Blue Skies Over Beijing

Blue Skies Over Beijing
Author: Matthew E. Kahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-07-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691192812

How individuals and the government are changing life in China's polluted cities Over the past thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates the ways that China's urban development impacts local and global environmental challenges. Focusing on day-to-day choices made by the nation's citizens, families, and government, Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng examine how Chinese urbanites are increasingly demanding cleaner living conditions and consider where China might be headed in terms of sustainable urban growth. Kahn and Zheng delve into life in China's cities from the personal perspectives of the rich, middle class, and poor, and how they cope with the stresses of pollution. Urban parents in China have a strong desire to protect their children from environmental risk, and calls for a better quality of life from the rising middle class places pressure on government officials to support greener policies. Using the historical evolution of American cities as a comparison, the authors predict that as China's economy moves away from heavy manufacturing toward cleaner sectors, many of China's cities should experience environmental progress in upcoming decades. Looking at pressing economic and environmental issues in urban China, Blue Skies over Beijing shows that a cleaner China will mean more social stability for the nation and the world.

Blue Skies over Beijing

Blue Skies over Beijing
Author: Matthew E. Kahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-05-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691169365

How individuals and the government are changing life in China's polluted cities Over the past thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the most polluted cities in the world are in China. Yet, millions of people continue moving to its cities seeking opportunities. Blue Skies over Beijing investigates the ways that China's urban development impacts local and global environmental challenges. Focusing on day-to-day choices made by the nation's citizens, families, and government, Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng examine how Chinese urbanites are increasingly demanding cleaner living conditions and consider where China might be headed in terms of sustainable urban growth. Kahn and Zheng delve into life in China's cities from the personal perspectives of the rich, middle class, and poor, and how they cope with the stresses of pollution. Urban parents in China have a strong desire to protect their children from environmental risk, and calls for a better quality of life from the rising middle class places pressure on government officials to support greener policies. Using the historical evolution of American cities as a comparison, the authors predict that as China's economy moves away from heavy manufacturing toward cleaner sectors, many of China's cities should experience environmental progress in upcoming decades. Looking at pressing economic and environmental issues in urban China, Blue Skies over Beijing shows that a cleaner China will mean more social stability for the nation and the world.

Clear Water, Blue Skies

Clear Water, Blue Skies
Author: Todd Johnson
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780821340448

Food, consumption, demand, agricultural research, fertilizer, land, water resources, infrastructure, domestic grain, international grain market, economy, business, markets, tariffs, environment, health, productivity, pollution, energy, industry, water, urban transportation, pension reform, elderly, education, employment, rural, urban, income, poverty.

Deceiving the Sky

Deceiving the Sky
Author: Bill Gertz
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1641771674

The United States' approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later the hope of producing a benign People's Republic of China utterly failed. The Communist Party of China deceived the West into believing that the its system and the Party-ruled People's Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat. In fact, these misguided policies produced the emergence of a 21st Century Evil Empire even more dangerous than a Cold War version in the Soviet Union. Successive American presidential administrations were fooled by ill-advised pro-China policymakers, intelligence analysts and business leaders who facilitated the rise not of a peaceful China but a threatening and expansionist nuclear-armed communist dictatorship not focused on a single overriding strategic objective: Weakening and destroying the United States of America. Defeating the United States is the first step for China's current rulers in achieving global supremacy under a new world order based an ideology of Communism with Chinese characteristics. The process included technology theft of American companies that took place on a massive scale through cyber theft and unfair trade practices. The losses directly supported in the largest and most significant buildup of the Chinese military that now directly threatens American and allied interests around the world. The military threat is only half the danger as China aggressively pursues regional and international control using a variety of non-military forces, including economic, cyber and space warfare and large-scale influence operations. Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy details the failure to understand the nature and activities of the dangers posed by China and what the United States can do in taking needed steps to counter the threats.

Wish You Happy Forever

Wish You Happy Forever
Author: Jenny Bowen
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062192019

Wish You Happy Forever chronicles Half the Sky founder Jenny Bowen's personal and professional journey to transform Chinese orphanages—and the lives of the neglected girls who live in them—from a state of quiet despair to one of vibrant promise. After reading an article about the thousands of baby girls languishing in Chinese orphanages, Bowen and her husband adopted a little girl from China and brought her home to Los Angeles, not out of a need to build a family but rather a commitment to save one child. A year later, as she watched her new daughter play in the grass with her friends, thriving in an environment where she knew she was loved, Bowen was overcome with a desire to help the children that she could not bring home. That very day she created Half the Sky Foundation, an organization conceived to bring love into the life of every orphan in China and one that has actually managed to fulfill its promise. In Wish You Happy Forever, a fish out of water tale like no other, Bowen relates her struggle to bring the concept of "child nurture and responsive care" to bemused Chinese bureaucrats and how she's actually succeeding. Five years after Half the Sky's first orphanage program opened, government officials began to mention child welfare and nurturing care in public speeches. And, in 2011, at China's Great Hall of the People, Half the Sky and its government partners celebrated the launch of The Rainbow Program, a groundbreaking initiative to change the face of orphan care by training every child welfare worker in the country. Thanks to Bowen's relentless perseverance through heartbreak and a dose of humor, Half the Sky's goal to bring love the lives of forgotten children comes ever closer.

Environmental ScienceBites

Environmental ScienceBites
Author: Kylienne A. Clark
Publisher: The Ohio State University
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN:

This book was written by undergraduate students at The Ohio State University (OSU) who were enrolled in the class Introduction to Environmental Science. The chapters describe some of Earth's major environmental challenges and discuss ways that humans are using cutting-edge science and engineering to provide sustainable solutions to these problems. Topics are as diverse as the students, who represent virtually every department, school and college at OSU. The environmental issue that is described in each chapter is particularly important to the author, who hopes that their story will serve as inspiration to protect Earth for all life.

A Comrade Lost and Found

A Comrade Lost and Found
Author: Jan Wong
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 015101342X

Hoping to make amends, Wong returns to Beijing to find the classmate she betrayed during the Cultural Revolution. As she traces her way from one former comrade to the next, Wong unearths not only the fate of the woman she is searching for but a web of fates that mirrors the dramatic journey of contemporary China.

The Last Days of Old Beijing

The Last Days of Old Beijing
Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2010-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802779123

Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.

China Goes Green

China Goes Green
Author: Yifei Li
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509543139

What does it mean for the future of the planet when one of the world’s most durable authoritarian governance systems pursues “ecological civilization”? Despite its staggering pollution and colossal appetite for resources, China exemplifies a model of state-led environmentalism which concentrates decisive political, economic, and epistemic power under centralized leadership. On the face of it, China seems to embody hope for a radical new approach to environmental governance. In this thought-provoking book, Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro probe the concrete mechanisms of China’s coercive environmentalism to show how ‘going green’ helps the state to further other agendas such as citizen surveillance and geopolitical influence. Through top-down initiatives, regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation, the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power and influence along the Belt and Road and even into the global commons. Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether a green authoritarianism can show us the way. This book explores both its promises and risks.