Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of Government at Cornell University, joined CDT to discuss his new book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China. In a wide-ranging conversation,...
From Reuters: Targeting mainland China with his energy-saving inventions, Peter Fung and executives like him have their eye on the hottest competitive advantage around: an ambitious government with deep pockets. “State...
As a battle over Green GDP continues to rage within China’s central government, China Daily, the country’s top state-run English language newspaper, issues a clarion call for the death of traditional growth...
From China Dialogue: China’s central government recently promoted “ecological civilisation” as an important aspect of a developed society in the report from the Communist Party’s seventeenth congress. This is encouraging news for China’s troubled environmental movement, but questions remain. Why, for instance, were trials of “green GDP ” abandoned in 10 provinces? Economic development still […]
China’s Green GDP accounting team faces the risk of being disbanded in coming weeks unless seniors leaders step in to save their stalled experiment, a high-level source close to the State Environmental Protection Administration tells CDT. Team auditors hope to get word soon from heads of the State Council about their future. “But our only […]
Ma Jun reports for Chinadialogue that “in today’s China, introducing green GDP calculations may be the cheapest of the practical options to achieve that end. ” With China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) indicating there is no way green GDP data can be made public, and the report from the main green GDP study group […]
A rift between China’s State Environmental Protection Administration and it National Bureau of Statistics has “indefinitely delayed” release of the long-promised Green GDP pollution report. From the BBC: Several local governments are reported to have objected to the release of “sensitive” information about the pollution they cause.Government officials from different departments also appear to disagree […]
The San Jose Mercury News has a nicely balanced feature on what China claims is one the biggest factors preventing it from cleaning up its environment–technology transfer–and the California companies looking benefit by addressing it: Some initiatives are driven by personal reasons. Peggy Liu, a former Silicon Valley Internet executive now living in Shanghai, grew […]
From The China Post: The buzzword of this new century is “global warming,” caused by greenhouse gases. The United Nations has just released a study by scientists on this hot-button issue, confirming that global warming is a fact. Emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants, factories and automobiles are the culprits of the greenhouse effect […]
A week ago, domestic newspapers broke the news that the National Statistics Bureau is balking on plans to publicize China’s second Green GDP report. This was not altogether shocking, since the country’s first estimates of the costs of environmental degradation, based on 2004 data, only came out in September 2006 – after much delay, cutting, […]
From People’s Daily: Green GDP accounting – which takes into account the impact of environmental degradation on the economy – has hit a snag, a source with the environmental watchdog said. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has asked the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) not to release the latest results of Green GDP to […]
From The ChinaDialogue: China boasts the fastest growing economy in the world. But how to calculate this development’s impact on natural resources, on public health and the environment? Pan Yue sets out the case for green GDP accounting. Green GDP would mean a great change in our ideas: a completely new way of thinking about […]
From China Dialogue: A recent “green accounting” report put a headline-grabbing price tag on China’s growth. But how far is the country from calculating its real “green GDP”? Stephen Green reports on the measures that may help to assess its sustainability. A small green bud sprouted in China’s statistical forest when a report that summarised […]
From Xinhua News Agency: Official figures from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) show that China will fail to meet its target of reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by four percent this year. China has set a unit energy consumption reduction target of 20 percent for the five-year period from 2006 to […]
Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, writes for Project Syndicate (via A Glimpse of the World blog): For a decade, the world has wondered when China’s leaders will recognize the staggering environmental crisis confronting their country. This year, we got an answer: a new Five-Year Plan that makes environmental protection a […]
What to make of Qiu Xiaohua’s abrupt removal from his job as China’s chief statistician? No one really knows for sure yet. Last week’s tersely worded Xinhua news agency item sounded an alarm bell that something was amiss. Word around Beijing is that Qiu will not be reassigned: he committed a “severe disciplinary violation” (‰∏•ÈáçËøùÁ∫™). […]
It’s been hard not to catch a whiff of foul politicking behind China’s first-ever Green GDP Report, which emerged earlier this month. The environmental regulator (SEPA) and State Statistics Bureau officially set to work on the index, designed to count the cost of pollution and resource mismanagement to economic productivity, in early 2004. Yet as […]
From abc.net.au: Pollution cost China about $80 billion in 2004. That’s more than the total GDP of some OECD countries in the same period. A figure of $80 billion for pollution comes from a new Chinese Government report, which tries to put a figure on the ecological effect of the country’s extraordinary economic boom.The authors […]
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