Udi Aloni

What if all Chinese people would decide to jump in the same minute on earth?

Udi Aloni is the director of Forgiveness, Innocent Criminals and Local Angel, called “one of the top five political films of all time” by The Sundance Channel.

Lesego Rampolokeng

You know, I suppose that, apart from the inherent racism of this question — which essentially is suggesting that we have more Chinese people than would render things completely safe for us if they, each of them, I would think, not just wanted a car but acquire a car — the thing is the Chinese people are not a homogenous glob. They are being rendered inhuman here by being made to represent a potential threat to life as we know it, should they get it within their heads, within themselves, to want a vehicle. Wanting a car counts for nothing. What if everybody wanted a dollar in their pocket? But the idea is that if they just did not want a car only and stop there but if they acquired a car, what dimensions of destruction could come down upon the earth based on the pollution factor of those vehicles that they would then have, based on the fact that space as we know it would be shrunken totally and completely out of proportion. What if every Chinese person wanted a car? What if every German person wanted this or that? That, I think, is a question that disguises much more than is getting thrown to the surface. If the question is what would happen if every Chinese person had a car, if that is the question…

Lesego Rampolokeng is a playwright and performance poet who was active in the struggle against Apartheid.

Valentina Melnikova

It's a very amusing question. Certainly, "the yellow peril" is a terrible old fairy tale of Europe. But once Americans rode horses too, once Russians went from village to village afoot. Nowadays, a lot of people drive a car. I think that, by the time the citizens of China can all get cars, the car industry will have learned to produce eco-friendly inexpensive engines that will permit transport in a smooth, safe and very fast way, not only for one billion Chinese people but also for the other billions of people in the world. And that will not be harmful for human beings and the environment. The main thing is to break through the routine thinking of engineers, who are used to a lot of petrol being necessary and that cars should be big and heavy, and perhaps to break through people's wish to show off by driving faster than other people.

Valentina Melnikova is the head of the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia and the chairwoman of the United People's Party of Soldiers' Mothers.

Neela Marikkar

That’s a great question. Well, why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they be entitled to have a car? I think they have as much right as anybody else in any other country. They already have 350 million mobile phones, so think about that. I mean, economic progress is going to lead to all these additional needs. Let me put it this way. What about if not only all of China, what about if all of China and all of India wanted a car? I mean, you’re talking about a huge number then. I think what is important is that the world has to put its head together about looking for clean fuel, looking for other ways of dealing with alternative energy sources, because, as the world progresses, as people get more prosperous, their desires and their needs and wants increase, and they are going to feel they have every right to it, and they do have a right to it. So, I think, the challenge is: how do we manage it, and manage it in a way that people can still have what they want, but it doesn't impact drastically on the environment?

Neela Marikkar is the president of Sri Lanka First, an association of business leaders advocating for a negotiated settlement to the decades-long civil war.

Leung Ping-Kwan

Well, I think, in this question the word “Chinese” is symbolic. It doesn't just mean Chinese. We can rephrase the question in many ways like, “What if all German people want a second car?” Or “what if all people from the United States want a third car?” So it's not just the problem of the Chinese but this should be the responsibility of everybody in the world: whether we want more of what we do not have or more of what we already have. Of course, the Chinese is symbolic or representative in a certain way because China is a large and also developing country and, in the past, all of the Chinese used bicycles and now we're moving into the spirit of industrialization and modernization, a lot of Chinese families will want a car. And, of course, that will create problems in terms of the ecology, in terms of energy and so on. But I think the question would be better rephrased, because even if the Chinese people, if not all Chinese people, want a car, there will still be oil problems and energy problems in the world. So the problem is how the world as a whole intends to face this kind of problem: how to limit one’s needs, how to have more control and how to save energy, how not to have more and more but have less and less?

Leung Ping-Kwan is a poet, translator and cultural critic, responsible for introducing underground literature from Eastern Europe and the Americas to the Chinese reading public.

Yang Shaobin

What if all Chinese people want a car? Then we have to turn all German people into automobile workers to produce cars for the Chinese until ultimately all the Germans are tired out. It’s an impossible story. If this was the case, the situation would be quite different, because China is actually a big agricultural country and it doesn't have sufficiently strong purchasing-power to buy luxury cars. Once I had an idea of setting a starting-price of $400,000 for cars in China, so as to make cheap cars not competitive any more and, in the end, push them out of the market. That way, some people's desire for automobile consumption would be restrained.

One of the most influential painters of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde, Yang Shaobin’s works are intended to make their viewer feel pain.

José Manuel Prieto

Well, all the Chinese citizens should be asked if they would like to have a car. This is a hypothetical question. I believe that it couldn't happen, and therefore the question might as well be extended to the entire earth. What would happen if all the citizens of the world would like to have a car? I think, to imagine that the future will be full of cars is misguided. This question points out the possible negative impact that China would have if it was motorized at the same level as, for example, the United States which. Due to the current situation of the price of oil and the ecological impact that car emissions have, to think something like that would be negative, but I believe that it's not worthwhile to extend a current option to the future, to imagine a future full of cars. In 100 years, this could change fundamentally. And I'm almost sure that the same technology will deliver an answer to this question. I don't think that there is space for panic, although it is without a doubt an issue that it’s worthwhile to debate and imagine solutions to, as an intellectual exercise. That is what I would say about this question.

José Manuel Prieto is a novelist, poet and translator of Russian literary greats.

Esther Mwaura-Muiru

And what if all Indians want a car? What if all Africans want a car? What all if Canadians want a car? What if all Europeans and Australians want a car? This kind of attitude that we must all have because other people are having and not because it helps us, isn't the best trait to take. I feel where we should invest energy is not to play bad for bad, but play good where bad has happened. We do all believe that the amount of vehicles that we are using — the amount of oil, the expenditure on energy we are using with our cars and industrialization — it's actually having a great impact on our environment. The responsibility is amongst all of us to be able to develop strategies how we can reduce the amount of natural resources that we are using to have energy. So I feel the answer is not for all the Chinese to have the car, if they wish to have. Because I believe all Chinese can have the cars if they wish, maybe. All Africans can decide to put all the resources they have to each own a car, because every other American has a car. But does that help us? Of course, it will only increase the negative impact on the environment. And it's not the Americans who will suffer. It's all of us. It will actually accelerate the amount of pollution we'll be generating in the air. And so that kind of idea may not work. I believe the best would be: we must be able to know that if then each American has a car, the idea is not to buy, in fact, it's to reduce so that we cannot [audio ends].

Esther Mwaura-Muiru is the founder of the Kenyan branch of the micro-development network Groots International (Grassroots Women’s Organizations Organized Together in Sisterhood).

Sabiha El-Zayat-Erbakan

Yes, that's a huge danger which is often talked about, the essence of which is very clear. If all human beings on this planet could achieve the same desires, the consumption of resources and the resulting emissions — as 20 percent of humans already do by consuming 80 percent of the resources — then an ecological catastrophe can be expected, that it will come is clear. Unfortunately, the standard reaction to this is to think about how it can be avoided that even more people participate in the same pattern of consumption that is damaging the ecological system, instead of thinking about how we can change this imbalance that 20 percent of human beings consume 80 percent of the resources and cause almost 80 percent of the emissions and environmental damage. Instead, we think about how we can refuse the Chinese this way of life that we have created. So the question is what we can do with this imbalance and we have no other possibility than to reduce our expectations.

Sabiha El-Zayat-Erbakan is the vice president of the German Society for Muslim Social Scientists and a founding member of the European Muslim Network.

Santiago Roncagliolo

If they wanted a car, I suppose we ought to sell them one. It would be a huge source of employment for a huge number of people, and it would be difficult to stop them, and no one would really be interested in doing this. What’s more, if they wanted them — and let’s just pretend that we didn’t have cars for ecological reasons — we would have to explain this to the Chinese that it’s a problem if they want them, but not if all Americans and all Europeans want them. If all the Chinese had a car, I’m afraid they probably wouldn’t fit into their country.

Santiago Roncagliolo is a writer, journalist and the youngest recipient of the Premio Alfaguara Award for his novel, Abril Rojo.

Pico Iyer

They could, should perhaps be shown a picture of Bangkok or Jakarta or Los Angeles: places that have to some extent been brought to a standstill by the car. They should hear stories from people who have had lots of cars and accept that those who have been on that road before them, so to speak, have a wisdom to pass on. Many of our mistakes, I think, could be cured by humility and a willingness to listen to others. And yet, more important than any of all this, if they should want to have a car, they, of course, have as much right to have a car as any of we do. And I think one of the most pernicious forms of colonialism evident in this new century is what I would call imaginative colonialism, which is to say that many of us in the developing, affluent, privileged world go to less privileged places and are very anxious that they not have the televisions and motorbikes and cars that we find so essential ourselves. And it's almost as if we want them to remain in a never-never state of picturesque quietness. We, having sought out their antiquity and their traditional ways, want them to remain stuck in antique and traditional ways, as we come to them from Berlin or New York or London. And, of course, what they will say in China and elsewhere is what they most aspire to is very much the life of Berlin and Los Angeles and London. So I think because China is slower along the road of development than other places, it can learn from our mistakes and improve upon our examples. And yet, on an individual basis, there should be no sanctioning in the sense of prohibiting of other people's desires. And I think sometimes we in the fortunate world are much too ready to tell people in the less fortunate world what they should want and what they should need.

A self-described ‘global village on two legs’, Pico Iyer is the author of The Global Soul.

Mohammed Arkoun

This question is typically European, occidental and Eurocentric, as it comes from Germany, but it could also come from France or from the United States. In the United States, as well as in Germany, there are families which have four or five cars — one for each son or daughter — and that’s considered normal. And even if the Chinese do not, other irresponsible people would continue to have several cars and to feed the car industry. But the idea that each Chinese person could have a car or that each Chinese family could have four or five cars, that’s like terror. It destroys the tranquillity of our spirit, even though everybody’s profited for a long time from this possibility. There is a way to answer this question without criticising the questioner. That’s about the mood of European and occidental subjectivity, which has long considered its advantages and privileges as absolutely deserved. And it’s not imaginable that they could be replaced by a form of equality — the right for everybody in the world to have a car — as there is India, which is also highly populated. There is Russia. There is the entire African continent. So why not? We have to leave this egotistical logic behind and enter a more humanistic logic of distribution of chances and opportunities and not keep alive this division of the world where I can have and the other cannot.

Mohammed Arkoun is the Emeritus Professor of the History of Islamic Thought at the Sorbonne and the author of Rethinking Islam.

Ashok Gangadean

What I’m hearing in this question is, of course, everyone, we would think, would want a car. Why should not all Chinese people or all people around the world want a car? What's behind the question I think is the thought-experiment that, given the number of Chinese people there are in the Chinese population, that if every Chinese person were to have a car, what would be the consequences of that? And just to expand the question, not just for China, for India, for Africa, for all of the peoples of the world. What if everyone wanted a car? What kind of world would that be? Would that be sustainable? That's the question. So it's clear that what's behind the question is not so much the Chinese people, but a metaphor for a situation in which it's unsustainable, clearly. And I think what it's pointing to is the need to rethink and reconsider our lifestyle and our way of being in the world. And to ask, are there alternative ways of living, where we can live in high standards and high quality of life that's sustainable and that can be maintained? That is the question. And that's a question that we have to think about especially in the United States, where it's known that the Western world and the United States is using a disproportionately large amount of resources compared to the other populations of the world. So I will bring it home to America and ask, must we not now, all people of this planet, all global citizens, re-examine their lifestyles? And see if there is not a more sacred way to be in harmony with our environment and with each other and to share the resources in a new way, in a higher way, from abundance rather than scarcity? And that really opens new questions for us.

Professor of Philosophy at Philadelphia’s Haverford College, Ashok Gangadean is the director of the Global Dialogue Institute and the co-convenor of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality.

Lillian Holt

Yes, what if all Chinese people want a car? That's an amazing scenario. I doubt that everyone literally could have a car but, given the fact that there's a billion people in the area or thereabouts, regardless, even a percentage of that is going to have some sort of probably catastrophic effect on oil and oil production. And hopefully, what turns out to be the end is a new beginning. And maybe it might precipitate the crisis that is ultimately coming or is even required immediately, I might say, sadly, in order to bring about some possibility of alternative uses of energy. We may be forced to look at exactly how we live and the way we just take everything for granted and expect that nothing will ever run out. And maybe it's only when this crisis comes about that we actually do something about the situation.

Lillian Holt was the first Aboriginal executive officer of Australia’s National Aboriginal Educational Committee.

Jonathan Stack

The question isn't what if they want a car. I think the question is: what if they get a car? I assume — I have no reason not to — I don't know if all Chinese, but I assume the majority would want cars. They want better cars than the ones they have and they want more of them when they've got a better car. They are probably no different from most people in this planet who want the ability to transport themselves from A to B as they choose to, the liberties and freedoms that come with a car. The problem, of course, when everybody gets a car, is (a) are there roads enough to carry people so that you’re not just stuck in traffic jams, sat there? And (b) is the pollution caused by the ridiculous quality of most modern vehicles going to destroy the planet so much that, in fact, we'll run out of whatever the tipping point is or the endpoint is for fuel will be reached? I’ve always been saying that we’re all out there selling the dream of consumption and the flipside of it is: what kind of world are we going to create by making the ability to consume or readily consume all goods universal? What needs to happen is that we need to find a better sharing and balancing of wealth because we in the West, who are the leaders of consumption, are setting a terrible example for those who up till now have not had the same opportunities. And those opportunities are going to come because the marketplace is a very powerful engine, it’s going to create the products that the consumer desires and a car is one of them. I guess my only hope is that the negative results of this inspire positive solutions or alternatives.

Jonathan Stack is the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary, The Farm, and the Emmy award-winning Liberia: An Uncivil War.

Fang Lijun

If every Chinese people wants a car, there would be over 1.3 billion more cars in the world. Not only Chinese, but also billions of Indians, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malaysian and all other people may want a car. The problem is not how many people want a car, but that the door to human desires has been opened interminably. How can we close the door again after we have opened it to our infinite, possessive desires?

Fang Lijun has been called the leading representative of ‘Cynical Realism’, a movement in Chinese art which grew up out of the Tiananmen Square massacres.

Eddie Glaude

What if all Chinese people want a car, Brother Andrew? Well, it would hasten the crisis that we’re currently confronting. It seems to me that part of the problem involves how we imagine our choices. It is the case that if the Chinese population finds itself gripped by the desire to purchase automobiles, we can't sustain it environmentally. So the issue becomes: can we make the sorts of choices, given our consumer-orientated ethos, that can sustain the world or will we make choices that will hasten its destruction? So it seems to me that part of the answer to the question involves coming to terms with whether or not we want to hasten the energy crisis — that we are literally standing at the precipice — in terms of we are literally about to experience a challenge in relation to whether or not we will have the energy to sustain our needs. So that's not helpful, that's not really clear. It just seems to me that if the Chinese population wants a car, given the U.S. pattern of consumption, given the world pattern of consumption, we will find ourselves in a crises that will simply lead to our ruin and destruction. So it's the kind of choices we make. This is what I think we need to address.

Eddie Glaude is an Associate Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the former visiting scholar in African American Studies at Harvard University.

Bora Cosic

Why Chinese? Maybe all Bulgarians or all Albanians want a car. If all German people want a car, that may seem normal to the young man from Frankfurt. But if people from numerous nations in the world want a car, it can seem threatening. We are all Chinese. We all have many wishes and a car is just one of them today. Maybe all Chinese people want to be educated, to travel, to meet other people. Are those things also threatening to our young man from Germany?

Bora Cosic’s satirical novel, Uloga Moje Porodice u Svetskoj Revoluciji (My Family’s Role in the World Revolution) has been called “a classic of subversion."

Bibi Russel

Andrew, you are from Germany. If the Chinese people start to have the car, that can you imagine the German car industry will go down straight away, because they will start to produce. But, beside that could you imagine, all these bicycle makers, and all these rickshaw pullers and all these people, will be so much unemployment, and there will be so much pollution unless they use all this now the diesel and everything. But I think, it will be very funny for me to see all the Chinese people using car, not anything else, because in China still they use lot of bikes and rickshaw is there, big danger for all these car making countries, you know, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, because, sure, definitely then they will produce their own car. So, it will be very funny.

Model and fashion designer Bibi Russel is the UNESCO Special Envoy: Designer for Development.

Song Kosal

Not enough roads, many accidents. Not enough car parking space, too much pollution, and the cost of the petrols will be high if all Chinese people want a car.

Song Kosal is a landmine survivor and youth ambassador for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Steve Earle

Then we're fucked. And the scary thing is that more than likely--why wouldn't they want a car. In the so-called-West we had our turn; we all got a car. Or most people got a car. Certainly in the United States almost everyone--everyone that society cared about got a car anyway. So it's a real concern. It doesn't mean that they don't have a right to, but it just means that we've reached critical mass in the number of cars that our environment can support. Period. And the only thing that China has to do with it is, China's developing so rapidly that it has suddenly become possible for everyone in China to have a car. Unless they take a different path than we did and decide to take better care of the world when they are running things than we have then they will indeed have a car and it will be detrimental to us--to everybody--and to themselves.

Steve Earle is the award-winning country and rock musician behind Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts Now.

Brian J. Weller

Well, let's see. If all the Chinese want a car, then all of us are in trouble. It is true that many of us have got more than one car. The Western world is a very poor example for China and certainly India to follow. But, basically, we are reaching this tipping point, if we haven’t already reached it. And unless we shift vehicle production from gasoline to certainly electric vehicles... We can power electric vehicles in much more fuel efficient ways and we have the batteries to do it. In fact, there's a recent movie called, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" If you haven't seen it, go and see it. It tells a story at the end of the '70s when the first oil shocks occurred in the States, when President Carter was really declaring we had to be much more energy efficient and there was this whole development of electric vehicles and these, of course, were then blocked and actually crushed and the program was ended by the very corporations that were being asked to create them, and there's a number of reasons why that happened. But, basically, if China one day has three cars for every four people, which is the current rate of the U.S. style, it will have 1.1 billion cars. The world today has 800 million. OK? So think of all the roads, the highways and the parking lots and the land area that will be required to deal with 1.1 billion cars. That would actually equal the area that China now has for planting rice. It would need 99,000,000 million barrels of oil per day. The current world production or consumption is about 84,000,000 million barrels per day. The Western economic model which is a fossil fuel-based auto control throwaway society, it just won't work for China. In a nutshell, the American dream is actually becoming the world's nightmare.

Brian J. Weller launched the Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL) project in 2004, a landmark program to foster a 100% local, self-sustaining economy in Willits, California.

Homero Aridjis

What would happen if all Chinese people wanted a car? Well, it would simply be the delirium of global contamination, the same that would happen if every Indian had a car.

Homero Aridjis is the co-founder of the influential environmental association Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) and the President Emeritus of International PEN.

Rachid El-Daïf

Today, every Chinese person wants a car and that is their right. That’s why, worldwide, nations have to rethink this matter. It's getting urgent. And this is why you shouldn't follow the example of western civilization, if I dare say, of the western states. It is not an example that should be followed in every detail. This question has definitely something to do with this problem. We have to develop transport systems — well, I don't know what we have to do — but we have to think in another way about this question. The communication systems, energy and I don't know what. Every Chinese person has the right to want a car. That's not the right way to ask the question.

Rachid El-Daïf is a fellow of the West-Eastern Divan and the author of the international bestseller Dear Mr. Kawabata.

Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas

Of course, we know very well that China has the biggest population in this world, and you can just imagine if all of them would have a car. You can just imagine the pollution: the pollution that these cars will give to our environment. And this question is actually not leading only to the Chinese. It leads actually to what if everybody in this world wants a car? And you can just imagine the volume of the pollution that the cars give to our air that destroys the ozone layer. And then definitely if everybody wants a car, we will be having global warming. And therefore those manufacturers who are selling cars should design, should come up with a design where emissions of polluted residues which come from cars can be controlled in such a way that, even if a lot of people buy from their companies and they are making a profit off it, at least they will be in a way profiting and not destroying our environment. Because if they do not design those things, I tell you: global warming will be heightened and everybody will be affected. Look at the climate now. It's becoming abnormal. It's because of global warming and nobody is an exception here. Poor and rich, Third World or First World, all of us are affected, with global warming.

A community leader in the Philippine province of Kalinga, Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas was a primary mobilizer behind the 1997 passage of the Indigenous People’s Rights Act.

Andries Botha

Well I'm sure most Chinese people want a car. Why shouldn't they? Andrew, I guess we're staring down the barrel of that gun. I think the pressure on the oil markets at the moment is measured by the kind of renewed and expanded demand that the emerging economies have for fuel. These would be India or China. So we've seen, for instance, an ecological system that no longer can sustain the kind of energy that we’re burning. So maybe it's good that all Chinese people will have a car and that the end will arrive sooner than later, and that we can then, as I say, develop a response. Because people are not going to be preemptive. They are going to be reactive. Human intelligence is always reactive and not preemptive, or seldom preemptive, I should say. So I regret to say that the scenario isn't as rosy as one would like, to say that human sensibility will be sufficiently responsive in time to avert what is an inevitability, that the ecosystem will be irreparably or is irreparably damaged.

Sculptor Andries Botha served as the National Visual Arts Chairperson in South Africa’s first democratically elected government.

Oliviero Toscani

Not just Chinese. Everybody want a car. Everybody! There are a lot of Italian, French and German people who don't have a car and they want a car. Everybody wants a car, of course. Why shouldn't they have a car? And an Indian? What about Africa? Everybody wants a car: probably something else and probably even worse than a car. And the cars don’t get better, they get worse in a way. And, on top, they all look the same. It is actually what those car manufacturers actually want, that everybody wants a car. So we should go on like that because nature want us to do that. All what we do wrong is because nature wants us to do it that. It's naturally that we do what we do. You know, the real ecologists are the ones who do their own thing. They think that we are against nature. It’s not true. Actually, nature wants those kinds of people doing that so they will destroy themselves quicker. Nature doesn't like us. If I would be nature, I wouldn't like a human being: making war, killing each other. We are the wrong creation of nature. We are the mistake of the creation. We are the mistake of Genesis. And that's why we’re interesting. That's why we still have a lot to do to become civilized. You know, the day we don't need to protect nature anymore will probably be the day that we are civilized.

Oliviero Toscani is the former creative director of Benetton and the founder of the Treviso-based international research center on communication, Fabrica.

Sydney Possuelo

It would create terrible chaos. Perhaps the earth would not support it. Perhaps, but only if they would change the parameters. We were talking about global warming some minutes ago. Now we’re talking about what would happen if each Chinese person would have a car. That would mean one billion more cars in the world. Plus India, that would be 2 billion people driving a car. I think this would be unsupportable — that is, if we’re thinking about cars that are moved by petroleum. That would be terrible. But it is the right of the Chinese. But the question is about what would happen. It would be chaos and extremely difficult to resolve. There would be all sorts of complications.

Sydney Possuelo is an explorer and ethnographer who served for decades as head of the Isolated Indigenous Peoples department of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).

Eliot Weinberger

Let's hope they want a very small car. I think that one of the problems in China is that they’re tending to make all of the mistakes that the West has already made, and that China, with it incredible booming economy which will be the major economic force clearly in the 21st century, is not developing alternate ways of thinking about what technological advancement should be. It was a society that existed, functioned extremely well without private ownership of cars for its first little less than 50 years, 40 years or so, 45 years or so: a society where people rode bicycles, where they took mass transit. Of course now, in its capitalist boom, with the boom of individual ownership and individual wealth, of course, everybody wants their own car. But I think that China has to be in the forefront of thinking about alternate forms of energy. Otherwise, the sheer numbers are going to lead to serious conflicts, energy wars that may be economic wars and that could conceivably also be military wars.

Eliot Weinberger is a poet, translator, and the author of Muhammed and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles.

Harry Wu

There are two points on this questions. One involves political discrimination. For example, they may say why doesn't each Chinese just buy a car if they want one? The other is realistic. Take the Chinese as a symbol, which means, what if an African or a South American want a car? We can't say it's OK that every American or European can have a car while others can't. This is essential. However, it will not be a serious problem for all the Chinese to have a car, as the environmental restriction is adjustable. There's still a lot we can do. However, the Communist Party's system has to be changed before the Chinese's problems can be solved. The dictatorial system ignores the advice of other people. This is an important point.

Harry Wu is the founder of the non-profit Laogai Research Foundation, which compiles documentary evidence of the world’s most extensive system of forced labor camps: the Chinese Laogai.

Tu Weiming

Uh oh. It could turn out to be absolutely disastrous. China, for a long time, was a nation of bicycles: Beijing, for example. Ever since the reforms and open policy of the 1970s, especially in the 1990s, China became a major importing economy concerning expensive cars. In the city of Beijing, with a population of 30 million, privately owned cars are now numbered at 3 million or so, and it is increasing at alarming rate. This is also true with Shanghai and other major cities. Unfortunately, this is the government's policy to enhance China's GDP or economic development. And, of course, this is also very much the policy of the major car makers, in making China the lucrative market for consumption of automobiles. And, increasingly, China has become a major producer of automobiles. A major corporation such as Toyota will open perhaps one of the most comprehensive and expensive factories for China to produce automobiles for exporting. And this process is a very dangerous process. Right now, the traffic jams in some of the major cities like Beijing have already shown public transportation, including railroads and other forms of communication, is absolutely necessary. Without that, not only China, but the rest of the world would really suffer.

Tu Weiming is the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University and the author of Confucianism and Human Rights.

Mahsa Shekarloo

Well, Andrew, don't worry about Chinese people wanting a car. Worry about automobile companies turning their greedy gaze and attention to the Chinese people as one billion potential automobile owners. That's what should terrify us all. And there's no stop to this. The demand is not creating the supply. The supply is creating the demand. We need to worry about these companies, not the people of China.

Mahsa Shekarloo is the co-founder of the Tehran-based, non-profit Women’s Cultural Center and the creator of the feminist online journal Bad Jens.

Constantin von Barloewen

The idea that all Chinese people want a car is understandable, and the American and European auto industries are making dramatic investments here. The Volkswagen company and the US car manufacturers only see the markets and China is considered the market of the future, without thought for the humanitarian or ecological consequences. It is alarming that the undemocratic government in China is subordinating everything to the economy and is only reluctantly implementing ecologically friendly measures. If one thinks of the fact that a few years ago there were almost no trained lawyers in China and no culture of justice. Today, there is a reluctantly growing small culture of justice with a few thousand trained lawyers. There is a lack of civil society that could act as a balance as an ecological counter-movement. And anyway, it’s being oppressed. If the public take steps to counter plans to build yet another embankment dam, people are arrested and sent to prison. The Chinese government doesn’t tolerate criticism of its economic growth. If ecological regulations are proposed, they are considered a threat to the system and to the government and are brutally oppressed with prison sentences. especially in the last few months. There have been arrests as well of members of civil rights movements who dared to speak in favor of ecological regulations. It’s threatening to think that, both in India and China, the markets of the future lack a sound ecological basis.

Constantin von Barloewen is the author of The Anthropology of Globalization and a member of the UNESCO World Commission for Culture and Development.

Anthony Arnove

Well, there are a couple of different ways of approaching this question. The reality is, I think we have to expose that the dominant way that this question is asked is in a racist way, which is premised on the idea that while it's OK for us, first of all it's OK for us in the United States to have developed a certain form of irrational, privatized transportation, which involved the systematic destruction of public transportation and more environmentally and also socially sustainable forms of transportation by arranging collective public transportation. Instead we have a privatized system of transportation, which was established very consciously by the auto industry, by the rubber industry, by the steel industry, and by people who had an economic stake in developing a model of privatized auto purchase and use. And it has created a whole political, economic framework to sustain and drive that economy. That economy is utterly irrational. It leads to such overproduction that the world auto industry produces as many cars as are bought each year twice over, and is creating tremendous unnecessary waste because of their lack of planning — a further example of the absurdities of the capitalist system. And now, you see the encouragement of a similar process in China. And the consequences are quite frightening, but have to be seen in the context of [audio ends].

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal and the co-editor with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Roland Berger

The question can be answered like any question leading in this direction. If all Chinese people want to have a car, considering the current car technology with the conventional combustion engine and supposing an ambition to use the biggest, the fastest and the most powerful car, the sky above us will darken. That means we have to switch immediately to renewable energy and a new way of driving. The technology in this field is already in the process of developing, for instance, hybrid motors, electric motors, fuel cell and hydrogen motors. They couldn't be applied immediately, but before the time that all the Chinese have cars, they will be applicable. I think it's primarily the responsibility of those nations which have the biggest car industries. These are the US, the EU and Japan. Although the Japanese are a little bit ahead in this field, I think, Europe has a chance to catch them up and America will follow. So, no need to be pessimistic, it's just a reason to switch.

Roland Berger is the chairman of the supervisory board of the global strategy consulting firm Roland Berger Strategy Consultants.

Raymond Federman

And why not? And why should they not own a car? But they must be responsible, we hope, but indeed no one is of the use of the car. We must find a way, a way to transport each other, to move about in our city, in our country by using machines — call them cars — which do not pollute the planet. And there are many other ways, many alternatives to that. Yes, of course, the best one is electricity. Electricity can be produced cheaply and effectively all over the world, using whatever method: using the wind, using water, using even atomic energy, if necessary, using the power of the sun. Electricity, one of the greatest inventions of mankind, finally can be used to activate the cars. But, of course, there is opposition: opposition from the car manufacturer and from the oil company. Yes, so the oil company will lose money, will go broke. No. They should do research right now — all of them together — to produce another mode of thing. It's true that there could be a world crisis. If suddenly the oil production, if those who are in control of oil, decided to create a crisis in the world, it's inevitable. We must act immediately, as soon as possible, to find alternative ways of moving our cars, and not only with gasoline, not only. But I think electricity is the safest and the surest way. And there are already companies in the world, especially the Japanese, who are working on this. But the Americans are far from doing it and that is their problem.

Raymond Federman is a poet, editor, translator, literary critic and the author of the experimental novels Take It Or Leave It and Double Or Nothing.

Benjamin Fahrer

If all Chinese people want a car, so if the children want a car or the baby wants a car, it's all about the conditionment in which, why do they want a car? In my understanding, I've never been to China but just from what I've read and witnessed, is that, through the rapid industrialization to get what the western world has, where people in America maybe have two cars, three cars. In China, if everyone wants a car, that will be really sad because in this development there's a huge opportunity to design, in a sustainable way, rapid mass transit and more efficient ways of getting around than a car. Designing cities in this evolution, if the cities could be designed not for the car but for people and for bicycles and for trains. And then how are those forms of transportation fueled? And oil is towards the end of its glory days. And so, looking to the solar, to the sun, to the winds, to the micro hydro, the small systems as well to help fuel this development and the human power: the cars being transformed into walking, biking. If all people want a car, you have to exhibit compassion for their lack of foresight and design, and foresight in lessons learned from the tragedy that we have now, which is a huge consumption of the individualistic society. In China, I don't know. It might be different. It's communist. It’s more of a community: everyone contributing.

Permaculture expert Benjamin Fahrer manages the Ocean Song Farm and Garden on the coast of northern California.

Timothy Speed

For sure, we know the problem. If every Chinese person drove a car, we’d be facing an ecological disaster. If I ask myself how to solve this problem, the answer is that it can only be evaded if we, the Western states — Europe and America — stop being an ecological threat ourselves. I don't think that we can expect people in China to do without progress, which we’ve praised for such a long time, if we don't solve our own problems. I think we have to return to our own values. As long as we aren't able to answer these questions about our own country or to develop alternatives for our own country, we won’t be able to reach the Chinese. In these countries, progress has just begun. They’re starting to enjoy progress. Progress has positive sides as well. The individual progress that happens in China is not only negative, like progress in our country wasn't only negative. It has many positive sides, which allow new forms of freedom to enter the country. I think that for the highly complex problems which we’re facing today, the only possibility for advancement is to start to develop ourselves. We have to start to look for solutions for these complex problems and how we can handle a situation when society and development reach equal technologies.

Timothy Speed is a philosopher, economist, futurist and the author of Aufbruch zur Inneren Freiheit (Unleashing Inner Freedom) and Gesellschaft ohne Vertrauen (Society without Trust).