Is China heading towards environmental catastrophe? Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore meets journalist and author Jonathan Watts to find out just what will happen when a billion Chinese jump.

In 2006, Jonathan Watts, then The Guardian’s China correspondent, took part in an expedition to find the last remaining baiji dolphins in the Yangtze. Watts joined 30 scientists from five countries in a 1,000-mile search along the river on a ship full “of good intentions and high hopes”; the capture pens were ready, a quarantine system was in place and a beautiful ox-bow lake was reserved for the rare freshwater dolphins to live in once found. But after just two days “it was obvious,” Watts remembers. “There were none left.”

By the end of the six-week mission the baiji was declared functionally extinct due to a fatal combination of relentless pollution, over-fishing and shipping traffic. For Watts, the expedition was a turning point. The baiji – traditionally revered as the ‘goddess of the Yangtze’ – had been on earth for 20 million years. “I’ve covered world cups, earthquakes and G8 summits,” explains Watts. “But I will probably never again write a story that is a once in a 20-million-year event.”

The baiji’s fate is a reminder of the consequences of China’s growth at-all-costs mindset. In his new book, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It, Watts warns that we are heading towards an “environmental apocalypse”. The book is written in the form of a travelogue – with an environmental angle. To conduct research, Watts took a six-month sabbatical from work, travelled 100,000 miles across China, and interviewed everyone from green activists to Tibetan nomads. The result is a startling and sombre book that anyone serious about China’s role in the world’s future simply must read.

As a child in 1970s Britain, Watts was told that “if everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth from its axis and kill us all”. It was, he laughs, a terrifying image. “My fate could be decided by these people on the other side of the world. They didn’t need weapons – just sheer numbers.”Terrifying indeed, and the concept resonates today more than ever. When A Billion Chinese Jump describes China as a “3,000-year-old civilisation in the body of an industrial teenager”. In just a decade the world’s biggest nation has gone from a poverty-riddled rural economy to an industrialised hothouse. GDP, industrial output and production of cars has doubled; energy consumption and coal production has increased by 50 per cent, and China has become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and pollution in the world. The result is desertification, soil decline, water shortages and chronic health problems. The upshot of this is simple: the decisions taken in Beijing will determine “whether humanity thrives or perishes”.

When we meet for coffee, Watts, 43, is surprisingly upbeat. “China’s environmental crisis is much worse than people think,” he tells me. “But, at the same time, China is doing far more to solve these problems than most people are aware of.” The country is spearheading a “spectacular” drive towards developing new green technology and has pledged to raise enough investment to overtake European spending on renewable energies within the next decade. With the highest amount of wind power capacity in the world, the most solar panels, and a unique opportunity to build eco cities from scratch, says Watts, China may well carve out the global leadership it hungers for in green technology. In 2009, even US political commentator Thomas Friedman predicted loudly that “Red China” is no more; “Green China” is the future.

The reality, Watts insists, is still far more “grey”. In the China he paints, the brilliant greens and blues – the mountains and rivers – are being sacrificed for an endless repetition of concrete, steel, and smog. “Forests, wetlands and wildernesses: we’re turning them all into cities or monocultures [a single crop grown over a large area].” Beyond this, as Watts tartly points out in a blog response to Friedman, China is still overwhelmingly “black” because 70 per cent of its power continues to come from coal. At the heart of the problem is a ferocious appetite to consume. In a chapter on Shanghai, Watts devours a “Barbie burger” in the Barbie emporium, visits the designer “ghost malls”, and parties with the upper class glitterati. This Shanghai lifestyle – where rampant wealth mimicking America is a sign of prestige and power – is what the leadership aims to eventually provide for all its citizens. Watts is far more concerned about Shanghai’s shoppers – hailed as “saviours of the global economy” – than the “snarling polluters”, who are recognised as a problem.

But why shouldn’t China provide the “American” lifestyle to its people, riddled as they are with a history of poverty and upheaval? Isn’t unbridled consumerism better than dire need? You can almost see Watts melt on the spot at this conundrum, something that he has been thinking over for years. It’s as if the world, he explains earnestly, is marching up a mountain. The first industrialised nations, such as Britain and America, are leading the way. “We’ve got to the top of this very high slope and realised that actually it leads to a precipice. Maybe we want to go sideways and downwards, but now there is this big crush of people coming up behind. Are they going to push us over or are we going to convince people: ‘You may not want to come this way’?”

Quite simply the earth’s resources cannot support another billion people consuming at the same rate as the rich nations. If the Chinese ate as the Americans do, they alone would eat two-thirds of the global grain harvest, not to mention 80 per cent of today’s meat production. Equality in consumption would be “completely fair and utterly calamitous”. China, Watts points out again and again, is not to blame for the state of the world – but they now have the power to make a difference.

When Watts first arrived in Beijing from a previous posting in Japan, he did his own daily environmental test: a “skyscraper index”. From The Guardian office he would count the number of visible skyscrapers on the capital’s skyline. Predictably, back in 2003, that was not many. Seven years later Beijing’s once rare “blue sky” days have increased, along with Watts’ skyscraper count. But while the improvement in air quality can partly be put down to advanced technology, it is also because China (like the West before it, who outsourced energy-intensive, high polluting industries to the developing world) is in-sourcing dirty industries to poorer, Western provinces. Yes, human beings are smarter than ever before, and our technology is becoming more advanced; but simply shifting the filthy, unwanted muck from our consumption to somewhere else cannot, in the end, be a global solution.

So is there any hope? “No,” says Watts, a little too quickly. “There were times when I wrote this book and put my head in my hands and thought: ‘I can’t see a way out.’” He soon backtracks, however. “I have kids. You have to be an optimist when you’ve got kids.”Endearingly, Watts is careful to point out that he doesn’t know the answers, and is by no means a paragon of “green” virtue himself. But his overwhelming message is that only a global change of values in the way we consume will save humanity. The danger is that this will only come about after a war over water or cataclysmic starvation – visible results of climate change. Only in case of such dramatic events might the world be stirred to act. “But at that point are you still able to deal with the problem?” asks Watts. “That’s what terrified me about the baiji – by the time that humanity had mobilised its A-Team, raised the money and set up the nature reserve, there were none left.”

When A Billion Chinese Jump is published by Faber and Faber