China and the World Energy Situation

China is now the world's fourth largest economy and has an enormous need for energy. Like India, China is now very much a part of the global economy and has as much right to energy as the US, Europe and Japan, leaders of the world economy for most of the 20th century.

But it's not clear that the Bush Administration or even the Democrats, to some extent, have fully absorbed what these new developments mean. Here's an article in the San Jose Mercury News that summarizes what's happening in China but I want to focus on this part:

Protests are increasing. While Chinese, especially in cities, are generally optimistic, the populace has many local grievances, ranging from corruption to land grabs and abuse of authority. The number of protests shot up from 10,000 in 1994 to "more than 74,000" last year, involving 3.76 million people, according to Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang.

Officials race to keep a lid on unrest, aware of Mao's famous saying on sudden social upheaval: "A spark from heaven can set the whole plain ablaze."

To quell uprisings, authorities don't hesitate to use brutality. When villagers in coastal Dongzhou in Guangdong province in the far south rose up on Dec. 5-6 against a proposed power plant, paramilitary police opened fire, killing between three and 20 people. Discussion of the event was largely purged from the Internet in China.

The protest against the power plant was actually the second protest in a week. An earlier protest in the same district involved land seized for windmills. I don't know the specifics on how much land this power plant would take but it's clear that taking land for a windmill plantation would involve considerable acreage. I've checked several different stories and only the earliest stories mention the windmills that initiated the protests. I'm not sure why the mention of the windmills has been dropped from subsequent stories but I have noticed over the last few months stories about China's developing energy policies. The Chinese appear to take seriously the need for energy independence, in terms of alternative energy and in terms of securing their own oil supplies (see India and China to Buy Canadian Holdings and China Lays Down Gauntlet in Energy War). The opening shot of China's new energy policy may have been the attempt to buy Unocal.

One has to notice that these developments bypass Washington. Bush has no long-term energy policy nor does he expend much energy in the cost-efficient exercise of diplomacy (preaching, braying and mugging for the cameras seem to be the limit of Bush's negotiating skills). China may not have much of an environmental policy yet but it clearly seems to be developing an energy policy that recognizes oil as a limited resource and the need for a prosperous economy to develop alternatives. One cannot escape the fact that Bush's parochial politics and unilateralism are putting the US behind the times.