Sustainability expert: China's development more hopeful
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Sustainability expert, Professor Mohan Munasinghe who is also director general of Sustainable Consumption Institute at University of Manchester said China's development is more sustainable than the U.S. and Europe when they were in the similar development stage.
In a recent interview with Xinhua in the Swedish capital city Stockholm, Munasinghe who was also Co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace as Vice Chairman of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) said sustainable development meant to balance the economic and social development with the damage of environment.
"What China proposes to develop harmonious society and especially to harmonize economic and social development and the environment is a way towards sustainable development," Munasinge said.
"China is more hopeful because stainability index shows that China's development is much more sustainable than the U.S. and Europe when they had similar development stage when per capita income was around 3,000 U.S. dollars he said.
"The second reason is that the discipline in eastern culture especially in China and Japan, you have a discipline to mix the social changes with economic development, you need a lot of discipline to bring about these changes," he said, adding that China's way of experiment in changes is very good.
"China often implements a pilot program and if it is good, it then promotes it in other areas and finally in the whole country and if you fail, then forget it and try new ways, this way you make the changes more beneficial than make it a total failure," commended Munasinge.
"China has the social capital that you make your society a consensus building society, this is Chinese social capital. Modernization sometimes is destroying very useful value systems, the value systems that survived from the ancient times are the sustainable values systems, for example, how to use less land and less water to farm and so on," he said.
Munasinghe believes that due to Chinese culture and due to its development stage, China will be quicker to step into sustainable development track than that in developed countries because it is difficult to change their mindset and behavior.
