(GLS staff members have returned from a visit to Beijing and Shanghai in April and early May. This is the first of a number of posts prompted by the trip that will appear over the next month or so.)
According to a new report, China has now surpassed the US as the world’s largest total emitter of greenhouse gasses. (Of course, the US retains the dubious honor of leading the world in per captia emissions.) This raises the question: is it possible for China and the developing world to find a path to sustainable development at a pace necessary to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Given the current development trajectory, there is reason to worry.
One thumbnail measure of how aggressive a country is in combating global warming is how easy it is to cross a city street. This tells you a lot about which mode of transportation is privileged by law and public policy: do non-polluting pedestrians and bicycles have the right-of-way, or do carbon spewing motor vehicles? In China, the answer in cities like Beijing and Shanghai becomes clear as soon as you step onto the street on the walk signal: cars, trucks, and buses, utilizing the right on red rule, regularly honk and push through the throngs of people on the cross walks. Pedestrians and bicyclists beware.
China has plunged headlong into the automobile culture and on China’s roads, the car is now king. Gone are the massed pelotons of workers riding bicycles home at rush hour, replaced now by traffic jams of cars, taxis, and buses and (on a more positive note) subway cars loaded to “crush” capacity. While bike lanes are still a fixture on Chinese roads, and many in Beijing and Shanghai still ride bikes or electric mopeds, one now has to travel to European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam to find genuinely bicycle friendly big cities.
While Beijing and Shanghai both have clean and efficient subway systems that would be the envy of any city, they are hopelessly overburdened and do not yet provide adequate coverage in these rapidly sprawling cities. New public transport is desperately needed and some is on the way.
But, China has massively invested in the internal combustion engine. It has built a world class road and highway system in much of the country. Automobile production is growing by double digits every year: according the Beijing Review, production in the first quarter of this year was up 20% and by 24% in March. Each day 1300 new cars join the 3.35 million vehicles already on Beijing’s roads.
China is now the second biggest market for cars in the world. Dealerships for even high end luxury cars can be seen all over cities like Beijing testifying to the wealth of the Chinese business and government elites. Car companies like General Motors and Ford may be rapidly losing market share in the US, but in China they reaping profits in a booming market.
Following the lead of the US and Europe, the automobile has become a middle class symbol of success and one of the key drivers for economic progress. Sitting around a table recently with a group of workers and students in Beijing —all of whom were proud of China’s genuine achievements—we asked if they thought things were currently getting better or worse for workers and young people. Things are harder, they all agreed. Wages were not keeping up with inflation and it was getting more difficult to find jobs. But a lawyer participating in the discussion—a successful civic minded man who devoted a considerable amount of his time and talent to representing workers, pro bono—disagreed, “Things are getting better,” he said, “just look at the number of new cars on the road. Today we don’t need so many bicycles.”
Car ownership is, of course, out of the question for most Chinese people. A small car costs around $4,5,00—relatively cheap by global standards—but consider that an ordinary worker with a really good job may earn $200-250 a month. Taxes and fees raise the purchase price even more. And even if a person can get the credit to buy a car, they are expensive to operate: in April a gallon of gas in Beijing cost the equivalent of around $2.88 per gallon. That’s almost 4 hours wages for a migrant worker employed at Beijing’s minimum wage of around $.75 an hour.
So who is buying the 1200 new cars each day that are increasing clogging Beijing’s roads? The answer: China’s rapidly growing urban middle class. McKinsey Global Institute divides China’s urban middle class between,
“lower aspirants earning 25,000 to 40,000 renminbi ($3,019 to $4,831) per year, and upper aspirants earning 40,000 to 100,000 renminbi ($4,831 to $12, 077) per year……in purchasing power parity terms, lower aspirants earn between $13,513 to $21,622 and upper aspirants, $21,622 to $54,054—levels of income that purchase a lifestyle that most of the world would recognize as middle class.”
Today, according to McKinsey about 43% of China city dwellers are middle class under this definition, and the middle class is growing. While one must be very careful with numbers like these, especially comparative purchasing power estimates, it is clear that somewhere in this wage range it becomes possible a family to buy a car and they are doing so in large numbers.
If you ask upper and middle class Chinese—in fact, middle class people in most of the developing world-- about the logic of creating an automobile culture at a time when the developed world is just beginning to come to grips with its catastrophic consequences, they will say—quite correctly—that it is hypocritical for people in the advanced countries to lecture them about cars. Except for increasing rhetoric, little is being done today to curb car use in the US and other countries. Why should China and the developing world, in desperate need of high end development, not follow the same path? And don’t forget, Westerners still emit far more greenhouse gasses on a per capita basis than do Chinese or other residents of the developing world.
Middle class Chinese, like people all around the world, buy cars because they want the freedom and flexibility they afford--or seem to afford. But that is only a part of the reason for the automobile industry's growth. The Chinese government promotes and heavily invests in the industry because it sees the automobile as a fast route to high end development. This was, after-all, the route to prosperity taken by the US and the West in the 20th century. In the classic account, auto moguls like Henry Ford realized that if workers were paid a high enough wage they could buy the cars that they produced and help create a mass market. And the ripple effect of that--in industries like steel, petro-chemicals, rubber, glass, automobile sales and finance, along with related highway construction and the development of the suburbs--would bring economic growth and prosperity. It worked for many decades.
But the truth is that--unfair as it might be--it is too late for China and the developing world to create automobile based economies. It is simply not environmentally sustainable. And this is the moral and political conundrum of the 21st century. It is why any attempt to solve the greenhouse gas problem must entail some kind of historic compromise between the developed world and the developing world. Apologies to Marx, but if this does not happen, history may repeat itself once as tragedy and once as catastrophe.
TC
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