China already leads the world in high-speed rail, solar power and wind turbine manufacturing.
Now, Spencer Swartz and Shai Oster report in the Wall Street Journal that “China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest energy consumer, according to new data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a milestone that reflects both China’s decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding influence as an industrial giant.”
China disagrees with the IEA’s announcement but that doesn’t matter.
Even if China were correct, it wouldn’t be long before China did pass the US in energy consumption since the latest five-year plan is extending the electrical grid into rural China to send electricity to 700 million more people.
In fact, as China modernizes and catches up with the US and Europe, more energy will be required to power all those rural homes. Even if the Chinese do not consume as much as those in the US, that is still a lot of electricity.
This begs an answer for the question the Slate asks with How Communist is China? After all, General Motors sold more cars in China than in the US in the first half of 2010. And let’s not mention the Golden Arches, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks.
Since China abandoned Maoism and Marxism, the Middle Kingdom has been rewriting the rules for capitalist growth. The irony is that politically, China is ruled by a single political party with an unpopular name in the West—a name that doesn’t fit any longer.
Maybe China’s government should call itself the People’s Collective Party.
See Volting all of China into the 21st Century
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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