China is the 800 pound gorilla in every room in the house, but damned if you can see that gorilla clearly for looking at it. So it’s good there’s a trend towards China-centric media coverage in the west. Here’s some of my recent favourites:

1. Seed’s Mara Hvistendahl reports on the enormous environmental crises and solutions China is cooking up inThe China Experiment
   

   ‘”The Chinese advantage is that when they decide something, they can do very dramatic things,” says energy analyst Jim Brock. “In 2000, they took 26,000 heavily polluting minibuses off the road in a week [in Beijing]. They cut the pollution by 6 percent just by saying we don’t want these cars on the road. Try that in the United States—it wouldn’t work.”

   But the story here in Inner Mongolia is how the speed with which China implements projects can become a liability. In places like this, China in fact runs the risk of moving too quickly on the environment, with too little attention to the alliance-building and cooperation that are necessary to address an issue as gargantuan as climate change.

   Entire wind farms have been built so quickly that the infrastructure to connect them to the grid wasn’t integrated into the plan, and so they sit, huge aeolian props thumping into the constant breeze, powering nothing. In July 2005, turbines from an Inner Mongolian wind farm collapsed, killing six workers. A subsequent investigation revealed that the accident was caused by hasty deadlines and failure to observe construction standards.’

   In a world where degree is all nobody does bigandfast like China. I’m reminded (as usual) of William Gibson’s immortal novel opener:

   “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”

2. Getting your head around matters of extreme degree often requires visual aids. Edward Burtynsky’s photos of industrial China do that for you. There’s a bunch of places to see Burtynsky’s photos on the interwebs (thankfully! lots of ‘serious’ photographers seem hell bent on consigning their efforts to arty obscurity by keeping their precious images off the tasteless plebian tubes), here’s a good one at Wired: Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias; Inside China’s Vast Factories

   

   You bet I’m gonna see the accompanying documentary movie as soon as I can, and in the astronomically unlikely change I’ll actually be in the same vicinity as one of his gallery shows I’ll even go see it, because I saw the micro version on the internet.

3. Maybe the best of the three,China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?

   (scroll down, it’s in there)

   is Orville Schell giving a longnow seminar on the current social and political state of the Big One. Someone’s going to complain that I’m being colonial by pushing a white foreigner’s view of China as important, but hey I’m a white foreigner and when it comes to something as foreign (to me) as China, I need the on-ramp of a sympathetically contextualized point of view. Schell, a longtime resident and observer of the country, suggests that China is aggressively in-between revolutions, extremely neither this nor that, in an entirely liminal and furthermore practical state of national mind. From the “blog summary” of the talk:

   “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army.

   No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.

   So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term.

   These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.”

Here we go.