The Devouring Dragon: How China's Rise Threatens Our Natural World

by Craig Simons

China's rise is assaulting the natural world at an alarming rate. In a few short years, China has become the planet's largest market for endangered wildlife, its top importer of tropical trees, and its biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Its rapid economic growth has driven up the world's very metabolism: in Brazil, farmers clear large swaths of the Amazon to plant soybeans; Indian poachers hunt tigers and elephants to feed Chinese demand; in the United States, clouds of mercury and ozone drift earthward after trans-Pacific jet-stream journeys. Craig Simons' The Devouring Dragon looks at how an ascending China has rapidly surpassed the U.S. and Europe as the planet's worst-polluting superpower. It argues that China's most important 21st-century legacy will be determined not by jobs, corporate profits, or political alliances, but by how quickly its growth degrades the global environment and whether it can stem the damage. Combining in-depth reporting with wide-ranging interviews and scientific research, The Devouring Dragon shines a spotlight on how China has put our planet's forests, wildlife, oceans, and climate in jeopardy, multiplying the risks for everyone in our burgeoning, increasingly busy world.

Genres: China, Environment, Economics, Nonfiction, Climate Change

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 2013

Reviews

[Scott Rhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

China's population is a staggering 1.3 billion people (as of 2011), with a projected growth of roughly 200 million more people. * A coal-burning industrial nation, China has burned roughly 4 billion tons of coal, making it the world's largest coal consumer. It is the fastest-growing nation in the world, in terms of economic and industrial growth, but it is also the most polluted.

Everyone knows that China can not sustain its growth, even the Chinese. To continue on the path that it is currently on, China poses an environmental threat not only to itself but also to the entire world. This is the frightening and beyond-inconvenient truth in Craig Simons's eye-opening book "The Devouring Dragon: How China's Rise Threatens Our Natural World". The amount of lumber alone that China requires makes it a very real possibility that, if continued unchecked, the rain forests of the world will be completely destroyed by the end of this century. The death of the rain forests would inevitably mean the extinction of millions of animal and plant species. Many of those extinctions are happening now.

In one of Simons's most emotional chapters, he writes about the rapid decline in the world tiger population, and how he desperately hopes that his newborn little girl will be able to grow up to see the beautiful creature before it, too, joins the list of extinct species in our lifetime. And, while our selfish world leaders continue to bicker over whether global warming is a real threat, global climate change continues to wreak havoc on the entire planet. Projections of global climate change and its effects on ocean levels, average global temperature, and precipitation rates are shocking.

Yet, Simons manages to not create a xenophobic atmosphere. He doesn't see the point in finger-pointing, and if there is any finger-pointing to be done, The United States deserves a fairly good chunk of the blame, as well. Throughout the book, Simons is quick to remind the reader that the average Chinese citizen lives far below our standard of the poverty line. At one point, Simons makes the comment that the average Chinese citizen's life is far more "green" than the average American's, and they do it without trying and without a choice in the matter. Simons remains hopeful, as he points out the many sustainable-energy strides and attempts at protecting the environment that China has already made. Even though, as he says, "we were poking holes in the bottom of a sinking ship even as we debated how to plug them. (p. 211)"

* These are 10-year-old statistics. In 2022, China's population was close to 1.5 billion.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The garish cover suggests that this book is a Western attack on China's rapid growth, but this is not the case. The book is really a love song to the earth and a lament about its destruction. Some of the best parts of the book are descriptions of nature.

The author has close ties with China. The only reason China gets major emphasis is that because billions of Chinese have a much better chance of raising their standard of living, the pressure this will put on species survival, forests, and natural resources will be immense. The author says little about India (which will be a similar story) and doesn't do much with climate change, which will make things even more challenging.

The author ends on a positive note, which I find puzzling. Definitely deus ex machina. His hope rests on an agreement between China and the US on climate, natural resources, etc. I don't think this has a chance of happening. But I'd love to be wrong!

Definitely a good book.

[Rebecca Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It was eye-opening and alarming. While I'm not so enamored of the subtitle: How China's Rise Threatens Our Natural World (is it semantically more palatable to say "why" instead of "how"?), it was a topic that though written in 2013, is still quite relevant six years later. In fact, it has me wanting to know more. Wanting to understand how things are different or better or worse than they were six years ago.

The conundrum is how to raise the standard of living for several billion people while not dropping our country's standard and allowing even more people (world-wide) to escape poverty and thrive. All while keeping the natural world (non-humans) intact and also thriving.

Towards the end of the book, Simons suggests that maybe it's time to not just "think globally, act locally" but to "act globally, think locally". Of course, in reality, all actions will speak louder than words.

[katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed how I shop. For example, instead of replacing our everyday dishes with something from Target or Pottery Barn (with the "Made in China" stickers), this book inspired me to go on Etsy.com, find an artist within driving distance, and have a set of dishes made for us.

[Dillon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short read on how China's rise and how their consumption affects Earth. From a re-opened coal mine in rural Colorado to old growth forests on New Guinea, Craig Simmons attempts to show the reach of China's insatiable appetite for resources. The book serves as informative introduction to a lot of the basics about climate change (what climate change book is complete without reference to Malthus?), and particularly how China fits in.

Overall good writing, but times it felt like he couldn't decide his tone. It's part travelogue, part science journalism with him wax philosophical throughout. He includes the usual subjects, Muir, E.O. Wilson, and attempts to include his voice among them to argue why saving the natural world is important. For the most part he does this well, like when travelling to rural areas of China with former students (he was a Peace Corps Volunteer) to show how China's development is affecting the life of individual farming families and how that in turn serves as example of China's resource thirst. Yet, at other times it felt like he was narrating a documentary.

The key takeaway of the book comes from the final chapter in which Simmons argues that legitimate action on climate change will only happen if the world's two largest emitters (China and the United States, respectively) come to a mutual agreement. He states that this is problematic because China is unlikely to take the first step given that it has publicly argued that Western nations need to act first - thus the Chinese leadership would lose face. Given the inability of the United States to make any significant progress on curbing emissions bilateral cooperation, at least right now, seems unrealistic. It would also require that Chinese throw away their key to growth - coal - which also seems unlikely.

The book ends on a half-hearted plee that the community of nations needs to work together and that we all need to bike and recycle more. Like most books about climate change, I walked away wanted the the current statistics (the book was written in 2013) and feeling more pessimistic about our future than before. I don't share in the author's strained optimism.

Read if you are interesting in human stories about the reach of China's demand for resources or if you want an introduction into the basics of climate change, look elsewhere if you want up-to-date reporting.

[Matt Brown]

I thought it was a pretty good book. It was boring if the stuff they talked about didn't interest you because it was non-fiction and didn't have any action. I personally liked it because I find it interesting what China is doing to their environment because I think the rest of the world is going to be where they're at if we don't change our ways.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think some of the problems here are more than solely from China, but mankind as a whole.
Perhaps the People's Republic may be a large contributor, and the problems may be clearly connected to with Chinese production, but I thought it also said China led the world in efforts to minimise our carbon footprint, or something like that... (I might have seen that somewhere else.)

I found Simons' research extremely intriguing to consider, and this did not go off onto many insistent "save the earth!"-type tangents.

For these reasons, I am confident that in the end of the day, while I kind of adored it, it was not all the way, otherwise I'd be able to reason why this is one of the best books I read this summer.
I liked it, for sure; I thought there was plenty to consider about what is happening to our society, and it did have quite a bit of Chinese historical background to support itself, just I think I was also reading another one that had a similar message in a more thrilling package at the same time that stole my excitement from this one.

I liked the ending of the prose best: it's everyone's world. "We need to decide what matters. And then we need to act."

[Claire Binkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book a while ago, but I accidentally didn't mark it. This matter sincerely perplexes me. I appreciated Simons' literature on the topic, though, and the number of other sources I could collect from this work.

I could have sworn I had written something about this a while ago, about how I thought the "China" of the title is pars pro toto - the author just picking part of an issue to indicate a huge problem.
Guess not.

[S2 Mc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly liberal global warming screed and fear-mongering, but valid points about Chinese consumption and ignorant traditional medicine that continue to endanger rare animal species.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book on China's impact on the environment I've read.

[Joel Blunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book on how Chinese development threatens the global environment.