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China’s leaders used to believe that humans can and should conquer Nature, that environmental damage was a problem affecting only capitalist societies, and that socialist societies were immune to it. Now, facing overwhelming signs of China’s own severe environmental problems, they know better. The shift in thinking began as early as 1972, when China sent a delegation to the First United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The year 1973 saw the establishment of the government’s so-called Leading Group for Environmental Protection, which morphed in 1998 (the year of the great floods) into the State Environmental Protection Administration. In 1983 environmental protection was declared a basic national principle—in theory. In reality, although much effort has been made to control environmental degradation, economic development still takes priority and remains the chief criterion for evaluating government officials’ performance. Many environmental protection laws and policies that have been adopted on paper are not effectively implemented or enforced.

What does the future hold for China? Of course, the same question arises everywhere in the world: the development of environmental problems is accelerating, the development of attempted solutions is also accelerating, which horse will win the race? In China this question has special urgency, not only because of China’s already-discussed scale and impact on the world, but also because of a feature of Chinese history that may be termed “lurching.” (I use this term in its neutral strict sense of “swaying suddenly from side to side,” not in its pejorative sense of the gait of a drunk person.) By this metaphor, I am thinking of what seems to me the most distinctive feature of Chinese history, which I discussed in my earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because of geographic factors—such as China’s relatively smooth coastline, its lack of major peninsulas as large as Italy and Spain/Portugal, its lack of major islands as large as Britain and Ireland, and its parallel-flowing major rivers—China’s geographic core was unified already in 221 B.C. and has remained unified for most of the time since then, whereas geographically fragmented Europe has never been unified politically. That unity enabled China’s rulers to command changes over a larger area than any European ruler could ever command—both changes for the better, and changes for the worse, often in rapid alternation (hence “lurching”). China’s unity and decisions by emperors may contribute to explaining why China at the time of Renaissance Europe developed the world’s best and largest ships, sent fleets to India and Africa, and then dismantled those fleets and left overseas colonization to much smaller European states; and why China began, and then did not pursue, its own incipient industrial revolution.

The strengths and risks of China’s unity have persisted into recent times, as China continues to lurch on major policies affecting its environment and its population. On the one hand, China’s leaders have been able to solve problems on a scale scarcely possible for European and American leaders: for instance, by mandating a one-child policy to reduce population growth, and by ending logging nationally in 1998. On the other hand, China’s leaders have also succeeded in creating messes on a scale scarcely possible for European and American leaders: for instance, by the chaotic transition of the Great Leap Forward, by dismantling the national educational system in the Cultural Revolution, and (some would say) by the emerging environmental impacts of the three megaprojects.

As for the outcome of China’s current environmental problems, all one can say for sure is that things will get worse before they get better, because of time lags and the momentum of damage already under way. One big factor acting both for the worse and for the better is the anticipated increase in China’s international trade as a result of its joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), thereby lowering or abolishing tariffs and increasing