green china rising

As the trailer for this new documentary from Mandarin Films makes clear, the global environmental crisis will be solved in China, not in America, for the simple reason that China has no other option. As I noted recently in my post on ecological civilization in China, there is a widespread recognition in China that the paradigm of industrial civilization must be changed so that China can bring economic development to its people without a correspondingly large increase in its ecological footprint. The interesting point made in the trailer is that the failure of the Copenhagen summit points simply to the fact that China cannot wait for the world to get its act together. Rather, China can rely only on itself. In fact, this is not a new theme in modern Chinese history. Maoism was famous for its voluntaristic spirit, in which the efforts of the people were called upon to prevail against all obstacles to building the new China. Moreover, China’s enormous economic and political engagement with Africa and Latin America at present is a continuation of the paradigm developed after the Sino-Soviet split, when China saw itself isolated from both cold war superpowers. For rapidly developing countries such as China, [...]