Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In the same week as China completed its first space walk, ChinaDaily published another perhaps even more important indication of China's advancement - its adoption of the Circular Economy Promotion Law . This law, long discussed, was adopted by the fourth session of the 11th People's Congress in Beijing in August 2008 and came into effect on 1 January 2009.1 China thus became the world's first country to promote an economy based on closed-loop cyclical processes as its official development strategy, drawing from the prior experiences of Germany and Japan. Whereas the practice of the 3Rs - reduce, reuse and recycle - is more technically advanced in the latter countries, they cannot claim to have adopted a closed-loop system as the image of their entire future economy. This is what China has now done.
Of course it is none too soon, as everyone acknowledges that China's growth over the past three decades has been bought at the expense of vast resource wastage and environmental spoliation. But to its credit, China is tackling these issues not, as elsewhere, in a piecemeal way, but in a root-and-branch restructuring of its economy to turn waste generation into resource creation, by fashioning links between firms that work off each others' wastes and by-products. It is a fundamentally sound ecological scenario for an economy, and one that seeks, by harnessing capitalist economic forces, to solve both the waste and resource issues at source. The only issue is whether it will really be put into effect and whether it will be in time.
Since 1979, when China opened up to the world, its economic and industrial transformation has been spectacular. Rapid economic growth and expanding international trade have driven China to become a leading economy, reducing poverty, attracting large flows of foreign direct investment, and establishing itself as the 'workshop of the world'. At the same time, it has seen the negative side of these developments, in terms of rapidly worsening pollution, waste generation and natural resource depletion. China is now the world's largest consumer of coal, while consuming half the world's cement, 30 per cent of its steel and more than 20 per cent of its aluminium. It is the world's leading consumer of fertilisers and the second...