China's Environmental Foreign Relations

Heidi Wang-Kaeding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000351644
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over recent decades, China has moved from being a follower towards taking on a leadership role in global environmental governance. This book discusses this important development. It examines the key role of Chinese interest groups, showing how through various domestic dynamics they have influenced how China has approached issues such as climate change and the environment. Focusing on examples of multilateral environmental treaties, bilateral cooperation, and the proposition of alternative norms – the idea of China as an "ecological civilisation" – the book provides crucial insights on the evolution of China's approach to international relations and engagement with global environmental governance, and contributes to the discussion of what kind of power China is poised to become.

1
Interest groups in China’s environmental foreign relations

Global environmental governance is, in essence, relational. The 1972 United National Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference) symbolises the beginning of “an expression of a changing view of mankind’s relationship to the earth”.¹ It pointed out the unsustainability of the obsession with economic development based on the intensive use of natural resources. Two decades later, the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities was established at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to reflect the relationship between commitment to climate governance and the degree of industrialisation. One year before the Earth Summit, Beijing invited 41 countries to attend the “Conference of Developing Countries on Environment and Development” and issued the “Beijing Ministerial Declaration on Environment and Development”. The declaration pointed out the contradiction between environmental protection and the rights of developing countries to grow their economies, the different responsibilities between the so-called North and South in terms of international environmental cooperation and, subsequently, the justification for varying degrees of commitment to joint global efforts to address environmental challenges.²

Fast-forwarding to the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, the passionate speech given by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg served as a poignant reminder that global environmental governance concerns our relationship with our future and the question of our very survival. Existing research has broached the complexity of international environmental cooperation by looking at actors (states, transnational advocacy networks and economic entities), institutions and paradigms of global governance, as well as the ideational component behind the logic of environmental regimes.³ An eloquent depiction of the relational aspect of the field is presented in the theorisation of “earth system governance”, of which the architecture is “the interlocking web of principles, institutions and practices that shape decisions by stakeholders at all levels”.⁴ This approach allows us to locate global environmental governance between international relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA), the latter defined as “actor-specific theory and the Ground of International Relations”.⁵ The earth system governance definition not only concerns policy formation but also implementation, which is largely ignored in FPA.⁶

My book proposes the subject of environmental foreign relations for several reasons. First, I challenge the assumption that international environmental cooperation is still the province of national elites (politically and economically). Second, the research aims to bring back “implementation” to benchmark the behaviour of sovereign states. The importance of implementation is articulated by Clarke in that “implementation is in itself a highly political part of the decision process” rather than purely “technical or administrative in nature”.⁷ Third, it looks at the “feedback loop” between the local and national and even international levels in an attempt to look at the flip side of “internationalisation” of environmental governance and address the question of how local experience contributes to global governance. The theoretical foundation behind this curiosity is Kellee Tsai’s adaptive informal institutions: “responses to the chasm between formal institutions and practical interests and desires”.⁸ She argues that even in authoritarian regimes, institutions are “not simply imposed and enforced by state agents and other proprietors of formal institutions, [but] depend on human interaction for their survival and transformation”, bringing the “relational and interactive ontology”⁹ to our understanding of institutions and explaining “regime durability amid change”.¹⁰

In this respect, foreign policy is not the primary focus of this research. Rather, it is the formulation of the broader set of foreign relations that is more relevant to the research question of how domestic groups play their parts in China’s international cooperation. The relational dimension has two connotations: first, it refers to relations between domestic and international players, which are expected to be a useful constituent of inter-state relations; second, and more abstractly, it acknowledges the relationship between policy formulation and implementation, the interaction of which engenders change. The relational aspect clarifies a mis-reading of the fragmentation of foreign policy-making. In China, foreign policy decision-making is not fragmented. What is fragmented is the broader sphere of foreign relations conducted by a plurality of actors and through which a diversity of messages and national images are sent out from China to the international audience.

The genesis of China’s environmental foreign relations

The official starting point of China’s environmental foreign relations is the 1972 Stockholm Conference, when the then-Premier Zhou Enlai sent a delegation to attend the first international conference after the recognition of the People’s Republic of China by the United Nations (UN). Since then, the regime has been building its domestic environmental infrastructure, establishing multilateral cooperation platforms and fostering bilateral partnerships, primarily to solve the problem of domestic industrial pollution. The formative stage of China’s environmental foreign relations was between 1972 to 2000, when China was preparing to enter the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and subsequently launch the “Going Global Strategy”, a government initiative which encouraged Chinese companies, mainly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), to explore overseas markets. This phase honoured environmental protection as a national strategy and witnessed bilateral, regional and multilateral cooperation, in which the Chinese government agencies learnt the best international practices, such as environmental monitoring and the establishment of information-sharing centres. It was also a period when the term “environmental diplomacy” was widely used to refer to environmental foreign relations. The key message in this stage was that international environmental cooperation was inevitable as foreign technology and financial assistance could help China deal with its environmental crisis.

Whereas the first stage was defined by China’s integration into global environmental governance, the second stage, after 2000, revolved around identifying problems and challenges from both domestic environmental management and international cooperation. An outcome was the brewing of suspicion towards the normative foundations of environmental cooperation. While entry into the WTO signified further integration with the world economic order and more competition from foreign firms in China, the Going Global Strategy encouraged Chinese companies to explore international markets. Heated debates between trade and environmental interests are well documented by China Environment News (zhongguo huanjingbao 中国 环境报).¹¹

The “green barrier” (lüse bilei 绿色壁垒), which refers to restrictions on trade brought about by environmental regulations and embeds environmental issues in international trade, became the centre of discussion. Environmental diplomacy was perceived as a means to fend off “environmental colonialism”, in which developed countries were seen to use environmental protection to set non-tariff trade barriers and dump their solid waste in developing countries, making China a victim of the global waste trade.¹² This linkage between trade and the environment invited officials in charge of foreign trade into the field of environmental foreign relations. The former Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MFTEC), now the Ministry of Commerce, represented national economic interests in environmental foreign relations. In 2002, an international seminar on the economic and ecological opportunities and challenges posed by China’s entry into the WTO was thus co-hosted by the State Environmental Protection Agency and MFTEC to explore ways of integrating international trade and environmental protection in accordance with WTO regulations.¹³

The third stage, from 2010 onwards, centred on questions of national image and discursive power, as environmental foreign relations have been incr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Interest groups in China’s environmental foreign relations
• 2 From ecological modernisation to environmental nationalism
• 3 A tale of two treaties
• 4 Selective sharing in bilateral environmental cooperation
• 5 The rise of ecological civilisation
• 6 Conclusion: a constructivist utilitarian power?
• References
• Index