welded joints. The arc welding process accounts for much of China's welding equipment manufacture. Major plants producing such equipment, for domestic use as well as for export, are located in Cheng-tung, Chu-chou, Kuei-yang, Shanghai, Shen-yang, and Tientsin. The Shanghai electrical welding machinery factory is a leading manufacturer and developer of welding equipment in China and has trial produced several types of advanced welding equipment. The plant serially produces automatic and semiautomatic arc welders, spot and seam resistance welders, electroslag welding machines, vacuum electron-beam equipment, ultrasonic and high-frequency devices, and fusion-cutting apparatus. In addition, China produces some flash welding equipment and cold pressure welders. 6. STORAGE AND DRY BATTERIES Nearly every province and major municipality has at least one dry battery plant, and storage batteries are produced in most major industrial centers. In recent years, there has been considerable advance in the variety and types of batteries produced and in their efficiency and performance. China is a major exporter of batteries, including 6 volt and 12 volt units suitable for heavy and light trucks, buses, cars, and motorcycles. J. Special Industrial Machinery China produces a broad range of special industrial machinery for the food products industry, textile industry, woodworking and paper industries, printing trades industry, plastic and rubber industries, and the chemical industries. With the possible exception of the textile equipment industry, most of the equipment produced is simple in design and lacks the sophisticated quality control and automation devices common to Western machinery. Most of the special industrial machinery produced in China is used domestically; attempts have been made to export the machinery in volume, particularly to Southeast Asia and other Third World areas. In the food-processing area China has had little, if any, capability to manufacture the modern packaging and labeling equipment needed to effectively compete with major world suppliers of packaged food products. While the number of canneries in China has increased considerable over the past several years, the machinery installed is obsolete by Western standards. Efforts to upgrade the food packaging industry were strengthened in 1974 when China established the National Export Commodities Packaging Corp. within the Ministry of Foreign Trade. The organization has primary responsibility for importing packaging machinery and related technology. In addition, several Chinese packaging equipment delegations have visited Western manufacturing facilities, and foreign delegations have been invited to China to present seminars on Western packaging techniques. 1. Rural energy flows in China in 1974.. 2. Typical Szechwanese biogas digester. 3. China's major coalfields.. 4. China's major oilfields_ 5. World's leading energy-consuming nations. 6. Commercial energy flow pattern for China in 1974_ TABLES 1. Primary productivity of China's major vegetation units.. 2. Useful work performed by China's draft animals in 1974.. 3. Availability of food energy in China in 1974. 4. Calculation of food energy requirements for the Chinese population in 1974__ Page 324 324 327 328 329 331 332 333 334 334 336 338 339 342 344 344 345 347 349 351 353 356 358 360 361 326 337 340 343 352 355 327 328 329 330 5. Estimates of China's crude oil reserves. 346 6. Regional distribution of China's energy resources_ 350 7. Sectoral consumption of primary energy in China, 1950–76_. 354 8. China's consumption of primary energy by sector and source in 1974.. *Vaclav Smil is with the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. 364 364 367 368 368 368 INTRODUCTION Chinese energetics presents a thoroughly intriguing, highly complex and, in not a few aspects, continuously puzzling case. In absolute terms, the country's fossil fuel and hydropower resources rank withor even above those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Globally, China has risen to the fourth place in primary energy production (following the United States, the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia) and to the third place in consumption (behind the two superpowers) and, in the process, has become not only self-sufficient but also a minor fuel exporter. And yet, at the same time, China's energetics is definitely that of a rather poor, developing country where large segments of rural population still depend on plant fuels and animate power and whose per capita modern energy consumption ranks close to the one-hundredth place in the global array of some 175 countries and territories. The future seems no less ambiguous. While the probabilities for retaining the energy self-sufficiency and expanding the crude oil and coal exports are very high throughout the 1980's, the potential fuel and electricity requirements for the modernization of the Chinese economy are immense and it seems quite improbable that they could be filled satisfactorily with the sole reliance on domestic technology. And even under circumstances favoring a very fast expansion, the country's per capita energy consumption by the year 2000 would equal the levels attained by most of the Western societies already during the first two or three decades of this century. Although these developments and prospects have recently attracted a good deal of research attention,' their assessment remains a rather difficult and, repeatedly, very frustrating task for any energy analyst familiar with the work and data base available for other major consuming nations. The amount of information completely missing in the Chinese case is staggering 3 and much of what is accessible is unpredictably fragmentary and, too often, of dubious quality. What follows, then, is just the best attempt-under rather restrictive circumstances to apply the approaches of general system analysis to the energetics of the world's most populous nation. RURAL ENERGY FLOWS 4 One of the major shortcomings of most national energy studies is, as R. H. Socolow puts it, that "solar energy doesn't count." Attention is focussed on fossil fuels and solar energy other than as hydroelectricity is not included in the analysis. While always regrettable, the omission is not critical for the Western industrialized nations, or for Japan, with their heavy dependence on oil, coal, and natural gas; for developing countries, however, it represents a serious error. Most of Most of this information has been summarized and evaluated in my "China's Energy Achievements, Problems, Prospects" (New York, Praeger Publishers, 1976). 2 To appreciate the wealth of information available on energy in the United States, other OECD nations and also the U.S.S.R. see, among scores of others, Congressional Research Service, "Project Interdependence: U.S. and World Energy Outlook through 1990" (Washington, D.C., USGPO, 1977), and Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies, "Energy Demand Studies: Major Consuming Countries" (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1976). Incomparably more material is also available for the largest energy consumers among the developing nations-India, Brazil, and Mexico. Systematic knowledge is completely lacking in critical areas of energy development and production financing and costs; output allocation and pricing; fuel extraction rates and conversion efficiencies and final sectoral uses. R. H. Socolow, "Energy Conservation" in J. M. Hollander, M. K. Simmons, and D. O. Wood, eds., "Annual Review of Energy," vol. 2 (Palto Alto, Annual Reviews, 1977), p. 241. the population in these countries is rural, and until fairly recently it has been either completely separated from, or only marginally involved in, the flows of modern commercial fuels and electricity. China, with four-fifths of its vast population living in the countryside, is the foremost example of a nation where most of the people are still relying on solar energy to produce, via photosynthesis, not only their food and feed for the animals-but also the necessary fuel and raw materials. For a better appreciation of China's solar energetics I have attempted to quantify all the essential sources, conversions, and uses of energy in the country's rural areas during 1 year: they are systematically discussed below, their derivations are presented in detail in appendix B, and a simplified flow graph is shown in figure 1. 5 The selected year, mainly because of a relative abundance of available data at the time of researching this complex topic, is 1974, the 25th year of the PRC's existence. |