THE BIG STORY
And the end of 2017 was a critical dead-
line: nobody could object. The goodbye
to little coal furnaces was non-negotia-
ble, even if it meant freezing nights for
villagers.
China’s decisive move away from coal
as a primary source of energy is prob-
ably one of the few pieces of good news in
terms of humankind’s efforts to avoid the
worst of climate change. In a remarkably
short time span, coal’s share of China’s
energy pie dropped from 72 per cent in
2005 to 59 per cent in 2018; at the same
time, wind power has grown 173 fold,
nuclear 5.4 fold and solar energy from
virtually nothing to producing 170 giga-
watts (GW) a year, according to govern-
ment figures. Experts are predicting that
China’s carbon emissions will peak well
ahead of its Paris Agreement commit-
ment of 2030. As the US, under President
Trump, withdraws from climate leader-
ship, China’s actions are providing the
global community with a level of cer-
tainty and confidence.
The transformation of China from
the world’s environmental ‘baddie’ to
its ‘poster child’ in a matter of years is
both the result of catastrophic pollution
(‘airpocalypse’) leading to national soul-
searching and the top-down enforce-
ment of a green vision held by President
Xi Jinping himself. Compared to his
predecessors, whose environmentalism
was mainly rhetorical, Xi’s is much more
advanced. He is probably the first Chinese
leader to articulate an environmental-
ism that is built upon the idea of nature
as a ‘national asset’: he famously opined
that ‘green mountains are essentially
gold mountains’. In 2018, the concept of
‘ecological civilization’ was elevated to
unprecedented heights: it was written
into the constitution. At the same time,
the entire central government structure
was reconfigured to match Xi’s view that
China’s natural resources and ecological
wellbeing should be carefully protected
and managed.Environmentalism from above
Chinese environmental policymaking
did not, of course, begin with Xi Jinping.
In the years before his ascent to leader-
ship, there was a notion that the envi-
ronmental field, less politically sensitive
than other domains, could serve as a ‘lab’
for experimenting with ideas like infor-
mation transparency and participatory
decisionmaking. The thinking was that
these ideas could be tested in an area lessthreatening to the Communist Party’s
core concerns before being rolled out to
wider applications. In the early 2000s,
China’s environmental policy area saw
the trial of public hearings about Envi-
ronmental Impact Assessments, the
introduction of progressive freedom of
information rules and the expansion of
judicial access to communities affected
by environmental degradation.
But Xi’s green turn is different: its
realization is more reliant on centrally
controlled, top-down mechanisms. In
the past few years, the most visible envi-
ronmental campaigns have been run by
the Party’s disciplinary arm, detaining
thousands of government officials for
negligence and other offences. Public-
interest litigation, a key tool for holding
environmental violators to account, is
now brought more by government prose-
cutors than by NGOs. In a 2013 Politburo
meeting, Xi stressed an appraisal system
with clear indicators, rewards and pun-
ishments as the ‘most crucial’ to realizing
an ‘ecological civilization’.
This brand of environmentalism can
be effective, to an extent. As scholar Bruce
Gilley noted in his paper on China’s
‘Authoritarian Environmentalism’, the
model is good at producing ‘outputs’
rather than ‘outcomes’: ‘rapid-fire’ envi-
ronmental laws and regulations from the
top down delivers short-term, low-hang-
ing fruit results, but the lack of extensive
deliberation may undermine long-term
implementation.
The nature of China’s environmen-
tal programme means it almost entirely
relies on the efficacy of an expansive
state machinery to deliver results. But
the bureaucracy can be distracted or
overwhelmed by other priorities, while
the rest of society lacks the motivation
to sustain these environmental gains.
(There is a common phenomenon of
‘compensation pollution’ when, after a
period of production restrictions are
lifted, industries produce excessively to
compensate for the previous loss.) This
is in contrast to the United States, where
state and non-federal level environmen-
tal initiatives may continue to shape the
country’s environmental path at a time
when Washington retreats from climate
commitments. Even though China’s
elaborate state machinery may be the
envy of many governments struggling
to ‘get things done’, its non-participa-
tory way of doing business can lead to
poor decisionmaking. The error with22 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
In 2018, the
concept of
‘ecological
civilization’
was elevated to
unprecedented
heights: it was
written into the
constitution