The Chinese government this week raised the price of gasoline almost 10 percent as shortages spread across the country. Higher gas prices may be just what Earth’s doctor ordered.

Given the recent rise in the cost of crude, the Financial Times reports, Chinese policymakers face challenges. To pay for expensive crude, retail fuel prices would naturally go up. But the government is concerned about inflation. And according to “analysts” in the FT article, concerns over public unrest would stop prices from rising more than about 10 percent further before the Olympics.

But some amount of public unrest over fuel prices may be what’s necessary to slow the rapid growth of automobile ownership and related pollution in Chinese cities. If it’s more expensive to drive, more people may choose public transport.

Making public transit cheaper has already had a partial effect. Last month, the number of public transit commuters surpassed car commuters for the first time since records were first kept in 2001. That landmark is largely due to the opening of the new Line 5 and a drop in ticket prices in early October. Since those changes, daily average ridership has reached 2.48 million, a 58 percent increase over the previous nine months.* Bus ridership also spiked after an earlier price drop.

The People’s Daily Online reports that 34.5 percent of Beijing commuters use public transit, versus 32 percent who use private vehicles. That leaves a third of commuters who use the most environmentally friendly methods: walk, bike, run, but don’t use a vehicle. Beijing wants to raise the proportion of public transit riders to 50 percent by 2012, but to do that, it will need to sufficiently discourage more people from joining the car-owning throngs. Perhaps more expensive fuel will do the trick.

Some environmentalists have encouraged the United States to levy heavy taxes on gasoline to encourage people to use alternative transportation and buy fuel-efficient cars. Others point out that this method puts the burden on commuters with lower incomes rather than on the individuals profiting from high emissions. At least in Beijing, however, this would not seem to be the case. Few if any low-income workers here own cars. Higher gas prices, if they can serve as an incentive not to pollute, will impact the people who have the luxury of choice. And with some luck, the city’s massive subway expansion projects will provide the capacity necessary to make that choice attractive.

* That statistic may be misleading. The previous nine months are warmer months, and the coming three will be cold. Some amount of this “increase” may be natural seasonal shift as people opt for a bus over a bike. At this time I only have this information from the People’s Daily Online article.

I’ve been busy recently in Beijing and watching a lot of good stories go right by. You’ll forgive a Colorado native for using a baseball analogy: It’s time to make sure I don’t strike out looking. Here’s a quick summary of transpacific pitches I wish I’d had time to swing at.

Greener Beijing?
• Will Beijing’s air be ready for the Olympics? The Worldwatch Institute has a good summary of what’s being done, who’s doing it, and what the challenges are, from Yongfeng Feng, a journalist for China Guangming Daily.
• Alex Pasternack picks up on a Christian Science Monitor story on the emergence of short-term bike rental service in Beijing. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned here is that folding bikes, trendy here despite being a pain to ride, have been banned on the subway recently to prevent overcrowding. Razor scooter, anyone?

Internet Filtering and Reactions
• Blogspot is blocked, again. It came back online along with Flickr, which I have just noticed is also blocked. Firefox users in the P.R.C. can use “Access Flickr!” to get those photo feeds back working.
• The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted the Global Online Freedom Act (H.R. 275) out of committee. The law, according to Forbes.com, would “penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for ‘Internet-restricting’ purposes.”
• Rebecca MacKinnon has smart commentary as usual on this issue. Go read what she writes, but here’s her bottom line:
  

  GOFA’s intentions are honorable in many ways. I think many of the people who support it certainly have honorable intentions. I know and respect many of them, despite having had some pretty heated arguments with some members of the human rights groups who say they support it for strategic reasons. But from where I sit in Hong Kong, this proposed legislation comes off as something that my Chinese friends who hate censorship and surveillance would find arrogant, patronizing, and interventionist, with the likely result that it would kill U.S. tech companies’ ability to do business in China in the first place - a result which by the way they don’t think would enhance their freedom.

• Also from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I haven’t mentioned yet that Chairman Tom Lantos is calling Yahoo’s Jerry Yang back to Congress under suspicion of misleading Congress in previous testimony. Go check with MacKinnon on this, too. She’s been on the story since a civil society group published a document that contradicted Yahoo’s statement that they did not know the nature of the investigation when they turned over information on reporter Shi Tao to Chinese authorities.
• At Wired, a writer with firsthand experience being monitored on a reporting trip in China declares that the “Great Firewall” is futile. Maybe, but I had to enable Tor to get the full article to load. The article is a good read though for those interested in Oliver August’s experiences talking to Chinese dissidents.
• Wikipedia’s Chinese-language service was crippled by the mainland’s block, reports Eva Woo at BusinessWeek.com.

In other news…
• From the Tokyo Auto Show, Michael J. Dunne who works on China for J.D. Power and Associates, writing in the Detroit News, notes that the talk is about China, not Japan. My favorite is the writer’s casual contextual note about when his cohort got interested in China: “Fascination with the China market started when the Middle Kingdom first challenged Japan for sales leadership. Two years ago, Chinese bought 5.3 million vehicles, just shy of the 5.7 million cars and trucks sold in Japan.”
• U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said she sees protectionism in both countries as a threat to U.S.–China trade.
• Relatedly, Andy Scott at China Briefing Blog ventures a coinage for China’s WTO practices: “Compliance With Chinese Characteristics.”
• It’s not just the United States hosting the Dalai Lama. Japan’s doing it too.
• The questionably hyphenated Trans-Pacific Express will for the first time link the China and the United States with an undersea telecommunications cable.

Olympic threats: really dumb. China: Bush’s diplomatic savior? The North Korea deal: not what the White House hoped. And China meets the U.S. Congress to plan for a post-Bush climate reality. Recent China–U.S. relations news.

• Steve Clemons agrees with me (OK, he agrees with James Fallows, whom I agree with) that “Boycotting the Olympics today or trying to preempt China’s hosting the games as Perle suggested in 2001 are hollow threats that perpetuate the mistaken notion that America is in a serious position to isolate China.” Clemons’ post today on China and his comments in the item below are worth attention.
• In a New York Times Week In Review piece today Steven Lee Meyers argues that George W. Bush is using China’s influence in Iran, North Korea, and Burma as a “diplomatic crutch”—that having spent much of his country’s international political capital, Bush is lucky to have China to turn to. Myers quotes U.S Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill as saying “China has become the first stop for any American diplomacy.”
• Not that the result in North Korea has been exactly what the Bush administration was hoping for, writes Richard Bernstein.
• I’m a bit late posting this, but Der Speigel reported a “secret” meeting between members of the U.S. Congress and Chinese National Development Reform Commission (NDRC) Deputy Chief Xie Zhenhue. The White House was reportedly left out of this meeting addressing post-Bush administration environmental policy. According to Speigel:
  

  High-ranking sources close to the participants of the meeting between the Chinese delgation and Congress said the Chinese sought to find out how determined Congress is to push through rigorous climate protection laws in the future. During the discussion, members of Congress made clear that they would soon like to vote on legislation that would set binding emissions limits. However, the members of Congress said they didn’t provide the Chinese with a firm timeline for when this might happen.

Today my newly-former employer publishes my interview with Fair Trade and international economics expert Jonathan Jacoby of the Center for American Progress. I always found myself wondering how exactly Fair Trade is put together, especially when confronting such things as a favorite coffee roaster Intelligentsia’s “Direct Trade” program, which claims to pay farmers even more than Fair Trade-certified sellers. About a month ago I interrogated Jonathan about how all this works, and here’s the product, after the jump.

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A China Daily (state-supported media) report asserts that the “western” media ignore the environmental impact of international business moving manufacturing to China. The story is on a think tank report from the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (CCICED).

The report suggests that when trade between China and its partners exerts an environmental impact, the responsibility should be borne by all parties, including manufacturers, traders and consumers in the product chain.

For example, it has been alleged that China poses a threat to tropical forests by importing timber from Southeast Asian countries. But 70 per cent of the timber is made into furniture and exported to the United States and European Union countries.

China’s environmental impact on Southeast Asia is far more exaggerated than the economic benefits it brings to the region, the report noted.

“China has been playing its role as a global workshop in the past two decades,” said Shen Guofang, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and core expert of the CCICED. “We import the raw material, produce, send the products abroad and keep the waste and pollution ourselves.”

The Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia blog notes that the effect may be even worse than moving the pollution.

The West is basically sending its pollution to China and that benefits the West! But when you consider China’s huge energy inefficiency and serious poor implementation of environmental regulations, I fear the net impact is probably far worse.

Indeed, if businesses move manufacturing from a country with a strict set of environmental regulations to China, the motivation to be clean disappears, and the externalized cost to the environment increases.

It seems that this should be a major topic of concern for U.S. activists, who might exert pressure on U.S. businesses.

Japan isn’t often in a position to demand things of China recently. The heated political environment during the Koizumi years left few opportunities for the Japanese government to get tough. They made noise over a Chinese submarine’s incursion into Japanese waters, and they were firm in demanding that the Chinese government protect Japanese citizens and interests during the April 2005 anti-Japan demonstrations. But less immediate issues didn’t often work their way into Sino-Japanese public diplomacy.

Today UPI reports that Japan is in rare form, getting tough on its neighbor with an unusually large pollution problem.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 6 (UPI) — Japan’s chief negotiator at the Kyoto conference in Nairobi Monday called on China to let the United Nations know what it is doing about greenhouse gases.

Mutsuyoshi Nishimara said China appears to be making great progress but needs to “the commitment and do the job.”

Nishimara rejected calls to punish those countries violating clean air rules.

“We lose the battle the moment we seek to punish countries for noncompliance,” Nishimara said.

This came at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Nairobi. Indeed, China’s environmental policies have a real effect in Japan, where the sun rises and the wind sometimes blows.