China’s climate sincerity is being put to the test

TO HEAR CHINA’S Communist Party tell it, the nifty thing about autocracy is that it lets rulers plan for the long term. Apologists for one-party rule hail China’s leaders as enlightened technocrats who think in centuries, while decadent Western democracies struggle to see beyond the next election cycle.

By the autocrats’ logic, China should excel at tackling climate change. For it faces stark long-term risks. As an arid country that lacks clean water and productive farmland, and where the richest regions lie on the coast, China is exceedingly vulnerable to global warming and rising sea levels. Sure enough, the supreme leader, President Xi Jinping, seems to be taking charge. Last September he decreed that China’s emissions of CO₂ will peak by 2030 and that by 2060 the country will become carbon neutral. A China-wide emissions-trading system goes live this summer. Vast wind farms and arrays of solar panels have been built, and more are coming.