Leaping for the future
- Source: Global Times
- [08:50 August 03 2010]
- Comments
Jonathan Watts.
By Nick Muzyczka
Jonathan Watts has drawn on his considerable experience as an environmental journalist based in Asia in creating an extremely enjoyable and highly educative travel book cum commentary on China's pressing environmental issues.
His interesting title, When A Billion Chinese Jump refers to the poignant childhood anxieties he felt when he was unable to grasp the scale of China. The young Watts experienced an apocalyptic vision of everyone in China jumping simultaneously, knocking the world off its axis with disas-trous consequences.
It also works as an effective metaphor to describe the crucial positioning of China in the environmental economy of the world. The subtitle to the work, How China Will Save Mankind - Or Destroy It, is yet another reminder of how the world's newest superpower has the ability, and the responsibility of writing the next chapter in global history.
Beautifully written, this work is as engaging as it is disturbing. The book is divided into chapters each of which takes a province of China as its focus. Selecting the most prominent environ-mental theme of the region, the chapter then weaves a string of personal anecdotes together with well-researched background information on that particular topic. Relevant examples from elsewhere in the country pepper the text before the book moves on to another theme.
So we begin in the south, where water issues dominate (the majority of China's water comes from ice reserves in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, before moving on to the verdant (but not as verdant as they were) hills of Sichuan where the author looks into dam building and some of the effects on wildlife and human populations.
Animals, and particularly those species under threat, are the subject of a chapter on Hubei and Guangxi, in an alarming chapter entitled "Fishing with Explosives." The reader learns about the eccentric practices of panda breeders, highly dubious nature reserves who, for many years, essentially operated as factories providing rare animal parts for traditional Chinese medicine, before their operations were curtailed by government reforms.
The quantity and quality of the personal anecdotes in the text more than justified thinking of When A Billion Chinese Jump as a travelogue. Though the book is a veritable torrent of information, Watts' clear and often witty prose makes the work feel like a story, making for highly pleasurable reading.
This project took Watts four years to complete and involved a great deal of research and collaboration. "This has felt at times like a cloud project because so many friends and experts were involved. I have been very impressed by the willingness of Chinese intellectuals - academics, scientists and novelists - to exchange ideas and share information. In this sense, I think China is becoming more open and confident," he told the Global Times.
