Will China save the planet or destroy it?

Though he lay dying of brain cancer, Mr Tu Changwang had one last thing to say. The Chinese meteorologist had noticed that the climate was warming. So in 1961, he warned in the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, that this might alter the conditions that sustain life. Yet, he saw the warming as part of a cycle in solar activity that would probably go into reverse at some point. Mr Tu did not suspect that the burning of fossil fuels was pumping carbon into the atmosphere and causing the climate to change. In that issue of the People’s Daily, a few pages before his paper, there was a photo of grinning coalminers. China was rushing to industrialise with the aim of catching up economically with the West.

Today, China is an industrial powerhouse, home to over a quarter of the world’s manufacturing – more than America and Germany combined. But its progress has come at a cost in terms of emissions. Over the past three decades, China has pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, in total, than any other country. It now emits over a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases each year, according to Rhodium Group, a research firm. That is about twice as much as America, which comes second (though on a per-person basis, America is still worse).