Due to the policy of one child per family and the preference for boys, only 100 girls are now born for every 147 boys, which means that poor men have trouble finding wives, that kidnapping is rampant and that gender ratios in society are out of balance.

I wonder where he got those numbers? Here is what I typically found:

at birth: 1.12 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.13 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.91 male(s)/female
total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2005 est.)
(http://www.indexmundi.com/china/sex_ratio.html)

The one-child policy gets blamed for this when in reality the Chinese have been using infanticide since the third millennia BC to favor boys over girls. The practice of infanticide continued into the early twentieth century and has merely been replaced and somewhat exacerbated by the illegal combination of ultrasound and abortion. When infanticide was made illegal, some families got bigger simply because they kept having babies until they finally had a boy. The one-child policy was not the problem; the devaluation of women in Chinese society is the problem. The same thing continues to happen in India as well.

China's success in reducing hunger inside its borders by 60 million in the 1990s was in stark contrast to India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan where the number of hungry increased by 60 million. This success was through the combination of social reform and family planning. Is it wise to apply our cultural standards to a country that is the same size as the United States, but has almost five times more people and 25 percent less arable land? Keep in mind that this is China, 30 million starved to death there in 1960 because of bungled government policy and they are still adding about 12 million people to their population every year.

His timing also seems to be off. China's ecosystems and rivers were destroyed long before their economy started to improve. The rate of destruction may even be slowing down. Urbanization is a good thing. New Yorkers have less environmental impact than just about anyone else.

A business executive who is impressed with the endless new high-rise buildings, neon billboards, shopping malls, luxury hotels and new ring-roads and fly-overs in cities like Beijing, Canton and Shanghai may see an economic miracle whose high growth rates are destined to impel this most dynamic and catalytic agent in the global marketplace forward almost indefinitely.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com