Give China a break. The hyped-up energy crisis and climate change clamor have implicated it as the world's new major problem.

After all, China is the second-largest consumer of oil behind the United States, and its carbon dioxide emissions are as large as ours. We seem to think that the planet would be better, safer and more comfortable if they just wouldn't use so much energy.

Greg Baker/AP/S (ENLARGE)

China has soared above its 'sleeping giant' days. The country's economic might is evident in the Beijing skyline, with (at right rear) the new China Central Television headquarters.

Pollution problems are highlighted in news about food, toys and other imports. Beijing air pollution is big news tied to the Olympic Games. The New York Times recently lambasted the pollution problems caused by China's economic expansion, saying that "China is choking on its own success."

The puzzle of China has been pondered for well over a century, with views ranging from tremendous trade potential to a hopeless future caused by too many poor people. During that time, China was the subject of derision, and some sympathy, as she struggled with poverty, war and bad government.

Americans have sympathized with the hard life of China's century past, though we know little about it. Theodore H. White ("Thunder Out of China," 1946) described the lot of its people as that of the Western world four or five centuries earlier, saying, "They are so cramped by ignorance and poverty that to write down a description of their daily life would make an American reader disbelieve the printed word."

This assessment described a China in flux after decades of conflict with Japan, during World War II and its aftermath, and amid the struggle between Nationalists and Communists. Victory by the Communists, and their "great leap forward," prolonged the misery and postponed the recovery that is so obvious now.

Today, trepidation covers the Western world about China's threat to world economies and the environment. American shoppers express their disdain for the overwhelming number of Chinese products that they buy anyway. Legislators and bureaucrats fret about jobs going overseas, especially China. Governments worry about her growing ability to increase armaments, launch satellites and overpower smaller economies.

There is a delightful part of the puzzle, but we are too absorbed in our own self-interest to appreciate the good fortune for the Chinese people. They deserve our admiration for pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. It is an amazing story told by data on the National Bureau of Statistics of China Web site (www.stats.gov.cn/english/). Although The New York Times says that because of their industrialization, "public health is reeling," life expectancy rose from 68 years in 1990 to 73 in 2006 and infant mortality dropped by 46 percent.

The Chinese are better off today than ever before. The illiteracy rate dropped from 33 percent in 1964 to just 6.7 percent in 2000. Food production increased nearly 5 percent annually from 1980 to 2004. So they're eating better, consuming 26 percent more calories per person and 52 percent more protein. Even though they are eating better, they spent a smaller proportion in 2006 for food, clothing and housing (60 percent) than in 1990 (75 percent). The average person's savings account balance rose 20 times in that period.

Chinese home life has gained centuries in the last 50 years. Housing space per person has more than doubled. For every 100 households, there are 137 color television sets in urban areas and 89 in rural districts. Half of urban households have a computer. The per-capita gross domestic product has risen to 33 times the 1980 value.

For centuries Chinese commoners lived an existence that we in the modern West can't fathom. Their progress and prospects are good news by almost any appraisal, except by those who fear the future. Although worldview environmentalists decry pollution there, and economic protectionists wring their hands about the overwhelming competition they foresee, those who wish and work for uplifting of the world's poor and hungry must be gladdened by the great industry and good fortune of such a large fraction of the world's people.

That good fortune of such an unlucky people results from a loosening of the stranglehold of a centrally planned economy and portends increased liberty and self-determination for them. Napoleon is supposed to have called China "a sleeping giant" that would "shake the world" when awakened. It has certainly awakened and a few decades from now will probably be the world's largest democracy. Why should the world's richest democracy fear that?

Harold Brown is a professor emeritus of crop and soil sciences at the University of Georgia.