Читать книгу China Goes Green - Judith Shapiro - Страница 12

Counterintuitively, the success of state-led environmentalism hinges not on a strong state, but on mechanisms that place state power in check. It is precisely the fragmented nature of Chinese state institutions, with their often conflicting lines of authority and tensions between the Party and the state, that has permitted de facto checks and balances. The Chinese state under the leadership of the Communist Party is no monolith. The state’s fragmentation gives it an advantage in governing a vast and complex nation, making possible pluralistic deliberations even under authoritarianism (Mertha 2009; Spires 2011; Teets 2018). However, the state’s efforts to consolidate and centralize power risk losing some of the elements that have contributed to China’s environmental successes. China’s progress in environmental governance would not have been possible were it not for the government’s consultation and collaboration with scientists, citizens’ groups, judicial authorities, entrepreneurs, and many other non-state actors that limit state power. The space for this is shrinking under an increasingly authoritarian regime. At the same time, some of China’s environmental programs have gone awry because the state chose to ignore non-state voices. The promise of state-led environmentalism can be fully realized only if the exercise of environmental power rests on a broad base of knowledge, perspectives, expertise, participation, and, ultimately, support. By the same token, some of the darker consequences of coercive practices can be avoided if an autocracy remains sensitized to the wide range of environmental sentiments and practices in the society at large.

The effectiveness of state leadership in environmental affairs is thus premised on its incorporation of civil society inputs into the policy process. Some environmental initiatives we examine in this book, such as the mandatory recycling program in Shanghai, afforestation by monoculture in Inner Mongolia, and the sudden switch from coal to natural gas in Northern China, went awry because the state went too far, too fast. By contrast, the state has done much better when citizens feel empowered to participate in environmental governance, or deploy “supervision by the masses” (qunzhong jiandu 群众监督). In fact, in examining the practice of environmentalism under Chinese authoritarianism, we discover pockets of democratic strength. Democratic confidence remains strong when scientists and activists join together to fight against hydropower dams, citizens use their smartphones to record and report polluters, artists and filmmakers discover creative means to shed light on the darker side of Chinese modernization, and students organize campaigns to clean up the plastic-littered coasts. These democratic moments may be short-lived, and some may be one-off events, but they speak to the strength of citizen determination even in the face of authoritarian environmentalism. These pockets of democratic strength are pivotally important in keeping state environmental power in check and environmental undertakings on track.

Seen in this light, the authoritarian environmentalism hypothesis operates on a false coupling between coercive environmentalism and authoritarian politics. In other words, environmental coercion need not always be authoritarian in nature. As the empirical chapters in this book illustrate, the Chinese state has been able to achieve durable success in some cases such as the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau, not because it acted in any way that was less coercive, but because the flexing of coercive muscle was based on extensive consultations with non-state actors ranging from international scientists to local peasants. Nevertheless, only with the backing of the state’s coercive power did the complex and elaborate rehabilitation plan materialize. Coercion came after consultation. We note that consultation often entails the messy legwork of meeting, talking, understanding, and ultimately appreciating different positions and interests. Yet consultation is key to achieving the kind of mutually agreed-upon coercion that Garrett Hardin saw as the only way out of the tragedy of the commons. Just as international environmental treaties are agreed-upon coercive instruments between nation states, much of environmental governance in subnational contexts can be fashioned into coercive measures that emerge out of a consensus-building process involving diverse and broad representations.

We are not suggesting that agreed-upon coercion is an easy process, but it is essential if the abuses and missteps chronicled in this book are to be avoided. During the consultative process, the state must be at once forceful and humble, even-handed and responsive, decisive and prudent, focused and inclusive. But instead, much of what we document in this book is the abrupt wielding of coercive and capricious power by state officials against the interests and wills of the people. We show a pattern of coercion that all too often lacks long-term vision, thoughtful planning, or sensible implementation. Driven by short-term bureaucratic self-interest, many Chinese officials have misused coercive policy instruments under the noble disguise of planetary sustainability. The resulting policies have advanced the state’s agenda for power consolidation but produced a mixed record in environmental and social terms. In the cases in which the state’s worst instincts were moderated by international actors or civil society groups, the restrained exercise of power produced more durable policies for the betterment of human and ecological conditions.

In China, examples of agreed-upon coercion are woefully difficult to find. Understood from this perspective, China offers less a model for global action than a cautionary tale. In fact, herein lies the inherent contradiction of state-led, authoritarian environmentalism. The effectiveness of the model is heavily dependent on non-state inputs, broad-based consultations, “supervision by the masses,” and similar processes that hold state power in check. Yet the authoritarian instinct is not to broaden and uphold such spaces of accountability and transparency, but to surveil, suppress, and subjugate them. As the state increasingly centralizes environmental power, it undermines the basis of its own efficacy. The state’s aggressive moves to limit the space for civil society are thus a disservice to the state’s grip on environmental power. To borrow a Chinese idiom frequently deployed by the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry when responding to international criticism, China’s brand of coercive environmentalism amounts to “lifting a stone only to drop it on its own feet,” or banqi shitou za zijide jiao 搬起石头砸自己的脚. In the final analysis, mutually agreed-upon coercion is only attainable when the state remains open to criticism and dissent, responsive to the intended and unintended consequences of its policies, and able to adapt to the changing conditions of the earth – features that are not yet characteristic of the Chinese state.

We hope that readers will find the book useful in three main respects: as a historical explanation, as a contemporary portrait, and as a guide to the future. Historically speaking, China has adopted an unprecedentedly systematic approach to authoritarian environmentalism by centralizing environmental management in the hands of the state. This form of state-led environmentalism is a comprehensive political program that is, on the one hand, based on seven decades of Communist Party experience with state planning, and, on the other, compatible with a full range of non-environmental policies of the PRC such as community-level supervision, urban planning, and media control. In recent years, China has successfully gathered all this into a national and now global strategy. Unlike the World Bank and other Western-style actors, China makes little pretense to this approach being equitable or democratic. Chinese state actors are unapologetic about the centrality of the Party. Our study of China, therefore, helps explain how the Chinese state systematized the exercise of authoritarianism. We draw from and contribute to a range of debates in the social science literature and popular press concerning authoritarian adaptability, responsiveness, pluralism, and durability. Using environmental governance as a point of entry, we cast light on some of the most long-standing theoretical issues in the study of Chinese politics in particular and authoritarian politics in general. This first point is the historical value of the book.

In the present moment, China is seeking to legitimate various approaches of state-led environmentalism domestically as well as globally. It is actively marketing its systematized environmental governmentality through soft and hard power promotion of its “going out” policy and Belt and Road Initiative, not only to its own citizens but also to those beyond its borders. In the current political context of rising illiberalism on a global scale, China has an audience. We therefore need better to understand exactly what China is marketing, as well as the broad environmental implications of a global China. This second point is the contemporary value of the book.

Finally, we have eyes on the future. Unlike periods when other state-led projects transformed landscapes, as when communist “ecocide” brought irreversible consequences to vast areas of the USSR in the 1950s, or agricultural modernization transformed rural Brazil in the 1980s, we are in the midst of a planetary crisis. By positioning itself as a civilizational leader in the Anthropocene, China is already leaving significant marks on the planet and playing a decisive role in shaping the future of humanity. This is because of not only the sheer size of the Chinese territory and population, but also the scale of its appetite for resources, the intensity of its environmental interventions, and the increasing interdependence between China and the world. This third point is the forward-looking value of the book.

A few caveats are in order. Even though our empirical focus is the Chinese state, the current study has implications beyond China. The environmental measures we examine are by no means wielded only by the state; powerful non-state actors have used such tools throughout the world. For example, that the Chinese have sometimes removed local people to create bordered national parks with high entrance fees reflects their adoption of “best practice” from other parts of the world. Big international conservation groups, Western governments, and even individual philanthropists have constructed fortress-style protected areas and nature parks, often forcibly dispossessing or excluding local communities whose traditional livelihoods relied on access. One notorious example is the Patagonia outdoor goods company CEO who bought up huge parts of Chile only to become one of the least popular figures in the region. There are many examples of wildlife parks in Africa whose creation so angered local communities that they actively hunted the endangered species the parks were intended to protect. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Shenandoah National Parks in the United States have similar histories of forcible relocation of native residents in the name of preserving nature.

Moreover, some of the authoritarian governmental tools we discuss in this book are not exclusive to authoritarian political contexts; they are often used in democracies as well. Quantitative goal-setting, for example, is standard fare in today’s global environmental politics, challenging established systems of rule-making in global governance (Young 2017). From the two degrees Celsius global average temperature threshold to local fuel efficiency standards across the world, the enterprise of global environmental governance is built on the extensive use of quantitative tools familiar to bureaucrats tasked with mandates and deliverables. In the political and economic reality of democracies, such authoritarian pockets are many. Similarly, in the name of safeguarding “carbon sinks” and preventing deforestation, Norway initiated the REDD-plus program to facilitate the transfer of funds from the developed world to developing countries, essentially transferring funds from wealthy countries to pay poor ones not to cut down their forests (the acronym stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). But the program can be highly unpopular with local people who have not been consulted and find themselves unable to use lands that have been in traditional usage for generations. Perhaps even more infamous are the “structural adjustment” packages that the World Bank and the IMF imposed on developing countries as loan conditionalities; critics have argued that they effectively remade recipient governance institutions so as to facilitate a vision of global trade and “sustainable” development that benefited Western corporate interests and forced livelihood changes in order to increase production of goods for export. These measures are top-down, heavy-handed, and problematic for those most immediately affected. In these and other examples of command-and-control environmental relationships outside of the China example, a diverse range of powerful actors sits at the command end, including big and powerful global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational businesses, and international development agencies.

And now a few words about who we are and why we wrote this book. We have spent our careers reflecting on the politics of environmental protection in China. Yifei Li is a native of Shanghai who completed his PhD in environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now teaches at NYU Shanghai. As someone who experiences China’s authoritarian system on a daily basis while writing about environmental governance, he draws on his professional experience as an ethnographer of the Chinese state as well as his personal interactions with environmental activists, ecological migrants, journalists, and scientists. Judith Shapiro teaches international environmental politics at American University’s School of International Service. Her intellectual focus has for many decades been the impacts of the Chinese state on ordinary Chinese people. She has written extensively about the Mao period, intellectual freedom in post-Mao China, and China’s environmental challenges under Mao and in the present. Independently, we have been reflecting on China’s implementation of a form of authoritarian environmentalism that is both attractive and worrisome. We are glad to be able to join forces to supplement each other’s understandings and experiences. Because of the speed of China’s rise, and the transformative depth and impact of this set of green authoritarian policies, a book addressing the implications of these phenomena seems urgently needed, even as the rate of change provides particular challenges. Emerging policies and techniques like the urban recycling mandate, the Belt and Road Initiative, big Earth data, and geoengineering technologies can be difficult to analyze because they change quickly.

In writing China Goes Green, our sources include personal experiences and conversations with a wide range of Chinese people, as well as our knowledge of the scholarly and policy literature about China, environmental governance, and the implications of China’s rise. We also draw upon news reports from mainstream publications like the New York Times and South China Morning Post and insider news streams like Sixth Tone, as well as official data and reports from Chinese government agencies. Our case studies build on the scientific literature in forestry, conservation biology, environmental chemistry, data science, climate science, and related fields. We are by no means experts in these fields, but we draw from peer-reviewed publications and convey their findings. The book is intended to be both argumentative and empirically grounded. We aim to organize the challenges so as to clarify them conceptually and provide a basis for debate.

This book is organized along spatial and chronological lines. Chapter 1, “Asserting ‘Green’ Control: The State and its Subjects”, examines the industrialized East, focusing on China’s domestic environmental governance. In Chapter 2, “‘Green’ China Pacifies its Borders,” we move to the less developed Western part of the country and border areas to focus on the forcible “ecological migration” of nomadic groups into settlements. Chapter 3, “The State on the ‘Green’ Belt and Road,” studies the international implications of China’s “ecological civilization,” as the country rises to become a world superpower and seeks to export a development model that is both green and state-led. Chapter 4, “Global China Goes ‘Green’,” focuses on China’s role in global trade, biodiversity, and climate, as the state finds its footing as a key contributor to the problems and a key actor in trying to find solutions. In these empirical chapters, we follow the protagonist of the Chinese state as it broadens and deepens its exercise of environmental power. We close with Chapter 5, “Environmental Authoritarianism on a Troubled Planet,” in which we reflect on the implications of our work and point toward the future.

We hope that this book will appeal to both academic and general readerships. Scholars of environmental studies, political science, sociology, geography, East Asian studies, development, political theory, and international political economy may find the book of interest, as it speaks to the ongoing debates in the social sciences about authoritarianism, the East Asian developmental state, the decoupling of economic growth and ecological footprint, ecological modernization, globalization, and the challenges of the Anthropocene. We have also tried to write in such a way that the book will be of interest to students and activists who are seeking a way forward on a planet that is losing ground against humanity and that many of them will inherit.

The prevailing sentiment in the West about China and the environment often entails two faces – pessimism over climate change and insecurity about a rising China. We do not provide a falsely rosy picture to counter either of these sentiments. Instead, we stress the importance of a systematic, evidence-based understanding of China’s exercise of environmental power. The empirical examples and cases in the chapters that follow have convinced us that the future of the planet hinges on the Chinese state’s efforts to go genuinely green. To do so, the state must trust the Chinese people to participate in environmental governance through “supervision by the masses,” rather than using a green cloak to obscure its current trajectory toward totalizing social control.