The author Hu Shaowei  is a senior economist with the State Information Center

"The cost of growth", the technical term for the imbalance between tapping resources and environmental protection, necessarily occurs in the course of all countries' modernization drive.

Some nations have managed to surmount this stumbling block to embark on the road of sustainable development. Others have fallen into failure.

China now stands at the crossroads. Shall we get over the obstacle or be baffled by it?

The experience of other countries indicates that the only effective formula for surmounting the obstacle is the transformation of the economic structure. This means that the growth mode marked by high energy consumption and pollution be turned into a clean one.

Currently, a new industrial policy of saving energy and reducing waste discharge is taking shape in the country.

China did not have an industrial policy in the real sense of the word until 1989. That was the year the State Council promulgated the Decisions on the Key Points of the Current Industrial Policy.

With this as the starting point, the country worked out a package of industrial policies in the 1990s. They involved optimizing the industrial structure, addressing the defects in market mechanisms and raising the quality of economic growth.

In the late 1990s, the government adopted policies to enforce the closing of enterprises in sunset sectors while taking forceful steps to ensure the development of newly emerging industries such as machinery, electronics, information, chemicals and construction.

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