《神州交流》Chinese Cross Currents

Foreword:
Living in Harmony—
Meeting Our Needs, Present and Future

Vol. 2, No. 4, July-September 2005

The concept of sustainable development is pretty recent. In fact, it can even be officially traced back to the beginning of the 1980s when a UN General Assembly resolution suggested that a Special Commission should be established to propose, among other things, “long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development to the year 2000 and beyond.” This commission, later known as the Brundtland Commission, released a report in 1987, titled Our Common Future , in which sustainable development came to be defined as a developing process that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It went on to equate sustainable development with “…a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, […] institutional change and the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities are consistent with future as well as present needs.”

Although the definition is pretty clear, its immediate and wide success gave rise to a lot of confusion. If the protection of the environment was implicitly the main focus, sustainable development came to be also associated with “all things right”: development of education, proper healthcare, women's emancipation, the fight against social inequalities, defence of fundamental rights, among others. In a way, it was understood as an updated synonym for “progress”, the very concept and meaning of which was in crisis and in dire need of revamping. Sustainable development is precisely an attempt at changing our perspective on “progress” by always linking the protection of the environment to human activities and the needs of societies, present and future. If the sense of urgency when considering the hazards affecting Nature's four elements—the water and earth tightly linked to agricultural activities, the air, and the fire of the “energy”—has to be stressed, the “need” for and the “cost” of development must always be in sight.

After more than 25 years of rapid economic development—one might even say economic growth at all cost—China is today confronted with massive environmental challenges: air pollution has reached worrying levels in big urban centres, desertification is at the cities' doorsteps, more and more water sources are being contaminated by chemical pollution, while food safety has once again become a concern, and dependence on oil imports has reached unprecedented levels. By announcing in late 2002 that “putting the people first” was to be at the core of the new administration, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao gave an indication that economic growth would no longer be achieved at any cost. If the urge to address the ever-expanding rich-poor gap was the prime target—from “getting rich first” to “common prosperity”—, the protection of the environment and the perspective of sustainable development were bound to be explicitly raised as well. China 's Eleventh Five Year Plan (2006-2010) that was examined and approved in October lays out precisely the charter for what is officially defined as “scientific development” in order to safeguard the often-repeated motto of establishing a “harmonious society”. In this new plan, economic growth is defined as “serving the people to improve the quality of life”.

The topic of sustainable development is therefore widely discussed in China today, and much needed new perspectives in terms of public policies could well prefigure profound changes in public governance.

For the sake of consistency, we have chosen to stick to a scrupulous definition of sustainable development in its connection with the protection of the environment. Mark Elvin first offers a broad outlook on the history of the environment, portraying the changes in China 's landscape during the past three and a half thousand years. Zheng Yisheng then depicts the efforts made in the past 10 years at transforming the pattern of economic growth, and the urge to make these efforts become fully successful. For Ma Zhong and Leo Horn, the transformation of the environmental fiscal apparatus is of utmost importance if one is to seriously involve all the actors of economic activities. For their own part, Da Lintai and Shen Xiaohui propose two somewhat more technical case-studies affecting the “earth” element in China today: the issue of grassland desertification on the one hand, and the sustainable management of forests on the other. By way of conclusion, Fu Tao considers the development of an environmental movement in China , and whether it constitutes or not an impetus for transforming the workings of relations between the state and society. And lastly, our unrelated “feature” article introduces an essay by Augustin Landier and David Thesmar putting into perspective the renewed debate on “genetic anthropology” raging today in the United States.

Finally, we must here acknowledge the great help received from the Ford Foundation in identifying the authors who have contributed to this issue, and in particular Irene Bain, the Program Officer for Environment and Development at the Foundation in Beijing . (1)

(1) Most of the contributors were selected thanks to the excellent collection of essays titled China Environment and Development Review, Vol. 2, Beijing , Social Sciences Documentation Publishing Houses, 2004.

Eric Sautedé, Chief Editor