coercion is only attainable when the state remains open to criticism and dissent, responsive to the intended and unintended consequences of its policies, and able to adapt to the changing conditions of the earth – features that are not yet characteristic of the Chinese state.
We hope that readers will find the book useful in three main respects: as a historical explanation, as a contemporary portrait, and as a guide to the future. Historically speaking, China has adopted an unprecedentedly systematic approach to authoritarian environmentalism by centralizing environmental management in the hands of the state. This form of state-led environmentalism is a comprehensive political program that is, on the one hand, based on seven decades of Communist Party experience with state planning, and, on the other, compatible with a full range of non-environmental policies of the PRC such as community-level supervision, urban planning, and media control. In recent years, China has successfully gathered all this into a national and now global strategy. Unlike the World Bank and other Western-style actors, China makes little pretense to this approach being equitable or democratic. Chinese state actors are unapologetic about the centrality of the Party. Our study of China, therefore, helps explain how the Chinese state systematized the exercise of authoritarianism. We draw from and contribute to a range of debates in the social science literature and popular press concerning authoritarian adaptability, responsiveness, pluralism, and durability. Using environmental governance as a point of entry, we cast light on some of the most long-standing theoretical issues in the study of Chinese politics in particular and authoritarian politics in general. This first point is the historical value of the book.
In the present moment, China is seeking to legitimate various approaches of state-led environmentalism domestically as well as globally. It is actively marketing its systematized environmental governmentality through soft and hard power promotion of its “going out” policy and Belt and Road Initiative, not only to its own citizens but also to those beyond its borders. In the current political context of rising illiberalism on a global scale, China has an audience. We therefore need better to understand exactly what China is marketing, as well as the broad environmental implications of a global China. This second point is the contemporary value of the book.
Finally, we have eyes on the future. Unlike periods when other state-led projects transformed landscapes, as when communist “ecocide” brought irreversible consequences to vast areas of the USSR in the 1950s, or agricultural modernization transformed rural Brazil in the 1980s, we are in the midst of a planetary crisis. By positioning itself as a civilizational leader in the Anthropocene, China is already leaving significant marks on the planet and playing a decisive role in shaping the future of humanity. This is because of not only the sheer size of the Chinese territory and population, but also the scale of its appetite for resources, the intensity of its environmental interventions, and the increasing interdependence between China and the world. This third point is the forward-looking value of the book.
A few caveats are in order. Even though our empirical focus is the Chinese state, the current study has implications beyond China. The environmental measures we examine are by no means wielded only by the state; powerful non-state actors have used such tools throughout the world. For example, that the Chinese have sometimes removed local people to create bordered national parks with high entrance fees reflects their adoption of “best practice” from other parts of the world. Big international conservation groups, Western governments, and even individual philanthropists have constructed fortress-style protected areas and nature parks, often forcibly dispossessing or excluding local communities whose traditional livelihoods relied on access. One notorious example is the Patagonia outdoor goods company CEO who bought up huge parts of Chile only to become one of the least popular figures in the region. There are many examples of wildlife parks in Africa whose creation so angered local communities that they actively hunted the endangered species the parks were intended to protect. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Shenandoah National Parks in the United States have similar histories of forcible relocation of native residents in the name of preserving nature.
Moreover, some of the authoritarian governmental tools we discuss in this book are not exclusive to authoritarian political contexts; they are often used in democracies as well. Quantitative goal-setting, for example, is standard fare in today’s global environmental politics, challenging established systems of rule-making in global governance (Young 2017). From the two degrees Celsius global average temperature threshold to local fuel efficiency standards across the world, the enterprise of global environmental governance is built on the extensive use of quantitative tools familiar to bureaucrats tasked with mandates and deliverables. In the political and economic reality of democracies, such authoritarian pockets are many. Similarly, in the name of safeguarding “carbon sinks” and preventing deforestation, Norway initiated the REDD-plus program to facilitate the transfer of funds from the developed world to developing countries, essentially transferring funds from wealthy countries to pay poor ones not to cut down their forests (the acronym stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). But the program can be highly unpopular with local people who have not been consulted and find themselves unable to use lands that have been in traditional usage for generations. Perhaps even more infamous are the “structural adjustment” packages that the World Bank and the IMF imposed on developing countries as loan conditionalities; critics have argued that they effectively remade recipient governance institutions so as to facilitate a vision of global trade and “sustainable” development that benefited Western corporate interests and forced livelihood changes in order to increase production of goods for export. These measures are top-down, heavy-handed, and problematic for those most immediately affected. In these and other examples of command-and-control environmental relationships outside of the China example, a diverse range of powerful actors sits at the command end, including big and powerful global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational businesses, and international development agencies.
And now a few words about who we are and why we wrote this book. We have spent our careers reflecting on the politics of environmental protection in China. Yifei Li is a native of Shanghai who completed his PhD in environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now teaches at NYU Shanghai. As someone who experiences China’s authoritarian system on a daily basis while writing about environmental governance, he draws on his professional experience as an ethnographer of the Chinese state as well as his personal interactions with environmental activists, ecological migrants, journalists, and scientists. Judith Shapiro teaches international environmental politics at American University’s School of International Service. Her intellectual focus has for many decades been the impacts of the Chinese state on ordinary Chinese people. She has written extensively about the Mao period, intellectual freedom in post-Mao China, and China’s environmental challenges under Mao and in the present. Independently, we have been reflecting on China’s implementation of a form of authoritarian environmentalism that is both attractive and worrisome. We are glad to be able to join forces to supplement each other’s understandings and experiences. Because of the speed of China’s rise, and the transformative depth and impact of this set of green authoritarian policies, a book addressing the implications of these phenomena seems urgently needed, even as the rate of change provides particular challenges. Emerging policies and techniques like the urban recycling mandate, the Belt and Road Initiative, big Earth data, and geoengineering technologies can be difficult to analyze because they change quickly.
In writing China Goes Green, our sources include personal experiences and conversations with a wide range of Chinese people, as well as our knowledge of the scholarly and policy literature about China, environmental governance, and the implications of China’s rise. We also draw upon news reports from mainstream publications like the New York Times and South China Morning Post and insider news streams like Sixth Tone, as well as official data and reports from Chinese government agencies. Our case studies build on the scientific literature in forestry, conservation biology, environmental chemistry, data science, climate science, and related fields. We are by no means experts in these fields, but we draw from peer-reviewed publications and convey their findings. The book is intended to be both argumentative and empirically grounded. We aim to organize the challenges so as to clarify them conceptually and provide a basis for debate.
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