It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

From recurring “airpocalypses” that send air pollution indexes off the charts and an insatiable demand for timber and mineral resources to President Xi Jinping’s promises to lead in global climate negotiations and share the model of “ecological civilization” through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the world’s most populous country has become the most critical to understanding global environmental politics. With Western democracies challenged to sustain even modest cuts to carbon emissions and most global consumers largely oblivious to the environmental impacts of their buying habits, it can be tempting for some to entrust environmental governance to a stronger, more authoritarian system.Whether such a system can work, and what its collateral costs would be, may determine the fate of the global environment in this century. Three additions to the growing bookshelf on Beijing’s ecological policies agree: “What happens to China environmentally in the 21st century matters deeply—for everyone” (Gardner, 221); “The fate of their nation and the fate of the planet depend greatly on” the Chinese people (Smith, 196); in short, “Everything seems to hinge on China” (Li and Shapiro, 147).When, starting in 1978, the Chinese Communist leadership turned away from Chairman Mao Zedong’s collectivist vision of economic development, they opened the door for the “sprouts of capitalism” to turn China into the “factory to the world” and, four decades later, the world’s third-largest and fastest-growing major consumer market (World Bank 2019). In the 1980s, China’s economic reforms seemed to hold the potential to reverse much of the environmental damage of the Mao years—ill-advised agricultural practices imposed from above without regard to local conditions, inefficient and polluting state-owned enterprises undisciplined by either market forces or effective regulations. And if China could make the transition to sustainable development, it could be a model for the planet: ecologist Baruch Boxer (1989) called China “perhaps the world’s best case study of whether an ancient, poor, and huge agricultural society can make the transition to economic and technological modernization while maintaining the natural productive capacity and the health of its people.”A generation or so later, there is less room for optimism. The economic reformers adopted a “pollute first, clean up later” approach to environmental pollution, accepting the logic of the hypothesized environmental Kuznets curve—that just as the more developed countries had passed through stages of more polluting, heavy industrialization before adopting their increasingly strict environmental standards, China’s first goal should be to climb that economic ladder before worrying too much about the ecological consequences. But the world was in a different place when China arrived at the starting line for industrial development, whether in terms of the cumulative effects of greenhouse gas emissions and threats to biodiversity or the proliferation of plastics and other toxic chemicals involved in modern manufacturing. The natural productive capacity is strained; public health is in jeopardy. Cleaning up later might be too late.Daniel K. Gardner’s contribution, Environmental Pollution in China, meets the goal of its subtitle (and the name of the Oxford University Press series to which it belongs): each section is posed as a question to which the answer is something “everyone needs to know.” After making the case that pollution in China is a matter for global concern—whether because of the transboundary movement of contaminated air and water or because so much of China’s economy is export oriented—Gardner surveys the historical and cultural setting for today’s environmental challenges with concise, usually two- to three-page responses to questions like “What do China’s major schools of thought suggest about the relationship between human beings and the natural world?” (26) and “What accounts for China’s economic growth since the late 20th century?” (31).Environmental Pollution in China then turns to by-the-numbers chapters on major categories of pollution and its consequences, from air and water to public health and policy responses. The numbers are not good: for example, under “What is contaminating China’s water resources?” (75–79), we learn that 90 percent of urban rivers are polluted and half of all lakes are “unfit for human contact.” Agricultural runoff, untreated sewage, and industrial effluents—both intentional and accidental—explain the sobering statistics, largely drawn from English-language journalistic and academic sources. Later, under “what are cancer villages?” we learn more about the consequences of industrial discharges into drinking water supplies, contaminating drinking water and foodstuffs.Gardner aims for a careful balance in answering the question, “Has the Chinese government been responsive to the challenges posed by pollution?” Crediting Premier Li Keqiang’s 2014 declaration of a “war on pollution,” Gardner comments that “the impression held by too many in the West … that authorities in China care only about economic development, no matter the cost to the environment … is outdated” (165–167). That’s followed by a list of key policy actions, from participating in the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to elevating the environmental ministry to State Council rank in 2008; budgeting billions toward plans for combating air, water, and soil pollution in the 2010s; and setting the goal in the thirteenth Five Year Plan of meeting 15 percent of the country’s energy needs with nonfossil fuels by 2020. Building an “ecological civilization” is now enshrined as a key national goal.On the other hand, when pointing to the efforts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to address the environmental and health costs of China’s development strategy, Gardner acknowledges that “it is unclear whether, in the end, the government will, or can, institute an effective, targeted remediation program for the hundreds of cancer villages” (109). More generally, Environmental Pollution in China acknowledges that environmental protection bureaus are limited in their ability to enforce central directives in the face of policies promoting urban development, not to mention many local officials’ financial ties to industrial ventures.In China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, Richard Smith gives little credence to the antipollution pronouncements of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders like President Xi or Premier Li. When it comes to ad hoc campaigns and crackdowns on industrial pollution or tainted products, “China’s demoralized citizenry has heard this all before” (65). Smith reviews many of the same facts and figures as Gardner, though eschewing bullet-point lists for anecdotes from a comprehensive survey of decades of English-language journalism and a smattering of Chinese publications too. Among the startling comparisons, we learn that China’s heavy–metal–contaminated farmland covers an area the size of Belgium, and “by U.S. EPA standards, large swaths of China … would count as Superfund toxic waste sites.” The scale of these problems calls into question the “clean up later” strategy: “What are the Chinese going to do? Scrape off the surface of Hunan province and put it ‘away’ somewhere? Where?” (62–63).Smith points a finger at global consumer capitalism: “Cheap Chinese labor spurred the biggest boom in global consumption in history,” replacing all kinds of durable goods with cheaper disposables that “in turn spurred an unprecedented acceleration of global natural resource plunder,” as well as a growing stream of e-waste and plastic pollution (10–11). But pollution in China is worse than almost everywhere else. Smith argues that this is not because a well-meaning state is struggling to control it but because the system itself is heavily invested in “graft-driven growth.” Out-of-control localities and too-big-to-fail state-owned enterprises have leveraged cheap credit and free land, displacing farmers to overbuild new factories, roads, airports, and entire “ghost cities” in a frenzy of “supply without demand” (24). Without the discipline of either market forces or a truly planned economy, and with stakeholders in civil society either suppressed or bought off, the CCP’s “bureaucratic-collectivist capitalism” has become “the leading driver of climate collapse” (xxii).How, then, to explain the flip side of China’s environmental profile—the massive investments in wind and solar farms, the feats of pollution control that achieve blue skies for international events, and President Xi’s leadership in climate negotiations? With China Goes Green, Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro delve deeper into the political logic that has turned environmental rhetoric and action into tools for CCP leaders to maintain their power. Having staked the legitimacy of the party on raising the standard of living in China, leaders live in fear of protests and public dissent over quality-of-life issues like pollution or tainted products. When confronted with environmental crises that can’t be ignored—spikes in urban air pollution are a prime example—the CCP resorts to its long-standing practices of mounting propaganda campaigns and sending in teams for short-lived crackdowns. Old habits of favoring technocratic solutions and imposing one-size-fits-all policies from above (“cutting everything with the same knife,” or yidaoqie in Chinese) are hard to break, to the extent that the environment ministry launched a campaign to “crack down on environmental yidaoqie” in 2018 (90). The martial language of a “war on pollution” echoes that of Mao’s “war on nature” (the topic of an earlier book by Shapiro).Most critically, China Goes Green shows how expressing environmental concerns provides a green cloak for an increasingly authoritarian central state, connecting with the broader academic literature as well as journalistic works from inside and outside China. In one memorable example, a 2019 municipal waste and recycling mandate led to confusion and inconvenience as Shanghai residents were required to sort their garbage into perplexing categories and deposit it under the supervision of “waste inspectors” during limited hours. The new system drove an informal economy of recyclers out of business while requiring a new enforcement mechanism to levy fines for trash-sorting violations. Invoking James Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State, Li and Shapiro write that “the new waste policy … seeks not only to modify citizen behavior to go green, but also compels citizens to adhere to a state-centric frame of mind” (69). Similar motivations appear to underpin efforts to exclude indigenous residents from new national parks and to sedentarize nomads on China’s periphery.The problem with these top-down, state-centric environmental policies is that they so often don’t work. A 2017 mandate to replace coal with natural gas for heating a region of 110 million people around Beijing—surely a good idea in terms of air pollution and carbon emissions—went awry when local officials, eager to meet their job expectations, destroyed coal-fired heaters before the natural gas supply was ready to meet the demand of a cold winter (61). A tree-planting initiative intended to rehabilitate degraded lands in the arid northwestern Loess Plateau perversely made things worse when officials tried to “scale up” planting of fast-growing trees beyond the region’s ecological capacity (86–87).Of the three works under review here, China Goes Green is the only one to have gone to press after the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Li and Shapiro find the timeline of events in Wuhan typical of the system that hinders effective action on environmental and public health issues: “risk-adverse local officials, for whom stability outweighs transparency, await[ed] guidance from superiors before taking action,” with catastrophic consequences for the world (39). Chinese scientists “fought state officials’ bogus claims” that downplayed the danger of the virus and “circumvented the state censorship apparatus by publishing” in international journals until they, too, were blocked at the end of January 2020. To Li and Shapiro, the lesson for the CCP should be that “the state produces better policy outcomes when its regulatory efforts are complemented by non-state inputs” (198–199). Indeed, some of the consultative institutions built into the Chinese system of governance from the Mao era, along with the officially sanctioned environmental NGOs and a nascent environmental judiciary, can fill this role if they can operate without fear of transgressing ever-shifting ideological boundaries.All three works give cause for alarm about the international implications of China’s environmental policies. Environmental Pollution in China cites figures that attribute to China more than a quarter of the plastic waste in the world’s oceans, along with air pollutants that strain relations with neighboring countries and have been tracked across the Pacific to North America. Gardner balances those observations by noting that US companies are finding business opportunities helping China combat pollution and that, facing even worse urban air quality, “India would do well to learn from the Chinese experience” (60). China Goes Green devotes a chapter to the BRI, China’s global push to build “soft power” partnerships and concrete infrastructure projects around the world. While the BRI is nominally cloaked in the language of spreading China’s “ecological civilization,” the more obvious impacts are its destruction of marine habitats for new ports and its construction of coal-fired power plants in partner countries (at several times the rate of China’s own touted wind and solar farms). China’s Engine keeps the focus on coal and carbon emissions: Smith sees no way to meet China’s current or projected energy demands without igniting a global climate catastrophe. The only solution is radical economic change: “Get off fossil fuels, downsize consumption of energy and all resources, and not use ‘green’ energy to consume even more” (86).At a point in history when the climate is in clear jeopardy and authoritarianism seems to be on the upswing, what Li and Shapiro dub the “environmental authoritarianism” of the CCP under Xi Jinping may seem like a small price to pay if it could save the planet from ecological collapse. The litany of statistics and headlines, anecdotes and studies, presented in these three works makes it clear that heavy-handed central authorities fail more often than they succeed at solving environmental problems. What environmental progress has been made, in China and elsewhere, is more often driven by messy processes—local and transnational protests, scientists free to share research, feedback from consumers to producers, leaders responsible to their constituents. Whether the Chinese people will stand up to the CCP over its engine of environmental collapse, as Smith hopes, or whether the CCP can meet today’s challenges by drawing on its more collaborative underpinnings, as Li and Shapiro urge, it all hinges on China.