Managing The Dragon

As a follow-up to our previous post, air quality in Beijing over the past four days was as bad as I have seen it in my 15 years here. Today’s headline in China Daily, Capital’s air quality “worst,” summed it up best. According to the Beijing municipal environmental protection bureau’s website, air quality in Huangcun […]

On days like today and the last few that we’ve had in Beijing, when the air is so thick that you can almost cut it with a knife, you have to wonder whether China is taking the environment seriously. In fact, air quality was so bad at the China Open on Thursday that the organizers […]

In an interview with Alex Dumortier of The Motley Fool in 2008, I was asked which industries I thought had good future prospects in China. I mentioned several growth areas, but Alex focused on my third suggestion: “any technology that has anything to do with the environment.” With China having now surpassed the United States […]

It was supposed to be history in the making when representatives from 192 countries met in Copenhagen to formulate a global solution to what some believe is the biggest problem facing mankind. Instead, it degenerated into a sometimes tawdry display of finger-pointing and trading of barbs between representatives from the developed countries of the world […]

Dressed in Asian garb and smiling for the cameras, the leaders of the 21 nations that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) looked as though they were at a love fest in Singapore this weekend. For those who cared to read between the lines, though, President Hu Jintao of China, the country whose importance […]

The adverse environmental impact of China’s rapid industrialization is there for all to see. Water resources are dwindling, air quality is a major issue in most parts of the country and the future availability of adequate energy resources is a very real concern. China has set a goal of reducing by 20 percent the amount […]

  News reports are filled today with the announcement of China’s massive 4.0 trillion yuan ($586 billion) economic stimulus plan, so there’s no need to repeat the basic facts here. Because much of this money would have been spent anyway as part of the country’s 11th Five Year Plan and to rebuild those parts of […]

The last few days in Beijing have been hot, muggy and grey—not great news for the upcoming Olympic Games. Also, the elimination of one-half of the cars on the streets of Beijing through the odd/even license plate system has not reduced traffic as much as one might think or hope. For one thing, one lane […]