CHINAwatch

China’s Response to Climate Change: A Study in Contrasts and a Policy at a Crossroads

An Asia Society Policy Institute Issue Paper of July 2020 by David Sandalow, Inaugural Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, surveys China's remarkable achievements and contradictions on Climate Change in its run-up to its 14 Five Year Plan (2021-2025) (expected to be launched in October this year).

The following excerpts are instructive - 

• China leads the world in deployment of renewable power, with almost three times as much capacity as any other nation. In 2019, 36 percent of the renewable power capacity added globally was in China (down from 42 percent in 2018 and the lowest this figure has been in several years).
• The Chinese government has adopted some of the world’s most ambitious energy efficiency and forest conservation policies, but is financing a significant expansion of coal-fired power plant capacity at home and abroad. China’s leaders are strongly committed to the Paris Agreement, but appear to attach less priority to climate change than in years past.
• The Chinese government has announced four principal climate change goals:
  I. to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, making best efforts to peak early;
  II. to lower carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60 percent–65 percent from the 2005 level by 2030;
  III. to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy to around 20 percent by 2030; and
  IV. to increase the forest stock volume by around 4.5 billion cubic meters from 2005 levels by 2030.
• China is on track to meet all these goals. In fact, many analysts project that China is likely to achieve the first goal—to peak CO2 emissions—well before 2030. The second and third goals both appear to be achievable based on current trends. And the fourth goal was met in 2019—11 years ahead of schedule.
• Policies that promote solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power as alternatives to coal reduce both local air pollutants and heat-trapping gases. So do policies that promote energy efficiency. Policies that promote natural gas as an alternative to coal help reduce local air pollution by 90 percent or more and CO2 emissions by roughly 50 percent, provided the natural gas does not leak. Policies to promote electric vehicles provide significant local air pollution benefits and are essential to long-term decarbonization of the transport sector. 
• China has 48 nuclear power plants—the third-largest fleet in the world, behind only the United States and France. Of the 13 nuclear power plants in the world opened in 2018 and 2019, 9 were in China. In 2019, nuclear power provided roughly 4.6 percent of China’s electricity, up from 4.0 percent in 2018 and 3.8 percent in 2017. The Chinese government has ambitious plans to expand China’s nuclear-generating capacity. However, construction has not kept pace with the goals in the 13th Five Year Plan (2016–2020), which calls for 58 GW of installed nuclear power capacity and an additional 30 GW under construction by 2020. As of June 2020, China had 48 GW of installed nuclear power capacity and roughly 12 GW under construction.
• In the first half of 2020, the central government and many provinces adopted policies to promote EVs, including extended purchase subsidies and additional license plate quotas. In his May 2020 speech to the National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang identified investment in EV charging infrastructure and promoting greater use of new energy vehicles as economic stimulus priorities of the Chinese government.
• Implementation of China’s national CO2 emissions trading program has proceeded slowly. Delays have been due to data availability challenges, government reorganization, the inherent complexity of emissions trading programs and—most recently—COVID-19.
• China’s green finance policies promote investment in a wide range of assets, including renewable energy projects, water treatment plants, recycling facilities, and mass transit. In 2019, China’s green finance policies helped mobilize in the range of RMB 240 billion to RMB 280 billion ($34 billion to $40 billion) of green bonds for qualifying projects.
• During the next 18 months, the Chinese government will spend heavily on economic stimulus measures, release its 14th Five-Year Plan (for 2021–2025), and develop short- and long-term climate action plans (known as its “updated nationally-determined contributions” and “mid-century strategy” in the terminology of the global U.N. climate process).
• In the United States (where a Biden administration would dramatically change the federal government’s climate change policies), in Europe (where climate issues have especially high profile), in many poor developing counties (where vulnerability to climate change is most acute), and everywhere policymakers focus on climate change, Chinese policies will receive significant attention.
• Today, China’s climate policies are a study in contrasts—promoting low-carbon development and high-carbon infrastructure at the same time. The next 18 months are a critical time in Chinese climate change policy. Decisions by China’s leaders will have significant impacts on the global climate for years to come.  

China is a vast and ecologically-challenged country. With 20% of the world's population, it is endowed with only 7% of the world's freshwater. Moreover, the distribution of its water resources is extremely uneven: over 80% are situated south of the Yangtze River. A vast proportion of China's polluted lakes and rivers remain sub-standard in water quality. While impressive advances have been made in renewables, this has been offset by "curtailment" due to insufficient "smart-grids" to capture and redistribute wasted power in off-peak hours. Moreover, much of China's energy needs have to be met by coal. Air quality in cities have registered improvements but much is left to be desired. 

Suffice it to say that an ecologically "beautiful China" remains a key tenet of the China Dream, hopefully to be realized by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The vision is no longer a mirage but getting there is a long and winding road. 

China Is Done Biding Its Time? But what is America's end-game?

The End of Beijing’s Foreign Policy Restraint? poses the above question in Foreign Policy on 15 July, 2020. The piece is penned by Kurt Campbell, Chair and CEO of The Asia Group and former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with Mira Rapp-Hooper, Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The tour d'horizon summarizes a dramatic about-face of China's foreign policy, in rhetoric and action, from Deng Xiaoping's earlier "hide-and-bide" admonition. China's assertiveness on all fronts is thought to be exploiting the Trump Administration's AWOL on global leadership. The worldwide chaos resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic has created opportunities for a much more powerful China to overreach, thinking that its time has come as a Great Power. 

The authors conclude with the following observation: 

"Fortunately for the next U.S. president, the contours of a better American approach to China have been evident for some time. The United States must reject the punitive unilateralism that has become the norm in recent years and that has produced no trade or national security gains whatsoever. It must rejigger its relationship with allies in Europe and Asia, who provide its only remaining chance at balancing China in the decades ahead. It must reinvest in international institutions, such as the UN, the G-7, and the WHO, which are indispensable for crisis management and which China is all too happy to lead in the United States’ absence. And it must restore its own domestic health and prosperity to remain a viable competitor on the global stage."

Aside from the chances of a second-term Trump presidency, there is a robust bipartisan consensus in the United States that China has become an existential threat (or an "evil empire") with a totally different ideology. This is perceived to be eroding the America-led liberal global order, including American interests in trade, technology, the South China Sea, and ideology. There is widespread support for a robust all-of-government push-back on all fronts, with unilateral sanctions and decoupling where necessary, to exert maximum pressure in the hope of behavioral, if not regime change. It's no wonder that amid the Coronavirus outbreak, American negative views of China have jumped significantly, according to an April 21st PEW survey. 

As for traditional US allies, while wanting to resist China's assertiveness, neither Europe nor Asia wishes to be forced to take sides. This also applies to the rest of the world, with a few exceptions. This is because China has become the largest trading partner of 124 countries, compared to US's 76. China is deeply imbedded in the global complex supply-and-value chains, strategic decoupling notwithstanding. The seven-year period needed for the UK to decouple from Huawei is a case in point. So is the fact that some 90% of India's pharmaceutical industry depends on inputs of China's ingredients.

Another example showing how integrated China remains is the proposed launch in a year or so of the world's largest trading bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), where China, as the world's second largest economy, is set to be a leading partner. This encompasses all ASEAN countries and each member's regional trading partners. With India, it would account for 50% of the world's population and 40% of world GDP. Without India, which has recently withdrawn from engagement, the percentages would be 30% in both cases. 

As for global institutions, the Trump administration has been flouting the UN, lording it over the G-7, and dishing the WHO. It would take time and concrete examples to rebuild America's leadership. 

At the end of the day, there is a growing risk of misreading China's real intentions. China would be foolish to displace the United States as global leader as it remains unable and unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities. Nor would the world be prepared to accept this in view of China's ideology.

However, the Chinese Communist Party has been enjoying increasing support by the people across the board, according to a July 2020 Harvard Kenney School Ash Center survey Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time. It's only rightful for China to realize its China Dream of historic renaissance as a Great Power, bringing better and more dignified lives for its people, provided its trajectory is not seen to be at other countries' expense.

What is more, absent a pragmatic and constructive end-game, a plethora of paranoiac, no-holds-barred, get-tough actions on China could well end up with the very opposite of what these maximum-pressure tactics are meant to achieve, warns Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., in his July 17 commentary The United States Has Gotten Tough on China. When Will It Get Strategic? 

A World Politics Review of May 2020, US-China Rivalry in the Trump Era offers a panoply of analyses of multiple responses to the perceived China challenge. As one of the Review's leading authors Howard French wily observes, "Nonetheless, beyond vague calls for the U.S. to get its own house in order and reinvigorate its partnerships, which few sensible people can argue with, it is far from obvious what else Americans should do about the across-the-board challenge that China presents." The absence of a clear-eyed endgame is conspicuous. 

A Rand Corporation 2020 study China’s Grand Strategy: Trends, Trajectories and Long-Term Competition examines how successful China would be in realizing its China Dream of becoming a fully-developed nation by 2049. It outlines four scenarios: "triumphant", "ascendant", "stagnant" and "imploding", concluding that the middle scenarios are much more likely.

While generally balanced, the study quotes statistics no later than 2015. It somewhat under-estimates China's explosive consumption growth (38.8% of GDP in 2019, contributing 60% to economic growth), overplaying the importance of exports (only 17.4% of GDP (5% for net-exports) in 2019). It doesn't seem to do justice to China's rapid advances in e-commerce, 5G, big data, quantum computing, internet-of-things (IoT), its recently-completed global BaiDou Navigation Satellite System, and Tianwen-1, China's first Mars Probe Mission. It also seems oblivious to the above-mentioned Harvard Kennedy School's study on CCP resilience. In any case, its overarching response is America's military.

A Brookings Institution April 2020 study Preparing the United States for the Superpower Marathon with China underscores the imperative of geo-economic competition, defined by 21st century game-changing technologies like 5G and quantum computing. Apparently borrowing the competitive terminology from Michael Pillsbury's much-admired 2016 tome The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower , it argues that " If we are to prevail, we must  compete rather than contain China." It concludes that "The outcome of this geo-economic competition is by no means certain. .... If the U.S. fails to prepare for this superpower marathon, we will resign ourselves to becoming a second-rate power while the world looks up to a new global leader with strikingly different values and views." This gives some credence to the possibility of the China "triumphant" scenario in the above-mentioned Rand Corporation study.

With American hawks in the ascendant, a new US-China Cold War seems inevitable. Nevertheless, de-risking  it would be in everyone's interests. What is more, President Trump will never win his New Cold War with China , according to columnist Robin Wright of The New Yorker on 29 July, 2020, suggesting that principled engagement on areas of concern coupled with partnership on global issues like Climate Change is likely to be more productive.

New Cold War: De-risking US-China conflict

A June 2020 Hinrich Foundation report authored by research fellow Dr. Alan Dupont offers seven insightful recommendations (Chapter 4):

(1) Protect democratic values and interests;
(2) Maintain a military edge;
(3) Manage decoupling to minimize disruptions; 
(4) Reform the WTO; 
(5) Strengthen international cooperation, middle-power diplomacy and "back channels"
(6) Develop new cyber and tech rules, protocols and agreements 
(7) Integrate economic and security policy.

These recommendations have a great deal to commend themselves. They may, however, benefit from the following additional perspectives -

(a) Does China really want to dominate the world, with all the obligations, costs and pushback implied? Would achievement of its China Dream be better realized by upholding multilateralism and a global "community of common destiny"? If so, instead of baiting an awoken lion by stroking fears of a global "China Scare", would there be room to encourage greater mutual understanding and learning between the West and China as regards governance and norms, without necessarily negating one or the other? 

(b) As for decoupling, it's true that the idea has gained much further traction thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. So essentials like certain medical supplies and equipment plus products and components directly affecting national security are likely to see changes in their supply and value chains. But totally "cutting the Gordian knot" seems impossible, as Dr. Dupont quotes from John Lee of the Lowry Institute (page 28). This will become even more apparent with the coming Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest trading bloc, of which China will be a key Member. China has also indicated it may well join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Click here At many more countries already have China as the largest trading partner by far, the vast majority of nations do not want to be forced to choose between the United States and China. 

(c) As the world's Superpower, the United States already possesses overarching global military dominance on multiple fronts. It has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier battle groups compared with China's nascent and miniscule version. It has some 800 military bases in 70 countries and territories, compared with China's only spot in Djibouti. It's nuclear stockpile is some tenfold over China's. Would stroking fears about US global military edge risk a "security spiral" with China and Russia, feeding into the American "military-industrial-complex" vested interests at the expense of much-needed improvements of homeland infrastructure, healthcare and education? 

(d) A looming new Cold War with the United States and the global  Coronavirus backlash have taught China a huge lesson. Its coming Five Year Plan (2021-2025) is likely to focus on improving its own people's livelihood and environment. Click here  Would cooperation with China on global issues of common interests such as Climate Change, denuclearization, anti-terrorism, water scarcity, poverty relief, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and reform of China's Belt and Road Initiative, be more productive in de-risking US-China conflict?         

Worsening Australia-China relations and what to do about it

As highlighted in this live TV interview on 9 June, China has warned citizens not to travel to Australia due to increasing hostility towards its nationals.

As Australia-China relations are plummeting, Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister (1988-96), and currently with the Australian National University, offers a nuanced yet realist view of how to engage with a perceived "increasingly-assertive" China to achieve a truly win-win relationship.

Read his article How Not to Respond to China dated18 June, 2020 on an online platform of the Asia Global Institute, a University of Hong Kong think-tank. 

The Struggle for Power: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century

Leading up to the more robust, realist, and all-of-government pushback against China in the latest White House report United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China is the above 14-chapter book, The Struggle for Power: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century

The relatively concise, 14-chapter book was compiled earlier in 2019 by a team of distinguished American experts and scholars including Joseph Nye, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Pillsbury, Graham Allison, Elizabeth Economy, and David Shambaugh. The tome is a good read to understand the intensifying dynamics in US-China rivalry for economic, military, technological, and ideological dominance. 

 

United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China

It's now commonly thought that the "Thucydides Trap" confronting rivalling Great Powers has now well and truly sprung.  A "New Cold War" is happening in all but name between the United States as world hegemon and China its existential challenger. To understand America's perspective, the above White House report released on 20 May, 2020 is as timely as it is instructive. 

The Report outlines a robust, realist, results-based pushback on all fronts against China as the greatest threat to American national interests including the free, open, and rule-based world order led by the United States.

Its apparently-benign Conclusion reads as follows -

"The Administration’s approach to the PRC reflects a fundamental reevaluation of how the United States understands and responds to the leaders of the world’s most populous country and second largest national economy. The United States recognizes the long-term strategic competition between our two systems. Through a whole-of-government approach and guided by a return to principled realism, as articulated by the NSS, the United States Government will continue to protect American interests and advance American influence. At the same time, we remain open to constructive, results-oriented engagement and cooperation from China where our interests align. We continue to engage with PRC leaders in a respectful yet clear-eyed manner, challenging Beijing to uphold its commitments."

Concrete pushback against China across the board is already in full swing. This includes a massive tariff war, tightening chokehold on Huawei (the lodestar of China's 5-G advance), restricted academic access to US technological research, measures to decouple from China's supply chains, increase in "Freedom of Navigation Operations" in the South China Sea, stepped-up development of hypersonic weaponry, ratcheted-up criticisms of China's perceived human rights violations (Xinjiang), questioning China's Belt and Road Initiative, its green energy credentials, its rhetoric in building a global "Community of Common Destiny", and most recently, refusing to recognize Hong Kong's "One Country Two Systems"

The Report denies any sinister motive of regime change or China containment - 

"Our approach is not premised on determining a particular end state for China. Rather, our goal is to protect United States vital national interests, as articulated in the four pillars of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS). We aim to: (1) protect the American people, homeland, and way of life; (2) promote American prosperity; (3) preserve peace through strength; and (4) advance American influence."

"Even as we compete with the PRC, we welcome cooperation where our interests align. Competition need not lead to confrontation or conflict. The United States has a deep and abiding respect for the Chinese people and enjoys longstanding ties to the country. We do not seek to contain China’s development, nor do we wish to disengage from the Chinese people. The United States expects to engage in fair competition with the PRC, whereby both of our nations, businesses, and individuals can enjoy security and prosperity."

To Beijing, however, the Report's rhetoric masks a blatant attempt to interfere with and discredit China's chosen development path. Warts and all, China's own model has proved remarkably successful for the Chinese nation and its people. Fear of China's increasing economic clout and influence sustains the rhetoric of a global "China Scare". It ignores China's lack of willingness and capacity to take over America's global leadership. It is tone-deaf to China's repeated warnings that its model doesn't suit every nation. It flips China's national defensive strategy to an offensive military posture.  It underplays China's leading contribution to solar, wind and hydroelectric energies under the Paris Agreement (which the United States has torn up). As for the Belt and Road Initiative, it is meeting a glaring global deficit in infrastructural connectivity. It is being embraced by a host of countries including Western nations such as Italy and Greece, while China has acknowledged important room for improvement such as debt-sustainability, transparency and corporate governance.

Beijing is now widely condemned for trying to enact for Hong Kong's national security bypassing Hong Kong's legislature. This ignores a gaping national security loophole in Hong Kong's mini-constitution (Basic Law). This loophole has been created by decades of fierce opposition to enacting Hong Kong's national security safeguards (Article 23) under the Basic Law. The same anti-Beijing legislators now stand on the high horse that such law should be enacted locally.

The absence of sufficient national security safeguards became all too evident in Hong Kong's recent violent protests. Symbols of Beijing's sovereignty have been ransacked, police stations fire-bombed, and ordinary citizens with opposite views publicly lynched. Flags, slogans, and demands calling for Hong Kong's "independence" became a common sight. Prominent activists were lauded and given high-level meetings with very senior officials of hostile foreign powers. A generation of Hong Kong people have been brainwashed into total loss of a sense of nationhood. Many have been turned into radical subversives, aided and abetted behind the scenes by opportunist hostile foreign forces. 

In the eyes of many Chinese people, China's many failings notwithstanding, America's double-standards about democracy and human rights are glaring. Apart from friendly relations with Arabian autocracies, the White House's attitude towards current "George Floyd" protests against deep-seated American racism and social inequalities stands in ironic contrast to America's support and encouragement given to Hong Kong's remarkably similar fiery unrests. 

While the Report rightly flags up legitimate alarm and fears of a rising "authoritarian" China, it begs the question if China's real intentions are misread.  Taken to conclusions, such misreading may turn out to be the fuse igniting a catastrophic powder keg that may engulf the whole world. 

The Decline of the West: What is it and Why might it matter?

Published on 11 April 2020 by the Asia Global Institute, the above Paper by Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia, traces the Rise of the West, including its ideas and values and the creation of a liberal, albeit hegemonic world order underpinned by US dominance and the Bretton Woods Institutions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. This liberal world order has been embraced by and beneficial to most nations, including China. 

The Paper also synthesizes the Rise of the Rest, especially an increasingly powerful and assertive China which seems to question and undermine American hegemony. At the same time, rampant America First exceptionalism is scattering to the winds much of the ideas and values that uphold the global commons.  This poses the question whether the world will converge into a one-size-fits-all, Fujiyama's "End of History" model, and if not, what would become of the world order. 

While the West largely understands what the world's current hegemonic superpower wants, not many outside China really understand what China wants. While "international collective-action problems" like terrorism and climate change may offer some grounds for cooperation between rival great powers, misreading and misjudgement, especially after the occurrence of the Coronavirus pandemic, are likely to translate into fear and a security spiral that may spin out of control.

If sad chapters of history are not to repeat themselves, it is timely and instructive to deconstruct The China Mirage.  

"The China Mirage" - Timely revisit of America's tragic misreading of China

Author James Bradley's 2015 eloquent introduction to his seminal book The China Mirage is a timely reminder of the critical need for Americans to really understand what China, a fifth of humanity, is all about as a nation, and what its people and leaders want, if only to avoid misjudging China again to the detriment of all, America included. 

As a follow-up, award-winning journalist John Pilger's documentary The Coming War on China is a dark revelation of the dangerous paranoia and inhumanity into which the world's most powerful democracy can sink with a twisted narrative of China inflamed by American pride and prejudice. 

US: China secretly conducting small nuclear tests

Live TV interview with Press TV on 16 April, 2020. 

 

China succeeds in mass extraction of combustable methane hydrates in the South China Sea

According to a Weixin report (in Chinese) on 22 October, 2019, using a semi-submersible drilling platform (Blue Whale One) measuring 117m x 92.7m x 118m tall in the South China Sea, China achieved the world's first breakthrough in extracting scalable quantities of methane hydrates ("inflammable ice"). The project's inception was reported in the South China Morning Post on 19 May, 2017

The strategic significance is obvious. As the largest energy consumer, China has to rely on oil and gas imports over long distances through "choke points" (e.g. the Strait of Hormuz and the Malacca Strait) vulnerable to foreign powers. On the environmental front, China is the world's largest coal consumer, contributing to carbon emissions and smogs in many Chinese cities.

Methane hydrates are a lot less polluting but ten times more energy- rich per unit compared to coal, oil, and natural gas. It is estimated that one cubic meter of methane hydrates is equivalent to 160 cubic meters of natural gas.

The global reserve of methane hydrates is twice as much as all other known fossil fuels combined, enough for 1,000 years of human consumption. China's gas hydrates reserve is estimated at 100 billion tons of oil-equivalents, of which 80% lies in the South China Sea.

The successful extraction marks a significant milestone in utilization of alternative sources of energy for China. It also explains why China has been so assertive to safeguard territorial claims in the South China Sea.