As China goes, so goes the rest of the world. That’s how British journalist Jonathan Watts frames the future. In When a Billion Chinese Jump, (due out this month from Scribner), Watts outlines two possible trajectories for the world’s biggest carbon emitter: it can reset its current fossil fuel-powered industrial development by becoming the first green superpower, or it can continue on its current course of staggering expansion against a backdrop of diminishing natural resources. On a six-month journey from the foot of the Himalayas to the country’s flat northern grasslands, Watts provides an account of China’s race into the 21st Century and explains the severity of the consequences of its decisions.
     The extent of the industrialization currently taking place becomes shockingly apparent in chapters detailing the construction of the world’s largest dams, emerging mega-municipalities like Chongqing, with its thirty-one million citizens, and the pulsating Chinese manufacturing lifeblood.