Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: "China Reveals That Pollution Is Getting Worse," by Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 28 August 2006, p. A4.

ARTICLE: "Biggest-Ever Emissions Trades: $1 Billion Deal Benefits Beijing," by John J. Fialka, Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2006, p. A4.

ARTICLE: "Rising Production Costs Join the List of What China Exports: Other Asian nations may start to take the lead on expenses," by Carter Dougherty, New York Times, 26 August 2006, p. B1.

What's amazing about China's rising pollution is not that it's rising (with development, local pollution rises dramatically and then tops out and declines as the population begins to value the environment more than that extra income per capita--a curve proven the planet over), but that the Chinese government so openly admits it and seeks to deal with it. That shows a growing deference to the needs of the average person, and a fundamental realization that bad environmental policies can--in themselves--be a significant trigger for social unrest--the great bugaboo of this regime.

While local pollution tops out with development, historically, a country's contribution to global pollution does not. So there again, the faster a country like China grows and integrates with the Core, the sooner we get its cooperatiion on the larger global pollution issues (like the growing role of China in greenhouse gas cap-and-trade regimes).

So no matter how you cut it, development is the answer, not the problem. Ditto for globalization. Look at Dan Estes' Environmental Sustainability Index at Yale: the least globalized states tend to cluster at the bottom of the index, and the most globalized tend to cluster at the top. The states moving from Gap to Core are on the lower end as well, but you need to see the critical mass on both pollution and development be reached before the larger trade-offs become apparent. Absent the development, the public and government just say, "The hell with it, we need development first!"

This increasing openness is just another example of China's normalization as a Core power, along with its rising production costs. Yes, China will continue to exert a strong deflationary effect on global prices. That doesn't go away anytime soon according to most experts. But it's no longer the obvious rock-bottom investment zone it's been for the past decade, and that means it's enduring "threat" to other emerging and less-than-emerging nations in Asia is less than previously thought.