When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts

About The Book

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China's - and the world's - greatest crisis. With filthy water, choking emissions and an unsustainable appetite for resources, China's development has taken our planet to the environmental edge. Now it faces a stark choice that will affect us all: accept catastrophe or make radical change.

To explore the response, award-winning correspondent Jonathan Watts travels from mountain paradise to blasted desert, through eco-cities, coal mines and industrial wastelands, examining the challenges facing those at the top of society and the problems and hopes of those below.

His travelogue will interest anyone concerned with economic development, energy security, globalisation or climate activism. At heart, it is not a call for panic, but an expression of hope that - despite political constraints - individual choices can make a difference.

Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays the diversity of a country too often viewed as a faceless machine. No reader of his book - no consumer in the world - can be unaffected by what he presents.

AuthorJonathan Watts is the Guardian's Asia environment correspondent and recently covered the Copenhagen Climate Conference. He was short-listed for Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the 2006 British Press Awards, and he and his research assistant were awarded the One World Media Award for best press story in 2007. In 2009, he was a co-winner of the environment prize at the One World Media Awards for a series on the global food crisis.