The Devouring Dragon: How China’s Rise is Reshaping the Physical World

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University hosts a special presentation with Craig Simons on how China's rise is reshaping the physical world.

While China’s rise is often viewed through its wide-ranging political and economic impacts on the world, its growing effects on the physical planet are likely to leave a more permanent legacy. Craig Simons argues that China’s rising consumer demands – demands that have pushed China from being a small player in global resource consumption just over a decade ago to its voracious market today – will reshape environments everywhere.

He will chart how China’s rebirth has raised our planetary metabolism and why its impacts are almost certain to spike before they plateau. He will address the roots of China’s environmental crisis and examine how China’s rise fits into the larger global history of environmental change and what its near-certain continued economic growth could mean for the physical planet and efforts to stem the rising damage caused by deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

About the Speaker
Craig Simons was the Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers from 2005 until 2009 and before that wrote about China and Asia for Newsweek, Reuters, and other publications. He first moved to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. In 2009, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He earned a master’s degree from the Regional Studies East Asia program at Harvard in 2001. His most recent publication is The Devouring Dragon (2013).