China’s climate sincerity is being put to the test
Until it stops burning coal for power, foreign firms will be reluctant to invest more there
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.
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Is China serious about the climate?"
From the June 19th 2021 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from China
The dark side of growing old
A coming wave of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia will test China to its limits
Examining the fluff that frustrates northern China
An effort to improve the environment has had unintended consequences
China is talking to Taiwan’s next leader, just not directly
Officials in Beijing want the island’s new president to be more like one from the past