China goes green: coercive environmentalism for a troubled planet

China Goes Green is a timely wake-up call to two illusions: first, that authoritarian regimes with centralised power are more effective in environmental governance and second that China’s experience can function as a model for other countries to follow. This book systematically considers the ‘non-environmental consequences of authoritarian environmentalism’ (p. 22), which reveals the cost and consequence of China’s style of state-led environmentalism.

It refutes the thesis of authoritarian environmentalism by challenging its assumption that authoritarianism is the means to achieve the end of sustainability. Li and Shapiro put forward the notion of environmental authoritarianism as their in-depth and longitudinal empirical observations reveal the common practice of cloaking a political agenda with green discourse. The first two chapters investigate the logic and tools of environmental governance within China. In economically prosperous parts of China, coercive measures such as campaigns and crackdowns, target-setting, and behavioural modifications have been deployed. Those measures create an impression of the strong environmental will from the state, and at the same time, transfer the responsibility to local officials (p. 55), citizens (pp. 65–73), and small businesses (p. 75). In this way, the central government is immune to criticism from the populace despite suffocating air pollution.

Coercive authoritarianism is taken to the next level when the authors shift their gaze towards the borderland where environmental governance is entangled with multifaceted ethnic minority policies. The treatment of ethnic minorities, in the name of environmental protection, further supports the overarching argument that environmentalism in China is a means to the end of authoritarian control. An additional set of coercive measures are explained through the case of afforestation, hydropower construction, and ecological migration. Statistics on each of these can impress international audiences: China contributed a quarter of the planet’s net increase in forestry from 2000 to 2017 (p. 80), has a quarter of the world’s installed hydropower capacity (p. 93), and over two million people have been resettled in the banner of grassland restoration (p. 105).

Yet as the authors trace the stories behind the statistics, the issue of environmental injustice emerges as green discourse is used to justify pressuring the ‘minority’ to give up their culture, identity, tradition, and ways of life to serve the need and interest of the state. Key coercive tools include one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter policymaking insensitive of local livelihood, green grabbing and forcible resettlement. It is ironic that local inhabitants, together with their ecological wisdom and expertise, are removed from the efforts to preserve an ecosystem in which they are an organic part. Instead, Han cadres who have neither emotional attachment nor local knowledge take the helm to control and manage the borderland.

The image of a green China is coercive and draconian domestically, and strategic and assertive abroad. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for instance, is claimed to usher in an era of ecological civilisation, even though its essence is to export over-capacity of heavy-polluting industries such as coal-fired power plants. The painting of BRI as an intrinsically green project accentuates the role of technology to compensate for China’s poor domestic record in environmental justice and social equity. Data collection and citizen surveillance, for instance, are what the Chinese regime proudly offers to its partners as technological solutions to environmental problems. A digital BRI not only exports China’s environmental fix but also the logic of coercion and control. A chilling fact of the environmental impact of BRI and the export of China-led environmentalism is a further marginalisation of the most vulnerable, exacerbation of social injustice and biodiversity loss, a disenfranchised civil society, and the normalisation of brushing aside those problems with a robotic obsession with technology.

This book is rich in evidence and full of fun facts (a campaign against the ‘Beijing bikini’ p. 43 as one graphic example). What is special about China Goes Green is that Li and Shapiro manage to avoid the trap of China exceptionalism by acknowledging the ‘authoritarian pockets of the international environmental regime’ (p. 65). For instance, the worship of quantitative target-setting dictates the global climate regime. In this light, this book not only provides lessons for Chinese policymakers to learn but also revisits the governing logic of the international efforts to take care of the planet. Its theoretical contribution, however, does not do enough justice to the exciting and insightful empirics. For instance, the authors discuss the thesis of authoritarian resilience (pp. 192–193). Yet it is unclear how environmental issues contribute to this thesis, apart from proving the validity of authoritarian resilience. In fact, the authors could have looked at the moral aspect of China’s coercive environmentalism and explore how coercive moralisation could function as a new pillar of the theoretical scaffolding of authoritarian resilience.