Analogically, the post-1980 rise of China (as well as India) has changed the circumstances of any response to rising global trace gas emissions. In 1980, four years after Mao Zedong’s death, China’s per capita economic product was less than one-quarter of the Nigerian mean; there were no private passenger cars; only the top Communist Party leaders living in the seclusion of Zhongnanhai (the former imperial garden within the Forbidden City, now the central headquarters of the Communist Party) had air conditioning; and China produced just 10 percent of global CO2 emissions.[103]
