One of the first things the traveler to China notices are the trees, thousands of them, lining the new highway from the Beijing Airport.
They are young trees, with spindly trunks, yet maybe 15 feet tall already. They sit close together in shallow bowls that hold water as their roots establish themselves. They are, at most, six feet apart, and in a half-dozen rows of various species. The bands of trees are thick, with maybe a hundred trees every 30 yards.
It was springtime in Beijing, which is, at 40 degrees north, almost exactly halfway around the world from Denver. The leaves had sprouted more further south, in Xi’an and Shanghai. The trees were everywhere, especially along the new highways.
China is putting on its best face as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics. “This is a time for China to sell ourselves,” one of our tour guides explained. The trees are emblematic of China itself. This is not a small project, nor is it inexpensive. It also would be impossible without cheap labor.
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has proposed to plant 1 million trees in Denver over the next 20 years. The first phase was to plant 7,000 trees last week. Compare that with China, which in 2006 planted 2.16 billion trees, or 6 million a day. It’s impossible to plant that many trees unless labor is devalued.
There are echoes in this massive undertaking of China’s past, when emperors used much of China’s wealth to create sprawling palace complexes and spectacular wonders like the Great Wall and the terra cotta warriors near Xi’an.
China is a paradox: a totalitarian society awash in runaway capitalism. China is still red, but it’s also green – and gray. The trees are the green. The concrete, and the sky, are the gray.
Beyond the trees are forests of concrete and steel topped with construction cranes. Think of the Fitzsimons campus project in Aurora, and then imagine a construction site three times as large. Then imagine there’s a project of that scope every mile or so along the eight-lane highway you’re traveling, and you have a picture of what China is like today.
There’s conspicuous consumption of electricity, requiring massive construction of new generating plants – and more pollution.
The towering buildings in Shanghai at night are wrapped in moving advertising videos, hundreds of feet high. The highway interchanges, three and four flyovers deep, are outlined in lights, and potted plants which are supposed to counter the pollution.
Our guide in Shanghai explained that the trees are “for the air,” not just for decoration. But for now, it looks as though pollution is winning. Especially when one considers that 2,000 new cars are added every day to the traffic in Beijing. As another of our tour guides said, “too much industrialized; global warming, too.” She also called the air “dusty.” That’s a nice word for it.
China has a different frame of reference, a very large frame. China’s 1.3 billion people are a fifth of the world’s population. Xi’an and Suzhou, with populations of around 6 million each, are considered “towns.” Beijing and Shanghai are around 17 million population each.
China’s one-child-per-family policy is having an impact: the population declined 0.3 percent in 2006. It’s a harsh policy, but it may do more than the trees to address China’s environmental problems.
As our flight from Shanghai approached Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, we could see the famous Chicago skyline, an architectural showcase. One of our party put into words what many of us were thinking: compared with the urban landscapes we had just left, it looked kind of puny.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
