China Goes Green

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Judith Shapiro. China Goes Green

Contents

Guide

Pages

China Goes Green. Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet

Copyright page

Map

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Rise of Authoritarian Environmentalism

Ecological Civilization as Political Philosophy

A Global Call to Action

What is State-led Environmentalism?

Authoritarianism in Green Clothing

Towards Mutually Agreed-upon Coercion

1 Asserting “Green” Control: The State and its Subjects

Campaigns and Crackdowns

Environmental Campaigns

Justifications and Risks

Target-setting

Targets Gone Awry

Behavior Modification

Environmentalism at a Price

Notes

2 “Green” China Pacifies its Borders

One-size-fits-all Policymaking

Afforestation by Monoculture

The Loess Plateau as an Unscalable Success

The Industrialized Forest of Uxin Banner

Green Grabbing: Hydropower as Ecological Civilization and Modernization

Green Grabbing as a Tool of Government Control

Citizen Resistance: The Nu River and Tiger Leaping Gorge

Ecological Migration: Sedentarizing Nomads and Building Parks

Protected Areas and National Parks

Pacifying Borderlands in the Name of the Environment

3 The State on the “Green” Belt and Road

The Belt and Road Initiative and the Environment

Win-win Green Development

The Quest for Soft Power

Green Technocracy

A Morass of Contradictions

4 Global China Goes “Green”

Mastering the Trade Game

Banning Global Waste Imports

Withholding Rare Earths

Curbing the Endangered Species Trade

Engineering China’s Atmosphere

Blue Skies or Bust

Constructing “Sky River”: Weather Modification on the Tibetan Plateau

Outer Space Environmentalism: The Digital Belt and Road

Geoengineering the Earth’s Climate

Mining the Moon

The Sleeping Lion Awakes

5 Environmental Authoritarianism on a Troubled Planet

Environmental Fix

Authoritarian Resilience

Techno-political Underpinnings

Transactional Logic

Indispensable Civil Society

Consultation under State Leadership

References

Index

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Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro

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.

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Third, the rise of China’s state-led environmentalism reflects a broad trend toward power centralization under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. For example, measures to tackle “airpocalypses” in urban areas have followed a top-down model that excludes even lower-level officials from the political process, making environmental programs part of a much larger authoritarian agenda of state control and power centralization (Ahlers and Shen 2018; Kosta and Zhang 2018). Although centralization is often assumed to produce better environmental results (Gilley 2012), it is not a panacea when the central government lacks adequate information about complex local realities (Kostka and Nahm 2017). Moreover, in an increasingly authoritarian era, the state has embarked on aggressive initiatives to use emerging technologies and big data analytics to buttress the centralization of environmental power (Kostka and Zhang 2018). Existing research on China points to the emergence of a highly centralized “hard” authoritarian model of government (Shambaugh 2016), under which environmental policies become a vehicle for the consolidation and centralization of state power (Yeh 2013). The state profits from the environmental crisis by projecting itself as the sole legitimate steward of the environment.

Such dynamics are not limited to authoritarian regimes, although they find their starkest expression there. As Naomi Klein and others have argued, natural disasters can sometimes provide opportunities for capitalist societies to impose neo-liberal policies that might otherwise have been resisted (Klein 2010). This problem is related to what some scholars identify as the “environmental fix” for the capitalist crises of our time. David Harvey’s classic analysis of late capitalism points to its tendency to “fix” or deal with overaccumulation and underconsumption through global expansion into new spaces, temporarily displacing the crisis that results from such contradictions by finding new resources and markets (Harvey 1985; Bakker 2004; Castree 2008). State-led environmentalism can, and often does, serve non-environmental ends to strengthen the authority and reach of the state.

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