China’s green revolutionary changes leave the West trailing

BEN CHACKO joins a multinational delegation to see first-hand Chinese advances in building an ecological civilisation and speak to global experts on its successes

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“AN IMPORTANT biological species is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions — humankind.”

These words of Fidel Castro at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, quoted by Communist Party of Spain Energy Secretary David Pineda Diaz, gave a sense of urgency to the multinational symposium on the global green transition held last week at Nanjing University.

But while climate conferences in Britain or other Western countries are rightly focused on what is not being done to meet the climate emergency, in China very real progress is being made.

With Pineda and 10 others from 10 countries on five continents I joined a multinational delegation to China to learn about its policy of building an “ecological civilisation” — which, over a week of site visits and seminars, we learned involves more than a shift to renewables.

It encompasses changing attitudes to quality of life, integrating urban and rural development, investment in resilience such as flood defences and emergency services, cleaning up rivers, restoring wetlands and more — with the rapid rollout of artificial intelligence being deployed for everything from early warning systems for natural disasters (which as Dean of Nanjing University’s School of Government Professor Zhang Haibo pointed out are becoming more frequent as the climate warms) to managing “smart” farms to minimise energy use.

But the shift to renewables is key and here China leads the world.

The numbers speak for themselves: its installed wind and solar capacity accounts for half the global total and has grown enormously in the last five years, from 530 gigawatts in 2020 to 1.84 terawatts last year. In the global photovoltaic (solar power) supply chain it provides over 96 per cent of polysilicon and wafer capacity, over 91 per cent of solar cells and over 80 per cent of the modules.

Its immense industrial capacity is still a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — but also allows it to bring renewable energy infrastructure to bear at scale, hugely reducing costs for all countries. Between 2010 and 2020 the cost of solar energy has dropped by 90 per cent, the cost of onshore wind by 70 per cent, largely thanks to China.

As the president of Serbia’s Forum for Strategic Studies Neven Cveticanin told the symposium, the country is “the central actor in the global green transition… without the expansion of green tech the global transition would be slower, and in this respect China is like Formula 1.”

Making renewable energy cheaper and more reliable allows China to avoid presenting climate adaptation and economic growth as either-or — a narrative prominent in Conservative and Reform criticism of net-zero targets in Britain. As Lu Xuejun, director-general of the Contemporary World magazine which organised our trip, put it: “The green transition is not a subtraction but a multiplication; not a burden but an opportunity.”

That is not to say it does not involve sacrifices. The huge Yangtze river restoration effort most famously includes a 10-year moratorium on all fishing in the enormous river, the world’s third-longest, which has already produced a significant recovery in biodiversity. But as we heard from Professor Luo Xiaolong it involves a lot more: in Jiangsu alone 1,421 chemical enterprises along the river have been closed since 2016, and a red line banning new construction within a kilometre of its banks enforced.

Wetlands have been restored, vegetation cover increased within that 1km boundary by 20 per cent. Jiangsu is China’s most densely populated province and home to 85 million people, so restoring nature is not easy, but from 2016-23 the percentage of natural Yangtze shoreline in the province rose from 42.8 to 47.9 per cent.

It is true that China’s economic growth has — deliberately, as we see in its five-year plan targets — slowed. This conscious shift is linked to the “people-centred development” (centring quality of life over abstract GDP growth) adopted as national policy in 2015, and as we’ll see in my next article has its roots in policies Xi Jinping formulated when provincial party secretary in Zhejiang in the early 2000s.

But it is also true that China’s economy continues to grow at rates any Western state would envy, and Mr Lu’s observation that China is showing how to “decouple economic growth from carbon emissions” should be of interest to all countries.

How the transition is globalised raises questions that strike at the heart of the current system of international relations, trade policy and war.

That’s partly because the United States is currently in the hands of outright climate deniers. Ignoring the negative impacts of fossil fuels is not credible, as our delegation leader, Dr Joseph Peter Ochogwu of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution Nigeria, noted when opening the symposium: “We will continue to use fossil fuels for some time, but it is clear they must be superseded; you need only look to the Niger delta to see how pollution has affected people’s lives, or go to Indian cities where even the air has become difficult to breathe.”

African countries needed to work together with China to green their economies, but “capture more value from their resources” than has been the norm in relations with the West. “China must do things differently from the West. Mineral exports alone will not deliver [African] transformation.”

Chinese investment needed to be tied to building local manufacturing capacity, technology transfer and training. “We do not want to repeat the experiences we have had with the Western world which were exploitative and unsustainable. The cost of finance from bodies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank has been very high.”

Dr Ochogwu’s remarks make it plain why China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which provides finance without the demands for neoliberal economic reforms attached to IMF packages, has become the biggest source of development funding internationally – and also why more countries now see China as a development partner than the US. But while discussed in a context of Global South development, concerns like tying investment to local manufacturing are obviously important in Britain too and the failure to do so is one reason the just transition unions rightly demand is not materialising.

“We can no longer afford gunboat diplomacy — we need ‘red boat diplomacy’,” Dr Ochogwu said in a reference to our earlier visit to the Red Boat, a wooden pleasure boat on Jiaxing’s Nanhu lake which hosted delegates to the founding congress of the Communist Party of China in 1921 after they fled French Concession police in Shanghai (more on how the “Red Boat Spirit” ties to China’s green transition in the next article).

Western-imposed globalisation has always rested on the threat, and often the reality, of violence: famously Thomas Friedman said “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonell-Douglas.” This is more obvious than ever as Donald Trump appropriates Venezuelan oil, demands ownership of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mineral resources in return for peace and mounts a crippling energy siege of Cuba.

China’s consistent rejection of the use of force to resolve disputes between states is a reason it is increasingly seen as a more attractive source of investment.

Another is, of course, that China is simply the country with the know-how now when it comes to many advanced technologies.

Its strengths are double-edged, as Chinese speakers at the symposium acknowledged.

Its manufacturing capacity is the reason it can bring renewable infrastructure to global markets at scale at ever lower prices; but is also still a huge consumer of fossil fuels and a leading source of emissions.

Its AI revolution is being used to make factories and farms more energy-efficient, but powering AI consumes huge amounts of energy.

But this is a transition, and China’s progress away from fossil fuels (emissions having already peaked, years ahead of the 2030 target date) and investment in infrastructure — it has just announced a Y25 trillion (£2.8tn) Six Networks investment project including over £500 billion for smart grids, battery storage and power lines to make renewable energy reliable nationwide — continues apace.

Likewise, AI’s energy use is less of a problem the less of that energy is from fossil fuels, and the focus on using it to make the rest of the economy more energy-efficient could lead to reductions overall.

What is undeniable is that China is facing the reality of climate change and making a monumental, nationwide effort to change and adapt.

That cannot be said of our own country. We have a lot to learn.

Read part II of Ben Chacko’s special reporting from China on Monday.

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