On May 26, 2010, E. S. Kulygin-Gubaidullin presented the report "Chinese Challenge: Limits of Growth and new technologies"at the regular seminar on socio-natural history. The central idea of the report is the thesis that China, with its one and a half billion people, is now a phenomenon not of a local or regional scale, but of a global scale. Although today we are seeing rapid growth in the Chinese economy, this growth has limits determined by the limited natural resources of China. Today, oil extracted to the surface per Chinese accounts for only 12% of the corresponding figure for the average earthling, while natural gas accounts for 14%. China is a net importer of crude oil, iron and manganese ore, copper concentrate and potash fertilizers. According to a number of forecasts, if the emerging trend is not reversed, in the next 30 years, China's raw materials and fuel needs will exceed the capacity of its own production several times. The average per capita size of arable land in China is 46.4% of the global average. In addition, 60% of Chinese arable land is located in areas that are insufficiently supplied with water or are seriously affected by salinization, soil erosion and desertification. The result is a rapid decline in the yields of major agricultural crops in the PRC. Finally, China's total forest area is only 13.9%, and its freshwater reserves are 25% of the global average. Thus, China's further growth is possible only at the expense of other countries ' resources.

In the near future, a significant part of the global commodity market will have to serve China. In China, the task of prioritizing the use of foreign raw materials is set, and the entry of domestic enterprises into the international mineral market is stimulated. China's demand for mineral imports is already growing by leaps and bounds. In parallel, there is also an increase in world prices for resources consumed by China. According to some Western estimates, in 2030, the country's food deficit may reach more than 200 million tons, which will increase world grain prices by 7 times. The growing prosperity of the Chinese, on the one hand, the decline in yields in the country due to limited arable land and falling quality of land resources, as well as global warming, on the other, will push the PRC to buy more and more food on the world market, stimulating further increases in food prices around the world. Meanwhile, China plans to quadruple its GDP once again by 2020. If these plans are implemented, the pressure on the natural environment will increase by 4 to 5 times with the current intensity of the use of natural resources. However, there is a physical limit to the flows of raw materials and energy that support economic growth and consumption. In particular, there are limits to the ability of existing effluents to absorb emissions and human waste. A third of China's industrial and two-thirds of domestic wastewater flows into rivers without prior treatment. Currently, this is one of the most acute problems of the PRC, and in the near future it will probably also become the most expensive.

In order to find acceptable solutions to its internal problems, China needs to raise its natural resource efficiency indicators by 8 to 10 times, which, in turn, means creating a number of fundamentally new technologies. However, the probability of such a breakthrough in the near future is quite low. In general, the need to create new, breakthrough technologies is facing all of humanity, but not as acute as it is facing China. Therefore, it is unlikely that China can count on the world to solve the problem of global technological restructuring in the time required to solve the internal problems of the Middle Kingdom. If China, left to its own devices, does not solve this fundamental problem for its own development, the rest of its problems will also not be solved, which will result in an increase in internal socio-political tensions in the PRC itself and a sharp increase in China's pressure on the planet's resources.

According to the speaker, three problems are the main ones for modern China and may blow it up from the inside in the future: 1) a 10 - to 20-fold gap in living standards and quality of life between prosperous coastal provinces and the continental hinterland, where the country's main resources are concentrated; 2) a similar gap between urban and rural living standards; 3) a gap between rich and poor (including at the grassroots level of state-owned enterprises, where executive incomes exceed earnings ordinary employees by 3-15, and often 50 times). The leadership and society of the PRC are trying to solve these problems through economic growth. At the same time, the problem of growth limits is not considered in principle, since it seems to be taken out of China, to the planet as a whole.

In conclusion, the speaker emphasized that the resource limits of a planetary system are not just finite: they can be compressed as a result of destruction. This happens if the resource usage is excessive. Then non-linear dependencies can take effect: after reaching the threshold values, the destruction occurs very quickly and becomes irreversible. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to purposefully slow down and then stop the growth of population (Land) and capital (in developed countries and in China). Otherwise, the situation will continue to worsen until feedback points out this explicitly. Thus, the development of the Earth as a whole largely depends on how domestic problems will be solved.

Olga Mashkina (Moscow) noted that the policy of the Chinese leadership and the attitude of the Chinese society do not give reason to believe that in the coming years China will solve its problems through external aggression. Emigration, apparently, will also not have a drastic impact on the solution of these problems. The search for a way out of the impending crisis lies on a different plane. The ambitious plan of the Chinese leadership to turn the PRC into the country with the highest GDP in the world in the first quarter of the XXI century and real achievements on this path led to a change in national identification, or rather, to the revival of traditional ideas about China's place as the center of the world and the corresponding role of the Middle Kingdom: to serve as a model for others

N. O. A. Mashkina believes that in order to prove its prestige, China should demonstrate to the world qualitative, not quantitative indicators of its achievements. At this stage of global economic development, there are two niches where China can take its rightful place: 1) providing consumer services aimed at improving the quality of human life and meeting individual needs (tourism, recreation, entertainment, medicine, education); 2) innovative technologies that are now so important for the fate of human civilization.

In the service sector, China is uniquely competitive. As a component of the tertiary sector of the Chinese economy, the services segment will certainly grow and the quality of services will improve. However, the development of the service sector is costly. Therefore, this direction is likely to become a side, rather than the main one in the future development of China.

The transition to an innovative development model, the transformation of the PRC into one of the leaders of the economy based on the latest resource - saving technologies, is the best development scenario for the country. However, it is only possible if there is an appropriate type of labor force. From this point of view, current trends in the development of China's human potential are of interest. These trends are generally contradictory. The success of the PRC in the field of education is obvious. In 2007, 99% of children of the corresponding age were enrolled in compulsory 9-year school. State policy in the field of education is aimed at creating fair learning conditions. Support is provided to rural schoolchildren and children from poor families. Admission to higher education institutions reached 21% of young people of the corresponding age category in 2005. In recent years, Chinese higher education has not only developed rapidly, but also steadily moved towards modern world standards. Universities have become the largest research and invention centers. They have become high-tech enterprises with intellectual property rights. China has a huge number of researchers, second only to the United States in terms of their number (about 1 million).

At the same time, some demographic trends are alarming. The population of the PRC is aging. After 2011, the country will gradually reduce the share of people of working age, as well as the younger generation. The share of children and young people aged 6-22 will fall to 20.9% by 2020. There is a growing gender disparity in Chinese society: for every 100 newborn girls, there are 120 boys. This creates psychological tension, and in the future, may force many Chinese people to go abroad in search of not only work, but also brides. The migration of the rural population to the cities has taken on an alarming scale. The influx of unskilled labor into the city hinders the introduction of new technologies and the growth of labor productivity. Getting a full-fledged school education has become a serious problem for migrant children. The health of the Chinese nation is of great concern. More and more Chinese people are overweight. The number of people with AIDS is growing in the country. In addition, today 93 million people are infected with hepatitis B. AIDS carriers face negative attitudes in society, and not enough is being done to adapt them. Another acute social problem is unemployment among educated youth.

The mentality and traditional values of the Chinese people have been changing in recent years. Although the focus on the traditions and experience of the past, the values of collectivism, and a strong state has not lost its relevance today, young Chinese citizens have become more pragmatic than their parents. Material enrichment has taken an important place in their hierarchy of values. Some features of the mentality may be hindrances to the creation of new technologies. In this regard, it should be noted, for example, the weak development of abstract thinking among the Chinese.

V. V. Lapkin (Moscow) briefly commented on the keynote speaker's speech. In his opinion, it is necessary to develop a methodology for assessing the challenges that have emerged as a result of environmental degradation. The analysis of China's prospects and problems should be conducted only in the context of analyzing global trends. In the early 1990s, China actually took the place of the USSR as a global antagonist of the United States. The growth of the Chinese economy faces a number of threats, the main ones being a lack of resources and a narrow domestic market.

The presentations made at the seminar allowed us to look at many of China's problems from a new perspective. This is its undoubted value for Oriental studies.

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