Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
educated laborers remain as a remnant from Mao's Great Leap Forward. In the
1980s, Deng Xiaoping's vision of a socialist market economy led to the emer-
gence of a thriving state-owned enterprise sector which specialized in low-tech
manufacturing. As a result of these reforms, China now leads the world in pri-
mary manufacturing of commodities such as steel, concrete, and lat glass.
34
In the 2000s, market reforms under Hu Jintao have catalyzed an upwelling of
high-tech industrial capability through policies that have encouraged foreign
direct investment and joint ventures.
35
Many of the world's most sophisticated
manufacturers have established plants in China to take advantage of China's
increasingly well-educated labor force, its lower cost base, and improved access
to the blossoming Chinese consumer market.
China's evolution in terms of both economic inluence and vocational
competency, along with an inlux of foreign investment and know-how,
has engendered a technological environment in China that exhibits an
ever-increasing capacity to support technological change. As the next sec-
tions will outline, the evolution of China's national landscape feeds into
evolutionary changes within China's governing regime and this feedback
process interfaces with regime characteristics to produce the wind power
development policy that currently exists in China.
6.5 INFLUENCES ON GOVERNMENT POLICY
6.5.1 Sociocultural
→
Political
Despite progressive reform, the CPC has a well-documented disposition
for responding to large-scale civil disobedience with force.
36
Perhaps as a
result, although there have been some exceptional instances of civic activ-
ism in regard to ill-conceived large-scale energy projects (such as the hree
Gorges Dam project),
37
government-led development projects tend to
engender public acquiescence. On the one hand, this predilection enables
China's state-owned enterprises (SOE) to pursue the development of energy
projects that carry high social costs, which in other nations might not be
tenable. Public acquiescence has played a role in enabling both government
commitment to nuclear power and ongoing support for environmentally
damaging coal-ired power plant expansion.
38
On the other hand, low levels
of civic activism also implies that NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) opposition
to wind projects, which tend to emerge as wind power capacity evolves in a
given country,
39
will be weaker in China.
Ampliication of engineering competency has provided the skill base nec-
essary for policymakers to begin thinking of alternative energy in strategic
