In the terms I've just described, the hopes of China's middle class will be checked by the country's physical and environmental limits. It's a nice thought, but China routinely proves that it can push those limits with the sheer mass of its population. Every Chinese Lunar New Year's chunyun—travels back home for the traditional festival, every National Holiday week of tourism, and every Friday night on Beijing's highways gives us reason to consider the determination of Chinese citizens. Like Americans, they don't easily accept defeat or relegation to fixed social strata. Have-nots want to be haves. For Americans like me, that has come to mean a sort of material plenitude courtesy of Wal-Mart and similar retailers. For Chinese the last few decades, this determination has meant nights standing on a train, just to be home for the holidays. Soon, though, they will come to expect what Americans enjoy, or dare I say, suffer from, material excess, often as a symbol of status.

This, I wish to suggest, cannot be comfortably borne by China's environment and society. There is another model, as I've said already: the European model, in which quality of life is much less a material notion. To oversimplify somewhat, European culture stresses three major points: health, not wealth; stability, not adventure; and a fair-shake society, not a rat race.

To what extent can China adopt this? It's not fully clear. Americans and Chinese can be quite fond of the rat race, at least preferring it to the humdrum pace of European life. Second, like Americans, Chinese attitudes reflect a tolerance for wealth gaps that Western European countries have paired substantially in the post-war era. And in an era of enormous economic transformation, "I've got my health" will be little comfort to Chinese who notice their neighbors buying second homes by the seashore or sending their children abroad for university or even high school and middle school.

What, then, are China's planners to do? My best estimate is that, as with many things, great transformation will not be accomplished through just carrots or sticks, but through a national commitment to avoiding the Americanization of parts of Chinese consumer society. Such an effort would likely include the popularization or even glamorization of sustainable living. Public transport and better, smarter urban design, of course, but also a linking of China's environmental quality to the survival of its many natural and cultural treasures. Crucially, it's here that rising living standards and middle-class consciousness can be exploited. Materially satisfied Chinese are perhaps better able to appreciate the lost mystique of a Taishan Mountain despoiled by empty water bottles and half-gnawed ears of corn.

Skeptical that this can be done? You have reason to be. Chinese airlines, for example, don't even offer customers carbon-offsets sold by third-parties, citing lack of demand. Furthermore, the just-made-it crowd in China, having left behind their bicycles behind in the countryside or college, won't take easily to a slick single-speed and a chance to risk death in traffic during the daily commute.

We shouldn't expect it to be easy, since large national transformations aren't. The United States has never quite taken to the metric system, and most developed nations are helpless to right their entitlement and demographic problems. I have not much in the way of solutions to add here, and I am tempted to resolve only to highlight the gravity of the situation. Perhaps this frame will provide a fresh perspective.

The author is an American teaching Western philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.