China as The Global Environment Leader in The 21st Century

Introduction

After three decades of exceptional economic growth, China has become a global economic powerhouse. As the economy has grown, though, so have China’s environmental challenges, causing enormous socioeconomic consequences for China and the rest of the world. The global financial crisis has prompted China to create more domestic demand for consumption and implement massive infrastructure construction. Despite China’s many efforts to protect the environment and improve resource use efficiency, increasing environmental pollution and resource scarcity have become a severe bottleneck for sustainable development. Because of China’s size, these and other challenges and opportunities have huge implications for the world.

China’s environmental state

Traditional Chinese culture, known as Confucianism, pits men against nature. This notion is articulated by the popular idiom stating that “man must triumph over nature”. There is evidence of environmental governance which can be traced back to at least the Western Zhou dynasty and the Book of Rites that local officials were responsible for protecting their local rivers, mountains, forests, and animals. Confucian teachings also call for the reverence of nature, while other Chinese spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Daoism, advocate a harmonious relationship between people and nature.

The father of the nation; Maoist policies have left three major marks on the current state of environmental governance in China. First, the development- first mind-set remains highly influential, among both government officials and the general public, in shaping attitudes about environmental protection. Only recently has environ-mental protection moved to the forefront of China’s policy agenda. Second, policy decentralization and the nomenklatura system continues to encourage fierce competition among local official, which has contributed to rapid economic growth. Third, Maoist campaign-style governance is still prevalent in today’s environmental management practices.

China’s modern environmental state was born in the 1970s. In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment convened in Stockholm, with China attending as a new borne member. In August 1973, China’s State Council (the Cabinet) convened the country’s first national conference on environmental protection. As early as the 1970s, the central government recognized the pitfalls of the developmental trajectory followed by countries that had previously industrialized. The 1973 Decision’s emphasis on ex ante pollution prevention, rather than ex post abatement represented a sea change in China’s approach to environmental governance and demonstrated the central leadership’s awareness of the problems associated with the “pollute first, control later” mode.

Two main features marked the development of China’s environmental state. The first was the rapid promulgation of laws, policies, and regulations concerning environmental protection; and the second was the expansion of China’s bureaucracy charged with environmental protection. As mentioned earlier, China’s first national environmental protection law, formally titled the Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China, was passed by the National People’s Congress (NPC) in 1979.

Among its many provisions, the law allows local governments to pass their own laws, policies, and regulations on environmental protection. Subsequently, dozens of national laws and hundreds of local regulations were adopted over the following decades. As of 2016, China has 20 national environmental laws passed by the NPC, nearly 200 national environmental regulations issued by the State Council, and more than 1, 000 local environmental regulations adopted by local people’s congresses.

In addition to powerful bureaucracies, state-owned enterprises also have substantial influence in the environmental policy-making process. Indeed, much of China’s energy sector is still dominated by a handful of large companies. For example, the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) together account for 72 percent of the country’s annual crude oil output, 75 percent of annual refined oil output, and nearly 90 percent of annual natural gas extraction. [endnoteRef:8] So, the state owned enterprises were often able to use their outsize political influence to reshape energy regulations or simply ignore them.

Market based environmental governance: Since the late 1980s, a gradual shift has occurred from a command-and-control style of environmental regulation; the type characterized by technological mandates to an adoption of more market-based policy tools. When the environmental sector is governed through market mechanisms, the basic tenet is the creation of economic incentives for specific policy actions.

Examples includes putting a price on pollution through Pigouvian taxes or cap-and-trade programs, as well as providing compensation for maintaining ecosystem services. Over the past three decades, China has initiated several waves of policy experimentation as part of an effort to curb SO2 emissions using pollution trading systems.

The first phase of emissions trading development occurred between 1990 and 1994, during which pilot trading programs were established in six cities. Later, during the tenth period (2001–2005), inaugurated the 4 + 3 + 1 program by selecting four provinces, three cities, and one company to take part in a pilot program for SO2 emissions trading, most up-to-date evaluation of China’s SO2 trading programs. China’s experiences with the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism, in which rich countries invest in low-carbon projects in developing countries to claim carbon credits. Under the direction of the NDRC, China participated in more CDM projects than all other developing countries combined.

In the case of Chinese carbon markets, policy development was extremely rapid. Carbon emissions trading was featured in China’s foreign policy for the first time in 2010. The following year, the NDRC approved seven pilot programs in five cities and two provinces, and, by 2014, all the programs had become operational. Finally, after less than two years of pilot program experimentation, the central government announced its intention to implement a nationwide carbon trading system in 2017.

In addition to adopting emissions trading schemes to deal with pollution, China has established large-scale payment for ecosystem services (PES) plans. Of these efforts, the Grain for Green program, also known as Farmland to Forest and Sloping Land Conversion, is the most notable example [endnoteRef:12]The Grain for Grain initiative sets aside sloped farmland with payments deliverable in cash or grain in order to protect forests that surround the headwaters of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. According to official statistics, by the end of 2013, more than 100 million farmers had participated in the program, with roughly 25. 8 million hectares of croplands successfully converted into forest.

During the 2013 meetings of the NPC and the National People’s Political Consultative Conference, the State Council unveiled plans to reshuffle various ministries and streamline their responsibilities. In September 2016, the power to nominate city-level EPB directors was transferred from city governments to provincial EPBs, although city “approval” was still required to confirm nominees. If all goes according to plan, this new rule will make local EPB directors significantly more accountable to vertical supervision.

Global threat or global peace?

According to the notion of power structure transformation, when any state becomes wealthier and more powerful, it will inevitably seek greater regional and then world-wide political influence, which will cause a change of the power-structure in the region and in the world. The change of the power structure caused by the rise of a newly established regional and world power usually poses a long-term danger for the security of the region and even for the stability of the world. According to the power structure analysis, China is a threat to the security of the East Asia region and the United States and its main ally in East Asia, Japan. Thus, Asia is likely to see more international conflicts in the near future.

For Lemke and Warner (1996), war is most likely when the power of a rising, dissatisfied country becomes equal to that of a dominant state, the US, in this case. Then power parity provides the opportunity to act for those who are committed to changing the status quo. The phenomenon has been applied to China as a rising power seeking to change the status quo in the East Asia region. Moreover, China’s desire to make change to the international status quo can be explained by China’s historical memory of past greatness and the desire to regain its Middle Kingdom status; its determination to erase the painful legacy of a century of national humiliation; its desire to recreate the traditional Sino-centric world order as a means of regulating political and economic structures of the world; and its belief that China’s external security in the past was primarily assured by a strong state.

On another note, given the dramatic increase in its economic development, China, since the 1970s, has begun to modernize its armed forces by, in a large part, importing advanced weapons from overseas. This has led many observers to argue that China will not only seek hegemon in East Asia, particularly its territorial claims over the South China Sea, but it will also assert its influence in the global sphere, which will most likely lead the US to counterbalance against China’s assertiveness, and if this situation persists, an hegemonic war would be on the horizon.

Although many scholars have expressed their pessimistic views of the threat of China’s rise on global security, others who belong to the liberalist group positively see China’s rise as opportunities for global economic cooperation and international peace. Friedman (1999), for instance, states that a new international system which is globalization, has now clearly replaced the Cold War. Globalization, the integration of markets, finance, and technologies in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small, enables each of us to reach around the world farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

The globalization process has also improved the deepening of mutual influence of the economies in various countries, and China is no exception. In other words, China has adjusted its attitude toward the world economic system from self-reliance to cooperation. China has already become a member of the IMF, the World Bank, and other international economic institutions and has been very active in those institutions that it once condemned as tools of capitalist imperialism. The cooperative and integrative nature of the Chinese government clearly shows that China has the willingness to integrate itself into the world market system and catch up with the quick pace of globalization.

Conclusion

Since the WW2 has ended, USA had been the global patron of disseminating democracy, free trade, judiciary, human rights and protection for the environment. The former Barack Obama administration even try to seek endorsement with the Paris Agreement which aims to strengthen global response in the threat of climate change signed in November 4, 2016. But with the president -ship of Trump and his ‘America First’ agenda has been created a new dimension in the climate diplomacy.

The reshuffling of the world order can be found through some conspicuous events- US’s withdrawal from the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), a failure negotiation of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, US’s performance in the COP 22, and finally the more nationalistic approach of the senators of Trump cabinet. All these have paved the way for China to wake up and steer the oar without the oarsman. Though the country had been always reluctant of climate change policy has transformed itself into a potential climate leader.

In the 13th Five Year Plan of China, it was clear that China’s leadership had identified low-carbon technologies, it is trying to develop a more sustainable economy rather than growing GDP. It’s already investing more than the US in clean energy and has invested more than $88billion to the US’s $59billion already. “As the US loses goodwill, China is building it, ” says Alex Wang, an environmental law professor at the University of California Los Angeles.