More than a quarter of the Class of 2010 has yet to find work

By Dexter Roberts

The job hunt came as a shock. The 23-year-old job seeker graduated in June from a good school—Beijing University of Technology—with a bachelor’s degree in materials science, a subject he figured would appeal to employers. Yet he had to go through scores of interviews and comb the online job sites endlessly before landing a job at a local trading company. Happy ending? Barely. The pay, $368 a month, is meager by Beijing standards, so he has had to move back in with his parents and he’s too ashamed about the outcome of his job search to give his name. As the young man explains, there are too many recent grads looking for jobs, while companies want only the most qualified people at the lowest price.

At least he got a job—many of his peers are still looking. Even as labor shortages plague manufacturing industries, more than one-quarter of this year’s 6.3 million Chinese college graduates are unemployed, according to the Education Ministry.

The problem of graduate unemployment and underemployment has been building for years, due to rising university enrollments and a mismatch between what students learn and the skills companies need. About a decade ago, the government decided to boost university admissions, a move that policymakers believed would yield big economic benefits as China shifted to an economic model based more on innovation than on cheap manufacturing. Since 1998 the number of graduates has risen threefold, according to Zeng Xiangquan, dean of the School of Labor Relations and Human Resources at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

“Ant Tribes”

The expanded enrollment has slowed down salary increases for entry-level white-collar jobs. Graduates in high-cost cities such as Beijing and Shanghai struggle to get by, living in crowded dormitory-like conditions. Chinese sociologist Lian Si has coined the term “ant tribe” (yi zu in Chinese) to describe the tens of thousands of grads subsisting in squalor on the outskirts of China’s biggest cities. In an Aug. 6 commentary for China Daily, Yu Jianrong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, wrote that with so many college grads marginalized, China risks creating a new class of “underdogs” who seethe with “hatred against the bureaucracy.”

Foreign companies are not doing much to absorb this surplus labor. Those that take on newly minted grads typically find they “have to invest significantly in training and development to bring their new hires up to par with their peers in other countries,” says a white paper published in May by the American Chamber of Commerce. “While we hire many recent graduates, of course we prefer candidates to have working experience, especially in a multinational, diverse environment,” says Trevor Hale, director of corporate communications for Ford Motor, Asia Pacific & Africa. “In some disciplines like engineering or marketing, we would much rather have fewer people who are more senior and experienced than a greater number of less experienced people.” According to Gerard A. Postiglione, a researcher on Chinese education at the University of Hong Kong, Chinese college students are not trained to work collaboratively, be creative and innovative, or take risks.

Some of these deficiencies are a product of the Communist Party’s decision to model the educational system on that of the Soviet Union. After the new regime seized power in 1949, China’s comprehensive universities were replaced with Soviet-style schools that churned out graduates narrowly focused on skills seen as necessary to manage a heavy-industrialized, planned economy. Academia was dealt another blow by the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Red Guards shut down all institutions of higher education and persecuted thousands of teachers and administrators.

Education Reform Plan

One feature that has survived all the upheaval is the traditional emphasis on rote memorization. “The teacher stands and talks, talks, and talks. The students sit and listen, listen, and listen,” says Renmin’s Zeng. “We overemphasize theory and don’t [do well] when it comes to the teaching of practical skills.” Compounding the problem is that state-owned enterprises, which traditionally hired many college grads, have been severely downsized themselves.

The government is trying to set things right. Chinese authorities on July 29 announced a “National Plan for Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development” that will boost spending on education at all levels and focus university curricula more on practical skills. Outside analysts are encouraged. “The blueprint 10-year plan is very clear about the flaws in the educational system,” says University of Hong Kong’s Postiglione. The city of Chongqing, meanwhile, has introduced special funds and tax rebates to support graduates who set up their own businesses. The central government is urging young people with college degrees to apply for official posts in the poor interior provinces.

Already, the government is claiming a small victory of sorts, with the Education Ministry announcing recently that the rate of employment for recent graduates rose from 68 percent in 2009 to 72.2 percent this year. “As the economic structure changes, more suitable jobs for graduates will be created,” says Zhang Juwei, deputy director at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Although Zhang may be right, that scenario is little comfort to the more than 25 percent of recent grads still hunting for work.

The bottom line: China’s new university graduates lack the skills companies need, and there are too many of them, which is keeping salaries low.

China defended its controls on exports of rare earth after Japanese officials raised concerns about supplies of the raw materials used in the manufacture of products from cell phones to radar.

Restrictions on the rare earth industry will help protect the environment, the state-run Xinhua News Agency cited Chen Deming, China’s commerce minister, as saying yesterday at a media briefing during China-Japan economic talks in Beijing.

China cut its export quotas for rare earth by 72 percent for the second half of this year, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce on July 8. Shipments will be capped at 7,976 metric tons, down from 28,417 tons for the same period a year ago.

Japanese officials told their counterparts that the lower quotas could have a major effect on global industry, and demanded early action on easing them, said Satoru Sato, press secretary for visiting Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Japan urged China to make ample supplies of rare earths available, Nikkei English News reported earlier today.

The U.S. Trade Representative is also targeting the restrictions for a potential trade case. The U.S. has asked business groups and labor unions to provide evidence that China is hoarding these elements for a case that might be filed at the World Trade Organization.

‘Limits Inevitable’

“Chinese officials said the export limits were inevitable and that they don’t expect any problems with the WTO,” Japan’s Sato said.

China controls 97 percent of production of the materials, known as rare earth elements, giving it “market power” over the U.S., the Government Accountability Office said in a report in April. China restricts exports of the elements through quotas and export taxes of as much as 25 percent, the GAO said.

In order to protect the environment, China had no choice but to take such measures, Chen said, according to Xinhua. The restriction policy will also have an adverse impact on the Chinese market, where parts for Japanese products are assembled, Chen added.

‘Minimize Pollution’

“China’s policy to restrict its rare earths mining and exports is out of concern for the environment and to minimize pollution,” Liu Aisheng, director of the Chinese Society of Rare Earths, said in an interview with Bloomberg News in June. “It also encourages the domestic industry to effectively use its own resources and discourages exports of raw materials, such as ore and mixed ore, without much processing.”

Rare earths are a group of 17 chemically similar metallic elements, including lanthanum, cerium, neodymium and europium. The U.S. was self-sufficient in the materials until the mid- 1980s, when lower labor and regulatory costs helped China’s climb to dominance, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a report.

For video - click here.

He notes that its not the China growth rate but internal mis-investment of the profits China gets from exports. One similarity that both Japan and China have, not discussed in the video, is declining demographics not offset by immigration. Both are closed countries. Japan has negative birth rates due to poor economy. China has negative, and gender-biased, birthrates due to political decisions.

The situation is not ’schadenfreude’, pleasure from the suffering of those causing one harm, but sadness as it does not need to be this way. Rather than China being mercantilist under a ‘beggar thy neighbor policy’, see how well that worked for world economies during the Great Depression, China could be putting even more into developing its internal economy. Instead, China has been building high-end condo’s for a market that is not there. Retail centers without tenants because there are not customers. These are the type of things the US was doing with bad lending practices circa 2005-2008. The US is seeing how that turned out. Will China go the same way?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Food and Drug Administration chief Margaret Hamburg said Monday her agency is limited by law to a mostly reactive stance on food safety and argued that it needs a more “preventive approach.”

Giving a series of network interviews in the wake of the egg and salmonella breakout, Hamburg said the FDA is taking the issue “very, very seriously.” At the same time, she said Congress should pass pending legislation that would provide her agency with greater enforcement power, including new authority over imported food.

Until this happens, and we should be complaining to our Congress, we should limit our use of imported foods especially from third world countries (i.e., China and others).

 Right now, China is following a policy that is, in effect, one of imposing high tariffs and providing large export subsidies — because that’s what an undervalued currency does. That should be a violation of trade rules; it might in fact be a violation, but the language of the law is vague on the subject. But leave aside the fine print of the law for a moment: what China is doing amounts to a seriously predatory trade policy, the kind of thing that is supposed to be prevented by the threat of sanctions.

Also, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich picks up on it from a different but related perspective - the flooding tragedy in Pakistan:

Yet we impose a 17 percent tariff on textiles and clothing from Pakistan. If we removed it, Pakistan’s exports would surge $5 billion annually. That would boost the wages of millions there.

That tariff also artificially raises the price of the clothing and textiles you and I buy. How many American jobs do we protect by this absurdity? Almost none. Instead, we’ve been importing more textiles and clothing from China and other East Asian nations. China subsidizes its exports with an artificially-low currency.

This actually needs to be framed as a national security issue. Traditional economic theory says this can’t happen but that theory assumed a certain set of rules - open governments, convertible currency, rule of law. History has shown that a closed government can do a lot to its citizens in order to protect its position. That’s happening in this situation. In the US there are anti-trust laws that protect companies against predatory practices. With non-convertible currencies, there is no market-based economic balance to protect against predatory countries. There needs to be. Before it is too late, if it isn’t already.

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — These are heady days for China’s state-controlled banks. Last month, the Agricultural Bank of China made its stock market debut, bringing in $22 billion for the largest public offering ever. A sister government-run bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, now has the highest stock market value of any bank in the world.

But the windfalls have created an unusual problem for China: white-collar unrest. A few days after the Agricultural Bank went public, dozens of former bank employees stealthily gathered outside the headquarters of the country’s central bank. There, after distributing small Chinese flags, they quickly pulled on red and blue T-shirts that read, “Protect the Rights of Downsized Bank Workers.” By the time they had unfurled their protest banners, the game was over.

Within minutes, a flock of police officers had swept everyone into five waiting public buses. By 8 a.m., when the People’s Bank of China opened its doors for business, the only sign of the rally was a strand of police tape.

During the past two years, these unlikely agitators — conservatively attired but fiercely determined — have staged similar public protests in Beijing and provincial cities. They have stormed branch offices to mount sit-ins. A few of the more foolhardy have met at Tiananmen Square to distribute fliers before plainclothes police officers snatched them away.

Strategizing via online message boards and text messages, they speak in code and frequently change cellphone numbers. Their acts of defiance are never mentioned in state-run news media.

According to one organizer, a scrappy former bank teller named Wu Lijuan, there are at least 70,000 people seeking to regain their old jobs or receive monetary compensation, a sizable wedge of the 400,000 who were laid off during a decade-long purge. Like many other state-owned companies, the banks slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors.

“They tossed us out like garbage,” Ms. Wu, 44, said before a recent protest, scanning fellow restaurant patrons for potential eavesdroppers. “All we’re asking for is justice and maybe to serve as a model for others who have been wronged.”

For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail.

“What the government fears most are people capable of organizing, and the bank workers have discovered their power,” said Renee Xia, international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. “The sad thing is that they’re not going to succeed because the more organized you are, the more harsh the government’s reaction.”

Protest organizers are often thrown in “black jails” — extrajudicial holding pens — where they are sometimes beaten before local police officers arrive to take them back home. The recalcitrant and unrepentant sometimes end up in labor camps, where they can spend up to three years without being prosecuted for a crime.

The years of fruitless protest and economic hardship have taken a toll. According to an informal tally by protest leaders, dozens of former bank staff members — most of them unsuccessful at finding new jobs — have committed suicide.

“To be middle-aged and live off your elderly parents is humiliating, and it can become unbearable,” said Huang Gaoying, 49, a teller who was dismissed from the Industrial and Commercial Bank known as I.C.B.C., in 2002.

Even if their numbers are smaller, the former bank employees are not unlike the millions of factory workers shed during the effort to restructure inefficient state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, they, too, clamored for redress but were eventually silenced.

In 2000, the Supreme People’s Court put an end to any hope that the legal system might adjudicate such disputes, saying that plaintiffs from state companies had no standing in Chinese courts.

Like the laid-off factory workers, the former bank employees have no independent trade union or association to take up their cause.

Yi Xianrong, a scholar at the Financial Research Center, part of the state-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the bank workers were unfortunate victims in the necessary revamping of a bloated and inefficient sector. “In a centrally planned economy, people were put into certain units without regard to need,” he said. “It didn’t matter if you actually worked or not.”

By Western standards, the banks were — and arguably still are — overstaffed, a legacy of their role as the pillars of China’s socialist financial system.

Mr. Yi was not particularly sympathetic to the complaints of the former employees, saying they signed and accepted buyout packages. Many of the workers would disagree, saying they were often forced to accept paltry compensation, sometimes just two or three years before planned retirements.

In interviews with nearly two dozen of the aggrieved, the pattern of dismissals was roughly the same. Workers over 40 were singled out first and there was no room for negotiation. (At I.C.B.C., the standard buyout was about $370 for every year worked.) Those who refused an offer were simply let go without compensation.

Asked to comment on the plight of laid-off workers, the banks — I.C.B.C., the Bank of China, the Agricultural Bank and China Construction Bank — declined.

The story of Ms. Wu, the protest organizer, is typical. Hired just out of high school by an I.C.B.C. branch in central Hubei Province, she said she received numerous “model worker” commendations and had expected lifetime employment. In 2004, as the bank prepared to issue stock, she was among 160,000 employees laid off. The compensation offered, she said, was unacceptable. “After 20 years at the bank, I thought I deserved more,” she said.

The six-year odyssey — some might say obsession — has included lawsuits, the petitioning of China’s top leaders and the storming of the branch president’s office, which turned into a brawl and led to a brief jail sentence for Ms. Wu.

The banks are so powerful that they can enlist the local police to keep an eye on the most troublesome employees, often following them to Beijing, where their protests and petitioning can prove embarrassing for executives back home. “The head of my branch said he would never give me my money and spend any amount to fight me to the end,” Ms. Wu said.

After her husband divorced her, Ms. Wu moved to Beijing with her teenage son to be closer to the country’s leaders, who she believes would force the banks to make their former employees whole, if only they knew. She lives in one of the so-called petitioner villages on the outskirts of the capital and survives by collecting recyclables or working as an artists’ model.

In the days after the protest, as the other detainees were released, Ms. Wu remained in custody. Her son, Xiao Yang, 22, said the police searched the family’s home and left with her computer’s hard drive. He said he had the feeling she might not be coming home for a long time. “She is a very stubborn person,” he said. “I’m definitely worried about her, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Lim Xinhui contributed research.

Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010

By Austin Ramzy / Beijing

Two years after tainted milk powder killed six infants and left some 300,000 more suffering from kidney stones, China is again roiled by allegations of health hazards in infant formula. This time the repercussions are less deadly but nonetheless disturbing. Three infant girls in the central city of Wuhan and a fourth in Beijing have shown signs of premature development, including growth of breasts, according to state media reports. Tests showed that their hormone levels were abnormally high, which some doctors suspect may be linked to drinking infant formula produced by Synutra International, a Nasdaq-listed infant formula maker based in Qingdao, in coastal northeastern China.

The company has denied the allegations, and on Aug. 9 CEO Liang Zhang said, “We are completely confident that our products are safe and our quality levels are industry-leading.” Synutra has also threatened to take legal action against those who have accused it of selling tainted products. (See pictures of the making of modern China.)

New Zealand–based dairy producer Fonterra has acknowledged that it supplies milk powder to Synutra but says the Chinese company also buys milk from domestic sources and whey powder from Europe. “Fonterra remains 100% confident about the quality of its products,” the company said in an Aug. 11 statement. Because of New Zealand’s strict regulations for the use of hormones in dairy cattle, “it is not necessary for New Zealand milk or milk products to be routinely tested,” the statement added. (Comment on this story.)

Both companies were embroiled in the 2008 Chinese milk-powder scandal. Fonterra was a partial owner of Sanlu Group, the now defunct dairy producer that was a main source of the tainted formula. Synutra was one of the 21 other Chinese dairy companies also found to have products contaminated with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics that can make milk appear as if it has a higher protein content in certain tests. When consumed in large doses, it can lead to kidney damage, which caused the infant deaths. The level found in Synutra’s products was small compared with that of other companies, like Sanlu, but as with many other Chinese infant-formula producers, Synutra suffered significant losses that year because of recalls and consumer fears. (See pictures of China’s infrastructure boom.)

The Chinese Ministry of Health has promised a full investigation into the hormone allegations. Ministry spokesman Deng Haihua said during an Aug. 10 news conference that “when it comes to early infant puberty, experts say the factors are complicated and the cause is often unknown.”

Like in 2008, the latest milk-quality scare has prompted many parents to take their infants to hospitals for health checks. Perhaps more worrying than the hormone concerns is the fear of what is still unknown about China’s food supply. Both the melamine scandal and the current hormone worries were prompted by readily obvious phenomena — kidney stones and premature development. But the possibility exists that there are other contaminants that have not yet come to light. What remains obvious is that despite steps to better regulate the food supply in China, many consumers here remain deeply concerned.

Gated villages in China have for years been symbols of affluence; places where the rich can live in villa-style homes, surrounded by private schools and swimming pools, with fences to keep out those who don’t belong.

Now China is gating off low-income villages, where migrant labourers from the countryside (the people who built those expansive villas) live in near squalor. The newly erected fences and nighttime curfews are designed to hold in the residents, and the criminality that supposedly emanates from these communities. “Enhance the idea of safety and reduce illegal crimes,” reads a red banner hanging over the main road to one such village south of Beijing, home to some 7,000 migrants

That road into Shoubaozhuang is guarded 24 hours a day by two uniformed guards and partially barred by an accordion gate that closes tight at 11 p.m. each night. Until 6 a.m. the next day, the residents are sealed in. Only those with passes are allowed to come and go, their movements recorded by a video camera stationed over the entrance.

It’s one of 16 villages around Beijing that for the past two months have been locked down at night, under a program local authorities call “sealed management.” They say the aim is to get a better handle on the millions of migrant workers who have moved to the Chinese capital in search of work, and who often end up living in poor, dirty and rapidly growing places like the villages south of Beijing, some of which have seen their population grow tenfold in recent years.

Another aim is to curb the rising crime in Beijing and other big cities, which is frequently blamed on the influx of migrant workers. Violent crime in the country rose 10 per cent last year, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which has also highlighted the dangerous and widening gap between increasingly well-off urban population, and the hundreds of millions of migrant workers and rural residents who live in and around the cities in poverty.

The authorities claim to have the support of the local population for the program. But many of those who live here say the gates around their homes are a major inconvenience imposed without consultation, and more proof of widespread discrimination against migrant workers. Those born outside Beijing already face limited access to the capital’s schools, health care and other government services, which they are supposed to return to their hometowns to receive.

“This is against our will. The ordinary people have no human rights,” whispered an elderly man watching the guards inspect a car stopped at the gate to Shoubaozhuang. The guards at the gate said no journalists were allowed to visit what they called a model city.

Critics of sealed management include Yuan Chongfa, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission’s research centre for small towns and cities. “This move not only closes the door on migrants but also on future development,” he told the China Daily newspaper when the plan to put permanent gates around Laosanyu was announced. “Closing off the village will do nothing but harm.”

Some residents protested against the installation of the gates at Shoubaozhuang after they went up two months ago, arguing that the curfews made it difficult for them to reach their jobs – sometimes a 2.5-hour bus ride away on the other side of Beijing – and get home again before lockdown. The authorities responded by pushing back the nighttime curfew by half an hour, but many here are still bitter about the restrictions, complaining the gates often open later and close earlier than they’re supposed to.

“It’s not very convenient for us, because they can lock us in and we can’t take our cars out without a pass. Everything is up to them, because they have the keys,” said Liu Lei, a migrant from central Henan province who runs a convenience store in the nearby village of Laosanyu, where the sealed management program was first introduced on a trial basis ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

The experiment was viewed as a success, and gates were erected around Laosanyu again last fall ahead of the politically sensitive 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China. In May, the gates were made a permanent feature. Migrant labourers living here were told to report to the local police office to apply for temporary residence permits.

“The security standard for the Olympics was very high, we were afraid of trouble caused by terrorists or illegals,” said Chen Yuanying, an official in the local Communist Party office who sported a red hammer-and-sickle buckle on his belt.

He said there were 31 security staff assigned to watch the entrances into Laosanyu, in addition to video cameras set up around the village. “The people here are very complicated. We need to know where they’re from, what they’re doing.”

Places like Laosanyu seem to exist in a different era than the affluent gated communities of the futuristic capital. In Laosanyu, unwatched young children play on a dirt road strewn with uncollected garbage while their parents work in the city during the day. The stench of fetid public toilets fills the air and bicycles vastly outnumber cars.

Some 7,000 migrants live on land owned by the village’s 612 permanent residents, many of them paying $35 a month to live in a row of identical 14-square-metre concrete homes. But the cheap accommodations, combined with the proximity to Beijing, and the capital’s relatively high-paying jobs, make everything else worth it.

“Of course, it was more comfortable living in my hometown, but here I can earn 5,000, 6,000 even 7,000 [yuan] a month,” said Wang Yunqin, a 40-year-old interior decorator from Anhui province who lives in his one-room home with his wife and 15-year-old son. He said that while the new gates around Laosanyu might make other residents of Beijing safer, they haven’t done much for security in the village itself. “They said [the gates] would make it easier to safeguard our property from thieves, but I don’t think it works very well. Someone robbed the place just across from here the other day.”

Mark MacKinnon

Shoubaozhuang, China

FILE - In this Dec. 3, 2009 file photo, workers load coal into a truck outside a coal mine in Dadong, Shanxi province, China. China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest energy consumer, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday, July 20, 2010. China immediately questioned the calculation. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

Jenny Barchfield, Associated Press Writer, On Tuesday July 20, 2010, 5:56 pm

PARIS (AP) — China is now king of the world in energy consumption, surpassing the U.S. years ahead of forecasts in a milestone that left the Asian giant immediately rejecting its new crown.

Sensitive to its status as the world’s biggest polluter, China has long pointed fingers at developed nations in climate change talks and resists any label that could increase international pressure for it to take a larger role in curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

When the Paris-based International Energy Agency released its data on Tuesday, China branded it “unreliable.”

The United States still consumes more energy and oil per capita than China. But China’s faster-than-expected shift has global consequences for markets and the environment, reflecting its transformation from a nation of subsistence farmers to one of workers increasingly trading their popular bicycles for cars and buying air conditioners and other energy-hungry home electronics.

China was not expected to overtake the U.S. in energy consumption until at least 2015, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast in April.

The consumption level, reached despite the global economic downturn, left China in an awkward spot: It is eager to be seen as an economic juggernaut and a major player on the international stage, but also insists it’s a developing nation that deserves to industrialize.

Some environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about what China’s new status could mean for the planet, pointing out that it has spearheaded research and development into renewable energy. The IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, said China is the world’s leader in wind and solar power.

China’s total 2009 consumption, including energy sources ranging from oil and coal to wind and solar power, was equal to 2.265 billion tons of oil, compared with 2.169 billion tons used by the U.S., the IEA said.

China’s energy consumption has more than doubled in less than a decade, from 1.107 billion tons in 2000 — driven by its burgeoning population and economic growth that hit 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2010. Per capita, the U.S. still consumes five times more energy than China, Birol said.

The surge in energy consumption has turned China into the biggest source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The government has pledged to curb the growth in its emissions, but has refused to adopt binding curbs. It has maintained that pollution is an unavoidable consequence of industrialization.

Chinese officials said the country’s energy consumption last year was equal to 2.132 billion tons of oil — or roughly 5 percent less than the IEA figure, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

“IEA’s data on China’s energy use is unreliable,” said official Zhou Xian, adding that the agency did not understand China’s efforts to cut energy use and emissions, specifically its new-energy development.

Birol told the AP that the IEA used the same sources and methodology it always has in compiling the 2009 statistics, which he said were in line with the trend for the past decade.

“The trend is undeniable that the Chinese energy consumption is growing very strongly” while use in the U.S., Europe and Japan was stagnating, he said.

Birol emphasized that China’s appetite for energy is consistent with the rise in its 1.3 billion-strong population and the growth of its manufacturing-based economy, which churns out half the world’s supply of steel and is also a top producer of aluminum — another fuel-hungry industry.

China, however, is trying to cut its rising reliance on imported oil and gas, which it considers a national security risk, by investing heavily in hydroelectric dams, wind turbines and nuclear power plants. Still, coal, oil and natural gas are expected to account for most of China’s energy supplies for decades to come.

According to IEA statistics, more than half of China’s total energy in 2009 came from coal, a heavy polluter that accounts for less than a quarter of U.S. consumption. China’s coal reserves are among the world’s largest but much of that is high-sulfur “brown coal” that produces sulfur dioxide, a component in acid rain, when burned.

Oil — the No. 1 energy source in the U.S., accounting for nearly half the total — made up less than a fifth of the Chinese energy total, the IEA said. But that could change as more Chinese trade their bicycles — historically the country’s dominant form of transportation — for cars.

Last year, China passed the U.S. as the biggest auto market by number of vehicles sold and supplanted Germany as the biggest exporter. Passenger vehicle sales in China jumped from 326,000 in 1995 to 8.7 million in 2009, according to J.D. Power and Associates. That number is expected to soar to 13.5 million vehicles in 2015.

China is going across the world on the hunt for oil. State-owned Chinese energy companies have forged multibillion-dollar deals in Central Asia, Africa and Latin America to secure access to oil and gas supplies. Chinese companies are major players in the postwar reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry.

As it pursues energy sources, the communist government is also in the midst of a five-year campaign to cut the amount of energy consumed for each unit of economic output by 20 percent from 2005 levels. The government said this month it has reached the 16 percent mark after shutting down outmoded power plants, steel mills and other facilities.

It is China’s green efforts, such as nationwide renewable energy targets, that has some environmentalists hopeful.

“We have substantive hopes in China, to be honest, that China will take the lead … to make the low-carbon economy, the high energy efficiency economy a reality in the coming years,” said Stephan Singer, the head of energy policy for the WWF environmental group.

“That’s not the case in the U.S., unfortunately,” he said. “We would need to see similar or even stronger targets there” in the U.S.

BEIJING – China rushed to keep an oil spill from reaching international waters Tuesday, while an environmental group tried to assess if the country’s largest reported spill was worse than has been disclosed.

Crude oil started pouring into the Yellow Sea off a busy northeastern port after a pipeline exploded late last week, sparking a massive 15-hour fire. The government says the slick has spread across a 70-square-mile (180-square-kilometer) stretch of ocean.

Images of 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) flames shooting up near part of China’s strategic oil reserves drew the immediate attention of President Hu Jintao and other top leaders. Now the challenge is cleaning up the greasy brown plume floating off the shores of Dalian, once named China’s most livable city.

The environmental group, Greenpeace China, shot several photographs at the scene Tuesday before their team was forced to leave. They showed oil-slicked rocky beaches, a man covered in thick black sludge up to his cheekbones, and workers carrying a colleague covered in oil away from the scene. His condition was not known.

Activists said it was too early to tell what impact the pollution might have on marine life.

In a stroke of awkward timing, meanwhile, Dalian’s International Beach Culture Festival, which draws thousands of tourists every year, started over the weekend, but the state-run Xinhua News Agency said waters around the beach had not been affected by the slick.

Officials told Xinhua they did not yet know how much oil had leaked, but China Central Television reported that no more pollution, including oil and firefighting chemicals, had entered the sea Tuesday. It was not clear how far the spill was from China’s closest neighbor in the region, North Korea.

Dalian’s vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told Xinhua that 40 specialized oil-control boats would be on the scene by Tuesday evening, along with hundreds of fishing boats. Oil-eating bacteria were also being used in the cleanup.

“Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters,” he said.

But an official with the State Oceanic Administration has warned the spill will be difficult to clean up even in twice that amount of time.

The Dalian port is China’s second largest for crude oil imports, and last week’s spill appears to be the country’s largest in recent memory.

“In terms of what is known to the public, this is definitely the biggest,” said Yang Ailun, spokeswoman for Greenpeace China.

“Government and business leaders have been telling the media that there’s no environmental impact. From Greenpeace’s perspective, that’s very irresponsible,” she added. “It’s too early to tell. Oil is still floating around.”

The cause of the blast was still not clear Tuesday. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume.

Chinese media continued to report Tuesday on the initial explosion and the oil cleanup. The government is known to censor reporting when an issue becomes too sensitive.

While the Chinese public has not seized on the accident as its own version of the massive BP spill in the United States, warnings over the country’s increasing dependence on oil were clear.

The International Energy Agency said Tuesday that China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest energy consumer, using the equivalent of 2.252 billion tons of oil last year. China immediately questioned the calculation.

“China was a spectator of the Gulf of Mexico incident, but suddenly it itself has attracted attention from the whole world,” Sima Pingbang, the executive chief-editor of environmental protection website chinaepr, wrote Monday of the explosion and spill. “Chinese can no longer live above such things.”

The slick of surface oil in the Gulf of Mexico spill was 2,700 square miles (7,000 sq. kilometers) late last week, far dwarfing the China spill.

But Yang worried that the scope of the Dalian spill was worse than reported so far.

“We need to send more independent voices out there,” she said.