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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4311-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4312-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Li, Yifei, 1978- author. | Shapiro, Judith, author.
Title: China goes green : coercive environmentalism for a troubled planet / Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Can China’s eco-authoritarianism save the planet?”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002554 (print) | LCCN 2020002555 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509543113 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509543120 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509543137 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental policy--China. | Environmentalism--China. | Authoritarianism--China. | China--Environmental conditions--21st century.
Classification: LCC GE190.C6 L54 2020 (print) | LCC GE190.C6 (ebook) | DDC 363.700951--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002554
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002555
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
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Acknowledgments
We are most grateful to two anonymous readers who helped us strengthen this book and to Isabella Baranyk, who provided exceptionally thoughtful and comprehensive feedback on drafts. We also acknowledge insightful comments and contributions from colleagues, friends, and relatives, including Jisho Warner, Elska Lennox, Rosa Shapiro-Thompson, Ivan Willis Rasmussen, Simon Nicholson, Jesse Ribot, Ken Conca, Craig Simons, and Bo Donners. Chen Qihang and Yuan Qianchun provided helpful research. Marcela Godoy generously shared her artwork. Tian Tian Wedgwood Young assembled the index. We are also grateful to our experienced editors at Polity, Louise Knight and Inès Boxman. Steve Leard designed an interesting cover, Neil de Cort expertly managed the production, and Ian Tuttle performed masterful copy edits. We are also immensely grateful to each other, for seamlessly building on the other’s strengths to create a much better book than either of us could have written on our own.
Introduction: The Rise of Authoritarian Environmentalism
A decade or so after the start of the twenty-first century, China’s policy makers appeared poised to assume global leadership on environmental protection. Where just a few years before, Chinese negotiators in global forums had argued vociferously for the primacy of international legal principles that protected developing country interests, China began to moderate its use of these arguments. Instead of focusing on the right to development, technology transfer from developed to developing countries, financing for mitigation and adaptation, absolute sovereignty over natural resources, and common but differentiated responsibilities, China’s leaders began to speak about climate change and other environmental challenges as shared global threats. Where at one time the country was seen as a primary obstacle to achieving consensus on these issues, China seemed to some observers as the last best hope for efforts to save the planet.
At around the same time, environmental governance was changing dramatically within China. Once seen as having weak environmental institutions with poor enforcement capabilities, China renamed and elevated the environment ministry to become the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, expanding and centralizing its portfolio of responsibilities to cover a broad range of pollutants including carbon emissions and water contaminants. Once seen as unable to control local officials who exploited lax enforcement to profit from pollution, China’s leaders changed criteria for performance evaluation to emphasize environmental protection and implemented severe punishments for local officials’ failures to fulfill environmental goals. Once seen as unable to enforce its assortment of environmental laws, China strengthened them, got rid of loopholes, created a system of dedicated environmental courts, and opened up the judicial process to environmental advocacy groups. Once seen as bent on destroying its own biodiversity, China reorganized the administration of protected areas and embarked on an ambitious program to conserve vast swaths of its West, under the authority of a new Ministry of Natural Resources. Once seen as holding open its door to some of the world’s most polluting industries and waste products, China banned them. The list could go on.
In 2009, at the Conference of the Parties to the UN climate negotiations in Denmark, observers excoriated China for undermining the talks. “How Do I Know China Wrecked the Copenhagen Deal? I Was in the Room,” wrote the Guardian’s Mark Lynas (2009) in a typical account. Widely seen as the villain for snubbing heads of state, blocking transparent public negotiations, and rejecting hard targets even for developed countries, China managed to weaken the talks and make it appear that rich countries had failed developing ones. China’s official position was characterized as wanting to “have it all,” leveraging its developing country status for reduced responsibilities, seeking to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change, and trying to achieve global recognition for domestic environmental efforts (Conrad 2012).
But by November 2014, everything appeared to have changed. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing, President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama jointly announced that each country would take ambitious steps to reduce carbon emissions. In a landmark agreement, President Obama used his executive power to commit the US to stop building coal-fired power plants; he promised that by 2025 the US would emit 26–28 percent less carbon dioxide than in 2005. United States action may have allowed President Xi to claim that the developed world was going first, as required under widely accepted international principles of common but differentiated responsibilities. For his part, Xi announced that China’s carbon emissions would stop growing by around 2030 and that clean energy sources would amount to 20 percent of China’s energy mix by that year. Some have argued that these commitments were likely a reflection of the path China had set for itself regardless of multilateral negotiations, given that reducing coal use would also achieve the “double win” of reducing ground-level air pollution and improving public health in addition to mitigating climate change. Nevertheless, the joint declaration was greeted with fanfare (Hilton and Kerr 2017). Cooperation between the US and China, which together represented 40 percent of global emissions, brought new life to the 2015 Paris negotiations, which did indeed result in tangible, albeit voluntary,
