China's Model Reversed

Higher energy consumption per capita GDP has driven China to attach great importance to energy efficiency, especially as it is one of those countries whose progress has been fast-tracked..

Zhou Dadi points out that in recent years, China has made rapid progress adopting new energies, raising energy efficiency and eliminating backward production methods. Meanwhile, China is whittling away (the verb you chose was inappropriate for passive voice) its technological gap with the developed countries in the high energy consumption industries, such as the electricity generation sector and petrochemical industries.

However, problems lie ahead. Energy resources are squandered in production and industrial development. In (you cannot speak of ‘international societies' - wrong meaning) developed countries, only one third of generated energy goes to industry and the other two thirds, or nearly 70 percent, are consumed by construction and transportation. Zhou notes, the shoe is on the other foot in China: industrial consumption takes up more than 70 percent of the total, in which the steel, chemicals, building materials, electricity generation, petrochemicals and nonferrous metal industries bring the tally to nearly 50 percent. This situation flags a situation that combines high energy consumption with low output - a problem crying out for a solution in the near future.

Zhou Dadi interprets matters this way. Since reform and opening-up in 1978, especially from 1980 to 2002, the annual rate of energy use increased in efficiency by 4.6 percent (energy consumption per unit GDP). This is lightening speed, compared with the world's average rate of increase - between 1.1 percent and 1.2 percent. The first couple of years of the 21st century saw relative stagnation in the pace of energy efficiency, while from the beginning of 2006 this laggard situation was gradually reversed, when the Chinese government defined the task of saving 20 percent energy consumption. From 2005 to 2009, the average rate of decrease reached 4.1 percent, far steeper than the global average and that of the world's leading developed countries.