Call me hipster but China has always been a little mainstream for me.
Everyone I talk to is interested in China-US Relations. Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of the significance of China in the world today, and I've always been glad that people are interested in it. It is just that China never really lit my inner fire. Of course as a naturally inquisitive person who is easily interested in almost anything I should have known that a fascination with China and its role in the world was only the introduction of a book away. Shapiro's integration of culture, history, society with environmental issues and policy was truly enlightening to read.
One thing I have been struck by recently is this perception that because China is supposed to be communist they can just tell their people what to do and they will do it. This seemed somewhat ignorant to me, and after reading this and listening to Dr. Shapiro talk about China my opinion is even more set. I saw a clip from a documentary a while ago, it showed a truck driver illegally giving rides to people in the bed of her truck. A uniformed man saw the truck with the bed full of people and tried to tell the lady that she couldn't give rides like that, the woman berated the officer, I mean she scolded him like a child. If I remember correctly she was even waving something in her hand, like a rolled up piece of paper, which we swatted the officer with before getting back in her vehicle and driving off with her truck bed full of passengers. While I was reading reports on the recent U.S. - China agreement I actually read precisely that many American's think that China can just tell their people what to do and they'll do it, but in fact this is not the case. A few days after I read this I was in my Economics class and we got into a discussion on the topic and a student actually raised her hand and said that China had a lot of power over their people and could just order them to follow the new pollution rules...
One of the biggest things I came away with from all this China talk was that the power in China doesn't really lie with the government. It lies somewhere in between the government and the lower classes. This reminds me somewhat of learning about the emergence of the merchant class in the U.S. and Europe, there are many gaps in the parallels but it is nevertheless brought to mind. There are certainly similarities in contemporary United States. Popular documentaries such as Food Inc. and Merchants of Doubt do a great job of highlighting the close knit relationship between big businesses and the government, I think we can see something fairly similar in China, and a certain kind of capitalism takes root there. With the sort of 'dash it all! We will be a huge beautiful developed country attitude regardless of what we have to do to get there!' attitude of China, they might actually have less control of what their people are doing that the United States. After all, as we read in Shapiro's book China has some of the best environmental laws in the world, yet the levels of pollution in China are jaw dropping, particularly from an American standpoint. What's going on here? In the U.S. there are certainly a large number of issues, and we as noted in the book, export a lot of our pollution causing industries. Nevertheless as jaded and skeptical as I am about the U.S. and environmental regulation policies I am sometimes made aware that there are actually some policies in place that function quite well. This doesn't seem to be the case in China. It doesn't really seem to me that China is going to be able to simply and smoothly reach their part of the goal, as seems to be the opinion of some people.
The United Staes of America and the People's Republic of China are unquestionably two of the most powerful states today, the question in terms of environmental policy and the recent agreement is are they more powerful that the polluting industries that have given them so much of the power.
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