observers feared China might feel released from its own responsibilities. Instead, President Xi Jinping reasserted China’s commitment to fulfill its obligations and to uphold multilateralism, signing a pact with French president Emmanuel Macron recommitting to the agreement. In so doing, China assumed the moral high ground as compared with the United States and spurred even more hope that China would become the new global leader on climate change.
This has not yet come to fruition. During the December 2019 Madrid negotiations, China joined other big carbon emitters such as India and Brazil in resisting more ambitious targets. Together with members of the bloc called the G77 plus China, it insisted that developed countries had to uphold their 2015 Paris commitments before developing countries could commit to new ones. When the US and other wealthy countries balked, talks came to a stalemate. While there was plenty of blame to go around for the failure of the talks, especially with respect to the destructive role of the US, China was singled out for once again being unwilling to assume the kind of global leadership it had flirted with four years before.
Nonetheless, on the face of it the Chinese state appears indeed to be offering the world a green vision. After an astounding period of economic growth since the 1980s, during which the country became both the world’s manufacturing hub and also one of the most intensely polluted places on the planet, the central leadership has issued hard-nosed policy changes intended to resolve China’s environmental crisis. Green China boasts solid achievements, especially in the clean technology industry. China in 2012 surpassed the US to become the world’s top wind energy user as measured by installed capacity (Lam et al. 2017). The growth of its solar sector helped drop world prices by 80 percent from 2008 to 2013 (Fialka 2016). The Chinese State Council has committed national support for hydrogen fuel-cell and battery-powered electric cars, with the eventual goal of totally eliminating gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles (K. Wang 2018). China is the world’s largest manufacturer and buyer of electric vehicles, including 99 percent of the world’s electric buses. China has built tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail, using cutting-edge technology to shrink distances among cities and integrate the country into a vast, energy-efficient transit network. China has shut down the import of low-grade recyclables and hazardous e-wastes, switched heating systems from coal to natural gas, and outlawed ivory sales. Rhetoric about low-carbon lifestyles, the circular economy, sustainable development, ecological civilization, resilient growth, and green development is inescapable. By these measures, it seems indeed that China has gone green. This book will deconstruct and challenge that assertion.
Ecological Civilization as Political Philosophy
These rhetorical and regulatory shifts toward “green” China may be traced to a rethinking of the country’s guiding political philosophy. For a struggling developing country emerging from Mao-era chaos in 1979, economic growth seemed the most important national goal. Ideological work to define and introduce “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – a formula that promoted the free market in a nominally Marxist society – was required. This formula helped make China the manufacturing hub of the world. But the explosive growth came at an unacceptable environmental cost, one that risked social upheaval and loss of legitimacy for the Communist Party. The country’s core ideological principles needed revision and updating so as to provide guidance to address deepening post-Mao social and economic contradictions like inequality, unemployment, and consumerism, all exacerbated by the befoulment of China’s air, water, soil, and food.
In China, to a degree unheard of in the West, major policy shifts must be justified through debate and agreement over underlying political philosophy. Supported by an extensive network of government think tanks, Party schools, and Marxism research centers at universities, the one-party system relies on ideological consensus for the country’s overarching direction. In 2007, under Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao, “ecological civilization,” or shengtai wenming 生态文明, became an explicit goal of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2012, the phrase was enshrined within the Party Constitution, and six years later within the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. With the successful elevation of this phrase to the level of official political philosophy, the latest iteration of the Party’s ideological work came to fruition. Xi Jinping’s ubiquitously quoted line encapsulates this: “Clear waters, green mountains are in fact gold mountains, silver mountains” (lüshui qingshan jiushi jinshan yinshan 绿水青山就是金山银山).
“Ecological civilization” garners widespread support across China’s broad and sprawling state apparatus because it projects the Party’s rule as both historical and visionary. Ecological civilization is described first and foremost as a continuation of China’s developmental path under the leadership of the Communist Party – transforming from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization under Mao Zedong, then to material civilization under Deng Xiaoping, and now to ecological civilization under Xi Jinping – a faithful reincarnation of Marx’s theory of the stages of development with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, on the world stage the phrase frames the Chinese nation as a leader of a rejuvenated civilization, reviving nationalistic fervor in a nation that has emerged out of its “century of humiliation” under Western and Japanese imperialism. Thus, in light of the tremendous political appeal of ecological civilization, China’s go-green efforts are inextricably linked to the political and ideological ambitions of the state.
As a political philosophy, ecological civilization builds on two schools of thought, both with Western roots. These are ecological Marxism and constructive postmodernism. The former understands the commodification of nature as lying at the heart of contradictions that may spell the eventual demise of capitalism. The latter attempts to integrate the best characteristics of tradition and modernity, both as a philosophical thought experiment and as a practical path toward harmony between humans and non-human ecology. More than 20 Chinese government research centers are dedicated to debating and refining these concepts for the Chinese context, including, for example, the Center for Ecological Civilization at the Chinese Academy of Governance. Such centers spearhead domestic philosophical debates and provide the underpinnings for constitutional changes, legal initiatives, and broad policy directions like five-year plans and national directives. Within Chinese think tanks, analysis of China’s environmental problems in the context of achieving ecological civilization often focuses on the negative influence of interest groups and capital, on the unhealthy “worship” of economic growth and development, and on the risks of an overly anthropocentric worldview (Z. Wang et al. 2014). In recent years, the discursive appeal of the phrase has enabled Chinese top leaders to institute governance reforms and reorganization and to promote technological innovations for environmental protection.
Alongside China’s domestic efforts, international forums and publications laud China’s newly articulated guiding philosophy. The world’s environmental advocates have expressed admiration and even envy that ecological considerations have received such high levels of official endorsement. Ecological civilization is widely interpreted as China’s effort to resolve tensions between environmental protection and economic development through concrete initiatives such as renewable energy promotion, carbon reduction, and reforestation. The phrase has become a focus of international optimism that China may be offering the world a visionary set of guiding principles, a sort of “sustainable development with Chinese characteristics” that both preserves China’s distinctive traditions and governance system and confronts the problem of capitalist overexploitation of global resources (Zinda et al. 2018). Some have speculated that ecological civilization embodies “the potential for a more assertive and confident China to assume a stronger leadership role in global environmental debates” (Geall and Ely 2018). Excitement around China’s prominent adoption of the concept has sparked conferences sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (Sawyer 2015). Typical scholarly work includes such titles as Barbara Finamore’s Will China Save the Planet? (2018), Arran Gare’s The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future (2016), and Joanna Lewis’s Green Innovation in China: China’s Wind Power Industry and the Global Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy (2013). Ecological civilization thus figures
