Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [224]
The remaining feature of China’s population trends worth stressing is rapid urbanization. From 1953 to 2001, while China’s total population “only” doubled, the percentage of its population that is urban tripled from 13 to 38%, hence the urban population increased seven-fold to nearly half a billion. The number of cities quintupled to almost 700, and existing cities increased greatly in area.
For China’s economy, the simplest short descriptor is “big and fast-growing.” China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, accounting for one-quarter of the world’s total. It is also the world’s largest producer and consumer of fertilizer, accounting for 20% of world use, and for 90% of the global increase in fertilizer use since 1981, thanks to a quintupling of its own fertilizer use, now three times the world average per acre. As the second largest producer and consumer of pesticides, China accounts for 14% of the world total and has become a net exporter of pesticides. On top of that, China is the largest producer of steel, the largest user of agricultural films for mulching, the second largest producer of electricity and chemical textiles, and the third largest oil consumer. In the last two decades, while its production of steel, steel products, cement, plastics, and chemical fiber were increasing 5-, 7, 10-, 19-, and 30-fold respectively, its washing machine output increased 34,000 times.
Pork used to be overwhelmingly the main meat in China. With increasing affluence, demand for beef, lamb, and chicken products has increased rapidly, to the point where per-capita egg consumption now equals that of the First World. Per-capita consumption of meat, eggs, and milk increased four-fold between 1978 and 2001. That means much more agricultural waste, because it takes 10 or 20 pounds of plants to produce one pound of meat. The annual output of animal droppings on land is already three times the output of industrial solid wastes, to which should be added the increase in fish droppings and fish food and fertilizer for aquaculture, tending to increase terrestrial and aquatic pollution respectively.
China’s transportation network and vehicle fleet have grown explosively. Between 1952 and 1997 the length of railroads, motor roads, and airline routes increased 2.5-, 10-, and 108-fold. The number of motor vehicles (mostly trucks and buses) increased 15-fold between 1980 and 2001, cars 130-fold. In 1994, after the number of motor vehicles had increased 9 times, China decided to make car production one of its four so-called pillar industries, with the goal of increasing production (now especially of cars) by another factor of 4 by the year 2010. That would make China the world’s third largest vehicle manufacturing country, after the U.S. and Japan. Considering how bad the air quality already is in Beijing and other cities, due mostly to motor vehicles, it will be interesting to see what urban air quality is like in 2010. The planned increase in motor vehicles will also impact the environment by requiring more land conversion into roads and parking lots.
Behind those impressive statistics on the scale and growth of China’s economy lurks the fact that much of it is based on outdated, inefficient, or polluting technology. China’s energy efficiency in industrial production is only half that of the First World; its paper production consumes more than twice as much water as in the First World; and its irrigation relies on inefficient surface methods responsible for water