China Emerges as the Yin and the Yang of the Global Warming Problem

BEIJING — Staring up at the dazzling, $32 million screen of light-emitting diodes suspended above one of this city’s luxury shopping malls, it’s hard to see China as a struggling “developing” country.

Sitting on a stone ledge with 34-year-old Wai Shen Ching hundreds of miles away in the remote village of Bai Bulou, it’s hard to see China as anything else.

Residents of this Hebei Province grassland community have no running water. Lately, devastated by drought, the village has had little water at all. Men in straw hats and blue Mao jackets smoke the days away because, they say, farming has come to a standstill.

“There’s no water, and there’s no way to get water,” Ching says, tugging at his gray-and-white camouflage t-shirt as two women in the distance leasd a herd of cows into a rocky pasture. “I don’t think we have a future. I think it will be the same if you come back here in 10 years.”

In a nutshell, China is at once the yin and the yang of the planet’s climate problem. In Chinese philosophy, they are complementary opposites that describe the whole. The yin describes the inertia or the burden of getting a nation still mired in numbing poverty to change its polluting ways. The yang describes the positive force that Chinese leaders have begun to use to attack the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

NY Times