As the last big space on Earth to develop, China needed to face up to scientific reality - that resources are limited and that pollution does not just "go up in smoke". Enunciating and striving for a "harmonious society" is an improvement on Keynesian acceptance of "disequilibrium". The result for China has been maintenance of 10 percent growth for the past decade and an unprecedented investment in new energies, clean production processes and modern infrastructure.

What is now increasingly evident is that our global economy and global environment are one and the same thing. The costs of production have nothing to do with some innate values in resources and commodities, but in the human costs of finding and processing them.

This perception can be termed the embodied human-used energy. (Stanford University researchers call this anthropogenic exergy). It is simply the Labor Theory of Value updated to be measured in joules, still a strange concept in Marx's time. A 1 kg ingot of copper seems like a "dead" inanimate object, but it embodies 2.1 megajoules of useful energy (approximately, depending on technology pathway) expended by humans. The production cost of all goods and services can be measured in embodied joules. What people, rich and poor, bid for them determines their price. But the costs are scientifically determinable.

Using this approach shines a whole new light on human economic activity and on the global community. And Scientific Outlook on Development fully stresses how important it is to keep development sustainable. The Industrial Revolution required taking more from the environment than all the dollar value of production boasted for in a nation's GDP. Now that we see a global environment, including global warming, and a global economy, including a global financial crisis, Scientific Outlook on Development will guide China to avoid repeating the developed countries' double crises of environment and economy.

Scientific Outlook on Development acknowledges the need for social consciousness (not "greed is good") and lays the foundation for society to go back to the subtle enjoyment of life, which looks beyond bland materialism and finds harmony in nature and communities - in short, a society with Chinese characteristics.

The author is an Australian researcher collaborating with Chinese academic and commercial institutions.

(China Daily 11/09/2012 page10)