There's a certain manner of conduct here called 'face', or mianzi, that seems contradictory in its very essence. Face is sometimes otherwise described as "lack of transparency." It's basically a means of protecting oneself and others from embarrassment. This very notion arouses my curiosity about China's green building philosophies. Let's take a recent Friday night as an example.

The architect who owns the Chinese architecture firm where I consult was driving. I'm riding shotgun on the way to a Chinese restaurant where we'll have a mid-autumn festival dinner celebration. This marks a perfect chance to ask her about green building. What she said represented one side of face.

Developers who won a significant green award ostensibly doled out by a major international organization, which shall remain nameless, allegedly won it with bribes, she told me. The whole thing was a sham. So if a developer wants to appear to be green, he just bribes a fake committee who's offering a bogus award.

‘So what is green building in China?’ I say, reiterating that in the time I've worked with the architecture firm, the greenest thing I've seen was rooftop landscaping.

'Developers often come to us and say they want to be green, but they only use planning and design techniques. They want houses to maximize natural light; they want lots of windows to make the residences seem bigger; they want abundant landscaping and green roofs,' she explains. 'But they don't actually want technology– not high-tech products.'

'Is that why we're still carrying around space heaters from room to room in our houses during winter?'

'Yes. They don't want to insulate buildings– not just in the frigid cold of Northern China but in subtropical South China either– because they consider insulation to be high tech,' she says.

'Insulation is high tech?' I'm realizing yet again how advanced North America is. There we even insulate some barns. Not only that but we have myriad solutions to insulation and are, now in this heightened eco-friendly era, exploring far greater possibilities. My mind goes back to the days of watching videos of testing a house's air quality. I remember being on site and watching SIPs being filled. I remember the strange tactile experience of certain insulations after they've hardened. Then I consider how these things improve the home's air quality (or prevent the entrance of dangerous particles in the air). I consider how they reduce sound pollution from entering or exiting the home. I sit in my apartment and wonder how insulation– even the kind resembling cotton candy strips– would prevent me from hearing a hand-held power drill used four stories up, on the other side of the building. I wonder how it would block out the noise from the population's burgeoning car traffic. I wonder how much warmer I'd be at night during January, February, March when it gets to the 30s and 40s.

My mind shifts to space heaters. I suppose some consider space heaters green because they don't require as much energy to heat up the entire home. But a devil's advocate considers overnight conditions. Overnight the things that keep me warm on a wet, cold night are my cat and a pile of thick blankets. Even an instant of tossing and turning brings the cold searing into my bones. Morning chill is enough to instantly put me in a bad mood (thank goodness my office is my house). Being from Chicago doesn't mean I love the cold. Climbing into a floating iceberg in Lake Michigan in January would make a sure suicide. So you get that I don't like the cold. To eradicate it, another option is leaving on the space heater throughout the night. That sparks fires of all kinds. Space heaters creating fires doesn't make for sustainability either. Therefore, lack of insulation is neither eco-friendly nor sustainable.

The architect has almost arrived at the restaurant. I decide to lighten the mood.

'Maybe from now on we should just recommend slapping some non-functioning solar panels onto the developments. After all, isn't China the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels?'

But then again, that too is a matter of face. When it comes to solar panels consider this: the technology still comes from the West, the need to manufacture it still hails from the West, and the end-user is still the West. More projects I'm writing about, but none that I'm consulting on, do indeed utilize solar panels. To lay the claim that the country actually manufactures them is grand. But in reality until they're used, and until those that are used yield better technology, China lags behind the green movement. When its government actually starts to press the issue, and when China actually starts to understand that it's making green implementation much more difficult to do later, and when China actually starts to think it's cool to be green, the excuses will continue. This is in proper form of giving "face."