Can China maintain sustainable economic growth and manage energy demand without contributing to climate change? The editors of this volume are mildly optimistic but worry seriously about coal use and China's ability to organize co-operative research and implement more sustainable forms of development. They divide contributions to this topic into three sections: economic growth, environmental degradation with emphasis on climate change, and trends in future energy use. While China's Dilemma offers a lot of interesting predictions, techniques and judgments, it suffers from the inevitable march of time and, more worryingly, from the lack of a unifying framework.

The six papers on prospects for economic growth appear to have been written in the Spring of 2008, prior to the big shocks of the global financial crisis. Yiping Huang's essay on stagflation was predicting 10 per cent growth per year for China up to 2013. Rod Tyers and Iain Bain were a bit more pessimistic, predicting the North American and European financial shocks would hurt China's economy but “mitigating effects” would help insulate China. They did not think the shocks would spread to China from the West. Prema-chandra Althukorala and Nobuaki Yamashita avoided predicting future changes in their chapter on the US–China trade relationship but stressed that China was still largely a labour-intensive economy and its relationship with the US was not likely to change that rapidly. Justin Lin, in a well-written essay, steers clear of prediction, instead encouraging China to avoid moving too quickly away from its comparative labour advantage. Xiaodong Gong, Sherry Kong, Shi Li and Xin Meng uses survey data to look at the massive rural to urban migration that has accompanied economic growth while Xialu Wang concludes the section by comparing the economic policies of Russia and China over the last 30 years, concluding that China was wiser for not following the Washington Consensus as closely as Russia had.

The seven essays on degradation and climate change provide the same sort of wide-range coverage. Ross Garnaut, Frank Jotzo and Stephen Howes see China as talking positively about climate change mitigation but the authors seem to be more pessimistic about whether China can actually deliver. Warwick McKibbin, Peter Wilcoxen and Wing Thye Woo argue that a hybrid carbon tax/permit system that two of the authors devised, along with development of green technology for controlling emissions, will work better than a cap and trade system. Based on an analysis of SO₂ emissions, Cai Fang and Du Yang see China as still far from making an inverted “U” Kuznets curve transition away from increasing greenhouse gas emissions due to differing levels of regional development. They see economic growth in central and western China as important in China's future emission control, since poorer areas have great difficulty installing and using efficient abatement equipment. Qun Bao Yuanyuan Chen and Ligang Song also see a Kuznets-like curve development pattern in their analysis of foreign direct investment and an environmental race to the bottom, although they do not find improvement for all kinds of pollutant after a certain level of wealth. They confirm Fang and Yang's view since they find that many of China's inland provinces have yet to show a Kuznets effect. In a change of direction, Liangzhi You et al. look specifically at wheat production and Jinxia Wang et al discuss water shortages on the North China Plain – the latter paper not making specific connections with climate change. A final chapter looks at air pollution and mortality in Shanghai, demonstrating clear connections between the two.

The energy section contains four essays. Kejun Jiang and Xiulian Hu give a good review of changes in energy use since 1987, but offer a rather uncritical picture of the Chinese government's plans followed by their own scenarios to 2030. In their study of household energy use, Jane Golley, Dominic Meagher and Xin Meng find that there is virtually a linear relationship between per capita income and energy demand. They note, however, that raising income should raise efficiency and might even lower total CO₂ emissions in the long run. Next, Xunpeng Shi gives a relatively positive assessment of the ability of China's coal industry to adopt technology that will be more emission friendly although he admits this is somewhat problematic. Finally, Peter Sheehan and Fiona Sun make CO₂ emission predictions up to 2030, suggesting that emissions will increase, although far less if pricing and technological solutions are used to control them.

The editors do not tell us how the contributions were solicited (such as in a planned conference) and offer no concluding chapter. This is symptomatic of the feel that this is a good set of essays that do not necessarily drive towards a specific conclusion. Still, those working on aspects of China's climate change challenges and development will find specific chapters very useful.