A Fossil Fuel Hellscape: How Coal is Destroying China
The Long Now Foundation - The Long Now Foundation
China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world," Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness - China's population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world's largest standing army.No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That "mad experiment" ended with Deng Xiaoping's effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focused on the very near term.These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish - The Long Now Foundation
