China fact of the day

University of Alberta political economist Wenran Jiang calculates China spends three times the world average on energy -- and seven times what Japan spends -- to produce $1 of gross domestic product.  It also is far more inefficient than nations like Brazil and Indonesia...Chinese steelmakers on average use about twice as much energy as Japanese or Korean rivals per ton of output.  Only 5% of the country's office and residential towers meet China's own minimal energy-conservation standards.

That is from the 11 April Business Week, pp.50-51.