"It is a dangerous misconception that China has gotten its population growth rates under control. The huge cohorts of children produced in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Mao encouraged large families, are now reaching their prime child-bearing years. Even with China's repressive one-child policy in place, its population is due to increase by 25percent, or 300 million people, over the next two decades. Given the regime's difficulty in enforcing the one-child policy in rural areas and in minority regions like Sinkiang, the increase could conceivably be 400 million. The most conservative estimate is for an increase of 200 million in three decades. In the 1990s, China will add the equivalent of another Japan to its population, and perhaps the equivalent of another United States between the early 1990s and 2020. But this assumes that the actual rate of population growth in percentage terms will be dropping after 1995."Among populous developing countries, only Egypt and Bangladesh have less arable land per person than China. In fact, 300 million Chinese in the interior - a fourth of the population - have less usable land per person than the Bangladeshis. This situation is about to become dramatically worse as the population grows, soil erodes, and urban settlements and transportation networks expand onto agricultural land: As much as a tenth of all Chins's good farmland could be destroyed with two decades. What will remain is rapidly deteriorating, because of declining organic content and salinization. Artificial fertilizers have already pushed crop yields to their attainable limit. Moreover, large-scale illegal logging to provide timber for everything from fuel and housing to mine-shaft supports is destroying Chinese woodlands by 10 percent every decade. Grasslands for cattle herds are being lost to desertification by as much as 3.7 percent a year Smil warns that while air pollution is amenable to dramatic hightech fixes, land degradation is largely irreversable, except in some instances and at extremely high costs.
"By 1990, about 77 percent of all China's agricultural land was being irrigated. An increasing percentage of irrigation water is being polluted by industrial wastes. Because irrigation is depleting the underground water table, forty Chinese cities have been beset by drinking-water-shortages. (In June 1994, while I was in China, The China Daily reported that 'leaky toilets' were 'causing a run on [drinking] water in China's 300 largest cities') Concomitantly, the extensive use of dams for irrigation has helped create a situation in which 10 percent of Chinese territory - inhabited by two thirds of the population producing 70 percent of China's economic output - is 'below the flood level of major rivers,' according to Smil.
"The loss of agricultural land, combined with a increasing concentration of wealth in the coastal cities, has put tens of millions of Chinese on the move. Since the 1980s, China has been experiencing the urbanization that Iran experienced from the 1950s through the 1970s.
"Behind the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644, as well as the steep decline of the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century - culminating in armed revolts that killed tens of millions of Chinese - were similar imbalances between soaring populations and precipitous declines in arable land capita.
"Meanwhile, relation between the central government and the twenty-two provinces are deteriorating fast, with wealthy coastal areas like Guangdong holding back large revenues from Beijing as they carve out their own geo-economic destinies. Regional warlord-business elite alliances could reshape China as they have in the past. At the same time, the breakup of the Soviet Union has led to a massive influx of Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek visitors to Sinkiang as the two parts of Turkestan begin to unify, de facto. 'We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map,' Homer-Dixon says.
"Will this breakup - if it occurs - occur peacefully and gradually over years, and even decades, or will it be sudden and violent? The stakes are high. China, according to Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, 'is losing the capacity to feed itself. When that happens the food supply of the whole world will be affected ...' China's huge population is growing while the amount of its farmland is decreasing. Perhaps agricultural technology will ultimately find solutions for this and many similar problems. But what of the medium term - the next few decades?
"Good news about the environment in North America and Western Europe (along with news that the environment elsewhere can, over the long term be replenished) should not blind us to the bad news just ahead for a critical mass of third world countries like China.
"Optimists, like Wall Street strategist Barton Biggs, consider all of this 'doom-and-gloom' stuff. Perhaps he's right. But what if he's wrong, even partially wrong? Homer-Dixon, Smil, and others have offered a plausible and detailed analysis of China's problems. The consequences of ignoring them could be catastrophic.
"The last word on China may have appeared in a little-known monograph by a former U.S. diplomat, Jonathan Moore:
'China may be the most dramatically unreadable harbinger of the future of our species: a giant microcosm with mighty contradictions poised for collision ... riding a tiger into the future at a gallop. China's rate of growth has been in double digits for the past three years, its free markets are running wild, its human rights abused. China faces massive internal displacement of people, its militarism is burgeoning ... and a threat to its social stability exists in millions of unemployed generated by the closing of thousands of state-owned factories. With over one-fifth of the world's population in 1992 and practicing the most coercive birth control in the world, China is assulting the nexus head-on, trying to control the chaos it is generating. The environment may be the final determinant.'"
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