書き抜き読書ノート 721

2010 年 9 月 19 日

Thomas L. Fridman 著「Hot, Flat, and Crowded − Why The World Needs A Green Revolution andHow We Can Renew Our Global Future −」Allen Lane, Penguin 2008 年刊を読む

Can Red China Become Green China?
１．I've visited China regularly since 1990, and, looking back, here's what strikes me most: Eachtime I go there, China's people seem to speak with greater case and breathe with greaterdifficulty.
２．Yes, you can now have strikingly frank talks with officials and journalists in China.

Butwhen I walked out of my hotel room heading for an interview the last time I visited Shanghai,in November 2006, the air was so smoky − from the burning of farm fields after the harvest −that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire. For some three decades now, China's
economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low‑cost labor and little regard forthe waste and pollution it pumped into its rivers and the air. For many years, when you asked
about pollution, officials and business leaders in China would say they will clean up when China
gets rich enough to afford to clean up. I would argue that now that we are entering theEnergy-Climate Era, China can get rich only if it cleans up. Unless Red China becomes Green
China, the Communist Party leadership will not be able to deliver to all the Chinese people therising standard of living it has promised.
３．China cannot afford to do what the West did: Grow now, clean up later. I know that thisstrikes many Chinese as unfair, which is why global warming is perceived by more than a few
Chinese as aconspiracy

concocted by the West to slow China's growth. It is unfair, if you

consider how much CO2 the Western industrialized countries blithely pumped into theatmosphere, long before the Chinese industrial dragon ever started huffing and puffing − andhow the West has shipped its dirtiest manufacturing industries to China. But Mother Nature
isn't into fair. All she knows is hard science and raw math: If China were to try to grow now
and clean up later, the unprecedented pace and scale of its development would lead to an
environmental disaster.
４．It's all in the numbers: China is one-fifth of humanity; it's now the world's biggest carbon
emitter; it is the world's second-largest importer of oil, after the United States; and, according toa report in The Times of London (January 28, 2008), it is already the world's largest importer-1-

of nickel, copper, aluminum, steel, coal, and iron ore. Timber is certainly up there as well. It is
not an exaggeration to say. As goes China, so goes planet earth. If China can make a stabletransition to clean power and an energy‑and‑resource‑efficient economy, we as a planet have achance to mitigate climate change, energy poverty, petrodictatorship, and biodiversity Joss insignificant ways. If China can't, China's emissions and appetites will nullify everything everyone
else does to save the earth, and the Energy‑Climate Era will careen toward the unmanageable.
So for me, the crucial question of this book is actually two questions:a real green revolution?

andCan China really follow?

Can America really lead

Everything else is just commentary...

５．To put it the local vernacular, Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China's economy:cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches miceBlack− that is, forget about Communist

ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore. Now, if that cat isn't green, neither
it nor the mice, nor any of the rest of us, are going to make it.
６．So how's China doing? The best short answer I've heard comes from the longtime Asia‑
watcher Nayan Chanda, the former editor of the FarEastern Economic Review and now editor ofYaleGlobal Online. When I asked Chanda for his views on China's energy and environment
performance, he answered with barely a pause:

Go rent the movie Speed.

７．That 1994 thriller stars Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, and Sandra Bullock. Reeves plays
Jack Traven, an LAPD SWAT team specialist who is sent to defuse a bomb that Howard Payne,
a revenge‑driven extortionist(Dennis Hopper), has planted on a bus. But here's the rub: Thebomb has been rigged to explode the second the speed of the bus falls below 50 miles per hour.
So Jack and Annie Porter, a passenger played by Sandra Bullock, must keep the bus hurtling
through the streets of Los Angeles at more that 50 miles per hour − or they, the bomb, andeverything around them will go up in flames.
China is that bus,said Chando.

８． It has to grow at a minimum of 8 percent a year or it will explode, he added, because it will
have so much unemployment and discontent, the population will erupt.

The implicit rulingbargain that the Chinese Communist Party has offered the people of China has been very clear
ever since the end of Mao's era. It goes like this:We are replacing Communism with GDPism.

GDPism says: We get to rule. You, the people, get to become prosperous. You accept out rule.
We guarantee your rising prosperity.

Without a steadily rising Gross Domestic Product −without that China bus going 50 miles per hour‑that ruling bargain would unravel.
９．But my own regular visits to China over the past two decades have taught me that while this-2-

remains the ruling bargain, China's leaders, who are very shrewd, have come to understandthat in a world that is becoming hot, flat, and crowded, China cannot sustain this ruling bargain
any longer‑without adding a footnote in fine print. And the fine print now says:

This rulingbargain is subject to limitations that China will soon have to impose on itself‑ because theenvironmental, energy, and biodiversity implications of China's largely coal‑ powered growthwill, if unrestrained, end up killing Chinese, irredeemably polluting China's environment,
sapping its economy, and alienating the rest of the world. If the rest of the world, particularly
the United States, moves in the next few years to some form of carbon tax, or if Mother Nature
imposes even harsher punishments in her own way, China will have to move away from cheapand dirty fuels; otherwise it will face a boycott of its goods. Therefore, the Communist Party
reserves the right to slow down growth in the name of cleaning up the economy.
10．China's leaders may not have spelled out that footnote to themselves or their people in somany words, but it is the logic driving where they need to go and have already started moving.
That is why, when you add it all up, there is no avoiding the conclusion that China's leadershipis engaged in one of the most daring political high‑wire acts ever attempted on the world stage.
As Chanda put it:

China's leaders are trying to replace the motor in that Chinese bus from agas guzzling polluter to a superefficient hybrid − but they're trying to do it while the bus is stillgoing 50 miles an hour.
11．This could be the greatest show on carth.
The drama unfolding in China is so compelling because the same Communist Party thatthree decades ago replaced Communism with GDPism is now trying to replace GDPism withGreen GDPism.

And what's most fascinating about this show is how the Chinese leadershiphas decided, after a lot of trial and error, to go about it. The bus driver has turned around, told
the passengers that the engine needs to be changed − without specifying exactly how it's to bedone − and even started allowing some of the passengers to jump into the engine well andtinker. China's leaders have come to understand that they can't change this engine alone.
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本のコラムを書き、世界の人々に読んでもらうために世界中を動きまわり、物を見、人の話を聞き、また、発言し続ける。少し難しいが、わかりやすい英語。音読に耐える。英語教材としても最適。わからない語句は全部辞書を引きすべて記憶すれば、国際感覚と同時に語学力が飛躍的に身につく。CD もあるようだ。
− 2010 年 9 月 19 日林-3-明夫記−