China Goes Green. Judith Shapiro
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of a new Ministry of Natural Resources. Once seen as holding open its door to some of the world’s most polluting industries and waste products, China banned them. The list could go on.
In 2009, at the Conference of the Parties to the UN climate negotiations in Denmark, observers excoriated China for undermining the talks. “How Do I Know China Wrecked the Copenhagen Deal? I Was in the Room,” wrote the Guardian’s Mark Lynas (2009) in a typical account. Widely seen as the villain for snubbing heads of state, blocking transparent public negotiations, and rejecting hard targets even for developed countries, China managed to weaken the talks and make it appear that rich countries had failed developing ones. China’s official position was characterized as wanting to “have it all,” leveraging its developing country status for reduced responsibilities, seeking to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change, and trying to achieve global recognition for domestic environmental efforts (Conrad 2012).
But by November 2014, everything appeared to have changed. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing, President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama jointly announced that each country would take ambitious steps to reduce carbon emissions. In a landmark agreement, President Obama used his executive power to commit the US to stop building coal-fired power plants; he promised that by 2025 the US would emit 26–28 percent less carbon dioxide than in 2005. United States action may have allowed President Xi to claim that the developed world was going first, as required under widely accepted international principles of common but differentiated responsibilities. For his part, Xi announced that China’s carbon emissions would stop growing by around 2030 and that clean energy sources would amount to 20 percent of China’s energy mix by that year. Some have argued that these commitments were likely a reflection of the path China had set for itself regardless of multilateral negotiations, given that reducing coal use would also achieve the “double win” of reducing ground-level air pollution and improving public health in addition to mitigating climate change. Nevertheless, the joint declaration was greeted with fanfare (Hilton and Kerr 2017). Cooperation between the US and China, which together represented 40 percent of global emissions, brought new life to the 2015 Paris negotiations, which did indeed result in tangible, albeit voluntary, commitments from almost all parties. When, in 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the treaty, observers feared China might feel released from its own responsibilities. Instead, President Xi Jinping reasserted China’s commitment to fulfill its obligations and to uphold multilateralism, signing a pact with French president Emmanuel Macron recommitting to the agreement. In so doing, China assumed the moral high ground as compared with the United States and spurred even more hope that China would become the new global leader on climate change.
This has not yet come to fruition. During the December 2019 Madrid negotiations, China joined other big carbon emitters such as India and Brazil in resisting more ambitious targets. Together with members of the bloc called the G77 plus China, it insisted that developed countries had to uphold their 2015 Paris commitments before developing countries could commit to new ones. When the US and other wealthy countries balked, talks came to a stalemate. While there was plenty of blame to go around for the failure of the talks, especially with respect to the destructive role of the US, China was singled out for once again being unwilling to assume the kind of global leadership it had flirted with four years before.
Nonetheless, on the face of it the Chinese state appears indeed to be offering the world a green vision. After an astounding period of economic growth since the 1980s, during which the country became both the world’s manufacturing hub and also one of the most intensely polluted places on the planet, the central leadership has issued hard-nosed policy changes intended to resolve China’s environmental crisis. Green China boasts solid achievements, especially in the clean technology industry. China in 2012 surpassed the US to become the world’s top wind energy user as measured by installed capacity (Lam et al. 2017). The growth of its solar sector helped drop world prices by 80 percent from 2008 to 2013 (Fialka 2016). The Chinese State Council has committed national support for hydrogen fuel-cell and battery-powered electric cars, with the eventual goal of totally eliminating gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles (K. Wang 2018). China is the world’s largest manufacturer and buyer of electric vehicles, including 99 percent of the world’s electric buses. China has built tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail, using cutting-edge technology to shrink distances among cities and integrate the country into a vast, energy-efficient transit network. China has shut down the import of low-grade recyclables and hazardous e-wastes, switched heating systems from coal to natural gas, and outlawed ivory sales. Rhetoric about low-carbon lifestyles, the circular economy, sustainable development, ecological civilization, resilient growth, and green development is inescapable. By these measures, it seems indeed that China has gone green. This book will deconstruct and challenge that assertion.
Ecological Civilization as Political Philosophy
These rhetorical and regulatory shifts toward “green” China may be traced to a rethinking of the country’s guiding political philosophy. For a struggling developing country emerging from Mao-era chaos in 1979, economic growth seemed the most important national goal. Ideological work to define and introduce “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – a formula that promoted the free market in a nominally Marxist society – was required. This formula helped make China the manufacturing hub of the world. But the explosive growth came at an unacceptable environmental cost, one that risked social upheaval and loss of legitimacy for the Communist Party. The country’s core ideological principles needed revision and updating so as to provide guidance to address deepening post-Mao social and economic contradictions like inequality, unemployment, and consumerism, all exacerbated by the befoulment of China’s air, water, soil, and food.
In China, to a degree unheard of in the West, major policy shifts must be justified through debate and agreement over underlying political philosophy. Supported by an extensive network of government think tanks, Party schools, and Marxism research centers at universities, the one-party system relies on ideological consensus for the country’s overarching direction. In 2007, under Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao, “ecological civilization,” or shengtai wenming 生态文明, became an explicit goal of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2012, the phrase was enshrined within the Party Constitution, and six years later within the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. With the successful elevation of this phrase to the level of official political philosophy, the latest iteration of the Party’s ideological work came to fruition. Xi Jinping’s ubiquitously quoted line encapsulates this: “Clear waters, green mountains are in fact gold mountains, silver mountains” (lüshui qingshan jiushi jinshan yinshan 绿水青山就是金山银山).
“Ecological civilization” garners widespread support across China’s broad and sprawling state apparatus because it projects the Party’s rule as both historical and visionary. Ecological civilization is described first and foremost as a continuation of China’s developmental path under the leadership of the Communist Party – transforming from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization under Mao Zedong, then to material civilization under Deng Xiaoping, and now to ecological civilization under Xi Jinping – a faithful reincarnation of Marx’s theory of the stages of development with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, on the world stage the phrase frames the Chinese nation as a leader of a rejuvenated civilization, reviving nationalistic fervor in a nation that has emerged out of its “century of humiliation” under Western and Japanese imperialism. Thus, in light of the tremendous political appeal of ecological civilization, China’s go-green efforts are inextricably linked to the political and ideological ambitions of the state.
As a political philosophy, ecological civilization builds on two schools of thought, both with Western roots. These are ecological Marxism and constructive postmodernism. The former understands the commodification of nature as lying at the heart of contradictions that may spell the eventual demise of capitalism. The latter attempts to integrate the best characteristics of tradition and modernity, both as a philosophical thought experiment and as a practical path toward harmony between humans and non-human ecology. More than 20 Chinese government research centers are dedicated to debating and refining