The UK government's Commission for Africa releases its report today on how to tackle the continent's problems in areas such economics, health and conflict.

It is expected to make recommendations about increasing Western aid, tackling corruption and eliminating trade subsidies that hinder fair competition. The bottom line will surely be to find ways of boosting economic growth in African nations, seen as the key to rescuing them from poverty and dependence.

Meanwhile, China continues to serve as a striking example of the economic growth that a developing country can achieve. Since the economic reforms announced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, its economy has been expanding at a rate of about 9% annually.

In February, the Earth Policy Institute, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, announced that China's consumption of several key commodities - grain, meat, coal and steel - now exceeds that of the US. Of these critical commodities, only in oil does US consumption still outstrip China's1.

The laudable objective of raising the entire world to Western levels of prosperity is hampered by the fact that the sums do not add up.

In 2004, China consumed almost twice as much meat and fertiliser as the US, and nearly three times as much steel. By 2000, the number of television sets in China was already about 50% greater than that in the US- and this in a country where only recently dozens of people in rural areas would gather in the evenings around the communal TV.

This spurt in consumption is matched by production. In 2004, China made 50% of the world's cameras, for example, and 25% of its washing machines.

Expanding influence

It is too early to describe China as a political superpower, but in economic terms it is clearly that. And other nations are recognizing its expanding influence in international affairs - all the nations in southeast Asia and the Pacific rim are cultivating good relations with it.

As one of the few countries still on fair speaking terms with North Korea, China could prove to be a crucial mediator in the tensions with the US over nuclear weapons technology.

While the challenges of economic development in post-Maoist China were clearly rather different from those faced today by African nations, on the face of it China seems to offer an encouraging message for those who believe that economic growth is the key to prosperity and, ultimately, to social and political freedoms.

And in many respects that is true. But the laudable objective of raising the entire world to Western levels of prosperity is hampered by the fact that the sums do not add up.

Runaway consumption

It is not growth per se that is at fault, but the way in which it happens.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute points out that if China's economic growth continues at its present rate, average per capita annual income will reach the 2004 US figure of $38,000 by 2031. If that were accompanied by the same per capita consumption of oil and coal as the US, China would then require more than the current total global production of both fuels.

Moreover, such levels of consumption would of course generate huge amounts of pollution, particularly carbon dioxide emissions. "It is only a matter of time," says Brown, "until China becomes the world's top emitter of carbon. Soon the world will have two major climate disrupters."

China is not blind to its growing environmental problems. Soil erosion in the rural northwest, for example, has created a dust bowl to rival that of the US Midwest in the 1930s. "They recognize the problems," says Brown, "but have difficulty formulating effective responses."

One might hope that China will 'leapfrog' some of the most wasteful and polluting stages of industrial development experienced in the West, just as it is leapfrogging the installation of a landline telephone network by moving straight to cellphones. But there is little evidence of this happening in the energy sector.

Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have already undergone comparable bursts of economic growth, but the global consequences were less profound because they are nowhere near the size of China.

Now imagine the same process happening in India and, perhaps ultimately, in Africa, and it becomes clear that Western development schemes that focus simply on 'economic growth' make no sense. "This is much better understood by natural scientists than by economists," says Brown.

Means of production

But he points out that it is not growth per se that is at fault, but the way in which it happens. "I'm less concerned about how much energy is consumed than by how it is produced," he says.

For China, this shift in thinking could provide an opportunity. The country's remarkable economic performance is reflected in its growing scientific stature. Between 1981 and 2003, the number of publications from Chinese laboratories in international science journals increased 20-fold (see ""China increases share of global scientific publications":http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040906/full/431116b.html").

In terms of the number of scientific and technological papers published in 2000 it ranked eighth in the world. And much of this growth is in fields directly relevant to energy production, such as materials science and physics.

Increasingly, leading Chinese scientists are choosing to conduct their research domestically rather than seeking positions in Europe and the US.

China now has one of the most active space programmes, conducting its first manned spaceflight in 2003. It now offers partnership opportunities to European space research that previously only NASA could provide, such as collaboration on the satellite navigation system Galileo. Appreciating the benefits of these partnerships, the UK government has designated 2005 the 'Year of British Science in China'.

Could this burgeoning scientific confidence make China the future leader in technologies that will ease the environmental burden of economic growth? It may yet learn to live by the proverb, "He who treads softly goes far."

In 2000, there were already 50% more television sets in China than in the US. Credit: © Punchstock