It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

From recurring “airpocalypses” that send air pollution indexes off the charts and an insatiable demand for timber and mineral resources to President Xi Jinping’s promises to lead in global climate negotiations and share the model of “ecological civilization” through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the world’s most populous country has become the most critical to understanding global environmental politics. With Western democracies challenged to sustain even modest cuts to carbon emissions and most global consumers largely oblivious to the environmental impacts of their buying habits, it can be tempting for some to entrust environmental governance to a stronger, more authoritarian system. Whether such a system can work, and what its collateral costs would be, may determine the fate of the global environment in this century. Three additions to the growing bookshelf on Beijing’s ecological policies agree: “What happens to China environmentally in the 21st century matters deeply—for everyone” (Gardner, 221); “The fate of their nation and the fate of the planet depend greatly on” the Chinese people (Smith, 196); in short, “Everything seems to hinge on China” (Li and Shapiro, 147). When, starting in 1978, the Chinese Communist leadership turned away from Chairman Mao Zedong’s collectivist vision of economic development, they opened the door for the “sprouts of capitalism” to turn China into the “factory to the world” and, four decades later, the world’s third-largest and fastest-growing major consumer market (World Bank 2019). In the 1980s, China’s economic reforms seemed to hold the potential to reverse much of