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Overdrive
Ramping up its export juggernaut and taking full advantage of WTO entry, China’s economy in the first decade of the new millennium was “boom with no bust.” The information revolution fed more growth, as hundreds of millions of Chinese came online. But the Internet also became a forum for discontent, and the new leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao acknowledged growing environmental and social justice concerns with their call for a more harmonious society. Then, as the credit crisis in the US spread into a global economic crisis, China’s export-dependent growth appeared in jeopardy, and fears of a Chinese crash surfaced. But, as in 1998, China weathered the storm, and emerged in 2010 as the world’s largest exporter, largest foreign creditor, and fastest growing major economy, poised to soon surpass Japan and eventually eclipse the United States as the biggest economy on the planet. |
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China Needs to Bring The Environment Back in SyncPeriod: Overdrive (2000s)
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Click to expand I think that the advent of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao helped to crystallize a new understanding of the importance of the environment and how the environment related to a number of different things that were more important to the Chinese leadership. And when they came in with their ideas about harmonious society, I guess this was about '02-'03, it was really a broader effort, that encompassed the environment, that said, “We’ve had 20 odd years of pell-mell, unfettered growth. Now, we look and we see there are many, many negative ramifications of this growth and the environment was one of them. How do we bring the environment back in sync?” So, I think this was a moment when they realized that the environment actually could hinder economic growth. If you don’t have enough water to run your factories, as happened in Xi'an at one point, for example, you don’t have economic output. So, land is becoming degraded and villages are becoming submerged in sand, as is happening in northern China, and then, you have tens of millions of migrants, environmental refugees, within your own country. They have to find new jobs, new housing and develop a new educational infrastructure for these people. There are enormous costs then, that are associated with what had seemed to be, essentially, a free ride.
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