Tgk1946's Blog

From China’s Galaxy Empire (John Keane & Baogang He, 2024) pp172-8

The future, longer-term efficacy of the Kunming-Montreal Convention on Biological Diversity agreement and the Chinese government’s ecological civilization’ initiatives can be debated, but much more controversial are the immediate bio-challenges faced by the galaxy empire. The long string of Chinese government policy failures in the hatching and handling of the Covid-I9 virus breed suspicions and misgivings.º To what extent the ecological problems it faces can be overcome, and whether the galaxy empire becomes the first recorded empire in modern times to damage beyond repair, or destroy outright, its own bio-foundations, remain open questions. The challenges are both numerous and serious, both at home and abroad.

Within the heartlands of the empire, the unchecked extinction of species flagrantly contradicts the official commitment to a ‘beautiful China’. Decimated by such factors as intensive farming and over-fishing, fertilizer runoff, and the spread of invasive species, untold numbers of plants and animals have either quietly disappeared during recent decades or are now on the list of critically endangered spe-cies. In matters of environmental policy, government guidelines are often no more than comprehensively ignored blueprints. Vested Party interests in polluting industries are a fact of life, data is notoriously unreliable, and inspection systems are often corrupted. The practice of “saving face’ (bão midnzi) by local Party officials who are in charge of everything but make things much worse, initially by doing nothing, is widespread. Bamboozling (hu you) by officials, con tricks, hyping things up and laying them on thick, and cleverly using four ounces to shift a thousand pounds’ to cover up the abusive power that is having ruinous effects on ecosystems are rampant. Government failures to devise and implement systems of regulation and certification that enable Chinese consumers to know the source of products, and how environmentally safe they are, are chronic. China has the world’s largest long-distance fishing fleet, for instance, yet the sources and harvesting methods of boats remain largely unregulated. China is a massive importer of such agricultural products as palm oil, soybeans, coffee, crustaceans, and fish, yet harvesting methods, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and the resulting environmental damage are matters left undisclosed. Equally difficult to ascertain are the toxic wastes left behind by industrial production and mining ventures. Unknown is the full extent of environmental damage already done by the unregulated production of rare earth metals in which China controls 90 per cent of world trade and around 35 per cent of reserves. Rare earths are in fact not that rare, but better described as costly and dirty to extract and to refine for use in smartphones, guided missiles, wind turbines, and other high-tech products. China’s rare earth industry is dominated by six major state-owned companies whose mining of elements such as dysprosium and europium—in sites stretching from Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, and Jiangxi to Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Greenland-has already dumped untold quantities of ammonia and nitrogen compounds into local ground and surface waters, as well as released other pollutants, such as lead and cadmium, long-term exposure to which poses health risks.

The widespread poisonings of air, soil, and water are also well documented by independent sources. Although per capita carbon emissions are only half US levels, around eight tonnes per person, China is the world’s largest air polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases. Water is a powerful cultural symbol in the lives of Chinese people; it is a life-giving material substance and a spiritual force, a cleansing reminder of the contingency of life. Yet-despite abundant talk of an ecological civilisation- shortages and pollution of the country’s waters remain chronic. Desertification is a curse: around a quarter of the total land area of China, nearly three million square kilometres of land, is vulnerable to loss of vegetation in a country with the least per capita forest area in the world.’ Despite costly engineering projects such as the South-North Water Project, imbalances of high-quality water supply between the water-rich south and the comparatively dry north remain problematic. The iconic Yellow River, which flows from Qinghai Province in the north-west of the country eastwards to Shandong, is the main source of water for over fifty large and medium-sized cities and around one-sixth of the country’s farm-land. It has already (twice during the 1990s) dried up. Plagued by the destruction of its headwaters, over-extraction of groundwaters, pol-lution, and poor management practices, its receding water levels continue to arouse worries. Climate change, erratic monsoons, droughts, and extreme weather events are bound to make things worse. An estimated 20 per cent of China’s surface waters remain so badly contaminated that people are advised not to drink or go near them.

Soil pollution is equally worrying. Figures are sometimes treated as state secrets, but a government survey reported (in 2014) that one-fifth of arable farmland soils and one-sixth of the country’s soils are heavily contaminated. It attributed the pollution to factory waste materials, excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers, the irrigation of land by contaminated water, and livestock breeding in tainted farmlands. According to the survey, over 80 per cent of the contaminated soils contained significant quantities of arsenic, nickel, and cadmium, whose levels had risen sharply in recent decades. Fears of poisoned food chains run high, traceable to areas such as Hunan Province in central China, a large rice-growing area whose farmland soils are among the most heavily polluted by local nonferrous metal production.

The tasks of mapping and measuring air, water, and soil pollution within the heartlands of the empire are hampered by government secrecy and obfuscation. Independent civil society reports are normally blocked. Topics such as domestic food contamination and cancer hotspots are usually considered much too sensitive to report by mainstream journalists. Public silence and official media dissembling about environmental problems elsewhere in the empire, well beyond Chinese borders, are equally chronic. Whatever is said by diplomats about the Chinese vision of a ‘beautiful earth’ where nations live in harmony with their habitats, growth for growth’s sake, whatever its polluting effects, remains the money-spinning orthodoxy in the Belt and Road Initiative and other projects. A commonly stated aim of these initiatives is to create ‘modern-ized’ economies in partner countries in which environmental regulations are weak, corruption is rife, and investigative journalism underdeveloped.

Coal-fired power plants financed by Chinese banks and built by Chinese companies are exemplary. Whereas at home radical cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are the reality-in the drive to transition from heavy industry manufacturing to consumer and service indus-tries, China met its 2020 carbon intensity target three years ahead of schedule the trends abroad run in the opposite direction. Beyond its borders, coal is big business. The dirtiest fossil fuel generates golden profits. China invests heavily in renewables such as wind and solar en-ergy; and it is true that in 2020, following international pressure, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank agreed to discontinue funding for coal-fired power plants. But truth is also that China remains the world’s largest investor in coal power, offloading its own coal overcapacity notably in places linked to the Belt and Road project. Its launch triggered huge investments in the financing, construction, and ownership of a sixth of the world’s coal-fired power stations. By the end of 2016, Chinese banks and construction companies were involved in 240 coal-fired power plant projects in twenty-five of the BRI’s sixty-five countries. Ignoring the dangers of global warming and stranded assets weighed down by heavy debts, countries that agree to buy and build new Chinese coal plants function as local contract compradors. In the same way that Qing dynasty compradors profited from deals struck with the British Empire, their governments and local business classes profit from contracts with Chinese firms such as the China Development Bank and the state-owned power company China Huaneng Group.% Advocates of the Chinese model of state capitalist development, they ignore Chinese government guidelines about the need to promote green’ Belt and Road projects. These compradors behave like buccaneers who are still in the grip of the outdated Kyoto Protocol, which recognized a difference between annex i ‘advanced economies’ and non-annex ‘developing countries’ entitled to exercise their right to develop and to decide whether, or to what extent, locally appropriate mitigation measures should be adopted. For these local governments and businesses, it does not seem to matter that Chinese state-backed development banks typically operate in unaccountably opaque ways, or that in countries such as Tanzania, Serbia, and Pakistan they are willing to defy the high principles of ‘ecological civilization’ by financing overseas coal-fired projects with few or no environmental protection standards.

The wanton violation of these standards serves as yet another illustration of the central weakness of the galaxy empire: its chronic reliance upon Party-sponsored and Party-controlled institutions that are prone to reckless power adventures because they are unchecked by independent monitory (watchdog’) mechanisms. The problem of abusive power is rightly seen. by scholars as the gravest danger facing every previous empire, China’s new galaxy empire is no exception to this old rule. Considered as a large-scale polity that already shapes the bodily habits, ways of thinking, and habitats of many millions of its subjects, at home and abroad, China’s rulers are prone to blind arrogance. They want to change the world, and to change the world in their favour. But we have already seen that these same rulers are aware that accountability matters. Living in an age of monitory democracy marked by the invention of many new forms of bio-representation,” they recognize that if they arrogantly abuse the habitats in which they operate, then they will destroy their own authority as well as risk unleashing organized green’ resistance to their rule, of the kind that has already bitterly erupted in Kenya, Gambia, Zambia, Serbia, and other places.’

It is this recognition – however dim — of vulnerability to resistance that helps to explain why, in contrast to every previous known rising empire, the rulers of the galaxy empire are the first to speak of the imperative of ending the human project of violently destroying our planetary ecosystems. Bodies like the National Development and Reform Commission, a powerful macro-economic policy agency that operates under the State Council, have for some time been saying that China is setting best-practice standards, that polluters must pay, and that new mechanisms must be established to compensate victims of environmental damage and to hold local officials publicly accountable. Xi Jinping weighs in with calls for ‘accountability systems’ that ‘hold responsible those who blindly ignore decisions in the ecological environment and cause serious consequences’.” Party officials, bureaucrats, diplomats, and corporate directors speak much the same language. It is as if they understand that in matters of environment China holds the key to globally negotiated improvements-that it is big enough to succeed, and much too big to fail. Realities are unfortunately more complicated, and much fickler. The contradiction between the grand vision of an ‘ecological civilization’ and a resource-hungry galaxy empire driven by one-party rule and state capitalist profiteering at the expense of our biosphere remains unresolved. Hence one of the most pressing and pertinent political questions of our century: whether China will carry on contributing to the cascading ruination of life on our planet, or whether instead, using the agile methods on display at the Kunming-Montréal Convention, it plays a key role in reversing environmental degradation and encouraging people everywhere, inside and outside the empire, to acknowledge the simple truth that they are living on planet Earth.