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The highest point on Hong Kong Island still bears its British colonial name.
On these rare days when offshore breezes blow away the industrial pollution
spewing from the mainland, Victoria Peak offers a spectacular vista toward
the fastest-growing economic colossus the world has ever known.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that China's share of the global
economy will triple by 2050, surpassing the United States' current share of
22 per cent. It wouldn't be the first time that China will lead the world: Its
share of the global economy peaked at more than 30 per cent in the early
1800s, before Europe's Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the
Americas displaced the Middle Kingdom economically. Then came
subjugation and savagery at the hands of the Japanese during the two world
wars, followed by Chairman Mao's brutally disastrous rule, leaving the
population traumatized and impoverished.
The major driver of personal income growth has been mass migration of
rural unemployed to the construction sites and factory floors of the big cities.
The current downturn resulted in the layoff of up to 30 million of these
workers; meanwhile, China's universities and trade schools will graduate 20
million this year, resulting in 50 million of the urban population looking for
jobs. This doesn't include the many impoverished millions in the countryside
wanting a new future in the cities.
Building the economy isn't China's only challenge. On most days, the view
from Victoria Peak to mainland Shenzhen province is obscured by a choking
blue haze. Just as coal-fired steam engines drove the smoke-darkened
European cities in the Industrial Revolution, China's industrial miracle is
driven by coal-fired electric power. Until the downturn of the past year, a
new coal-fired power plant was coming online every five days. Annual
consumption of thermal coal is about 2.6 billion tonnes and China's coal is
“dirty” – contaminated with compounds that yield a noxious soup of gaseous
emissions along with airborne, toxic ash particulates, much of which hitches
a ride on the jet stream to the west coasts of Canada and the United States.
While the United Nations and G8 continue to pressure China to clean up its
act, it is the people of China who will drive the most change, and not only for
air emissions. Angered by enforcement officials who either fail in their duties
or accept payoffs to look the other way, rural communities are rising up
against factories that pollute farmland and poison drinking water. In the new
People's Republic of China, it is the people that Beijing's powerful need to
fear most.