Hoping for a green and beautiful decade

Does this mean that the economy has to be "sacrificed" to accommodate these needs? Will the fact that industries will have to increasingly negotiate their way into a middle class community increase their costs? I would argue that in the long run, a stable and secure middle class would only benefit the economy.

Demands of the middle class, if addressed properly, will help accelerate the much needed structural change of the Chinese economy, which is heavily reliant on investment (often in resource-intensive industries) and exports for growth. The service industries and high-tech sectors will certainly gain ground and have the potential to become China's next growth engines.

But this is not to assume that the environment will automatically improve after the needs of the middle class are met. Affluence does also bring about a lifestyle that may result in higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions or more wasteful consumptions. The emergence of "fast fashion", for example, results in an even shorter life span of textile products, which end up at an alarmingly increasing frequency in landfills as garbage. In Shanghai alone, 130,000 tons of clothing is discarded every year. So technology innovations and better manufacturing practices are needed to reduce the environmental footprint of consumer goods throughout their life cycle. And obviously, the government has an important role to play in this aspect.

It is therefore encouraging to find in Hu's address to the 18th Party Congress indications that the top leadership is committed to setting up a full range of conservation mechanisms, including the integration of resource and environmental indicators into economic development appraisal systems and reforming the pricing and taxation systems for resource products.

For sure, when it comes to promulgation of environmental policies, China has a distinct advantage over its Western counterparts. There is no "entrenched opposition" to the environmental agenda in China, something which decades of highly polarized debates have created in countries like the United States.

This broad consensus is an opportunity that the new leadership should harness when it embarks on a great journey to build a country that is not only beautiful, but also full of happy, energetic and healthy people.

The author is head of Toxics Campaign of Greenpeace East Asia.

(China Daily 11/13/2012 page10)