Jonathan S. Watts > Quotes

“I had seen small-scale electric fishing near Beijing, where workers from local restaurants wandered the streams and pools in rubber waders with giant batteries strapped to their backs connected to a pole in each hand that they dipped into the water, electrocuting everything in between. This was by no means the worst form of indiscriminate fishing in China. I had read and heard numerous reports of fishing with explosives.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“Darwin never mentioned survival of the cutest, but it is a reality on a planet dominated by mankind.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“What were we doing to our world? How could we assume our species was developing and becoming more civilized when an animal once worshipped had been wiped out by neglect, greed, and human filth?”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“There are few sharper contrasts in China between the desire to find harmony and the instinct to impose order.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“The mix of communist politics and capitalist economics was well named as GDPism. Everything was sacrificed for growth.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“part of the floating population of migrants that have built modern China. Estimated at between 100 and 200 million, this vast population of itinerant workers had provided the human fuel for the country’s economic engine. They were a flood unleashed.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“the seventy-one-story solar-and-wind-powered Pearl River Tower stands proud as the world’s most energy-efficient superskyscraper. Its low-emission, environmentally friendly credentials are, however, compromised by the identity of its owner: China National Tobacco.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“Guangdong is where many of these dubious environmental accounts are hidden. Just as in the Qing dynasty, when corrupt local officials put British opium dealers above their own people, the province is now selling itself as a haven for carbon cheats and waste-regulation dodgers. This is a major reason why China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: between 15 and 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide output is attributable to the production of exports.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“Twelve percent of the animals, reptiles, and fish in Shangri-La are found nowhere else in the world.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“in December 2001, when the Chinese authorities found a new way to sell northwest Yunnan’s beauty: they renamed the region Shangri-La. As well as being a brilliant piece of marketing, the appropriation of a fictional Utopia dreamed up seventy years earlier on the other side of the world was a remarkable act of chutzpah for a government that was, in theory at least, communist, atheist, and scientifically oriented.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“mainstream thought, Utopia was not about nature, it was about people.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“the Three Gorges Dam, the most ambitious and controversial hydroelectric development ever undertaken. It took fifty years to plan, fifteen years to build, $24 billion to pay for, and 16 million tons of reinforced concrete to fill. The giant barrier has created a reservoir that stretches back along the Yangtze almost the length of England.21 This mass of water drives twenty-six giant turbines to generate up to 18,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. There are few more fitting monuments to early twenty-first-century China.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“The steep slopes that rise up from the Gangqu River are particularly abundant, ranging through six climatic zones from the subtropical in the moist, warm valley to the alpine in the cool and craggy peaks.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“Lancang (better known outside China as the Mekong),”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“From 2003 to 2008, China stopped receiving aid from the World Food Programme and overtook the World Bank as the biggest investor in Africa.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“China, like developing nations through history—prefers to deal with the environmental symptoms rather than the economic causes. Instead of closing down or cleaning up dirty factories, it just relocates them farther inland. Instead of cutting waste-water emissions, it builds more treatment plants.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“Yunnan is home to 87 percent of all the fungi found in China.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“The province’s most lucrative agricultural export market was Matsutake pine mushrooms, prized in Japan for their fragrance and taste. Consumers in Tokyo and Kyoto were willing to pay up to 10,000 yen (US$110) for the best specimens.34 Chinese consumers preferred the caterpillar fungus Cordyceps sinensis, which consumed its host, the ghost moth caterpillar, from inside out as it hibernated on the mountain grasslands. But rising demand and intense competition is driving foragers to collect earlier in the year, sometimes before the fungus has had time to release spores. This means it has no way to reproduce. Production has plummeted over the past twenty years, driving up the price of the fungus to almost twice the price of gold, gram for gram.35 Many Chinese believe this ghoulish parasite, known in Tibetan as yartsa gunbu, or bu, is variously a cure for cancer, an aphrodisiac, and a tonic for long-distance runners.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“The range of natural and human life in Yunnan is greater than anywhere else in China. The province covers 4 percent of the nation’s land area, but it is home to more half of the country’s vertebrates, higher plant species, and orchids as well as 72 percent of the country’s endangered animals, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It

“On the black market, a single animal could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bones, used in tonics, were the most valuable part: the 25 kilograms yielded by the average tiger can fetch 2.4 million yuan ($343,000), about ten times the price of a pelt.21”
― Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind -- Or Destroy It