Experiences with Sustainability in China (May 2011)

Just returned from my trip to China. While I was there, it was interesting to see China's progress in environmental sustainability on so many different areas:

Green lawns/public spaces - signs everywhere reminding people to be more "civilized" (a term used by the Chinese): not littering, not trampling on grass, not smoking too much (China is obsessed with smoking), and protecting the environment in general.
But these signs aren't enforced. So many people (not most) still litter. On Huang Shan, a mountain that's basically a Chinese national icon, I was appalled to see just how many plastic-bottles were littered about the landscape, and some people even still smoked in the non-smoking trails!
Better enforcement of more "civilized" behaviors, and punishment for those who are "uncivilized" (fines, etc) are definitely needed to reduce incidences of littering, smoking in non-smoking places, etc. But since they aren't being done, China obviously doesn't think they are a national priority... or the authorities may have just given up trying.

Solar panels. Specifically, solar thermal hot water heating.
I don't think I saw many solar electricity panels in China - they were mostly small ones located on streetlights. But I did see millions of solar thermal hot-water heaters. They're plastered on the roofs of almost all Chinese apartment buildings. And even my grandparents who live in poorer, rural China has one - it helps heat their shower-water to 100+ degrees, especially during the summer, and all for free! (photo to the left: a solar-thermal panel on a rural-Chinese hut!)
Solar is of course dependent on the availability of sunlight, and for many areas of China this may not be feasible. But in Southern China, where sunlight is abundant (esp since it's in a drought right now), solar thermal does seem like an excellent idea for hot-water heating... but it's costs of production would also have to be evaluated. Complicated!

Drought in Southern China (2011):
Southern China, where both my grandparents live, is in its worst period of drought since 1950. Some 34million people are affected - i.e. almost the entire population of Canada! Crops, aquatic animals, etc are all suffering, and it's contributing to rising food prices (esp rice) across China. The river in front of my grandparents' rural house, once so high that it reached the levees on either side of the river, now flows about 20 meters away from the levees on either side. The tributaries of the Yangtze river that flows through my other grandparents' city are just as low, and even canals are drying up! Not good! Wonder how much of this drought is due to seasonal variation, how much is due to dams upstream, and how much is due to climate change??
(Photo: Drought on the farm-fields surrounding my grandfather's rural chinese town)

Eco-art: turning waste into art.
The 798 Modern Art Gallery in Beijing is truly a work of Eco-art on many levels. The gallery grounds/building is itself located inside a shut-down arms factory, thus reusing the land and the building material. The smokestacks scattered across the grounds serve now as piece of art as well. Within individual art exhibitions themselves, many artists have decided to use recycled materials to create art. One masterpiece involved tens or hundreds of rear-view mirrors arranged in a hemisphere around an old, worn-out school chair. It looks fantastic, and to me it's the perfect piece of art for the nostalgic student! (Photo: artistic statue in front of the many formerly-functional smokestacks in this re-used factory)




Transportation:
One saddening thing that I noted in China is that people are switching from old-fashioned bicycles to motorized bikes and scooters. Not only could this raise emissions caused by transportation and increase the demand for resources/energy needed to make more scooters, etc, this may also reduce public health as exercise levels on a bicycle decline. Could this be a reflection of people getting lazier? Or is this a response to cities getting bigger, forcing people to now commute longer distances to work and thus requiring a motorized vehicle? (Photo: crowded transportation in Zhenjiang, China)

Encouragingly, China is also making advances into mass public transport at a tremendous pace.
Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, and many other big cities now have state of the art metro systems (Beijing's has been expanded and renovated, with 13 different lines!). Xi'an, the former capital of ancient China where the Terracota soldiers are, will be getting it's new metro system in 2012!

China also has a high-speed rail system, with two classes of high-speed rail trains: D and G. D-trains are fast, over 200km/h, but G-trains are even faster, over 300km/h. I took a G-train from Zhenjiang to Nanjing, and the once hour-long trip was reduced to a meager 15 minutes!
China has invested over 4 trillion Yuan into these trains sine 2008, and they certainly are good at increasing rail capacity and reducing travel times - possibly leading to more efficient, productive workers. (Photo: high-speed rail in Shanghai Hongqiao train station, one of the hundreds of new train stations recently built across China just to accommodate high-speed rail)

Some definite advantages of high-speed rail over road and air transport is that, if designed properly, high-speed rail can 1) reduce land usage per passenger, 2) use less energy per passenger per kilometer, 3) accommodate more passengers than can airplanes or busses over defined travel corridors between cities.

Sadly, Beijing has cancelled it's production of huge Straddling Busses due to safety reasons :(


Population:
It's impossible to go to China and NOT talk about the effects of population on the Chinese and world environment, and the ability of China to sustain its rate of growth and energy use into the future. But there's also massive social issues that the government has to manange: 30 million bachelors are expected by 2030 (according to the Chinese govn't), and people have began stealing male babies to sell to parents who want them, and girls from rural china to bachelors! The population is on its way to declining though thanks to the 1-child policy: the UN projects an increase from 1.3 billion (now) to 1.5 billion people in China by 2025, but then declining to 1.4 billion by 2050. Good for survival with limited resources, but social problems? We'll see! (photo: travelers in Shanghai's Hongqiao train station! and this is not so crowded!)