Cambridge; Oxford; Boston; New York: Polity, 2020. 245 pp. (Map.) US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-509-54312-0.
China Goes Green by Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro seeks to explain “not only the environmental implications of the Chinese green state, but also many of the non-environmental consequences of authoritarian environmentalism” (22). The core argument of the book is that instead of a means to achieve an end goal of sustainability, environmentalism in China is actually a means to strengthen the party-state’s authoritarian resilience.
To my knowledge, this timely book is the first one to systematically examine the non-environmental consequences of coercive state-led environmentalism in China. It greatly contributes not only to the literature on China studies, but also to mainstream comparative environmental politics.
This book aims to deconstruct China’s green image under the era of Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization.” Since 2012, China’s leadership has been using a green “China Dream” discourse that connects domestic environmental actions to global leadership on climate change and the “glorious revival” of the Chinese nation. As this book shows, Xi Jinping often speaks of green policies in glowing terms, such as “clear waters, green mountains are in fact gold mountains, silver mountains” (6). However, whether and to what degree the Chinese leader’s lofty green political rhetoric has been translated into environmental outcomes in practice has become a major question in the study of Chinese environmental politics and policy.
The gap between the glorious green Chinese dream and its reality is often explained by a phrase from the Yuan dynasty: “heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.” Within China, people generally trust the central government’s will to fight pollution and global warming, but they are dissatisfied with the efficacy of local government, which is an inverse pattern to that seen in the United States, where the federal government enjoys less trust than that found at local levels. This “blame local government” discourse sees the major obstacle to China’s climate governance in local governments and officials who turn blind eyes to polluters in their jurisdictions, ignoring good policies from higher up.
Li and Shapiro’s book makes a significant academic contribution to challenge and deconstruct this “giving credit to central government and blaming local government” discourse in China’s environmental politics. They illustrate how green policies have helped the state to strengthen citizen surveillance and geopolitical power. The authors conceptualize coercive state-led environmentalism from three dimensions. First, “state-led environmentalism materializes through a range of top-down governmental tools, techniques and technologies that have the ostensible goal of environmental protection.” Second, “the state manages its relations with the society by incorporating some non-state environmental interests while maintaining and consolidating its dominant position.” Third, “the practice of state-led environmentalism has non-environmental spillover effects, most notably on the centralization of political power and the suppression of individual rights and public participation” (20).
To empirically test the above arguments, the book identifies pollution crackdowns, centrally administered campaign-style inspections, target setting, behaviour modification, forcible relocations, big data monitoring, and manipulating global trade and geoengineering as the primary governmental instruments employed in the name of environment. The authors conclude that China has learned that “cloaking investments and partnerships in ‘green’ is an effective technique to buy acceptance” (196). Therefore, a more accurate term than “authoritarian environmentalism” would be “environmental authoritarianism,” which resonates with the comparative environmental politics literature.
From the perspective of comparative environmental politics, the rise of “environmental authoritarianism” (EA) reflects the long debate in comparative environmental politics about the relations between regime type and the state’s environmental performance. Considering the climate and environmental challenges faced by liberal democratic systems, critics have questioned the better environmental performance of liberal democracies and especially their capability in leading global climate change governance. The concept of environmental authoritarianism was created to bring together these doubts on democracy as a favourable and capable environmental decision-making and governance model. China is widely regarded to be a prime example. Supporters of environmental authoritarianism assume that a centralized undemocratic state will prove to be essential for major responses to the growing, complex, and global environmental challenges.
Li and Shapiro’s book is deeply engaged with this debate and provides a clear and simple solution. In their opinion, “authoritarianism is the end and environmentalism is the means” (24). They hold that a state-led, coercive, authoritarian style of environmental governance is not a new paradigm but an “emerging strategy to fold environmental concerns into the concatenation of the techno-political interests of the Chinese state” (23).
This book can further inspire readers to critically ponder the following four questions:
First, from the methodological point of view, how can one empirically test the differences between the intentional and unintentional outcomes of China’s state-led environmentalism? Despite the recent centralization trend, China’s environmental state is still fragmented, such that different agencies have their own agendas and bureaucratic interests. Therefore, a question that needs to be further explored is who or which agency within China’s fragmented environmental state gains more credit by using environmentalism as the “clothing” of authoritarianism, and who gets more blame when it fails?
Second, what are the criteria with which to evaluate a state’s “genuine commitment to core environmental and social values” (196)? Deep ecologists believe that ecology should have its own moral and legal rights, order, and meaning, independent of its instrumental benefits for human use. But the supporters of sustainable development and liberal environmentalism are often using the environment as a tool to fulfill their non-environmental goals, such as economic growth, prosperity, human rights, and election victories. Despite upholding the ideology of ecological civilization, the Chinese government does not officially believe the natural environment per se has its own meaning and end. China is not unique in this aspect; few countries or ruling parties in the world have adopted a deep ecology ideology.
Third, why did the Chinese government intentionally select “green” as the “clothing” of authoritarianism? Could it be a risky double-edged sword for the party-state’s maintenance of its legitimacy? In the formerly communist Eastern European countries of Ukraine and Poland, environmental crises led to national social movements that presented significant challenges to their governments’ political legitimacy. Do the political elites in China have the same concern that using environmentalism as the “clothing” might result in “lifting a stone only to drop it on its own feet,” as the old Chinese proverb predicted?
Last but not least, why does the Western liberal world still want to cooperate with China on climate change governance if China is not genuinely interested in green values and only using environmentalism to maximize its power in the international community and increase control of its own institutions and citizens?
Scholars, students, and general readers, especially those who are seeking answers to the above questions, will enjoy Li and Shapiro’s thought-provoking book on China’s environmental authoritarianism.
Ran Ran
Renmin University of China, Beijing