Jonathan Watts at the Literary Festival

3pm Sunday March 6 th 2011

The Glamour Bar filled up quickly as Jonathan Watts prepared at the front of the room, gathering together his material on his laptop and waiting for the technological tantrums to be tamed. Outside, rain and smog - somewhat appropriately - obscured the Glamour Bar's famous views across the river. Watt's book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, outlines the problem posed by China's drive towards modernization and its exponential increase in consumption.China's sheer size in terms of population heralds an Industrial Revolution with environmental effects many times worse than that which took place in Europe during the 19 th century.

Watts began his lecture by announcing that he was going to do some politically incorrect things: he would criticize Shanghai and he would praise the recent 5 year plan. “Nothing ever turns out as you expect” he enjoined, a maxim he had come to learn as a journalist. He talked about his beginnings in journalism, explaining hat he didn't start out as a ‘Greenie' but as an IT and business reporter. However, after spending the past 5 years covering the environment in Asia for the UK's Guardian newspaper, he had come to realize that the environment “is not a subject, it's a way of looking at things.”

In this vein, he turned to the 5 year plan, which he described as “Not a boring programme but a programme that will change the colour of the sky”. Stressing that he had not yet seen the entire plan, he argued that although the changes to the Chinese government's policy may be slight, they are enough to slow growth and affect the environment in positive ways. He argued that levels of growth in China and levels of consumption in the rest of the world had reached their peak, and that we were seeing the “first hints of China starting to accept that there are limits.”

Watts proceeded to cover some of the material in his book, When a Billion Chinese Jump , a work which he says he made deliberately populist by structuring it as a travelogue, a sort of dystopian or “alternative guide book to all the places you don't want to go to.” In fact, he told the audience, Amazon originally classified his book as part of the ‘travel and holiday' section, but it has since been reclassified. He went on to joke that he had also attempted to popularize his book by including “animals, sex, and animal sex” and that it contained “the most detailed chapter about Panda sex of any English book”. However, When a Billion Chinese Jump also contains some more lamentable stories, such as that of the Yangtze River's Baiji dolphin, which all the money in the world was too late to save from ‘functional extinction' or the many eco-migrants who have been forced to move away from their homes and businesses because of the scale of environmental devastation there.

It is the stories of ‘cancer villages' or of grassroots protests at industrial pollution that Watts pointed to as indications that China is getting serious about cleaning up its environment. Through graph after graph, he explained that once a threshold of growth has been reached, a developing country will set about cleaning up its act for its own good, raising Victorian London, with its noxious pea-soupers, as an example. What worries Watts more about China and about the rest of the world, and what should worry all of us more, is the rising trend in consumption. This is where his criticisms of Shanghai came into play: Shanghai has the highest amount of sheer consumerism in the country. It is on par with New York , London , Tokyo . Shanghai city-dwellers are disconnected from the environment and simply waste too much. In addition, the wider coastal regions of China are “pushing their dirt inland”, outsourcing their industrial needs to the poorer regions to the West.

While any government initiatives to clean up the pollution of industrial development might be difficult to enforce and implement, Watts argues that ultimately, that form of environmental degradation is fixable. The real problem is one that he summarized in a notebook he kept while investigating the loss of the Tibetan grasslands: “In the 19 th century, the Britain taught the world to produce. In the 20 th century, America taught the world to consume. In the 21 st century, someone needs to teach the world to sustain.” He doesn't know if it will be China , but Watts hopes that someone will step up to the plate.

Check out the following articles for help finding his books in Shanghai: Part One, Fake Books and Bookstores ; Part Two, Used Bookstores and Online Shopping ; Part Three, Libraries .