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PRC would rank with the world's first five for crude minerals and only a little behind in terms of total value added for minerals and metals. [Wang, p. 374.]

Electric power is another key sector.

There exists a widespread shortage of electric power in the People's Republic of China (PRC) today that is adversely affecting the economy and which must be corrected quickly if the program to modernize industry, agriculture, science, and technology, and national defense is to be successfully implemented. Electric power is a "vanguard" industry which in a developing country like China must advance at a pace 1.3 or 1.4 times that of industry generally.

The shortrun solution to the power shortage is being sought in the fall 1977 directives of Chairman Hua calling for conservation, fuller utilization of existing generating capacity, and its more efficient operation. In the longer run China will place reliance on the continued development of both hydroelectric and thermal power stations. No nuclear stations are currently operative, but the Chinese will probably soon begin one. Although both large and small power stations will continue to be built, the greater emphasis will be placed on development of China's hydroelectric potential, the largest in the world. Currently, the PRC is the fourth largest producer of primary energy in the world after the United States, the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia.

In 1977, the PRC's electric power industry generated about 136 billion kilowatthours of power or 6 to 7 percent that of the United States. This was enough to place China ninth in power output. Installed capacity on December 31, 1977, was estimated to be 40,500 megawatts. The bulk of this capacity is found in the 192 known thermal and hydro stations of 30 megawatts capacity and over. Of these, 126 units are thermal stations and 66 are hydroelectric, some are currently under construction or are being expanded. Additional stations of this capacity or greater are thought to exist. About 62 percent of the capacity is thermal, the balance hydroelectric.

To adequately support a 10-percent rate of industrial growth, the power industry would need to add about 5,300 megawatts to capacity this year, a 13-percent rate of growth, and about 12,700 megawatts in 1985 to provide capacities of 45,800 and 108,000 megawatts, respectively. The domestic power equipment manufacturing industry, while quite substantial, does not appear capable of meeting this requirement. Thus, if a 10-percent industrial growth is to be achieved, Peking will have to import powerplants and equipment from abroad possibly expending as much as $300 million annually during the period 1978-85.

It does not appear that between now and 1980 the electric power industry can accelerate growth to the level to support a 10-percent industrial rate of growth 1978-80. It does seem possible, however, that by 1981 acceleration of developments in industry could support such industrial growth. To achieve this the Chinese will need to:

(a) Invest heavily in the development of the coal industry;

(b) Improve rail transport and develop "mine mouth" thermal plants to reduce coal hauling;

(c) Sharply reduce station construction times, especially on large hydro plants;

(d) Develop higher capacity transmission systems;
(e) Accelerate the development of

turbogenerators;

600-megawatt boilers and

(f) Expand the domestic power equipment manufacturing industry; and (g) Engage in a consistent and planned import of complete foreign powerplants and equipment. [Clarke, pp. 404-405.]

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 with-or 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 fuel and animate power and whose per capita modern energy consumption ranks close to the 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 its 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.

. . most of China's rural population continues to live as do hundreds of millions of other poor peasants around the world-in solar-dominated ecosystems, largely independent on external subsidies. Even for the nation as a whole solar energy recently transformed by green plants still predominates: approximately 4.1 10 kcal of phytomass energy-as food, feed, fuel and raw material-were used to support China's people and animals in 1974, while the total flow of fossil fuels and primary electricity amounted to less than 2.65 X 10 kcal . . .

.. Perhaps the best current interpretation of the Chinese coal resource figures is that the recoverable reserves are no less than 100 [billion Metric tons] bmt and the total resources are at least 1,500 bmt.

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Quality of coal is mostly very good and seams are of above average thickness and are predominantly horizontal or only slightly inclined. In sum, China's coal resources are outstanding both in their quantity and quality

.. Leaving aside the sizeable shale oil resources, whose oil content and recoverability are largely unknown, the best currently available geological evidence, compatible with production totals and growth rates, would indicate that China's crude oil reserves are certainly no less than 3 bmt and most likely no more than 10 bmt.

. . . It is to the Northwest-remote, severely inhospitable, thinly populated (less than 7 percent of the total), unindustrialized (less than 5 percent of gross industrial output) and still only tenuously linked to the rest of the countrywhere the Chinese will have to turn for their future fuel needs, a westward shift of energy centers comparable in its magnitude to the eastward shift of the Soviet energetics: Northwest has no less than half of China's ultimate coal resources and nearly half of her estimated recoverable onshore oil supplies. The only major way to postpone this costly and complicated shift would be to turn offshore first and to plunge into certainly no less expensive and difficult search and production of underseas hydrocarbons.

China's primary energy consumption, which was barely over 20 [million metric tons conventional energy] mmtce in 1949, grew nearly tenfold in a decade, topped, after years of politically induced stagnation, 300 mmtce in 1972 and is now exceeding 500 mmtce. In aggregate terms, China has thus become the world's third largest energy consumer, just ahead of Japan-and very far behind the Soviet Union and the United States. Per capita consumption, naturally, remains rather low: at around 500 kgce annually it is more than double of India's modern energy usage, but less than half of Mexico's figure-and an order of magnitude less than the consumption of developed nations; addition of the still important traditional fuels increases the aggregate value to some 500 mmtce in 1976 and the annual per capita usage to nearly 650 kgce. . .

. . The most striking feature of the Chinese sectoral energy use is the large share of the industrial consumption; even with power generation requirements classified separately, industry now draws about half of all China's primary energy, a sharp increase in comparison with the early 1959's. On the other hand, relative importance of residential and commercial uses has declined considerably since the late 1950's and, significantly, both the power generation and transportation shares, in spite of large absolute increases, have also diminished. Agriculture consumed about 46 times more commercial energy in 1976 than it did at the end of the First Five-Year Plan two decades ago-but in relative terms it is still no more than about six percent.

Expansion of the Chinese primary energy production by seven percent per year for another decade would have to be then termed a success; it would bring the output to just over 600 mmtce in 1980 to some 850 mmtce in 1985, meeting the likely domestic requirements and leaving a small, though valuable, export surplus equal, in crude oil terms, to some 40 mmt in 1980 and 60 mmt in 1985.

Coal industry is to double its output in the next ten years; this means an average exponential growth rate of seven percent per year and the total output in excess of one billion tons of raw coal in 1988. However, as both the Soviet Union and the United States have been finding out, the cost, the environmental problems and the logistics of producing more than half billion tons of coal annually is sharply curtailing any fast growth rates.

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agricultural sectors will continue without much relief from demographic s before 1990. Hence even the rather spectacular shifts in fertility projected models during the next few years do not portend an immediate and radical n in the problems that have hitherto been posed by population growth PRC. [Aird, pp. 440, 465-466, and 474.]

estion 9. How may current regime policies affect the efficiency of Chinese urban and rural labor force in the years ahead through nnological change, modernization and education?

When we try to assess the changes in China it may always be useful to maintain a historical perspective as all changes may not be permanent and we can expect that China will experience political struggle between opposing views on the roles of science and technology and how the sector should be controlled and organized. Is there any risk that China will eventually move toward political changes such as have taken place in the Soviet Union and which the Chinese term revisionism? No doubt, the heavy emphasis on economic growth and the use of the intellectual and technological expertise in the country may make it difficult to strike a stable balance.

The new technology and science policy now emerging in China may be an element which is at least partly antagonistic to the objective of reaching the socialist society conceived by Mao and the reasons for this are several: First, to meet the technology requirements of the modern industry the emphasis must be on large systems with a high degree of vertical division of labor with apparent nonegalitarian consequences for management in production enterprises as well as in the related R. & D. institutions. Second, trend toward further professionalism and inequality encourages importation of technology where technological and management solutions developed in capitalist countries must be adjusted to suit Chinese conditions. Third, if this were desired, the integration and coordination of large scale technological projects and the subsequent applications in manufacturing will require professional expertise which must be highly trained and competent. All such people will spend much of their time in central agencies, ministries or offices in the bigger cities with little or at least less time than previously to move into manual labor. Fourth a large scale approach to industrialization also requires improved transportation and communications and new management systems which all lend some credibility to the argument that new forms of social control might develop which are detrimental to the egalitarian interests of the masses of the Chinese populations.

So, it might be appropriate to pose the following question. The emphasis is on urban technological change-will it be possible for the Chinese leadership to maintain a fair balance between urban industry and rural agriculture? Herein we can find three different type problems with regard to changes in technology and science policy. First will the leadership be able to maintain the delicate but necessary balance in meeting the modernization objectives while reflecting the legitimate interests of the various groups in the Chinese society? Second, as the potentially privileged groups will make use of the new situation to further their own interests, in ways detrimental to the majority of the population in the rural areas will this nonprivileged majority create a counterforce in order to redress the balance? Should this be the case the present change in technology policy would create an unstable situation. Third, will the changes create a situation where privileged groups become established as a stable new class to the detriment of the overall, long-term development of China?

It must also be emphasized that the current situation in China is rapidly changing and the structure for encouraging innovations and change in technology and science policy has not been fully worked out. . . . The current debate on science and technology, as reflected in the news media over the past couple of years, can thus only shed limited light on the future development of science and technology in China. [Sigurdson, pp. 533–534.]

Question 10. What special role does the female labor force play in the Chinese rural economy?

Policies toward women in China are one aspect of the overall attempt to transform the whole country. Every change in general policy has engendered a concomitant change in policy on women. After 1949 the policies that were developed for development in urban and rural areas showed marked differences. The differences were most clear cut in policy statements on employment of tradition marginal groups in the labor force, such as the young, the old, and wo

Crude oil production will have to be expanded considerably--but exponential growth of no more than ten percent per year would exhaust the Chinese onshore reserves of around five bmt by the mid-1990's. Chinese are, of course, well aware of this fact, as exemplified by Hua's call to discover ten more Ta-ch'ings; even should the required reserves be in the ground, the Chinese investment to discover and to develop them might be of the same order of magnitude as the Soviet oil industry's expenditures during the past twenty years.

Chinese planners also face difficult decisions regarding the future state of small-scale technologies which have played such a critical part in the rural industrialization. Their low quality output and inordinate energy cost do not make them very suitable in more advanced stages of modernization-but their total, or near total, substitution by centralized large-scale production would not be an appropriate solution in a capital-short country so badly equipped with good roads and railways.

In sum, China's energy development strategy should be multifaceted and flexible. Taking into account the richness, location and quality of resources, ancient traditions of solar energetics and enormous regional disparities within the nation, it should strive to modernize the country-side without cutting it completely off its traditional renewable energies and without abandoning appropriate smallscale industries; it should aim for sustainable growth rates of coal and hydrocarbon production by, among others, tapping the still sizeable economics of scale and introducing as many advanced foreign technologies as practicable; and it should attempt to improve conversion efficiencies and encourage proper final uses and widespread conservation. . . . [Smil, pp. 324, 332, 345, 347, 351-354, and 361-364.] Question 8. What are the likely ranges of population growth and how can Chinese policy control demographic growth?

Almost 30 years have elapsed since Mao Tse-tung declared that China's large population was "a good thing" and that it could multiply "many times" without posing any difficulties for national development. Now birth control has been written into the constitution of the PRC, and Hua Kuo-feng has called for a reduction of the national population growth rate to less than 1 percent within 3 years.

Absolute population totals for the three models as of January 1 and July 1 for the years 1953-80 and every fifth year to the end of the century are given in table 1. Perhaps the most striking implication of these figures is that China's population is close or may already have surpassed the 1 billion mark. The low model reaches 1 billion in 1980, the high model exceeds that figure by 1977, and the intermediate model crosses the line by the beginning of May 1978. The total of 900 million, now at least authorized for domestic use in China, should have been passed at least by the middle of 1974 and possibly as early as the end of 1971.

By the end of the century, the new models show a population of from 14 to 11⁄2 billion people. The projections from 1978 onward assume no major catastrophies or other startling changes in fertility or mortality. Up to now, China's demographic determinants have not shown such a high degree of stability. There have been setbacks from time to time in the efforts to control both fertility and mortality which have been significant enough to affect national levels. There is no reason to suppose, as has often been mistakenly supposed in the past, that the course of Chinese history hereafter will be all smooth sailing. The projections of population growth during the remainder of the century are therefore not predictions but simply the implications of some rather artificial assumptions. They serve mainly to indicate the orders of magnitude that would be generated given hypothetical trends in fertility and mortality.

If China's demographic prospects fall within the range indicated by the low and high model projections presented here, it is obvious that there are significant differences between the two extremes by the year 2000. The size of the totals varies by about 17 percent of the mean value and the annual population growth rates range from 1.1 percent to 1.7 percent. However, either of these rates is sufficient to give continuing cause for concern in a country with finite resources at an early stage of economic development with an already large population. The pressure of population growth on the growth of food production may not be greatly reduced by the anticipated decline in natural increase rates if the expedients used to increase agricultural output yield diminishing returns. Unless the economy is more immune in the future than it has been in the past to political dislocations, population growth will continue to dissipate a significant portion of the gains from economic growth. The difficulties of funding productive employment for large increments to the labor force while mechanizing labor in both the nonagricultural

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