Green transition and red tradition: ecology and revolution in Xi’s China

China’s drive for ‘ecological civilisation’ is based on a political vision that puts sustainable development ahead of growth at any cost. BEN CHACKO reports

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CHINA’S green transition is framed as part of building an “ecological civilisation,” a term written into the country’s constitution in 2018.

Like the elimination of absolute poverty — perhaps the signature achievement of the Xi Jinping government to date, delivered through an eight-year campaign launched soon after he became Communist Party general secretary in 2012 — it reflects the stronger emphasis on “people-centred development” over GDP growth which has marked his leadership.

It’s a technological revolution, depending on mass application of renewable energy infrastructure as mentioned in the first article in this series, but also AI in “smart” farms and factories.

It’s about improving quality of life in ways we associate with developed countries — beautifying urban spaces, facilitating mass domestic tourism in a country with a high proportion of pensioners and hundreds of millions of households with disposable income, restoring clean air and water.

But it is intimately associated too with the revival of mass mobilisation politics (essential to the anti-poverty campaign) and party-building which are also hallmarks of the “new era” ushered in by Xi.

Our international delegation to learn about the green transition (see the preceding article) visited agricultural co-operatives, eco-villages and research institutions, saw a world-leading supercomputer and raced from Nanjing to Beijing on a 212mph high-speed train.

These trips were punctuated with visits placing them in the context of China’s revolution, from the “red boat” of Jiaxing to the Museum of the Communist Party in Beijing.

The red boat is a wooden pleasure boat anchored in Nanhu lake. The 1921 founding congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) opened in Shanghai’s French concession, but had to hurriedly relocate after attracting police attention and hiring a vessel on the pretext of a boating party gave the 13 delegates the seclusion needed to conclude it safely.

Xi took the standing committee of the CPC politburo first to the Shanghai site and then to the red boat in Jiaxing following his election to a second term as general secretary in 2017, emphasising the party’s need to remember its origins and mission. The site is now one where Communist Party cadres from all over China come to renew their oaths.

But Xi’s interest long predates his leadership; he invoked the “red boat spirit,” encouraging party members to persevere in the face of adversity, in an article for Guangming Daily published in 2005, when he was party secretary in Zhejiang (the province containing Jiaxing).

Much of the thinking behind “ecological civilisation” stems from that period and the slogan most associated with the policy — “clear waters and lush mountains are worth mountains of gold and silver” — comes from a speech Xi gave to local officials in Zhejiang’s Yucun village, also in 2005.

Xi was praising decisions the village had already taken and urging them to see these through.

It was in 2003 that Yucun residents, alarmed by ecological degradation and pollution from the mining and chemical industry, voted to shut down their factories (these grassroots whole-community decisions on local development are common enough in China, though alien to us in Britain’s “liberal democracy”). It was not an easy decision as half the households were dependent on these industries for work; incomes dropped steeply.

Though Yucun, a village with a permanent population of just 800, has rebuilt itself around sustainable agriculture and tourism, it took years for the environment to recover sufficiently for it to attract visitors.

Xi, in recommending they stick to their plan, cited specific advantages the site would enjoy as a tourist attraction once restored — it’s within easy travelling distance of big cities including Hangzhou, Suzhou and Shanghai — but elaborated themes which would gain national prominence within a decade: “Do not pursue everything simply because it is profitable. Do not chase economic growth at the cost of the environment… development must be sustainable. It means knowing what to do, but also what not to do… Clear waters and lush mountains are worth mountains of gold and silver.” The latter phrase headlined an article Xi wrote (under a pen-name) published in Zhejiang Daily nine days later.

Yucun was a pioneer of the “green rural revival programme,” which again began in Zhejiang (and was awarded the UN’s Champions of the Earth honour in 2018) but is now national policy.

The villagers collectively raise chickens and grow mushrooms in the local bamboo forest they own, and mushroom-picking and egg-collecting have become the focus of localised festivals and tourist attractions in their own right.

The Green Rural Revival project is also concerned to attract young talent back to the countryside to live and work. This is part of levelling-up rural living standards and slowing China’s long urbanisation trend.

To attract young people shared workspaces, some (with full online connectivity) under the open sky, have been opened as well as libraries and a cinema (with all films free to watch on Wednesdays and Thursdays); a village canteen provides subsidised meals for over-60s, costing just 2-3 yuan (20-30p).

Xi’s encouragement of young graduates to return to their families’ ancestral villages and help develop them has been compared to the Down to the Countryside movement under Chairman Mao, which saw Xi himself sent from Beijing to spend seven years working in the village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi.

Echoes are likely deliberate, as China seeks to revive the pioneer spirit of the revolution and early People’s Republic. Mao-era “sent-down” youth were expected to teach peasants skills they had learned in the cities, such as being able to read, while learning to farm, help build farm infrastructure and so on.

Today, at Yucun and other places we visited such as the Xincang Common Prosperity Co-operative Vegetable Hub and nearby tomato farm, young people’s tech-savvy and digital skills are used to help modernise agriculture and increase productivity, through building smart greenhouses with automated control of water and nutrient supply, deploy drones to perform farming tasks and help villages market their produce to nearby cities, manage their finances and more.

The joint venture running the “vegetable hub” is 70 per cent owned by the township, and runs a “common prosperity partners” programme training 10 people at a time in modern agricultural techniques to take elsewhere in China; its “Youth Returning to the Countryside” project aims to train “a new generation of farmers.”

As we learned from our young guide at the tomato farm — which also rotates rice and wheat crops, and hosts rural getaways with guesthouses, farm activities for children, a cafe and a library — young people from the city are also taught skills many no longer have, from growing their own food to cooking.

These projects are not gimmicks: at Xincang agricultural productivity is up 50 per cent and participating farmers’ annual incomes have risen by 18,000 yuan (£1,800). Hundreds of schemes like this are reducing the urban-rural income gap across China, but as at Yucun, the details are decided locally to play to strengths of the particular location and its residents.

That model of locally worked out plans to implement nationally decided policy is seen higher up — in the measures Jiangsu province took, mentioned in my previous piece, to clean up its stretch of the Yangtze following national legislation on protecting the river; in the role of the Beijing Green Exchange in organising city-wide carbon trading, advice to companies and local governments on emissions reduction, and approving subsidised exchanges of old gas-powered vehicles for EVs (in Beijing alone 441,000 such swaps have already been approved).

After the seminar on green transition held at Nanjing University, our delegation leader Dr Joseph Peter Ochogwu and I discussed our thoughts.

“The difference with the Chinese is that they don’t just announce plans — they follow through,” he observed.

Nobody claims China has solved the problems of climate change: experts were open that natural disasters will be more frequent and extreme weather affect areas unused to it; moving away from fossil fuels will take time; managing the AI revolution in a socially beneficial way will be a challenge.

But it is not just doing far more than any Western country to meet these challenges — they are its national priority, as it invests trillions of yuan in new infrastructure, new energy, climate resilience and more. They are core to its foreign policy, with Belt and Road projects like the China-Laos railway reducing emissions by 80 per cent compared to shifting the same freight volume by road, and solar capacity being installed at scale from Kazakhstan to Cuba.

What a contrast to Western governments that — if they even acknowledge the climate emergency, as the US no longer does — say the money isn’t there to tackle it, while funnelling countless billions into war machines specifically aimed at preventing the emergence of a multipolar world, and the peaceful rise of China.

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