China's stance on climate change has been a cause for debate for some time, but never more so than in the run up to the Copenhagen summit. Views have ranged wildly through a hundred different combinations of hope, disappointment, pride, and despair, from seeing China as leading the way on climate change, to dragging the world down in a quest for wealth. China has been used as a spur to action and as an excuse for inaction.
Those who hope China will make significant steps to combat climate change point to the affect climate change will have on China as a nation. China certainly has a lot to lose. UN reports suggest upwards of 67 million people may have to be relocated by 2050 due to rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers could lead to increased flooding downriver, or worse, to the drying up of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, on which hundreds of millions of people depend. Warnings about all these threats are easily available and understood by the Chinese leadership.
They also point to China's record of acting on large scale environmental threats. The desertification of northern China, beginning to threaten Beijing, prompted the Green Wall of China. The holes in the ozone layer led to the Montreal Protocol, which was ratified and thoroughly implemented by China.
However, those who suspect China may scupper attempts at a binding treaty point to China's economic interests. China's rapid development has been based on cheap raw materials, cheap power and cheap a massive workforce. Moving to a greener but more high-tech economy based on green industries and clean power would slow the growth in the economy.
China itself has says that its stance is only just. After all, it was the West who started pumping out harmful chemicals and has been for over 200 years of industrial history. Now it's China's turn to develop, why should the West have the right to pollute without punishment while China has to invest all of its money into cleaning up its act instead of catching up with the West? Isn't it really just a question of the West not wanting developing countries to be able to challenge them? This is, of course, mostly rhetoric and a strong bargaining position. China understands perfectly well that developed countries are not likely to pay the $200 million in reparations some suggest that they owe the developing world. But the rhetoric masks the real reasons why China does not want to foot the bill. The fact is that economic growth is as vital to the Chinese leadership as its land or its people.
It has always been this desire to maintain the Communist Party at the apex of power that has motivated reform in China. At the end of the 1970s, when China's rural population was on the verge of turning against the party, Deng Xiaoping introduced reforms to increase rural wealth. By the end of the 1980s, when urban China began to ask why the cities were not growing as fast as the Township and Village Enterprises, and began to suffer the effects of inflation, they too began to turn against the party. In the post Tiananmen world China's reforms again began to focus on urban development. In both rural and urban cases therefore, economic growth was the key to maintaining social stability.
The Communist party understands the importance of climate change and accepts that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut, but it's own position depends on maintaining the magic figure of 8% growth which will create enough jobs to ensure social stability. This is why it concentrates so much on getting the West to shoulder the burden of any deal on climate change.
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