BIZCHINA> Review & Analysis
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BIZCHINA> Review & Analysis
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The price of green revolution
By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-18 07:49
Crouched behind his fruit stand in a small mountainous town, Zhou Jian had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to watch the live broadcast of Barack Obama's visit to Beijing yesterday. Yet, although the welcome party for the United States president was far from his mind, the 52-year-old fruit seller's situation will likely be an important topic of discussion when Obama and President Hu Jintao sit down to talk about climate change. For 30 years, Zhou worked in a coal-fired electricity factory in the poverty-stricken Tongjiang county, Sichuan province, earning 20,000 yuan ($2,900) a year, just enough to support his family and pay for his son's education. But in 2007 he was among around 200 staff laid off when the national grid switched to powering the country from a hydroelectric plant on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. His unemployment was a massive blow to the family, especially as the prospects of Zhou finding another job were bleak due to the central government's decision to shut down almost all thermal electricity generators with capacities lower than 100,000 kW. By 2020, China is expected to close all generators with less than 300,000 kW in capacity and build larger ones in an effort to cut the country's dependency on coal, which is currently used to produce 70 percent of its primary energy. With his son at a college in the provincial capital Chengdu and his wife also unemployed, the 700-yuan monthly allowance from the local authorities was not enough for the family to survive. Zhou had no option but to open a fruit stall last spring. "I badly need vocational training. I'm no good at touting for customers, so there is no future in me staying here with no business," he said, shivering in the freezing cold. Zhou's story highlights perfectly the multi-faceted impact of China's drive to mitigate global warming.
Yesterday, Hu and Obama agreed to inject political will into the deadlocked climate change negotiations ahead of the December summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, despite the sacrifices of workers like Zhou. China has closed thousands of energy-inefficient factories in the power, steel, iron, coal, petrochemical and textile sectors to meet the energy intensity target set in its 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10) - cutting energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent from 2005 levels. The cap has cut 1.5 billion tons of greenhouse gases in five years, Hu announced at a New York summit in September, and he will likely refer to the achievement when urging Obama to act faster on climate change.
At the same time, the government is also shutting at least 10,000 small coal shafts, leaving many more miners and migrants jobless. It is the second wave of mass lay-offs in China within 10 years. Between 1998 and 2005, the country restructured thousands of State-owned enterprises, making around 30 million workers redundant. (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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