ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), as one of the major economies in the world, has maintained continuous economic growth since the onset of reform and opening up over 30 years ago. Such a large-scale and sustained economic growth has brought about increasingly heavy pressure on its natural resource base, which is actually not particularly rich or well endowed. Coupled with continued population growth and the significant improvement in people’s living standards, some main resource consumption in China continues to grow, leading to emerging resource shortages in supplies of fresh water, oil, iron ore, arable land and others. This chapter will briefly illustrate the situation of some major resources of China in general, and then identify some issues and trends of shortages in particular of water, land, energy and mineral resources. The solutions to mitigate the resource shortage crisis are also put forward at the end.
