There's a new wind turbine installed every day in China, according to Guardian Journalist, Jonathan Watts, who spoke tonight with Isobel Hilton at Asia House in London about his recent book, When A Billion Chinese Jump, which he spent four years researching, travelling north south east and west in China, exploring in dialogue with around 300 people, the contemporary and growing environmental crisis in a country which is facing drought in many areas of the north and where water is becoming an increasingly contested and scarce resource - a situation likely to worsen in future  to the extent that some people are proposing running pipes in from neighbouring countries - even from Khazistan and India - despite the water wars that might ensue.  As Watts's book says: 'with foul air, filthy water, rising temperatures and encroaching deserts, China is already suffering an environmental disaster. Now it faces a stark choice: either accept catastrophe, or make radical changes'.  The research for the book included seeking out people and sites exploring and experimenting with green and sustainable approaches to engineering and technology in a context where every week a new coal fired power plant opens.  The future looks pretty grim on the basis of this publication which portrays how even when central party commitment to innovative environmental solutions and sustainable standards exists it is not leading to implementation at local and regional level where property developers and planners collude and the leadership at the centre have no means of forcing regional buy in..  The idealism of a few years ago when people spoke of a Green China leading the way with notions of Green GDP has subsided into acknowledging a Coal dependent China where Beijing is referred to as Grey-Jing and Government Ministers who were driving the approach to environmental reform have been sidelined and their plans for assessing the environmental impact of developments shelved.  At the same time, we heard that the infamous Silk Road is now lined with Wind Turbines. I'm convening an event in China this September called DARE - Design Age Research Exchange - when with experts and researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the RCA in London we'll consider how design might interface with the challenges and demands of an ageing society  - looking at technologies, well-being and health, transportation, clothing, meta and co-design. We'll also look at what we can learn from the history of design in this country which often seems to be hurtling through the 21st century like there is no tomorrow.  We'll do this partly in the company of Retired Professors from Tsinghua who will have lived through the tumultous social revolution of the mid 20th century ...what do they I wonder think of the wind of changes now?