Book Review: Postcards from Tomorrow Square - Reports from China by James Fallows - Page 2

II.

In fact, they offer a few very important parts of the complicated picture. While the chapters are organized chronologically in the order they were reported, I find the ninth chapter, "China's Silver Lining," one of the most significant.

In a small town in eastern China, an engineer named Tang Jinquan has spent his entire career trying to clean up cement production. He has created a cogeneration system, an energy-recycling technology that shoots two vultures with one arrow: it turns the huge amount of heat normally wasted in cement making into electric power, while at the same time reducing dust and waste in the process. Now Tang is selling the system to cement producers in many other countries.

The cement plant case is only one of those homegrown, and very creative, green efforts popping up across China. I've seen others during my annual visits to China. One of my favorite examples is the electric bicycle which I first saw in Chengdu several years ago. These are popular with people who want more than a bicycle, but can’t afford, or don’t want to deal with, a car. And there is not just one kind. There are lots of different brands using different kinds of components. Nobody is waiting for the right battery. They just make the things and try, apparently successfully, to sell them. Some look like junk, some look pretty good, but they are out there and being used.

Solar water heaters, flourishing on rooftops in some cities, are another example. In many hotels, guests must keep the door key inserted into a switch to obtain electricity, which shuts off power use when one leaves the room. Flying out Shanghai's airport, I've seen big fields of wind mills. Most recently, Bloomberg.com reported that China has become only the second country to begin operating a plant that converts coal into liquid motor fuel.

And I just heard this: When Fallows was doing a phone interview from Beijing with NPR on this book, it was afternoon in the U.S. but 2am in China. He was frozen in the cold of his office, because the building's heat was turned off at night. Another small effort to save energy.

Here's a bigger one: in the second chapter of Postcards from Tomorrow Square, Fallows tells a story of how Zhang Yue, a tycoon in central China, runs the world's largest Freon free air conditioning manufacturer, using technology abandoned in America. Such air conditioning utilizes a nonelectric cooling process that saves energy by requiring fewer stages of conversion and taking advantage of seasonal availability of natural gas.

This is the first time I've heard the stories of Tang Jinchuan and Zhang Yue. They are my favorite characters from the book, and their stories excited me enormously. The two men and their stories are remarkably different but both have success based on Chinese education, ingenuity and hard work, instead of graft and corruption. It is heartening to read about people who are, very simply, doing things that are helping in a country that is facing so many difficult obstacles. They are no less heroic than the democracy activists often hailed by the West. People like Tang and Zhang might not be fighting for human rights directly, but they work toward saving mankind's otherwise dismal future, and the importance of this should be recognized.

Article Author: Xujun Eberlein

Xujun Eberlein, author of "Apologies Forthcoming," is a writer originally from China. She hosts the literary and cultural blog Inside-out China.

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