travels with janne

The chilly air of the Shanghai hotel room feels positively wintry in comparison with the outdoor evening temperature of about 25 degrees centigrade and a muggy 85 percent humidity. The cool air is refreshing for about five minutes. However, it soon becomes too much for me.

Moving further into the room, I turn the light in the bathroom on. This sets off an automatic squirt of something cleansing into the toilet bowl (which I presume is already squeaky clean after the chamber maid’s ministrations). Sitting down I quickly discover that the toilet seat is heated.

Later on, catching a quick nightcap with a few of my fellow travellers in the bar on the 33rd floor, we have a panorama view of this vibrant, futuristic, dynamic city that at night is lit up like a Christmas tree. Down on the streets cars whiz by transporting the millions of busy Shanghai citizens and visitors to their various destinations.

The expenditure of energy in Shanghai and the rest of China is enormous. Although Shanghai by no means represents the average energy expenditure of all Chinese cities, towns and villages, it is hard to ignore the fact that the use of fuel to power the Chinese society of one billion people and its growing standard of living will place increasing strains on the environment. The challenges to combat air and water pollution and to find alternative energy sources are enormous, but pressing.

At our visit to the Chinese headquarters of Novozymes we were told that in four years time they expect to be ready for the production of second generation biofuels. In the meantime, farmers here and in other parts of the world are busy planting crops for energy. These crops take up valuable farmland that could be used for food production.

We should not only be looking at biofuels and other alternative sources of renewable energy. We should also be focusing much more strongly on reducing energy consumption. Just like eating too much food is bad for the health of the individual, so too is over-consumption of energy bad for the health of the planet. This is very evident in a rapidly expanding economy like China’s.

In 2006 I visited China as a tourist. One year later I am here again, this time as part of a business delegation with the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Helge Sander.

Both last night and today I have been to dinners at which the Danish ministers for education and for science were also present. The Minister of Education, Bertel Haarder, mentioned in his speech that in Denmark there are 600,000 students, while in China there are 600,000 schools. Obviously, China has a lot of brain power available and is ready and willing to use it.

One of the purposes of our mission here is to investigate how Danish companies, research institutes and universities can interact and benefit from the huge pool of dynamic and diligent human resources that China contains. So we have been visiting scientific institutes and universities as well as Danish companies that already have a solid base here in China, notably Novozymes.

The sense of dynamic growth and energy is felt everywhere in Beijing, which is where I am writing from now. Countless skyscrapers are under construction, the Olympic village is rapidly taking shape, and old buildings are being spruced up in preparation for the Olympics next year.

On the research and development side things are going the same way. Spanking new facilities and buildings, plans for more buildings and a biofuel industry that is charging ahead much faster than at home in Denmark are the order of the day.

Here in China things get decided and then get done with amazing speed. No need for messy democracy and free speech here, where annoying citizens would just get in the way of major decisions with their protests, doubts and questions. Imagine the fate of the huge Three Gorges Dam project if environmentalists had had their say! Or if the thousands upon thousands of traditional farmers had refused to give up their fertile land farmed by generations of ancestors and had refused to swap it for steep and stony orchards further up the mountainsides.

China has major problems with regard to human rights, the environment, animal welfare and imperialism. As a participant in an official delegation representing Denmark and my employer, it is not politic for me to criticize. However, I do find it rather frustrating that we walk on eggshells with regard to China, while we criticize the enormously more free and democratic USA to shreds and we ignore the disastrously huge problems in Zimbabwe – to name but a few examples.