Last night I found some French blogs, via the Paris newspaper, Liberation. Here are three entries by Pierre Haski, Liberation’s Beijing correspondent, which I translated to share.March 11
We’re done for

In the 1960s, the Club of Rome, composed of great spirits, considered a ‘zero development’ report because the planet didn’t have enough energy resource to sustain that era’s development. Four decades later, we’re already there, and another Institute is warning of the same thing, this time regarding China.

The Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, just went through the same classic intellectual exercise: if the Chinese maintain the same rate of development, and they’d equal that of the Americans in 2031, and if they began consuming at the same rate as the Americans, what would happen? The spectacular result: there would be 1.1 billion cars in China (versus the 795 million in the world today), the Chinese would consume more gasoline/oil that the whole world today produces, they’d eat 4/5ths of the world’s production of meat, 2/3rds of the grains, and you’d need to double the world’s production of paper (thus cutting down more forests).

You might say that’s an absurd scenario, except that we see today the few million Chinese who already effectively live the ‘American lifestyle’, that is, they have one or two cars, and are active participants in a consumerist society, as identical as that we know in “the West”. The American Dream as assuredly entered the minds of the Chinese.

The real problem of this study is the conclusion: it underlines that the Western model cannot be applied to China, simply because that planet doesn’t have enough resources (especially if India applies it as well!). And it concludes that we need to invent other things. But what? And especially, why not equally reconsider the American lifestyle, or that of industrial countries in general.

If the model is a failure for the whole world, how do you tell the Chinese: you can’t have cars, the ‘clim’ or low coast companies to develop the tourist industry (to refer to a recent posting), and are forbidden to pollute? Especially when the Americans refuse to sign the Kyoto Accord … but that’s another debate.

Therefore, is this 2005 report is as absurd as that of the Club of Rome was in its time? Or is China going to drive us into the wall? I await your response this weekend of a beautiful blue sky, but very cold in this Beijing end of winter.

March 12
Cars Again
Following-up on the commentaries by Jia and Bern on ‘We’re Done For’, car licence plates are sold by auction in Shanghai. The municipality has found a hyper-elitist was of limiting to a few million the numbers of new cars one can have in a city that has already reached it’s saturation point. They can reach exorbitant prices: last year averaging around 40,000 yuans (around 4000 euros), which is almost the price of a small car itself. This explains why there are no ‘small cars’ in Shanghai (the QQ Chinese brand, that you see a lot of in Beijing, sells for 50,000 yuans, less than 5000 euros). Paradoxically, this system was judged to be illegal by a Chinese administrative tribunal, but Shanghai hasn’t hear of this decision and continues to sell it’s licence plates by auction (which is nothing compared to Hong Kong, which has used this system for a long time, where record prices have been reached like 7.1 million HK dollars, a little less than 600,000 euros for the plate number 12, which sold last month. But it’s true that the earnings of those in Hong Kong is superior to those of France, and that the extravagance of the tycoons is without limit…)

Elsewhere, there are no limits, like in Beijing, where the number of cars went up last year at the rate of about 1000 a day (500,000 more in two years!) There’s already 2.3 million cars and the municipality estimates that there’ll be 3.5 million cars in Beijing in 2008, thus there’s already the feeling that the point of saturation has already been reached.

The government has invested too much into the auto industry to pull back, and according to it’s own predictions, (not those of the Americans this time), there’ll be 140 vehicles on Chinese roads in 2020, that is 7 times more than 2004. Even if China applies the same environmental standards as Europe for locally built cars, and if it encouraged research into electric card (Dassault is ready to pounce!) the development model followed is still that of ‘The American Dream’. All you have to see is how Beijing encouraged the sale of cars that are faster then public transit, the network of which is still quite limited (it’ll be better, they say, in 2008, the new frontier of the ‘harmonious society’ of the Chinese).

Photo: At this rate, as the bicycle is already marginalized in Shanghai, it has no better use than to be used for works of art, like this one of Ai Weiwei, shown at Factory 798 in Beijing. Chinese experts – translate the Maoist slogan on the wall….)

March 20
Ephemeral art

Art is in galleries, art is in the street. This afternoon, going to an opening at the Courtyard Gallery, one of the better ones in Beijing, situation two feet from the Forbidden City, I saw an old man who was painting … the ground. Armed with an enormous paintbrush and a bucket of water, he was doing caligraphy on a esplanade, which was evaporating as he was working. He was working for his own pleasure, and for those who were passing, who stopped to watch on this springtime Sunday afternoon. The experts would call this ephemeral art.

Here, it is a part of life, an art of living that fades.

At the Courtyard Gallery, another ambience. The one we find in Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Cao Fei, a young artist from Canton, presented large format photographs, with exagerated colours, of young Chinese dressed as mythological characters in the middle of the urban setting of contemporary China. Accompanied by a whacky video of the same scenes, with a subdued audio chanel. A work that was seductive and catchy. But here, we’re no longer in the world of ephemeral art, we’re in the world of the fashionable and expensive contemporary globalised art.

These two forms were happening at the same time 200 metres from each other. But these two universes are light years apart.

That’s Beijing in 2005.