The hydrogen explosions at the three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in March 2011 launched one of the largest disasters in industrial history. A year after the Japanese government declared that the reactors were under control, experts continued to find radioactive leaks. According to TEPCO's latest estimate, cleaning up the mess-removing fuel rods and debris, decommissioning the reactors, and decontaminating some of the surroundings-will take four decades and cost at least $125 billion." Along the way, thousands of workers will be exposed annually to levels of radiation well in excess of 20 milliSieverts, the internationally recognized maximum limit for normal working conditions.

At one level, of course, working conditions in the three devastated reactors are anything but "normal." By definition, states of emergency - nuclear or otherwise -entail a suspension of the ordinary, a breach of normal rules. In the nuclear sector, this eventuality has been codified. Recommendations developed by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP) allow for higher exposures during post-accident recovery operations.2And Chernobyl established a precedent: at least half of the roughly 700,000 "liquidators" who cleaned up after that accident were exposed to 100 milliSieverts of radiation, and many received far higher doses.

Drawing legitimacy from these precedents and the exceptional nature of the emergency, the Japanese government raised exposure limits for workers to 250 milliSieverts immediately after the accidents. Limits for the general public rose from 1 to 20 milliSieverts. Widespread outrage ensued: citizens and experts loudly denounced the fact that infants were being permitted radiation exposures equivalent to the ICRP maximum for industry workers.

China's energy strategies have attracted a huge amount of attention, precisely because they have been so effective. Chinese energy companies - from global oil and gas giants, to new wind and solar power success stories as well as electric grid operators, not to mention rising Electric Vehicle (EV) producers - have all had an impact on the industry, and sometimes shaken it up. In solar Photovoltaic (PV) cells there are aggressive counter-moves being made by both the US (and potentially the EU) against Chinese subsidized exports. These threaten to spill over into related sectors, and could trigger an all-out trade war.

In such a setting, it is important we argue to understand just what the aims of the Chinese strategies and associated policies might be. Of course China is offering all kinds of subsidies, both direct and indirect, to its nascent renewable energy and nuclear power industries, which are viewed in China as essential guarantors of energy security and export platforms for the future. The fact that they can deliver lower carbon emissions is a convenient side effect. We make this point not to belittle the efforts of those who take seriously the environmental threat (after all, we count ourselves as amongst them) but to emphasize the primacy of 'growth' in China's 'green growth' strategies.

The fact is that China is undergoing an astonishing energy transformation that underpins an industrial revolution that is making it the workshop of the world. It is building its 'black' energy system at a prodigious rate - building the equivalent of a 1-GW thermal power station every week 1, and burning vast amounts of coal in doing so. But at the same time it is building a 'green' energy system based on non-fossil sources (renewables and nuclear) faster than any other country on earth. China's green revolution is reflected in its targets for building renewable energy systems, which are being expanded as fast as is humanly and technically possible - in the name of energy security and nation-building infrastructure as much as for decarbonizing the economy. Which wins in this close race between black and green development is a matter of the highest importance, for China and for the world.

John Mathews, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia and Eni Chair in Competitive Dynamics and Global Strategy, LUISS Guido Carli University, Viale Romania, 32 00197 Roma, Italy.

Hao Tan, Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle, Australia. Their article "The Transformation of the Electric Power Industry in China" appears in Energy Policy, Vol. 52, January 2013.

Recommended citation: John Mathews and Hao Tan, "China's Energy Industrial Revolution (Part II)," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 1, No. 3, January 14, 2012."