Seattle Post-Intelligencer (2002): China hopes it can upstage U.S. on environment

Thursday, November 28, 2002
China hopes it can upstage U.S. on environment
Atlanta physicist to head up program at Peking University

By JULIE CHAO
COX NEWS SERVICE

BEIJING -- If China is looking for one area in which it can beat the United States, then Peking University is betting on the environment. And to better its chances, it's taking a gamble on an American.

C.S. Kiang, a physicist from the Georgia Institute of Technology who helped develop an environmental program there, has been chosen to run the newly established College of Environmental Sciences at China's most prestigious university. The college is the first of its kind in China.

"One reason they wanted to set up this college (is because President) Bush hasn't emphasized the environment too much," he said. "If China does something big on the environment, it will be almost like a Sputnik."

The Soviet Union shocked the world, humbled the United States and sparked the space race when it launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, in 1957.

Two decades of rapid development have not come cheaply to China's environment. The country suffers from annual flooding in the south and a severe chronic drought in the north. Its massive dust storms have found their way across the Pacific Ocean and its cities are some of the most polluted on earth.

"This could all be the case in the future for developing countries, like in South America, Africa, Southeast Asia," Kiang said. "If China can solve these problems -- balance the environment and development -- they could be solved for the world."

Environmental degradation is one of the biggest factors threatening China's continued economic growth. Yet government officials have been slow to recognize that environmental issues must be dealt with proactively rather than reactively.

"The mind-set is the most difficult to change," Kiang said. Most Chinese think "once you develop the economy, then you fix the environment."

Peking University decided to merge several departments and research centers to form the college, which officially opened in June. Kiang hopes the interdisciplinary approach will promote a more comprehensive look at China's environmental problems, allowing, for example, urban planners to work with natural resources specialists.

Kiang also wants to emphasize innovation, a trait now lacking in China's manufacturing-oriented economy.

"Everything is made in China, but how many things come from China?" he asked.

The government has allocated about $128 million to Peking University and Tsinghua University, China's finest, over the past three years to make them competitive with the West's best schools.

Kiang is the first foreign dean at Peking University.

"People say, 'You gotta have someone from Harvard, someone from Berkeley.' Rarely do they say, 'You gotta have someone from Georgia,' " he said. "In that sense, Georgia Tech should feel pretty good."

Born in Shanghai and educated in Taiwan, Kiang has lived in the United States for 40 years, 35 of them in Atlanta. His wife runs the Kiang Gallery in Atlanta.

He has worked with Chinese scientists on studying the impact of industrialization in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. As a consultant for companies including Coca Cola and Bell South, as an academic and as an adviser on Atlanta trade missions, he visited China more than 100 times. But he had never spent more than two weeks here before taking the job.

Having retired only last fall from nearly 20 years at Georgia Tech, he wasn't planning on taking up a project requiring a commute between Beijing and Atlanta. But he said it was an honor and an opportunity too interesting to pass up.

As an Atlantan and an environmentalist, he is also trying to work with the Beijing city government, whose winning Olympic bid for the 2008 Games included a promise to hold a "Green Olympics." But Kiang is diplomatic on the question of how committed Beijing is to that concept.

"It's too early to say," he said. "They have a good idea . . . but implementation is the issue."