Which World? by Allen Hammond

Author:Allen Hammond [Hammond, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610913669
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-06-15T05:00:00+00:00

Critical Trends

How might present trends, if they continue, constrain China’s future? China’s population, at 1.2 billion now the largest of any country in the world, is not expected to grow much more and could stabilize at about 1.5 billion as early as 2025; by 2050, the population could conceivably decline again to its present size (the plausible range is 1.2 billion to 1.765 billion). Thus, if present trends continue, China faces relatively less population growth than any other developing region. But it faces another kind of demographic pressure, with an estimated 300 million urban migrants expected to crowd into cities by 2010; even more will follow as China shifts rapidly from an agricultural, largely rural country to an industrialized, largely urban one.

How prosperous could China become? Even if China’s torrid pace of economic growth slows significantly, its economy might still increase nearly sevenfold by the middle of the next century (the medium growth projection), and could match the U.S. economy in size. Under optimistic, high-growth assumptions, the economy could grow elevenfold, becoming the largest in the world. China’s growth could also falter.

In the best case (with high economic growth and no net population increase), average annual incomes in China would reach $33,000 by the year 2050. Although this figure represents real prosperity, it is less than projected levels for either Latin America or Southeast Asia under their best-case assumptions. Nonetheless, such a prosperous China would almost certainly be a major world power. Under more moderate, midrange projections, incomes would reach nearly $16,000 per year— perhaps enough to bring the bulk of the country’s population a middle-class lifestyle. And in the worst case, as might result from an extended period of economic and social chaos, average incomes could be as low as $6,000.

Environmental conditions in China could become intolerable if present trends continue. Urban air quality is already unhealthy, with pollution levels well exceeding the World Health Organization’s guidelines in many of China’s cities, largely because of the country’s reliance on coal. But even midrange economic growth is expected to require a sixfold increase in energy consumption over the next half century, and high growth would mean even more.4 If expanded energy consumption were to translate into a comparable increase in urban air pollution, many cities would be literally unlivable, yet China has few alternatives to coal.5 The effects of China’s rising use of coal would also extend far beyond the country’s borders—by 2020, China is likely to become the world’s largest source of potentially climate-altering greenhouse gases. Uncontrolled dumping of toxic chemicals is already an important environmental issue in China, creating significant health problems, and the country’s industrial sector—and thus, potentially, its output of toxic materials—is projected to increase more than tenfold over the next half century. So China has no choice but to use cleaner technologies and enforce antipollution laws, as the country’s leaders recognize, and to do so far sooner in its development and at far lower levels of average prosperity than have other rapidly ndustrializing countries. Even so, pollution is likely to get worse before it gets better.

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