for some international observers.
A Global Call to Action
At least some of this international scrutiny must be traced to an awakening to the crisis of the Anthropocene, the idea that the outsized human impact on global ecosystems has created an entirely new geologic epoch unlike anything in the planet’s long history. From this perspective, our planet is on the brink of becoming unlivable. Atmospheric scientists from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that climate change will be more severe than even some pessimists anticipated; activists are calling for an immediate end to fossil fuel extraction and use in order to avert catastrophe. A similarly authoritative UN panel, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, sees a biodiversity emergency with more than one million species on the brink of extinction. With his “Half Earth” call to action, biologist E. O. Wilson argues that no less than 50 percent of the earth’s land and sea must be protected from development. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has become a voice for the younger generation’s rage, denounces her elders at climate change conferences and demands to know why they have failed to act on the “existential crisis” that threatens humanity. Complicated and interconnected environmental challenges comprise what philosopher Stephen Gardiner (2011) calls “a perfect moral storm” confronting humanity. At a deep ethical level, our existing political, scientific, and social institutions are ill-prepared for the current ecological crisis.
For many scholars and activists, the urgency and gravity of the planetary situation justify decisive state interventions. Authoritarian environmentalism – the use of authoritarian methods to accomplish environmental goals – has a particular appeal at this historical moment. At a time when liberal democratic states repeatedly fail to address environmental problems, it is tempting to feel that draconian measures are needed, or at least worthy of serious consideration. Authoritarian environmentalism seems like a logical alternative to messy, gridlock-prone democracies that require unacceptable compromises with special interest groups. In autocracies, by contrast, policies that in democracies are subject to drawn-out political debates have been instituted almost overnight. In 2018, for example, Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte ordered a six-month closure of the tourism-dependent island of Boracay for its failure to meet environmental standards. During the rehabilitation period, hundreds of hotels and restaurants were shut down for environmental violations and the island’s shoreline easement zone was fully restored. In stark contrast to environmental inaction in liberal democracies, illiberal political regimes have often demonstrated impressive decisiveness in combating environmental problems, from bans on plastics to mandated increases in renewable energy use.
In that context, enter China, which has one of the world’s longest-lasting authoritarian governance systems and also one of the most explicit commitments to environmental protection. This is despite its well-deserved reputation for being one of the smoggiest places on the planet. China exemplifies a model of state-led, authoritarian environmentalism which concentrates political, economic, and discursive power within the parameters of the state under the centralized leadership of the Communist Party. Rather than sharing and balancing environmental tasks with independent scientists, entrepreneurs, and citizens’ groups, the state aims to monopolize the production of environmental knowledge and policies, the innovation of environmental technologies and their deployment, and the implementation and practice of environmental protection.
State-led environmentalism is accomplished through concrete mechanisms: centralized and targeted disbursement of research funding, channeling of industrial subsidies and support for state-owned enterprises, and guided media programming about the environment that is censored if it challenges state authority. Environmental NGOs and scientists are forced to cooperate with the state if they wish to survive, playing a delicate game of testing boundaries and carefully monitoring the prevailing political winds. By simultaneously expanding the regulatory scope of the state to encompass a growing range of environmental issues and co-opting non-state actors into the state’s environmental agenda, the Chinese state goes green.
China seems, on the face of it, to embody hope for a radically new approach to governing the planet, and given the limited time we have left to slow the pace of climate change and protect more than a million species from extinction, we need to consider whether a “green” authoritarian China can show us the way. In The Collapse of Western Civilization, a semi-fictional narrative of a post-apocalypse world of climate collapse, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the rise of a “Second People’s Republic of China” because of the supposedly superior model of state-led environmentalism that China practices. They conjecture that, from the perspective of an apocalypse survivor looking back, “China’s ability to weather disastrous climate change vindicated the necessity of centralized government … inspiring similar structures in other, reformulated nations” (Oreskes and Conway 2014, p. 52).
The imagined scenario is not without basis. China’s clean energy revolution has led some observers to view China’s approach as “developmental environmentalism” – industrial development of the sustainability sector that follows national priorities dictated by the state (Kim et al. 2019). This concept draws from the extensive scholarly literature on the East Asian “miracle” of economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s. The secret recipe, many have argued, was the East Asian “developmental state” that played a central role in shaping and implementing national industrial priorities. China’s success in green technologies is also due to favorable state policies. However, as we will see in the examples and cases presented in this book, the developmental environmentalism framework is insufficient to explain China’s environmental ambitions, which encompass many aspects of economic, political, and social life beyond clean technology.
As we look more closely, we see that China’s track record of environmental success has often been accomplished through top-down, non-consultative coercive measures at the cost of citizen rights and livelihoods. China’s state-led environmental action needs to be understood in a broader context: China is also the world’s largest repressive state. For evidence, one need look no farther than the state’s intrusions in Xinjiang and Tibet, its harassment of unauthorized Christian house churches, its internet Great Firewall that filters out whatever the state deems “unhealthy,” and its introduction of facial recognition technologies that track and assign “social credit scores” to every resident.
We may also consider the state’s handling of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak as evidence of the limits of the authoritarian governance model. While the state displayed apparent decisiveness in restricting travel from the hot zone, the lockdown came only after a lengthy delay that allowed five million people to leave for Spring Festival holidays. Record-time, ten-day construction of quarantine hospitals was admirable and would likely have been impossible in a non-authoritarian context, but this feat must be balanced by the fact that the state initially censored the findings of medical personnel and even detained doctors who attempted to share their concerns about an emerging SARS-like virus on a medical chat group. Other weaknesses in China’s style of authoritarian governance show in the poor regulation of the wildlife markets that allowed the virus to jump the species barrier, as well as chaos in the provision of testing kits, masks, and medical care. Mistrust and anger resulted.
The admirable green policy developments under China’s authoritarian system must similarly be set against the egregious pollution of water, soil, and air, unremitting environmental burden on the disadvantaged, globalizing appetite for resources, and export of carbon-intensive production (Power et al. 2012; Simons 2013; Shapiro 2015; Lora-Wainwright 2017). As Financial Times journalist Leslie Hook (2019) writes, China “is both the greenest in the world, but also the most polluting.” Domestically, China is plagued by entrenched environmental challenges such as soil and water contamination, cancer villages, airpocalypses, and unabating pollution from rare-earth mining and other ecologically destructive undertakings. Even with respect to coal mining and consumption, actual trends countermand the promises made at APEC and in Paris. (China blames the US trade war for making it increase the percentage of “cheap” coal in its energy mix.) Internationally, China’s export of coal-fired power plants,
