9.2 The China-EU Conflict in Building Climate Rules
The efforts of the international community in addressing climate change challenges
are embodied in building global climate governance rules. As important participants
in global climate governance, China and the EU conflict and compete during rule
setting on the following two aspects.
Competition and arguments among countries during the establishment of the
rules for the assignment of responsibility for greenhouse gas emission reduction,
climate fund and technology management, performance review, etc. are definitely
not separated from the balance of national interests. Given the great differences in
developmental level, prospects for future economic growth, energy structure,
consumption structure, etc., the assignment of responsibility for emission reduction
will certainly impose different degrees of restrictions on the space for development
of the countries involved. Disagreements among countries about sharing the
responsibilities reflect the countries’struggle for developmental space and devel-
opmental rights.
China’s consistent principled stand on this issue is that developed countries
should assume the primary responsibility for global climate change and also have
relatively high economic and technological capability, thus developed countries
should make special contributions to prevent global climate change and should
become thefirst to take domestic actions for restricting and reducing greenhouse
gas emissions. Limitations on carbon dioxide emissions that the international
community plans to carry out in order to protect the global climate should be
established on the premise of guaranteeing moderate economic development and
rational per capita energy consumption in developing countries; any restrictive
provision relating to the Convention should not be detrimental to the economic
development of developing countries.^19 The EU has expressed inconsistent posi-
tions by changing from the position that does not require developing countries to
assume responsibilities to the position that requires developing countries, especially
BRICs including China, to assume legally-binding responsibility for emission
reduction. Change in the EU’s stand reveals increasingly prominent competition
between China and the EU in building climate mechanisms.
First, conceptions about the emission reduction target put forward by China and
by the EU are different. At the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, China
announced a voluntary action target for reducing unit GDP emission by 40–45 %
by 2020 compared with 2005 and also proposed that developed countries on the
whole should reduce emission by 40 % on average by 2020 compared with 1990.
The EU proposed that developing countries should take proper actions to reduce
emission by 15–30 % by 2020 compared with their BAU scenario (Business As
Usual scenario), and required that the emission reduction actions of developing
(^19) China’Principled Stand on the Global Environmental Issue, adopted by the Environmental
Protection Commission of the State Council on July 6, 1990,http://www.ep898.com/view1.asp?
id=1073, accessed on February 27, 2013.
174 F. Cong