Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [33]
And then I put my reading glasses back on and read the newspaper. I was sitting on a small foldout chair in the hallway of a sleeping car. I had no need for a sleeping berth as it was a midday train, a six-hour journey through green farmland under a gray, soot-stained sky. But since I was traveling the rails of China during Golden Week along with 150 million other people, every seat had been sold out except for the higher-priced sleepers. Train tickets are divided into four classes—hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. The Chinese, of course, are among the most frugal people on the planet. Few people spend their hard-earned kuai on a daytime soft-sleeper.
I shared my cabin with two cheerful kids, along with their mother and grandmother, who were happily sprawled on the two lower births contentedly munching on fish heads. In the next cabin, a quartet of Party officials was busy spewing a fog of blue smoke that hung in the train car like a carcinogenic mist. There were, I was surprised to note, prominent No Smoking signs throughout the train. As I sat reading, a young train attendant approached the cabin of smokers and bowing, deeply and often, kindly reminded them that smoking was forbidden on the train. Moments later, she returned with ashtrays.
I returned to my reading, an engrossing article in the government-run English language newspaper China Daily about all the shoddy Western goods that had to be recalled in China. It’s terrible, the article suggested. You just can’t trust what comes out of the West these days. I took a sip from my bottle of water, idly recalling that 50 percent of all bottled water in China is contaminated. The label said Nestlé, but it could just as well be Beijing tap. I put my magic spectacles back on and tried to view the bottle of water in the Chinese context. But they made my head spin and I took them off again.
Outside, beyond the gritty sprawl of Jinan, in a landscape of stony hills and farm fields in spring bloom, we rumbled past power plant after power plant. What are those, I’d wondered, a few miles back, those perfect conical mountains pointing to the sky? They were dusty slag heaps, it turned out, the enormous stacks of coal that power China. And they were everywhere, stack after stack. One, two, three, the power plants stretched on to the horizon. It’s an astonishing sight, rolling past farms in the shadows of chimneys with billowing plumes of smoke. I had, of course, lost hope that I’d know what, precisely, I was eating in China, and it was enlightening to see that my vegetables came braised in the unfiltered emissions of hundreds of coal-fired plants.
And there are so very many of them. In 2005 alone, China built enough power plants to power the United Kingdom. In 2006, China built enough power plants to power France. It is, frankly, nearly impossible to comprehend the scale of China’s energy demands. The United Kingdom is no Togo. France is no Fiji. These are two of the most industrialized nations in the world. And yet every year, China added another France or United Kingdom in energy production.
Most of the power plants are relatively small. And nearly all of them burn coal. This is because China has an awful lot of coal, mountains of it really, and to obtain it thousands of miners die each year, as many as six thousand a year by some estimates. In a single twelve-month period, China burns more coal than the United States, Japan, and Europe combined.
I’d had no intention of dwelling upon air pollution when I boarded