The Inconvenient Case of China
Global environmental politics are in a dire state. Despite the proliferation of environmental treaties and policies, there are no countries currently on track to deliver a green transition at anything like the speed required to counter the global trends towards environmental and ecological breakdown. Serious questions must therefore be asked about the accepted premises not only of environmental governance, but of governance more generally—not the least of which is that, if the capitalist democracies of the West are so failing to meet the major challenge of our age, what form of political system could actually implement the kind of effective climate policy we so urgently need?
Proposals are many and varied. Perhaps, some argue, the state should play a more prominent, even unprecedented, role in the economy—an “environmental state”, “big green state” or a giant centralized “electrostate”, say. Or, better yet, could it be some form of ecological “war communism” or “climate leviathan”? Others call for the disciplining, or even coercion, of private capital towards environmental ends, whether by the state or by various other actors, ranging from central banks to credit rating agencies. More still hark back to the view propounded by environmentalists since the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report in 1972 and call for an alternative political economy—one not beholden to the capitalist injunction to grow the economy at all costs, but instead some kind of de-growth or post-growth economic model.
Alongside the much-debated analytical and empirical features of what the green transition is, comparable energy is devoted to the necessary or practical prescriptions of what the green transition should be. Should it, for instance, be voted for by the majority? Or should it be led by workers in order to ensure just outcomes?
Yet, in all this debate and discussion, thesis and counter-thesis, there is almost always a constant: whatever else, all seem to agree that the transition, if it is to come, must be democratic for it to be effective. Whether people advocate for the Green New Deal or the just transition, some form of green capitalism or a new ecosocialism, received wisdom says that if democratization is not the key then, at the very least, it is a central mechanism to achieving anything like a proper green transition. Whatever limitations of democracy are laid bare by the faltering and spluttering states of the Global North, the need for democracy—perhaps a “better” or more “true” democracy—remains.
Above all hangs the ever-present spectre of China. Indeed, to the dismay of many in the West, it is now more difficult than ever to avoid the question of China’s dominance in environmental matters, not least in the productive industries required for a green transition. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the country currently boasts over 80 per cent of global solar manufacturing production, 75 per cent of global electric vehicle (EV) registrations and 80 per cent of global lithium-ion battery manufacturing. Of many of the inputs of green technologies—including of cobalt, gallium, graphite and lithium—China now refines up to 90 per cent and plays host to around 50 per cent of installed nuclear capacity.
Such is China’s dominance in these technologies that countries across the world now face a striking dilemma: should they compete with China, or should they simply give in and import more goods from this new green behemoth? Of course, there is a third option too, one that countries like the US are now flirting with: to abandon the green transition altogether and double down on fossil-fuelled growth.
As political scientist Mark Henderson puts it, today “all hinges on China”. That is so even though China remains the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels. The country’s natural environment, meanwhile, has incurred decades of sustained damage due to the “growth at any cost” mantra of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with impacts ranging from air quality once so poor it was referred to as an “airpocalypse”, to around 60 per cent of the country’s water supply being polluted. China’s national Net Zero commitment is also later than many in the West, with China’s goal of achieving this by 2060 some ten years further away than the 2050 of the United Kingdom, the European Union and Japan. Yet, as these problems increasingly give way to the country’s Dual Carbon Goal—or 30–60 as it is known[1]—and the principles of “ecological civilization"[2] and “high-quality development”,[3] Henderson’s provocation seems more solid than ever.
But what makes China particularly inconvenient for those who believe democratization to be the key to any future transition is that all of this has been achieved in the absence of democracy. The green transition in China is being produced by an authoritarian party state that sits at the heart of Chinese political economy. The CCP does not seek approval at a ballot box for its decisions. Instead, they are made primarily by the Politburo Standing Committee, a seven-person political leadership body of Chinese politics led by Xi Jinping. Appointments to the Standing Committee are made by the committee itself, which chooses candidates from the 24 members of the Politburo. The political will of the committee is thereafter executed by the State Council before it is diffused through the apparatus of the Chinese state, from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). Approval from the people in China is therefore borne out in the outcomes of these decisions, known as “performance legitimacy”, rather than by electoral votes.