At Globalicity, Blogger Gardiner Rynne makes an interesting comparison between Beijing… and Booth Tarkington’s early-twentieth-century Indianapolis, of all things.  In 1914’s The Turmoil (and later in the trilogy compendium Growth), Tarkington described the effects of industrialization on America’s midland:

There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.

Rynne remarks that he “couldn’t help but marvel” at Tarkington’s description given the current fuss about Beijing’s air pollution.  “Okay,” he continues, “the only elements that don’t fit are the ‘negligently tended streets.’ Beijing’s streets are well tended indeed at the moment.”

The comparison is apt, really.  Nearly one hundred years after Tarkington wrote those words, China is experiencing very much the same kind of massive growth — fueled by the internationalization of their economy — that America once did.  Was it horrible for us then, just as it is for China now?  In a way, yes; and Tarkington (as well as other writers, such as Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis) admirably documented the ways in which it was.

But there is light at the end of such darkness… and we’d do well to cast fewer stones, given our legacy.  We’ve still got our own environmental sins to atone for without being overly critical of China.