter of just a few years.
But I have an even better example of a reasonable success that still misses.
Better because it refers to a broad range of developments, and because it
displays all the common weaknesses of long-range forecasting. I am referring to
a Delphi forecast of China’s future, a study I conducted with twenty experts on
Chinese affairs between November 1974 and March 1975, that is nearly two
years before Mao’s death. The Delphi method is an extension of systematic anal-
ysis into the areas of opinion and value judgment. Its basic ideas are anonymous
questioning, iteration and controlled feedback, and expression of results in terms
of probability estimates. This probabilistic group response is most useful wher-
ever there is a high degree of uncertainty and complexity, and Delphi output is a
valuable heuristic tool for gaining insights into fuzzy futures. And China’s future
a year or two before Mao’s death looked utterly fuzzy.
Our group of twenty included Richard Baum, Jürgen Domes, Leo Goodstadt
(at that time at the Far Eastern Economic Review, later Chief Policy Adviser to Chris
Patten’s Hong Kong government), Michel Oksenberg, Leo Orleans and
Frederick Teiwes, and, in retrospect, it did a surprisingly good job. In quantifying
probabilities of important events that might take place in China between 1975
and 2000, the group assigned the highest value (median and mode of 75 per
cent) to new “revisionism”, that is to a major departure from the Maoist course:

participants felt that although some aspects of the Maoist period might be
retained, the evolution of a more stable society is all but inevitable due to
the industrialization of the country, mechanization and modernization (e.g.
fertilizers) of her agriculture, growing urbanization, greater contacts with
the world, the increasing importance of scientific research, and the necessity
of long-range planning and complex management.
(Smil 1977b: 480)

On the other hand, we correctly saw very low probabilities (all modal values
below 10 per cent) of not just Sino-Soviet and Sino-Indian war, and a new Great
Leap Forward, but also of the collapse of the Communist government and reap-
pearance of regional fragmentation.
In weighting the relative importance of China’s critical problems during the
last quarter of the twentieth century, we ranked population/food balance,
modernization vs. ideology, youth, industrial growth and its requirements, and
generational succession, as the top five items. And, interestingly enough, there
was the group’s difficult task of estimating dates of future developments. Its
212 Looking ahead by looking back

median estimates of 50 per cent probability occurrence were: 1978 for the peace
treaty with Japan (it was signed that year); the first long-term credit arrange-
ments with Western countries (China became a member of the World Bank in
1980); 1999 for Hong Kong’s integration with China (its colonial status ended in
1997); and 2000 for China becoming the world’s third-largest economy (true if
using some higher PPP estimates).
But the group’s assessment was also subject to the biasing effect of recent
events, perhaps the most common weakness found in long-range forecasts. Sino-
Soviet relations were ranked far ahead of Sino-American ones in terms of their
impact on China’s future. The second highest probability, after the new “revi-
sionism”, was another Lin Biao-type crisis (who now remembers that affair but
historians of modern China?). Rumors of China’s potential oil riches led the
group to put a 50 per cent probability on China surpassing the USA in crude oil
output by 1995. And, most importantly, the group consensus did not foresee (in
spite of all the relics of Maoism in today’s China) either the speed or the sweep
of post-1978 reforms. We have taken these developments increasingly for
granted, but they still appear astonishing when seen from the 1975 perspective.
I summarized the dismal record of long-term energy forecasting in three
conjoined axioms (Smil 2003). No long-range forecast can be correct in all of its
aspects; most of these forecasts will be wrong in both quantitative and qualitative
terms; and while some forecasts may get a number of quantities and timings
right, they will not capture the new qualities created by subtly-to-profoundly
altered wholes. And so the lessons of failures in forecasting are clear: while there
is no way to prevent our forecast-happy, computer-equipped civilization from
issuing a ceaseless stream of outlooks and predictions and scenarios, it is impera-
tive to understand the profoundly limited utility of this output, and to realize
that even its apparent successes may not be very helpful, as it is virtually impos-
sible to supply them in the correct, and complex, context.
A correct forecast of China’s GDP growth rate for the period 1978–2000
would be one thing if it had taken place in a slowly reforming quasi-Maoist state
with a high degree of autarky; and an entirely different matter when the country
has been an increasingly important component of the global economy to which
it is now tied by links ranging from growing foreign trade to a large population of
students at foreign universities, and from membership of the WTO to an
emerging dependence on imports of energy. That is why I will not offer here any
new forecasts, merely some musings on possible trends.

Contending trends
A careful reading of history shows that the outcomes of complex developments
are often much less circumscribed than is commonly believed. The combination
of biophysical constraints, burdens of history, and peculiarities of culture and
politics counts for a lot – but it does not preordain the future. Closer looks at
complex situations always reveal the existence of contending trends, and hence
of realistic choices. Every one of them can be handled in one of three basic
 Looking ahead by looking back 213

ways: vigorously pursued, largely ignored or aggressively opposed – or with

countless, and shifting, nuances in between. The long-term balance of these
complex interplays determines the outcome.
China’s dependence on coal offers a perfect example of these contending
options. Recent reductions in coal extraction (leaving aside the question of their
real extent) generated some exaggerated expectations – but China’s high depen-
dence on coal cannot be shed so easily. Currently some three quarters of China’s
electricity is generated by burning coal, and, as we have seen, the electricity
intensity of China’s economy, unlike its overall energy intensity, has been
increasing. And although China has a very large untapped hydroenergy poten-
tial, most of the approximately 20GW of new generating capacity needed every
year cannot come from hydrostations whose capital costs are far higher, and
construction periods far longer, than for coal-fired plants. This kind of reasoning
leads to long-range forecasts of doubled coal consumption by 2020–2025.
Yet this growing demand for electricity should also increase the efficiency with
which coal is used in China. Because of the numerous advantages of electricity
compared to fuels, the twentieth century saw a relentless rise of the share of coal
consumption used to generate electricity. The US share rose from less than 20 per
cent in 1950 to nearly 80 per cent by 2001, with residential and commercial uses
accounting for the combined total of less than 0.5 per cent of the final consump-
tion (EIA 2001). The Chinese pattern is still very different: the country converted
only about 10 per cent of its coal to electricity in 1950, and about 35 per cent
during the late 1990s (Smil 1976a; Fridley 2001). About 12 per cent of China’s
coal is still burned very inefficiently by China’s urban households and commercial
enterprises, and nearly 40 per cent is used directly by industries, including many
small-scale operations. Shifting this fuel to large power plants, particularly those
with cogeneration or combined cycles, could eventually nearly double the current
output of useful energy.
Moreover, a very large share of these domestic and industrial uses can be
converted relatively rapidly to natural gas: the higher cost of the gas is readily
repaid by much higher conversion efficiencies of burning this inherently superior
fuel, and by radically reduced air pollution. China has already embarked on this
near-universal substitution, and the coming years may see anything ranging from
a steady expansion to a very rapid replacement of urban coal by a combination
of domestic and imported natural gas.
At the same time, China’s rising affluence may lead to such a widespread
adoption of air conditioning and electrical appliances that its coal-fired elec-
tricity generation will have to grow even faster than anticipated. Hence it will be
a complex and dynamic interplay of rising need for electricity generated largely
from coal, more efficient uses of coal in improved electricity generation, and
the requirements for more efficient conversions and cleaner environment that
favor natural gas that will determine the shares of these fossil fuels in the
country’s primary energy consumption. Realistically conceivable differences
between the extreme tilts translate to very large absolute values over the course
of 15–25 years.
214 Looking ahead by looking back

Similar contending trends can be found in every instance of securing China’s

energy and food while maintaining an acceptable quality of environment. The
application of nitrogen fertilizer is the best analogy to coal use in the food sector.
As we have seen, China is now the world’s largest user of nitrogen fertilizer – but
also perhaps its most inefficient one. Field experiments have shown that nitrogen
recovery rates in continuously irrigated rice in Asia are very low, averaging only
about 31 per cent (Cassman et al. 2002), and the rates are often less than 25 per
cent in some Chinese provinces.
This, obviously, leaves much room for improvement, and a seemingly unexcep-
tional forecast of large increases of nitrogen fertilizer applications needed to
produce food for an additional 200 million people from the diminishing area of
farmland may be thus defeated by the concurrent aggressive pursuit of higher
field fertilization efficiencies. These are harder to achieve with wet-field crops, but
Japan points the way: after reaching their peak during the early 1980s, average
nitrogen applications to Japanese rice began falling, and in combination with a
slightly higher yield, this decline translated to an approximate 30 per cent gain in
apparent uptake efficiency of the nutrient between 1980 and 1995 (Smil 2001b).
But even a significant success in reducing specific nitrogen applications may
not lead to the stabilization of the nutrient’s overall use if China’s meat eating,
and hence the need for more animal feed, should rise closer to today’s Taiwanese
rate. And, to make just one more switch, this need for more feed could be easily
met if future genetically modified grains were to be produced with less fertilizer
in a climate with higher, and better distributed, natural precipitation due to the
regionally beneficial effect of global warming that may leave China better off
than, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, the long-term outcome is
not predetermined by today’s constraints and realities, and the range of possible
results remains very wide.
Finally, let us consider a key environmental example of contending trends, the
one involving China’s northern water supply. South/North water transfer may
ease the conditions of the northern part of the North China Plain, in Shandong
and in the southern Hebei (including Beijing and Tianjin), particularly when
combined with higher water-use efficiency in irrigation and industrial production.
The effectiveness of these steps can be clearly seen in the USA, where the abso-
lute water withdrawal dropped by nearly 10 per cent between 1980 and 1995
(USGS 1995), even as the country’s population increased by 16 per cent, and its
inflation-adjusted GDP rose by about 54 per cent (EIA 2001). On the other hand,
China’s average per capita water use is only a fraction of the US mean and, as I
stressed before, it can never come even close to the US rate. Yet increased grain
imports could considerably lower the water use in farming, as one kilogram of
grain typically needs at least 1,500kg of water: large-scale imports of feed grain
could thus save China both fertilizer and water (Smil 2000a).
However – to switch to a counter-trend that is well documented in other
countries – greater affluence means the spread of suburban housing (with its
vastly higher water demand for yards and pools), and of recreational water uses
(from ubiquitous golf courses to water parks). Most importantly, it will be the
 Looking ahead by looking back 215

long-term effects of the unfolding climatic change that will either ease or inten-
sify North China’s water shortages. But I hasten to add an important caveat:
even significantly higher northern precipitation may be of limited use if most of
it comes down, as some climatologists fear, in a few extreme summer events
when the main effect of high and rapid runoff could be more crop and property
damage and accelerated soil erosion. And so, once again, the future of northern
China’s water is not foreclosed by today’s realities, but remains much more open
than those observers who resort to simplistic comparisons of the existing
supply–demand imbalance would believe.
Perhaps I should have dispensed with these three examples and just cited a
passage from Mencius, whose keen insights I have found always more inter-
esting than the didactic moralizings of Confucius. He opens the second book of
his sayings and conversations by the following parable (taken from D.C. Lau’s
translation):

Suppose you laid siege to a city…and you failed to take it. Now in the
course of the siege, there must have been, at one time or another, favourable
weather, and in spite of that you failed to take the city. This shows that
favourable weather is less important than advantageous terrain. Sometimes
a city has to be abandoned in spite of the height of its walls and depth of its
moat, the quality of arms and abundance of food supplies. This shows that
advantageous terrain is less important than human unity. Hence it is said, It
is not by boundaries that the people are confined, it is not by difficult terrain
that a state is rendered secure, and it is not by superiority of arms that the
Empire is kept in awe.
(Mencius 1970)

The message is clear: while in complex matters no factor is unimportant, none

is necessarily defining, and our choices, our inventiveness and our perseverance
can make the greatest difference, even in situations that may seem entirely
discouraging. True, in China’s case the confining variables may be more
acutely felt than in the case of countries that have, literally and figuratively,
more room to maneuver – but the country’s fate, so fundamentally dependent
on its supply of energy and food and on the maintenance of a healthy envi-
ronment, will be determined more by the future choices and actions of its
people than by either its ancient cultural heritage or its natural endowments
and challenging environment.
Appendix
Units of measurement and
quantitative abbreviations

7DEOH$ Units of measurement

Variable Unit Symbol Equal to

Mass gram g
3
kilogram kg 10 g
3
tonne t 10 kg
Length meter m 100cm
kilometer km 1,000m
2
Area square meter m
2
are a 100m
2
hectare ha 10,000m
2
square kilometer km 100ha
Time second s
Energy Joule J 1W/s
Watthour Wh 3,600J
Power Watt W 1J/s

7DEOH$ Quantitative abbreviations

Name Symbol Value

-2
centi c 10
2
hecto h 10
3
kilo k 10
6
mega M 10
9
giga G 10
12
tera T 10
15
peta P 10

The most commonly used large units in this book are EJ (exajoules, 1018J), Gm3
(billion cubic meters), Gt (billion tonnes) and GW (billion watts), Mha (million
hectares), Mt (million tonnes) and MW (million watts), and TWh (trillion watthours).
The terms kgce and Mtce stand, respectively, for kilograms and millions of tonnes of
coal equivalent, the fuel containing 29MJ/kg, compared to 42MJ/kg for crude oil,
35MJ/m3 for natural gas, and between 15 and 18GJ/t for biomass fuels.
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Index

acids: amino 109–110, 128 combustion: coal 17–19, 22; fluidized bed
agriculture: productivity 85–86; reforms 18
87, 92–94; research 136–137; crops 110–114, 130, 150; leguminous 112;
traditional 110–114 multicropping 111, 130, 151; residues
alcohol 123–124, 132–133 27, 35–36, 38–41, 112; rotations 111,
ammonia 112, 115, 119 113; yields 115–116, 130–131, 151
Anhui 6, 75 Cultural Revolution 12, 76
animals 29–30, 100–101, 104–105; feed
30, 101, 104, 118, 132, 134–135; dams 12–13, 44–45; Danjiangkou
manures 111–112 165–167; Ertan 22; Fengman 12; large
appliances 24, 213 12–13; Liujiaxia 13; Sanmenxia 13,
aquaculture 103–104, 113, 128, 130, 138 161, 168, 190–194; Sanxia 3 22, 167,
Australia 59 190, 195–201; small 44–45, 48–49, 52;
Supung 13; Xiaolangdi 194–195
bacteria 110–111, 179 Deng Xiaoping 3 6–7, 33, 61, 72, 79, 92,
Bangladesh 79, 83, 149 94–96, 115–116, 198, 208
Beijing 18, 91–92, 96, 102, 156–157, denitrification 119, 179
diseases 16, 108
163–164, 167, 172, 177, 182, 207, 214
disparities: of food supply 98, 107; regional
bicarbonate: ammonium, 134
5–6
biodiversity: loss of 108, 146
Dongtinghu 162–164
biogas 45–48, 52; digesters 46–47, 52
droughts 77, 156, 159, 161
Brazil 28, 150
eggs 101, 106–107, 123, 135
Canada 61, 66 Egypt 114, 149
carbon dioxide 15, 25, 65–66, 119, 151, electricity 10, 13, 21–23; consumption 24,
172 213; generation 10, 13, 1518, 21–23,
cement 24 42, 44–45; hydro 13, 42, 44–45, 48–49,
Changjiang (Yangzi) 18, 22, 149, 156, 52 (resources 14; small stations 26,
161–162, 167, 173, 175, 195–200, 209 44–45, 48–49, 52); intensity 65; nuclear
Chongqing 199–200 22–23
climate: change 127, 136, 169 energy: biomass 26–28, 30–32, 35–41;
coal 10–12, 15–19, 38–39, 44–51, 63–64, consumption 6, 25, 31–43, 150–151;
151, 171–172, 182, 213; exports 18; efficiency of use 60–68, 151; forecasts
mines 11–12, 16–17 (productivity 26, 210–211; /GDP elasticity 6, 8, 22;
16–17; safety 16, 51; small 11, 16–17, intensity 60–68, 173 (calculations
42, 44–51); prices 19; production 62–63; decline 61–62, 65, 67–68;
10–12, 15–16, 38–39, 51; quality of trends 61–62); noncommercial 26–41;
15–16, 63–64; resources 14 production 10–12 (small-scale 42–52);
230 Index

resources 14–15, 52; rural 28, 31–39, 63–66; China 64, 66, 68, 136, 137,
42–43 (shortages 35, 37–38) 173–176, 181, 188–189, 211–212, 214
environment: anthropogenic change of Germany 83
142 (cost of 178–189); attitudes toward grain 97–99, 125–127, 132–137;
142–146; cost of degradation 125; consumption 118; exports 86, 138;
degradation of 175, 185–188; policies imports 118, 137, 139; losses 104, 125,
177–178; protection of 136, 173–174; 135–137; prices 133; production 74, 81,
and security 168–171; services 94, 120, 125–127, 133, 138; rationing 91;
179–181, 185, 187–188 stocks 132, 138; supply 97–99, 103, 113
Grand Canal 165, 167
famine 72–87, 92, 94, 115; 1959–1961 72 Great Leap Forward 7, 9, 11–13, 44–45,
73–87 (and communal eating 74–76, 49, 61, 73–75, 80, 115, 209; and famine
79–80, 86); extent of 82–83; mortality 75, 73–75, 80; and iron smelting 73–75, 81
78–80, 82–83, 85–87; origins of 80–82 Guangdong 22, 53, 59, 100, 113, 119
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) Guizhou 94
89–90, 98, 105–106
farming: productivity of 85–86; traditional Haber-Bosch process 114, 116–120
72, 74, 110–114 Hainan 6, 19, 28, 53
farmland 7, 124, 127–131, 149, 158, Hebei 79, 155, 159–160, 162, 167, 177
185–186; losses of 124, 130, 175, Heilongjiang 21, 28, 131, 154
185–186; underreporting of 126–130, Henan 75, 86, 124, 159–162, 190–194
175 Hong Kong 5, 22, 59, 78, 84, 167
feed 30, 101, 104, 118, 132, 134–135, 139 Huanghe (Yellow River) 17, 124, 149,
fertilizers 114–119, 134; nitrogen 3–4, 15, 156–157, 159–160, 162, 166–168, 173,
73, 131–132, 134, 151 190–1, 192; diversion of 124, 159–161;
fish 101, 103, 106, 108, 113, 128, 130, 135 drying up 149, 156
Five Year Plans 11, 88 Hubei 22, 176, 195, 197
floods 77, 131, 161–164, 176, 192 Hunan 75, 113, 118, 133
food: animal 91, 100–101, 104, 106–108,
135, 139; balance sheets 29, 88–89, 92, India 28, 66, 97, 115, 137
95, 105–106, 135, 138; consumption Indonesia 28, 59, 114
29, 99, 105, 107, 122; convenience 102;
Inner Mongolia 26, 29
cost 102–103; diets 99–109 (transitions
insolation 28–29
99–109, 120, 135); publications 2;
iron: smelting 73–75, 81
rationing 90–92; requirements 90,
irrigation 124, 131, 134, 151, 158–160, 163
97–98, 105, 107; supply 75–78, 86–90,
93–99, 122, 138, 149, 174 (concerns
about 120–133, 137; per capita 89–90, Japan 5, 18–19, 26, 53–55, 58–61, 65;
93–99, 105, 107); waste 107–108, 132 farmland 127–128, 130; food supply
forecasts 207–212; Delphi 211–212 88, 93, 96–98, 101–106, 118, 122–123,
forests 144, 175–176, 186–188; 174; oil imports 54–55
deforestation 74, 144, 176, 186–188, Jiangsu 118–119, 166, 173, 183
209; reforestation 145, 175 Jiangxi 97
fruit 123
fuelwood 26–27, 30, 33, 35–37, 39–41; lots Khrushchev Nikita 73–74
26, 37, 40–41 Korea 18; North 84–85; South 26, 59, 118,
Fujian 100, 119 127–128, 130, 171, 181

Gansu 94 lactose, intolerance 104

gas, natural 10, 60; imports 58–59; Laozi 142–143
liquefied 58–59; resources 14 Li Peng 197, 201
gasoline 20–21 life: expectancy 174; quality of 174
GDP (gross domestic product) 7–8, 15, 60, Loess Plateau 161, 185
 Index 231

malnutrition 75, 78, 98, 149 pork 100–101, 103, 107, 118, 123, 135
manures 111–113; green 112–113, 118 potassium 109, 134
Mao Zedong 4, 7, 9, 11, 44, 115, 144, 208; poultry 100–101, 106–107, 132, 135
and famine 72–74, 80, 82–83, 86 PPP (purchasing power parity) 63, 66, 68,
meat 91, 100, 103, 106–108, 118–119, 189
134–135 protein 76, 117, 128
megaprojects 189–203
Mencius 215 rain 131, 154–156, 162; acid 18, 125, 182,
milk 101, 104, 135 184
monsoon 154–155 recycling; organic 111–115, 118
refrigerators 21
Ningxia 94 restaurants 108–109
nitrates 110, 119, 183 Rhizobium 112
nitrogen 109–120; in crop residues 112; rice 91, 99, 118, 123, 127, 130, 132–133,
eutrophication 119; fertilizers 114–120, 139, 151, 177
183, 214; fixation 100, 111–112; Russia 14, 25, 59–60, 65–66, 84, 87
Haber-Bosch process 114, 116–120;
inputs 113–114; in manures 111–112;
Sahel 79, 83
in modern agriculture 114–120; oxides
September 11 2001 207–208
172; recycling 111–115; in traditional
Shandong 75, 124–125, 159–161,
agriculture 110–114
166–167, 214
Nixon, Richard 82, 94, 116, 208–209
Shanghai 6, 183, 203
North China Plain 75, 124, 134, 136, 146,
Shanxi 6, 16, 18, 50, 125, 155
155, 158–161, 164, 214
Shenzhen 6, 167
shrimp 183
obesity 108 Sichuan 6, 17–18, 22, 35, 45–46, 75, 86,
oil (cooking) 92, 100, 103, 123 94, 100, 113, 185, 195
oil (crude or petroleum) 10, 12, 121; silting 17, 161–162, 179, 191–194, 199
exports 19–20, 53–55; fields 12 (Daqing smog: London type 172–173;
12, 21, 55, 159; Shengli 21, 55, 156);
photochemical 25, 125, 172, 182
imports 19–21, 57–60; offshore 55–57
soil: erosion 125, 179, 185–186, 191;
(exploration 56–57; South China Sea
quality of 185
19, 53, 56–57); prices 52–53;
Somalia 79, 82
production 19–20, 58 (abroad 21,
soybeans 102, 127
58–59); reserves 57; resources 14,
statistics 1, 6–7, 9–10, 106
19–20, 53; security 20; tankers 58
omnivory 108 stoves 26, 34, 36–38, 40–41
OPEC 1, 52–53, 59, 65, 121 subways 201–202
orchards 128, 130 sugar 92, 100, 108, 138
oxide; nitrous 119, 134 sulfur: dioxide 17–18, 125, 145, 151,
ozone 25, 125, 172 172–173, 182

particulate matter (PM) 172, 183 Taiwan 103, 105, 127–128, 134, 171
phosphorus 108, 134 Tarim 53, 57
pigs 100–101, 103 Three Gorges (Sanxia) 3, 22, 167, 190,
pollution: air 11, 17–18, 25–26, 125, 171, 195–201
180, 182, 184; and health 183–184; Tianjin 92, 157, 160, 167, 214
water 172, 183–184, 202 Tibet 29, 35
ponds 128, 130 TPES (total primary energy supply) 63–65
population 72, 89, 132; carrying capacity trains 202; shinkansen 26
111, 113–114; census 78; forecasts 147,
149, 152; growth, 115–116, 118, 122, Ukraine 66, 83
127, 146–147, 181, 209 USA 14, 16, 25, 58–61, 66, 73, 105
232 Index

vegetables 123 wildlife 108–109

wood 26–27, 30, 33, 35–37, 39–41, 187
water (see also irrigation); ground 156–157,
159–160, 164; prices 134, 163, 177; Xi’an 161, 191–192
resources 130, 149, 154–158; runoff Xinjiang 20, 29, 35, 53, 56, 97, 156
131, 156; shortages 124–125, 131, 152,
157–158, 162–164, 177, 214–215;
supply 149, 156–157, 160, 164, 202, Yunnan 18
214; transfers 3, 152, 160 (South-North
164–168, 202); waste of 133 Zhejiang 119
wheat 91, 99, 139 Zhujiang 113