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This book review by Paul Morris was first published in the Spring 2020 issue of US-China Review, the journal of the US China People’s Friendship Association (USCPFA) and we are grateful to Paul for his permission to reproduce it here. Paul is Production Co-ordinator of US-China Review; he is also a SACU member.

A foreign father given up for dead, an unwed mother struggling to make ends meet, a reunion with a long-lost daughter from abroad. Add a handful of prominent China hands who show up at key junctures and you have the plot for an international, intergenerational family drama. This story of 20th century Britain and China comes to us from Zoë Reed, now head of the U.K. friendship association, the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). Her wide-ranging memoir illuminates the history of British-Chinese relations as she recounts the connections among her father, her mother, and notables such as Joseph Needham and Rewi Alley.

The book, A Bridge Between Hearts: Anglo-Chinese Friendship and Understanding, contains a substantial autobiography by her Chinese father, an account of her English mother’s life, and her own story of connecting with her Chinese roots and working in the China friendship movement. Published in Beijing, it is bilingual.

The author’s father won a scholarship to study industrial engineering in Britain in 1946, and met the author’s mother in London through the circle of Joseph Needham, the scholar of Chinese science and technology. Their relationship ended in 1950 when K.C. Sun, the student, returned to China. The author’s mother, Susan Eunice Reed, had not told him she was pregnant with their child.

After years of believing that her Chinese father was dead, Zoë discovered that he was living in Lanzhou, Gansu province, and with considerable effort managed to reunite with him and his Chinese family. China during the war with Japan is where K.C. Sun’s story began, in a farm family living near Kaifeng, Henan. In a battle with the Japanese in 1937 the Nationalist army dynamited dikes to stop the advancing enemy, flooding large tracts and making refugees of Sun and his family. He was unfortunate in being left in an orphanage near Xi’an, but fortunate in eventually finding a spot in the Bailie Schools, a series of progressive schools set up by New Zealander Rewi Alley.

In the Bailie School near Baoji, Shaanxi, he received academic and technical training and met other left-leaning foreigners, such as George Hogg, who were involved in the Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement. After a move to a Bailie school near Lanzhou, Sun had the chance to accompany Joseph Needham and Rewi Alley on a 1943 expedition to Dunhuang in the northwest of Gansu province. “Meeting Dr. Needham as well as Mr. Alley would affect the rest of my life in ways I could not predict,” he wrote. Needham’s photographs documented the adventure.

One memory from the Bailie school in Lanzhou is of gardens that featured apple trees that were a gift from U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace. The same vice president presented honeydew melon seeds to the school in 1944, according to a memoir by Charlie Grossman of USCPFA. Sun graduated from his studies in mechanical engineering in 1947 and was picked to go to Britain for further training, with the sponsorship of Needham and the charity British United Aid to China. In Britain he gained technical experience in the textile industries in Nottingham and North Wales. During a three-year stay he met and had a relationship with the student Susan Reed, who had an interest in China because of connections with Joseph Needham. She helped introduce him to British life, including concerts by Paul Robeson in London and walks in urban parks.

One touching story from 1949 told of K.C.’s invitation to speak to a Women’s Federation group on the new Chinese government. “I told Susan, ‘They want me talk about Chinese Communist, so she read a book, which was called Red Star Over China. Eventually she did a very well speech and typed it down for me. When I got to the meeting, I just read it. Since then, we meet each other more and more, I really admire her very much.”

The second part of the book is Eunice (as she later called herself) Reed’s story, also something of an international adventure that began in Nyasaland (today’s Malawi) where her parents were in the retail trade. As a student back in England she encountered the Needham family through the Cooperative College near Nottingham. When, after K.C.’s departure for China, she needed help as a single mother, she turned to Needham, who made some attempts to find work for her. She had decided to abandon any hope of reconnecting with the father of her daughter Zoë.

After a career in nursing, Eunice circled around to connect anew with Joseph Needham. In his last years in the 1990s she worked as his caretaker in Cambridge. While Zoë was growing up she made several important contacts in the Anglo-Chinese community. One contact eventually led to her father, still living in Lanzhou. Though her mother declined to participate, Zoë journeyed to China and made a strong connection with her father and his extended family. Her description of the growing bonds with her Chinese family is sensitive and affecting, as is her treatment of her mother’s often difficult times. She writes of her youth, when her father was never spoken of, and her need to answer the question, “Where are you from?” She comments, “I felt a fraud to claim being half Chinese when I couldn’t then point to any relations from China.”

After 1999 she was able to learn much of her Chinese heritage during visits to her family. Zoë Reed is currently a medical administrator in London and since 2009 has been Chair of SACU. This major volunteer contribution demonstrates her commitment to building understanding between China and the U.K. As leader of a SACU tour group in 2013 she retraced the trip her father had made with Joseph Needham in 1943, visiting the Bailie School and Dunhuang. In her description of SACU’s history she mentions a detail that will be familiar to USCPFA members: “It had thousands of members in its early days and was the only route to China in the 1970s.” This was the result of a Chinese policy that in the early years of travel gave visas to politically friendly organizations. SACU is now a smaller volunteer organization with regular events in London and several other cities.

A Bridge between Hearts: Anglo-Chinese Friendship and Understanding by Zoë K. Reed,
Beijing Publishing House, 2016, 256 pages in English with Chinese translation.
ISBN 978-7-200-12351-7.
This very worthwhile family memoir is available from Amazon in the U.K. and Cypress Books

Covering up: Covid-19 and the face, by Elizabeth Gasson, 10th April 2020

Having spent seven years in China, our SACU member, Elizabeth left China with her soon-to-be fiancé, and headed to the UK to take a research degree and convert her career area into Psychology (so as to better support her students). She is now residing in Sydney where her now-husband is working towards the opening of a Chinese bank branch there and she is pursuing her PhD in Cognitive Science (focused on Chinese reading difficulties) while expanding her online Education Centre for Chinese individuals around the world. Here she discusses her recent concern relating to COVID-19, based on her conversations with Chinese, British and Australian communities, and the international news.  

Various sources have criticised The People’s Republic of China, PRC, for its tardy disclosure of the Covid-19 virus. However, even after letting the virus duplicate its DNA like wildfire, The PRC managed to contain the virus so radically when the deadly picture had been painted. Following this, they warned international media of the deadliness this disease presented and provided regular updates. However, even as this is being written, China is being accused of “fake statistics” as they start loosening the restrictions placed for months on millions of peoples’ lives.

Internationally, when the row was getting too tough to hoe for international leaders, some of them were barely pulling in the reins on social contact as they larked about rubbing their nostrils with one hand and shaking patients’ hands with the other, all on national TV. Meanwhile, Chinese leaders were locking down cities, only allowing those with permits to leave their building, and even then, they must be masked up.

A student of mine from a small city in Zhejiang province shared his account of Covid-19 each week. He spoke of lights turning on and off in different rooms at the hotel-turned quarantine centre that he could see from his apartment window. As he described his experience, I imagined how he was watching a slow-motion newsreel about tragedy and hope, waiting for the next stage. The future looked bleak but life would go on.

Internationally, a large number of countries have already surpassed China’s stage of the epidemic yet there is still relative freedom to stretch the legs and roam around unmasked. Reports of sunbathers lapping up the sun and picnics in the park can still be found in British local community groups on Facebook, even after The British Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s denouncement of such acts.

The different approaches in containing the virus can be reflected in the international statistics. In the USA, the death toll currently sits at 1014 (Coronavirus Update (Live), Worldometer, 10/04/2020), in a country of 0.33 billion, between a quarter and a fifth of China’s 1.45 billion people. Yet in the densely populated cities and towns of China, the virus has been contained at 3335 fatalities. Covid-19 was halted in its steps in a country with the largest population in the world. Nonetheless, comments claiming that China is “covering up” are still being voiced in the media. On April 2nd, Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, told Bloomberg News, “The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false”  (‘China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says’, 2020). China has taken the brunt time and again for its “coverups”.

It is a matter of perspective one might say, for misinformation has a number of facades. The PRC has been criticised over censoring the initial outbreak in Wuhan,  but did they understand the severity of it, or even what it was in December of 2019? Was their handling then more improper than the broadcasting recently of distracting or even dishonest information abroad?

In China, while trying to decipher the convoluted nature of a new strain of disease, there was less information released than the world would have liked. But when the studies had started rolling out and the ugly face of Covid-19 was unveiled, the reporting and effectiveness of governance exceeded all expectations and set international precedents. In a country of nearly 1.45 billion people, 18.5 percent of the global population, fatal cases have been limited to 3.7 percent of the total international death toll (calculated from population and Covid-19 statistics taken from Worldometer on 10^th April, 2020). Looking west, the information was already out for them to learn from. But were the Chinese methods followed?

Of crucial importance, far from enforcement, there were no recommendations to mask up in the UK or the USA, as was the recommendation in China.

My discussions with friends in the UK have received two main answers to my question “Do you have face masks?”. The first group of people would respond by saying they had but were perhaps anxious about wearing a mask outside due to fear of what others would think, say, or possibly do.

The second group responded saying they didn’t have any face masks because they were ineffective in protecting against the disease, including one lady who ran a childcare centre. It may seem obvious that the first group were people of East-Asian heritage or with East-Asian friendships. The second group were British and Australian (with no influence from Asia).

The issue appeared to be a difference in the levels of clarity provided by official health recommendations. An interesting example can be drawn from guidelines provided by the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. Until this week, the CDC have continued to advocate that face masks are not useful for healthy individuals. In their guidance on “How to Protect Yourself”  (CDC, 2020) they explained “If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a face mask).”

However. two months before these guidelines were finally being “reconsidered”, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, “There’s no doubt after reading this paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring.” (CNN, 2020).

Ironically, a 2009 study was previously published by CDC (the very same official organisation that claimed face masks did not need to be worn) outlining that face masks were useful to protect against influenza (MacIntyre et al., 2009).

If proper guidelines and legislature were provided, if we listened to and learned from our Chinese friends who had the real stories to tell of Covid-19, could this have saved many from contracting the virus in the first place?

The April 2^nd Bloomberg article accusing China of misrepresenting the numbers also complains about China’s “coverup” in late 2019. The question is, did China’s alleged “coverup” last longer than America’s delay in Covid-19 preventative measures? The US had weeks to prepare before their first fatal case at the end of February. We are now four months in and still, there is still a lack of clarity about universal face-mask usage.

As the public are still in a state of confusion about whether to cover up their faces or not, the Covid-19 coverup blame still spreads across the frontpage news.

China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says. (2020, April 1). Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says

CNN, E. C. and J. B. (n.d.). ‘There’s no doubt’: Top US infectious disease doctor says Wuhan coronavirus can spread even when people have no symptoms. CNN. Retrieved 6 April 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/31/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-study/index.html

Coronavirus Update (Live): 1,318,229 Cases and 72,766 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak—Worldometer. (n.d.). Retrieved 7 April 2020, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

How to Protect Yourself | CDC. (2020, March 31). https://web.archive.org/web/20200331143006/https:/www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html

MacIntyre, C. R., Cauchemez, S., Dwyer, D. E., Seale, H., Cheung, P., Browne, G., Fasher, M., Wood, J., Gao, Z., Booy, R., & Ferguson, N. (2009). Face Mask Use and Control of Respiratory Virus Transmission in Households. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 15(2), 233–241. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid1502.081167

Tamara is a member of SACU who has already contributed a number of articles for China Eye on a variety of subjects. She has lived in Germany and the U.S. but is currently living in Beijing and working in the media industry there. Photographs accompanying this article are also by Tamara, taken recently in Beijing. 

When news broke of a mysterious virus causing respiratory illness said to have originated in Wuhan, I was about to enjoy several days off due to the Spring Festival holiday at home in Beijing. I vaguely remember Beijing having only two cases at the time. I was chatting with a Chinese coworker, deliberating whether I should return the movie tickets for the Spring Festival blockbusters my boyfriend and I had booked online.

“Nature has turned against us,” a Chinese coworker observed. I wasn’t so sure about that. “Nature is not for or against… it just is,” I mused. While nature I believed was ambivalent, I would discover that people’s attitudes towards the virus it had produced definitely weren’t!

There were bags of face masks stashed on an office desk and some coworkers were helping themselves. Some of my coworkers were already wearing masks in the office, and there was a sense of nervousness and hush. No one encouraged me to take any masks; but in retrospect, I think I should have been more proactive and asked to help myself. However, a Chinese coworker kindly offered me some from her bag, and I gratefully accepted.

Little did I know how valuable these face masks would be to me and my boyfriend Jackie in the coming weeks, as people made a run for the pharmacies to stock up on them. (Note: the usefulness of face masks in preventing the spread of the new virus, dubbed novel coronavirus, is controversial, but in China they are widely believed to be effective. Another issue is what types of masks work.) When I visited a pharmacy and convenience store, they were sold out and had no idea when new stock would come in. Searching for masks would become somewhat of a search for the Holy Grail for us in China.

“Good afternoon my foreign friend… be a bit careful these days,” a Wechat message from a Chinese acquaintance read several days later. It was a security guard at my local Yonghegong subway station whom I was friendly with, and whenever I met her in the subway station, we would wave to each other. She would later ask me by text whether I knew where to buy masks – maybe she thought I had connections abroad? – but I was sorry to tell her I couldn’t help. I was relieved to see, however, that she later found a rather high-tech mask which she wore while working in the subway.

Things started to get bizarre as the virus spread during the Spring Festival. It turned out I didn’t have to worry about going to the movies as the theaters were promptly closed, as well as the Yonghegong Temple across the street, which attracts thousands on the first day of the lunar new year. Temple fairs were canceled.  My boyfriend and I spent the Spring Festival hunkered down in our hutong house, living off the food we had stockpiled for the festival, watching movies, and holding our breath with the rest of China.

At the end of January, the U.S. embassy issued a level-four travel advisory for China, warning Americans not to travel to the country, and Americans in Wuhan were subsequently ferried out on evacuation flights, as were nationals of other countries. China’s neighbors started to close their borders. Flights out of China were starting to be suspended, and my mother asked me whether my boyfriend and I wanted to come spend several months with her in the U.S. until the virus had disappeared.

My gut reaction was to take her up on this offer, but the logistics of it were complicated. My boyfriend, who is Chinese, was highly unlikely to get a visa on such short notice, or at all under these circumstances. So I made the choice of riding out the epidemic with my boyfriend here in Beijing; after all, he wasn’t from Beijing, and leaving him stranded alone under these circumstances was not an option for me. “Thank you for sticking things out with me, I am very moved,” Jackie told me one morning, with tears in his eyes.

I read an article in the Beijinger magazine that stated that as of February 9, 70 percent of foreigners in Beijing chose to stay, either out of conviction that things would look up soon or because they simply couldn’t leave for various reasons. Some however did push the panic button and left, for example, I had an American acquaintance who scrambled to get on a flight back home because his mother was seriously ill and he didn’t know whether he would be able to see her again in the next couple of months. Upon landing, he put himself under a quarantine.

My Chinese and foreign coworkers became part of a successful “work from home experiment” that has been encouraged throughout China during the epidemic. I edited news stories from my home computer and communicated with my coworkers in a Wechat group of over forty people. Every day, I also sent a Wechat message to my office saying I was in good health. I felt very fortunate that I was not temporarily out of work like many others and that my employer was acting in a morally and socially responsible way by having us work from home to avoid the risk of infection.

Part of my job was keeping up with the news cycle. Every morning when I woke up, the latest numbers of infected and deceased flashed across my phone, and the media reports coming out of Wuhan and Hubei at large were harrowing. Especially poignant were the stories of healthcare workers infected in the line of duty, e.g. a 29-year-old doctor who was engaged to be married and died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. When my boyfriend and I were first exposed to such stories, we were shell-shocked as they were taking place not too far away, but gradually became used to the “new normal” of living in the  midst of an epidemic.

Misinformation and conflicting reports were rampant, and like many, I did not know whom to believe and which clickbait article to read next. Common sense was our best friend – practicing good hygiene, such as washing one’s hands, avoiding mass gatherings, trying to stay at home and sustaining one’s physical and mental health. Not giving in to irrational fear and hysteria but remaining vigilant. A sense of routine and interacting with others as part of the infinitely large cyberspace community also helped.

Compared to those in Hubei Province, we in Beijing have been very fortunate – we had access to goods we needed, could leave our apartments, move relatively freely, and could still run errands. However, everyday errands, like shopping or going to the ATM were fraught with complication – we had to pass through fever checks and barricades to get out of our buildings or hutongs, and show residence cards that our community center issued to us, and I was now nervous about the germs on the ATM keypad so I used a pen to put in my pass code.

Non-essential doctor’s and dentist visits were indefinitely postponed, as well as appointments with the hairdresser. I saw an elderly man on the street walking his poodle, which was also wearing a mask, a protective outfit and little slippers as there was uncertainty whether pets could also contract the virus.

Activities at home included emailing concerned friends abroad and assuring them of our safety, checking in with local friends, reading and writing, exercising in our small private courtyard, and engaging in home improvement.

We also interacted with my boyfriend’s family back in the Xi’an area as well as Chinese and foreign friends via Wechat. Not surprisingly, our bonds grew stronger during this difficult time. These are some of their reactions to the crisis.

When I called to check in on my Chinese landlord, who was in his 70’s, his voice was laced with fear. “Don’t go out,” he advised me. “Not now.”

One African friend who was a father to two teenage boys texted me: “Boys are stressed with staying at home and doing homework all day. I do not know how to cheer them up. They played all computer games and got tired of them.” He observed that one of his boys started to laugh hysterically after napping.

A Brazilian friend who lived alone was frustrated because the gym was closed, and he enjoyed socializing there. Even though he could work from home, he preferred going to the office and wearing a mask although it was hard to breathe in them long term. He was confident that the situation would soon return to normal. “We need to cling to that, otherwise we get crazy,” he said.

“We know nothing really about the virus,” an American friend who had lived in China for decades told me. He had been here during the SARS epidemic and was trying to power through this one by working on his creative projects. “True,” I thought. “But we know our own reality.” And this was it.

What was greatly concerning was that not only Chinese people around the world, but also foreigners associated with China were being stigmatized because of the virus. One acquaintance from Romania who was still in China and produced content for a local media outlet posted on Wechat that she had become the victim of online abuse from her country fellows by virtue of her relations with China, which she found distressing and demoralizing. I urged her to “ignore the bad and focus on the good,” but that was certainly easier said than done!

While the outbreak brought out the worst in people, it could bring out the best. Although I felt helpless and frustrated that there wasn’t a lot I could personally do to help, I was touched by the many people, Chinese and foreign, who had expressed their concern for us, and I tried to do my modest part to help boost morale. Here are two examples.

I have a young coworker who was originally from Wuhan, Hubei, the epicenter of the outbreak, and I made a point of checking in on him via Wechat several times to see how his family were doing back in Hubei. He said his family were safe, but isolated at home. He had spent the Spring Festival alone in Beijing because the virus had “killed” his travel plans of going home.

Similarly, I  tried to encourage a Chinese friend whose English name was Anna and who was under indefinite lockdown in the city of Yichang, Hubei. I was impressed by how stoic and appreciative she was. Anna told me that she bought a small piece of meat for  a whopping RMB 190 (about 27 U.S. dollars/21 GBP) but was understanding because the drivers’ efforts to deliver goods to the city posed  a health risk for them. When the drivers return from their run, she said, they would have to be quarantined for 14 days.

Without a question, it must be psychologically hard not to be able to leave one’s apartment except maybe once or twice a week to buy a limited selection of groceries at inflated prices. Still, for Anna and many of us in China, optimism prevailed. “With your encouragement, everything will be fine, you guys also take care of your health, we can do it together,” Anna texted me.

28 February 2020

Climate Change and China

by Walter Fung

This short article summarises the current policy of China on climate change and the environment and the steps being taken. It draws substantially on Barbara Finamore’s recent book, Will China Save the Planet? (Polity Press, 2018). In 1996, she founded the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Program, the first clean energy programme to be launched in China by an international non-government organisation. I can recommend this book, packed with positive information together with extensive references and suggestions for further reading.

Contrary to popular Western public belief, China has always had a policy to protect the environment from the earliest days after opening up in 1978. Much has been achieved in limiting the effect on the environment, but China has also had extremely serious pressing problems to overcome: widespread poverty, building up the economy and creating jobs and health care. These issues are vitally important for national stability.

Economists in 2008 estimated that China needed growth of 8% to prevent unemployment rising in urban areas. China’s leaders focused on economic growth and poverty alleviation as the top priority, but this was to change in the second decade of the 21st century after significant economic progress had been made and 800 million people had been lifted out of poverty.

China’s early environmental achievements

In January 1999, New Scientist magazine published an article which began, ‘Remember- you read it here first’. The subtitle of the article was ‘Fred Pearce slays the myth of the Chinese carbon dragon’. The article reported that China is one of the few countries in a relatively early stage of industrialisation in which energy demand has grown significantly less than GDP. ‘China has cut its energy consumption per unit of output by 50% since 1980’. Remember this article was written in 1999.

China’s National Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2006 detailed the threat to coastal cities and other consequences of global warming and in 2007 China published its National Climate Change Programme. This was the first document of its kind by a developing country. It listed what China had done over many years, including the central government order in the summer of 2004 to 24 provinces to slash their power consumption.

A document of 2007 solicited public opinion on a draft law to regulate air conditioning and central heating in public buildings. The law would require room temperature in summer to be no lower than 26 degrees centigrade, and no higher than 20 degrees in winter. These proposed regulations were to reduce energy consumption. The new regulation also promoted the use of renewable energy and proposed to ban the use and import of energy inefficient materials, techniques and facilities.

The Biosani organisation in 2007 issued a publication, Green China 2007-2008’, which detailed sustainable and green projects.

The Three Gorges Dam and other hydro-electric projects form part of the plan for clean energy. This dam generates energy – the equivalent of 18 nuclear power stations as well as providing flood control and vastly improved river navigation facilitating development of the interior and south-western China.

In September 2010, China topped the Ernst Young Renewable Energy Attractiveness Index. In the previous year, one half of all wind power turbines had been set up in China. The UN Environmental Programme reported that more than one third of all global investment in renewable energy was Chinese in 2010.

International agreements

In 2009 at Copenhagen, China would not accept binding international limits on its greenhouse gas emissions because this would restrict economic growth and hence threaten national sovereignty and stability. China’s view was that it had already made a significant contribution.

Before the Copenhagen talks, China had already pledged to increase its proportion of non-fossil fuels i.e. hydropower, nuclear power, wind and solar power, to about 15% of its total energy mix by 2020.  In addition, China’s carbon intensity emissions (defined as emissions per unit of GDP) would be reduced by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2020. China holds the view that developed and developing countries have common but differential responsibilities. Other developing countries, notably India also hold this view, but this is an issue that the US will not entertain.

Before the Paris agreement in December 2015, President Obama visited Beijing and the climate was discussed. The two countries issued a joint statement; they would work together on environmental issues. The US would reduce GHG (greenhouse gas emissions) by 26-28% by 2025, compared to 2005 levels and China committed to peak its emissions around 2030. At Paris, China reaffirmed its commitment to peak emission by 2025, but added, it would make try to increase the mix of non-fossil energy to 20% by 2030. It would also reduce its carbon intensity by 60-65% below 2005 levels by 2030 and also expand forest cover. Recently President Trump has indicated that the US may pull out of these agreements.

Change of priority

These Climate Change agreements coincided with a change of priority in China’s development. It was decided that the focus on GDP growth was no longer the way forward for China’s citizens; 800 million people had already been lifted out of poverty. Although China’s environmental laws and policies had been strengthened by President Hu Jintao, the new president, Xi Jinping in November 2012, stressed that China’s future prosperity depended on a more balanced economic model that also protected the environment and people’s health, i.e. ‘ecological civilisation’. This formed part of a programme to move away from fossil-fuel driven heavy industry and manufacturing to one based on services, innovation, higher quality goods, clean energy and environmental sustainability.

A lower level of GDP growth, around 6.5%, would become the ‘new normal’; GDP growth would no longer be the most important factor in assessing an official’s performance. In its place, environmental performance would be the primary criterion for promotion decisions.

Focus on pollution control

At the beginning of 2013, the Chinese government began to release hourly air pollution data to the public, for more than 70 Chinese cities. Most failed to meet national pollution standards. The monitoring was later extended to the 338 largest cities. Public awareness and concern soared and at the end of September 2013, the central government pledged 1.7 trillion yuan to clean the air.

Cleaning up pollution had become a top priority and an integral goal of the new economic development model and in November 2013, a National Strategy for Climate Change adaptation was published. This set out guidelines, targets and actions to protect water and soil resources and reduce climate impacts on agriculture. The report also called for steps to prevent and monitor rising sea levels for early warning systems at coastal cities and construction of seawalls and other flood control systems.

Public concern had grown and a survey in 2012 and again in 2017 showed that people understood and accepted that Climate Change was being caused by human activity. They believed that the government should take the lead to combat Climate Change, but citizens were willing to take action on their own and nearly 75% said they would be willing to pay more for climate friendly products.

Clean energy development and Climate Change

The main cause of air pollution and Climate Change is the burning of fossil fuels, the main culprit being coal burning. The development of clean energy and control of emissions had become not only in China’s national interest, but in all other countries’ as well. Xi Jinping has promised to help other developing countries both with technical and financial support and a 20-billion-yuan fund has been established.

Coal-fired power plants still generate a significant amount of electrify but are now subject to stringent requirements to improve efficiency and more energy output per unit of coal burnt. In 2014, ultra-low emissions standards were introduced, requiring them to be as low polluting as natural gas power plants. Those units not able to meet the regulations were to be closed. Those that do meet the standards would pay reduced tariffs.

Beijing has invested billions of yuan to reduce its reliance on coal. All heating and power facilities in the city have been converted from coal to natural gas; the last coal plant closed in March 2017. But the capital remains polluted because of its proximity to Hubei province which has huge glass, cement and aluminium factories.

Tree planting had always been encouraged in New China and by 2009, 18% of China’s land area had forest coverage. This coverage will increase to 23% by the year, 2020. Soldiers have been assigned to tree planting to meet this target.

China is the leading producer of wind turbines and solar energy panels. The price of these items worldwide has been reduced by the economics of scale of production in China. The 12^th Five-Year plan (2011-15) designated the production of energy from solar and wind sources as ‘strategic industries’. Targets, timetables and policy measures were implemented together with financial grants and incentives.

As early as 2001, China made the development of new energy vehicles (NEV) a priority in its 10^th Five-Year Plan (2001-05) and in 2010, NEVs were designated a strategic emerging industry. Accordingly, the government granted $10 billion over 10 years to the leading automotive and battery manufacturers for the development of electric cars. About 140 Chinese companies make 66% of all lithium batteries in the world. The US share is about 10%. As with wind turbines and solar panels, the volume of production in China, has brought down the price of lithium batteries. In March 2018. China launched an EV battery recycling programme.

China also grants subsidies for the purchase of NEVs and they are exempt from purchase tax. In some cases, subsidies total $16,000 per vehicle. Beijing plans to replace all its 69,000 taxis with EVs. Didi Chuxing, the leading ride-hailing service in China plans to spend $150 million on a nationwide charging service and expand its fleet of EVs to one million by 2020.

China is now the leading producer of EVs together with charging facilities. There are now more charging points in Beijing alone than the whole of Germany. In 2017, more than 605,000 passenger NEVs were sold in China, nearly half the world’s total, plus 198,000 commercial NEVs, mainly electric. China is home to 99% of the world’s total of 385,000 electric buses. Every five weeks, China’s cities convert the equivalent of London’s entire bus fleet.  There are plans to ban petrol cars by as early as 2030.

President Xi, in a keynote speech at the Belt and Road (BRI) Forum, on 14 May 2017, stressed that China would uphold the concept of green development: low carbon, recyclability and sustainable lifestyle. China would play its part to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The BRI would be used to accelerate the use of low carbon techniques in the countries involved. A report from the Grantham Research Institute of the LSE, (March 2016) indicates that China, itself, may well attain the goal of peaking its carbon emissions several years ahead of schedule.

Barbara Finamore
Will China Save the Planet?
Polity Press, 2018
ISBN 978-1509532636 (Hardback)
ISBN 978-1509532643 (Paperback)

Walter Fung, November 2019

A book review by Dirk Nimmegeers. 

Dirk is a member the Belgium-China Friendship Association and also of SACU. He edits the website ChinaSquare.be a Dutch language website which covers news and comments on developments in China. 

Peter Nolan realizes the danger of a lengthy and fierce battle between the West and China, which may cause enormous material and human damage. One way to avoid that disaster is to ensure that China and the West get to know and understand each other better.

According to the authoritative Cambridge professor, many Chinese, and certainly the prominent persons among them, know more about Western history and current events than Westerners know or want to know about China. Nolan hopes to change that.

Two civilizations
China and the West: Crossroads of Civilisation consists of three parts. First Nolan compares the routes that the West and China have travelled in the last 3000 years. He then explains that capitalist globalization is a two-edged sword, with both very reasonable and extremely unreasonable elements. The last and by far the largest part of the book deals with the Communist Party of China, its role and how it views parliamentary democracy. According to Nolan, many differences between the West and China go back to what he calls the Ancien Régime. During that era prior to the revolution, which ended in Europe with the 18th century, in China with the 19th century, those two great civilizations had a totally divergent, almost opposite character.

Two evolutions
The author perceives long periods in which they become similar and grow together. Those eras are interspersed with centuries in which both were evolving in a completely different way and getting alienated from each other. In every age, various ways of thinking and acting were formed in the two regions and that has continued to the current date. Nolan discusses the fields that matter in the relationship between the two entities. He gives his views on their ideas concerning the following topics: unity or division, politics, expansion, balance between sections of the population and ethnic communities, religion, militarism, innovation, nationalism and communism. The way China looks at the West today is largely determined by what the Chinese know and have experienced from Europe and the United States over the course of history. Much of this is still seen to exist, shaping Chinese perceptions today. For instance, the inclination of the West to use violence for serving its interests and to impose its values on other continents.

Division & conflict vs. Unity & harmony
After centuries in which the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire had been growing into vast unified universes, the former disintegrated while the latter remained largely united and stable. In Europe and in the large parts of the world that it took over, murderous internal and external confrontations often prevailed. The latter include hundreds of years of territorial expansion and looting – colonialism – which have resulted in bloody wars against independence movements and neo-colonialism. In China, soldiers, such as the ones we are familiar with from the terracotta army, played only a marginal role after the Han Dynasty (ended in 220 of our era). They fell primarily under the authority of the civil service, just like the People’s Army today obeys the CPC.

According to the author, the Chinese view the conflictual course of the West with a mixture of wonder, disgust and a certain anxiety. For centuries, China had a strong appetite for hierarchy, stability, but especially for harmony. These differences explain the current geopolitical contradiction between the leading nations of the West and China: zero-sum versus positive-sum, also called win-win.

Market and bureaucracy
For centuries, and many readers may be surprised at this, another constant in China was the role of market which was regulated by the state. The market ensured economic development and prosperity for large sections of the population. The Confucian civil servants were selected for merit and for the will to serve the interests of the population. Harmony here too: the balance between the market with its healthy (energizing) competition and regulation by the state apparatus, intended to curb excesses of the market. Harmony and dynamic competition did not exclude each other, but rather complemented each other.

Maoist interlude
The hostility to the market among the Maoists and their unilateral emphasis on ideology, on the one hand promoting revolutionary violence and on the other hand displaying a strong aversion to all competition, belonged to a variant of communism, according to Nolan. This was partly prescribed by the Soviet Union, but it was also a reaction against the equally ideologically inspired and violent anti-communism of the West and its allies. During the anti-Japanese resistance and the civil war, Maoism co-existed in the CPC with a tendency that was more focused on improving living conditions. At the same time, the struggle between these two lines flared up regularly.

According to Professor Nolan, Maoism has in fact been determining policy for only two decades. After 1976, the CPC slowly but surely returned to the kind of marriage of convenience between the market and the state that had been typical of Confucian China. Deng Xiaoping and his successors have successfully combined that Confucianism (and other age-old philosophical movements such as Daoism) with their own Chinese brand of Marxism. They have returned to the two-thousand-year-old Chinese road after a “deviation”.

Nolan’s Marxism
That provides food for thought and perhaps for discussion, as does Nolan’s definition of Marxism. The author states that Lenin, Mao and their followers have interpreted Marxism in a selective manner. In a similarly reductive way however, he strongly focuses on Marx’s admiration for the dynamic forces of capitalism. That would even have led Marx to an approval of colonialism, which, after all, ‘would accelerate capitalist development’. Nolan believes he finds the best analysis of Marx’s thinking in the work of Shlomo Avineri. This political scientist believes that Marx saw the communist revolution as a long-term evolutionary process. Understandably the importance that modern-day Chinese Communists attach to class struggle and their suppression of movements that undermine socialism receive rather little attention in Nolan’s book.

New insights and knowledge that has grown dim
The knowledge that Nolan passes on about Confucian harmony, the military domain, the market and bureaucracy in pre-20th century China may enable us to recognize and understand developments in today’s China. These insights will be new to many readers in the West and it is possible that they open eyes to a different view of the country.

However, the author not only provides new insights. He also refreshes old knowledge or points to phenomena that we have grown to take for granted. So that we no longer see how exceptional they are, or must be for the Chinese. The fact that Christianity has dominated the entire European culture from the end of the Roman Empire until well into the 20th century for example. China has not seen a comparable influence and power of religion. The Chinese admire the art treasures this has produced, but fear that other product of religious zeal, the urge to convert. This is something that they detect in the Western pursuit of regime change in other countries.

Parliamentarism
Nolan acknowledges that in European history not all was sorrow and misery. After the Renaissance, the West successfully caught up with China in the technological field until it got abreast of China in 1800, albeit often by adapting original inventions. Nolan also applauds the long undeniable progress from feudalism to parliamentary democracy, noting that the latter is also a very young system in the West, just like the phenomenon of the European nation states is. The author informs us that Chinese leaders and citizens study parliamentarism thoroughly and are affected by its influence, even to a certain extent welcoming it. He then, however, convincingly explains that the doubts of many Chinese people about the suitability of that kind of democracy for their own country are certainly legitimate. A majority of Chinese people still prefer meritocratic bureaucracy over a fully-fledged multi-party system. Because according to them, the current system is more suitable for a country with the size, history and degree of development of China. Moreover, the power of the CPC and the system of government control also offer the best guarantee that politicians and officials will strive at serving the people.

Knowledge or caricature
Peter Nolan recognizes that we live in dangerous times. “If the West and China are unable to cooperate, the outcome will be a disaster for the whole human race. This is a choice of no choice (mei you xuanze de xuanze)”, he says in the introduction. China has changed but Westerners refuse to see it, either because they fear China’s growing economic and military power or out of ideological aversion. We should not be surprised that China is disappointed by the caricatures that cynical and suspicious Westerners make of their political system and policies.

Nolan’s motivation
China fears that Western politicians are preparing the minds of the population for war and are thus heading for a self-fulfilling prophecy. That gives Peter Nolan a sense of urgency motivating him to share with his audience and readers his phenomenal knowledge of China and its relationship with the West. He has experienced for years that in China there is a great interest for his ideas and opinions. With the book China and the West: Crossroads of Civilisation, that will be no different. Hopefully his message will reach a large audience in the West as well.

China and the West: Crossroads of Civilisation by Peter Nolan
Routledge, Published 12 October 2018
278 Pages

ISBN 9781138331884 (paperback)
Series: Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy
Hardback and e-Book also available

Tom Harper is a SACU member and joined SACU Council in September 2019. He is a doctoral researcher at Neijiang Normal University. He specialises in China’s foreign relations and has written on this subject for several publications. This is his first for China Eye, published in Issue 63, Autumn 2019. 

Over the course of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, few nations have had as great a reversal in status as China has had, going from an isolated quasi-feudal empire seemingly frozen in time to one of the Great Powers of the modern day complete with cities that are as modern if not more so than many First World capitals. This comes with the 40^th anniversary of China’s opening up to the world under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, who has gone down as one of the significant leaders of the 20^th century and Deng’s vision for China will continue to have an impact on global life today.

One of the testaments to this has been in Xi’an, which I had the fortune to visit in 2017. The city saw China’s past and present paths blend together, with the tombs and palaces of emperors long departed standing almost side by side with structures from the modern day. One wondered what Emperor Qin, one of the founders of the Chinese nation, would have made of his new kingdom. This blend has also made itself apparent in the frequent references to the Silk Roads of old which once began in Xi’an, with the city being one of the focal points of China’s ambition to craft a latter day Silk Road in the form of the Belt and the Road Initiative, which renders China as a truly global power rather than the hermit nation it has often been cast as and is a demonstration of how far China has come since 1979.

As with any major global development, China’s ascent has been a challenge to the common assumptions and myths we have regarding China. In addition, China’s development has also been perceived as an example for other states to follow for their development, seemingly following China’s traditional role of leading by example.

China’s current status can be attributed to the defeats suffered by the Qing dynasty at the hands of the European powers, most notably in the First Opium War of 1839. This was often claimed to be a result of China seemingly falling behind the Western world, most notably in the perception that China was unwilling or unable to industrialise in the way that the European powers had done. As a result, this raised the question of how China should modernise with the once dominant Confucian system seemingly losing its appeal in favour of Western ideals, a development that would be furthered by the downfall of the Qing dynasty in the Xinhai revolution of 1911. It was the question of how to modernise China to regain its former status, a quest pursued by Sun Yat-Sen, the father of modern China, that has been the starting point for the path that we see today in the form of China’s ideological and economic development.

The roots of China’s development, which has seen it become the world’s second largest economy a decade ago, overtaking Japan and often projected to overtake the United States in the near future, has often been traced to the economic reforms and opening up of China in 1979. This saw the abandonment of the pursuit of the communist ideology that had been the guiding force of the Mao era in favour of the pursuit of economic development, which continues to underpin China’s relationship with the wider world today.

With the opening up of China, it became the world’s workshop, a title once held by the United Kingdom at the height of its power during the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This also saw the rise of the moniker ‘made in China’ which has been synonymous with cheaply produced, low-quality goods that litter everyday life. It is also this image of China as the world’s low-cost factory that would be challenged in the later phases of China’s development as it sought to conceive its own designs rather than building those of others.

What has been most notable about China’s development has been in its speed, which has been likened to the Industrial and ICT Revolutions happening simultaneously and in half the time period, as described by the former Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd. This has also seen what had once been little more than dirt roads give way to sleek infrastructure that puts many First World nations to shame. In addition, China’s experiences of development have also been an inspiration to the developing world, which has been expressed through the China Model.

The Chinese model of economic development, known as the ‘Beijing Consensus’, has been one of the tools behind China’s rapid development and one of the most successful aspects of China’s soft power push. This has seen the elites of the developing world, such as Pakistan’s Imran Khan, become staunch advocates of the China model, as demonstrated by his pledge to bring this model to Pakistan during his electoral campaign. It is this aspect that has demonstrated China’s appeal to the developing world.

China’s model follows the precedent set by Japan’s modernisation during the Meiji Restoration of the mid-19^th century and its post-war economic development. It also utilised what Ho Kwon-Ping termed as ‘Neo-Confucian State Capitalism’ pioneered by Singapore, which has also been praised by British politicians who misinterpreted the country as a nirvana of free-market capitalism. This came at a time where China’s identity shifted towards a more Confucian vision rather than the ideological project of the 20^th century. While the Chinese model has been part of China’s appeal, it has also challenged the common images of China, most notably the perception that China’s development was solely due to outside help and that it was based upon a Western model, which has been raised by the image of China’s development as a Frankenstein’s monster created by Western investors and economists.  Such an image often overlooks the nature of the Chinese model as well as the role that the Chinese themselves have played in the country’s development.

The latest phase of China’s development has highlighted its technological advances, which can be characterised as going from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Designed in China’, a move that has been epitomised by China’s telecommunications flagship, Huawei.  As with much of China’s development, this challenges many of the common myths about China, most notably the assumption that it can only manufacture goods that have been conceived elsewhere and that China is either incapable of innovation or can only do so through imitation. Such an image overlooks China’s tradition of innovation, with inventions such as gunpowder and paper money continuing to play important roles in everyday life as well as how China has been able to make its advances in high technology.

China’s advances in technology can also be attributed to its long-term strategies and its Confucian embrace of education. At many British universities, this can be seen in the flood of Chinese students eager to study in the UK, with applications from China recently eclipsing those from Northern Ireland to become the largest contingent of foreign students studying in the UK. This will further the educational exchange between China and the UK as well as offering a glimpse of what is to come. This was clear in the China Bridge competition in London this year, where Chinese universities sought to recruit the future of Britain as well as challenging the assumption that the British have no aptitude for foreign languages, with students across the country giving speeches in fluent Mandarin. It is this event that shows how the Sino-British educational exchanges offer a window into the future of their relationship.

As a result, China has moved away from what the influential Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, termed as ‘Foxconn China’ to a state where Chinese firms have become an equal to their Western counterparts in numerous fields and has even surpassed them in others, most notably in 5G technology, with Huawei being identified by British Telecomm as the global leader in this technology. While this challenges the image of China being incapable of innovation, it also questions the belief that the Western world will always hold the technological advantage, an assumption that seems increasingly tenuous today.  As a result, it is likely that China’s innovations today will play a role in shaping life just as its previous innovations had done.

China’s experiences of economic development have demonstrated how far the country has come as well as setting an example to inspire other nations in the developing world. In addition, it has challenged many of the common assumptions about China as well as seeing it become one of the major powers of the modern day, which will play a greater role in shaping the future of the world.

Tom Harper, November 2019