China Goes Green. Judith Shapiro
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evidence, one need look no farther than the state’s intrusions in Xinjiang and Tibet, its harassment of unauthorized Christian house churches, its internet Great Firewall that filters out whatever the state deems “unhealthy,” and its introduction of facial recognition technologies that track and assign “social credit scores” to every resident.
We may also consider the state’s handling of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak as evidence of the limits of the authoritarian governance model. While the state displayed apparent decisiveness in restricting travel from the hot zone, the lockdown came only after a lengthy delay that allowed five million people to leave for Spring Festival holidays. Record-time, ten-day construction of quarantine hospitals was admirable and would likely have been impossible in a non-authoritarian context, but this feat must be balanced by the fact that the state initially censored the findings of medical personnel and even detained doctors who attempted to share their concerns about an emerging SARS-like virus on a medical chat group. Other weaknesses in China’s style of authoritarian governance show in the poor regulation of the wildlife markets that allowed the virus to jump the species barrier, as well as chaos in the provision of testing kits, masks, and medical care. Mistrust and anger resulted.
The admirable green policy developments under China’s authoritarian system must similarly be set against the egregious pollution of water, soil, and air, unremitting environmental burden on the disadvantaged, globalizing appetite for resources, and export of carbon-intensive production (Power et al. 2012; Simons 2013; Shapiro 2015; Lora-Wainwright 2017). As Financial Times journalist Leslie Hook (2019) writes, China “is both the greenest in the world, but also the most polluting.” Domestically, China is plagued by entrenched environmental challenges such as soil and water contamination, cancer villages, airpocalypses, and unabating pollution from rare-earth mining and other ecologically destructive undertakings. Even with respect to coal mining and consumption, actual trends countermand the promises made at APEC and in Paris. (China blames the US trade war for making it increase the percentage of “cheap” coal in its energy mix.) Internationally, China’s export of coal-fired power plants, construction of roads and ports in ecologically sensitive areas, and extraction of natural resources have also undermined the country’s self-proclaimed leadership in planetary ecological civilization. In this book, we seek to untangle these seemingly contradictory observations about China’s green politics and ecological conditions.
What is State-led Environmentalism?
Almost every course on environmental politics includes discussion of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” the classic 1968 Science magazine essay in which Garrett Hardin articulates a core metaphor describing how human beings deplete shared resources (Hardin 1968). We professors often organize students around tables with goldfish crackers and straws and instruct them to go fishing – before long, there are no fish left in the “sea.” Hardin argued that rational individuals will necessarily and inevitably over-extract resources from shared spaces because their self-interests, collectively, outweigh the good of the group. In the essay, he describes townspeople who added so many sheep to an English common pasture that the fields could not sustain them. But the metaphor can be extended to other common “goods” – fisheries, forests, and water – as well as common “bads” – factory smokestack emissions, discharges into shared watercourses, “space junk,” and noise pollution. Hardin’s position is that “mutually agreed-upon coercion” is the only way to avoid the inevitable overexploitation of the shared resource; he lauds “the greater candor of the word coercion” and problematizes the ideal of individual freedom.
During the 1970s the essay was much discussed, and refuted, by scholars who objected to the authoritarian tenor of Hardin’s approach. They showed that “open access” resources like the fisheries of the high seas were very different from “common pool” resources like coastal fisheries where communities could agree through consultation to be bound by measures to assure sustainable use such as catch size, technology restrictions, permit issuance, and seasonal limits. Elinor Ostrom is best known for writing on this but many others have used combinations of economic game theory and sociological research to show that communities who know each other and expect to work together for the foreseeable future are more likely to create workable community-based resource management systems (Ostrom 1990; Petrzelka and Bell 2000). For transnational and planet-level environmental issues, the challenge is to create a “global community” that can cooperate to manage shared resources without succumbing to self-interest.
International environmental treaties provide a form of coercion established collaboratively through the consent of the governed, and at times they have offered great promise. In 1992, with the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development), it appeared that such global cooperation might work. There were high hopes that countries would overcome the barriers of sovereignty to manage transboundary environmental problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification, and so on. Along with 169 other countries, China signed the Rio Declaration and ratified many of the treaties that emerged from that historic meeting. By then, socialism was on the wane with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the debate over the need for coercive measures to resolve environmental problems had abated. Many Western scholars took it as a given that public participation, rule of law, and guarantees of access to information were necessary for robust environmental governance (Schnaiberg 1980; Young 1994). Unfortunately, since then environmental governance has struggled to find broad consensus and legitimacy at local, regional, international, and global levels.
In recent decades, it has become increasingly clear that the promise of the Rio Earth Summit has not been realized apart from isolated successes with phasing out a short list of ozone-depleting chemicals like CFCs and controlling obvious neurotoxins like mercury. The democratic elections of Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, both of whom actively undermined principles and protections for the natural world, have further challenged assumptions about liberal market systems’ environmental virtues. Can the planet afford a messy liberal democratic process when the threats are so urgent?
In this context, then, eco-authoritarianism seems to some observers and scholars to offer a possible solution when other measures have failed. Among those who have revived the conversation is Mark Beeson, who writes, in “The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism,” that “good” authoritarianism, where unsustainable behaviors are outright banned, by fiat, is essential for the long-term survival of humanity (Beeson 2010). Predictably, the essay sparked refutations. For example, Dan Coby Shahar writes that even though liberal market democracy does not seem to offer much hope for the environment, eco-authoritarianism is “not an attractive alternative” because the ruling class may not be capable of producing or implementing pro-environmental policies over the long run (Shahar 2015). During the revived debate, many environmentalists continue to argue instead for cooperative global governance of environmental problems through better multilateral treaties and institutions, on the grounds of shared interests and the findings of scientists. Others seek to reform global trade by internalizing the environmental costs of production and making them more transparent, and by changing the mindsets of consumers. Still others see hope in empowering local communities and restricting the extractive power of international corporations (Clapp and Dauvergne 2011).
Scholars of coercive state-led environmentalism have turned their focus to China to flesh out the implications of managing the environment through authoritarian means. The empirical literature has generated valuable insights into three main dimensions of Chinese environmental governance. First, research has uncovered a range of governmental tools that characterize the state’s efforts to manage the environment. Often, technocratic elites take a dominant position in defining environmental problems in purely technical terms (Gilley 2012; Kostka and Zhang 2018). With these mechanistic approaches, officials set quantitative goals and targets for the ostensible purposes of monitoring environmental conditions and enforcing environmental standards (Kostka 2016; Yifei Li 2019). However, these targets give rise to “blunt force regulations” that over-enforce environmental mandates to the detriment of the livelihoods of ordinary citizens (van der Kamp 2017). Moreover, state-led environmental programs tend to orient toward outcomes but forgo transparency and justice (Johnson 2001; Chen and Lees 2018). On a positive