China Translated

Lately China’s sustainable development goals have been in the news again following the announcement of a sudden jump in energy intensity of production. China has been tracking this interesting metric – which is linked not only to energy use and carbon production but also to technological improvement and movement up the industrial value chain – for some time (warning: apparently nobody outside the relevant departments really understands how it is calculated) and it is said to be a particular focus of Premier Wen Jiabao. Energy intensity had steadily declined 14% from 2005 and was almost on target to meet the 2010 goal of a 20% reduction, but took a sudden 3% (annual) jump in the first quarter. Heavy industry, responding to the tremendous infrastructure push of last year’s stimulus package, is seen as the culprit. Following the news Premier Wen got all medieval, promising in widely published reports to take an “iron hand” on the issue.
For deeper analysis, see the excellent Green Leap Forward.

China’s top leadership has been increasingly visible on alternative energy, low carbon development, pollution control, climate change and other sustainability issues, and Wen seems to be making the energy efficiency target a line in the sand. I think we can safely assume that this is not because senior Chinese leaders are lying awake at night worrying about snail darters and burrowing owls, but because they see these issues as serious potential threats to continued economic development and social stability.

Last week, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a report of a speech given by the Vice Director of the Chinese Institute of Engineering Du Xiangwan called, “After 2050 China Will Enter a Stage of Green, Low-Carbon Energy Development.” The speech was notable to me for its clear description of the importance of changing China’s current energy use – followed by a set of energy goals that can could perhaps be described as realistic: In his description of China’s energy mix in 2050, renewable energy, including hydropower, has taken a position as a major (but unquantified) component, but coal still occupies 35% to 40% of the total, natural gas has 10%, and nuclear has 15%.

Here’s the report’s description of the issue and China’s strategic approach:

Our Nation Must Move Towards Green, Low Carbon Energy Sources
The tasks of China’s sustainable development of an energy development strategy can be summed up as “scientific, green, low carbon energy strategies,” and can be further summarized as speeding up the transition of regulations and controls, strengthening the primacy of energy efficiency, implementing controls on total energy use, guaranteeing appropriate demand, optimizing a diverse structure, carrying out “green and low carbon,” leadership from science and technology, and a high efficiency economic system.

Proposing such a strategy stems from the challenges faced by China’s energy resources. Du Xiangwan said that China very quickly will become the world’s largest energy consumer. “If China’s energy consumption is maintained at an average growth rate of 8.9%, by 2020 China’s energy consumption will reach 7.9 billion standard tons of coal, which is half the world’s current energy consumption.”

He pointed out that this kind of economic development model would obviously run into very severe restrictions. To support society and the economy’s scientific development, it is necessary to put forth total consumption control standards for fossil fuels, and to plan for the overall speed, structure and consumption model of development. Furthermore, China’s current crude energy exploitation and use results in severe environmental problems.

“No matter how much climate change is disputed, China’s energy must move towards green and low carbon,” Du Xiangwan said.

The original speech is here.

Don Johnson is a senior economist with AECOM

Energy, Environment, Guest contributor, Industry, Statistics

Chongqing and the rest of central and western China is to the coast what China as a whole is to the rest of the world – cheaper and less developed, but moving faster. It feels like a different country sometimes, and this thought occurred to me last week just as our taxi maneuvered gingerly around a giant excavator fitted with a jackhammer, which was trying to break up the street as we were trying to drive on it. Our city taxi was on a search for a CNG station, which are relatively common in urban Chongqing but quite rare in the suburbs where we were. We were following a local taxi which had promised to lead us to the only local station, and so when he went around the excavator down a very unpromising-looking back street, so did we, literally darting past when the big arm pulled its drill back for another try. That might have happened in Shanghai ten years ago, but Shanghai is more first-world now, and you would expect to see traffic barriers and a flagger to wave vehicles through. Suburban Chongqing isn’t there yet.

CNG stands for “compressed natural gas,” and many vehicles in Chongqing run on it, not only most (if not all) buses and taxis, but also many others, including the black sedan that took me to the airport the day I left. They can also use gasoline, but gas is more expensive, so drivers will take some trouble to get CNG – I personally experienced several lengthy detours, and saw several long lines at CNG stations of mostly taxis that were willing to wait to get the cheaper fuel. As a gas, CNG takes up more space than gasoline, so taxis have to refuel several times a day, even though the tanks take up a good part of the trunk. On the other hand, CNG is much less polluting than gasoline, and in Chongqing’s famous smog this is a big plus.

However, it probably wasn’t the environmental benefits that originally pushed natural gas vehicle development, but fuel availability. Sichuan, which borders Chongqing and used to administer it, was the site of the world’s first industrial use of natural gas. Gas was found in sites that had salt springs and, as early as the Western Han dynasty (221 BC – 23 AD) was piped through bamboo tubes to fuel boilers that reduced the brine to obtain salt. Transport links to coastal China were weak until very recently, despite the city’s strategic river location, so development of vehicles that could use the locally available fuel was an obvious choice.

There are actually many places in the world that rely on CNG as a supplementary fuel to gasoline; China is only in 7th place by number of vehicles (Pakistan, Argentina and Brazil are the top three.) Many more use “autogas,” also referred to as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG,) which is a mix of butane and propane (the proportion varies by the season, for reasons known to chemists. Like CNG, it’s cheaper than gasoline, but it has fewer environmental benefits and is produced from petroleum.) There are attempts to promote CNG cars in the developed world, but these run into the problem we encountered in Chongqing – you have to find a place to fill them up. There is a chicken-and-egg problem common to all “new” automobile fuel schemes, including not only CNG but also electric and hydrogen: nobody wants to built a network of filling stations for cars that don’t exist, but nobody wants to buy a car they can’t fuel. Chongqing is hardly unique in having a second fuel infrastructure, but if you come from the United States, being in Chongqing is like visiting a future in which a large number of cars are not running on gasoline, and doing it semi-successfully. Only semi-, because while the fleet is large the infrastructure is still clearly lacking – CNG shortages played a role in a Chongqing taxi strike in late 2008, after which the government promised to increase supplies, but my anecdotal experiences show that problems remain. The private automobile market in Chongqing is booming, but it’s not likely that many of the new cars hitting the road will be CNG vehicles until you don’t have to spend so much time on the road just looking for a fillup.

- Don Johnson

Energy, Environment, Guest contributor, Infrastructure, Regional

This weekend I paid a visit to Dongguan.  Dongguan is a factory town in Guangdong Province, one of the engines of China’s export economy, and a city made famous by Leslie Chang’s relation of the lives of its many Factory Girls.

An afternoon’s trip to a city of 7m people is not enough to even scratch the surface, but for what it is worth, my main takeaways from the trip were:

-The migrant workers have not yet returned.  On a Saturday afternoon, we walked down a street of factories that was completely empty - no workers enjoying the balmy weather, only a few shop owners bemoaning the lack of customers.  One shop owner we spoke to, whose shop sold snacks, and offered internet access and payphones for migrant workers to make calls home, said business had not been good for the last two years.  ‘Two years ago this street would have been wall to wall with factory workers’ he said.  ‘Now they have all gone home.  Business is so bad all my revenue goes to pay rent.’  The bus station, whilst by no means deserted, was not crowded either.  December’s trade data, published by China’s Customs Bureau last weekend, shows exports making a surprisingly rapid recovery.  But the view from Donnguan street is that there is still a long way to go.

-Purple jeans and Mohawks - two migrant workers we did speak to were crouched outside the entrance to a factory waiting for their friend to finish a shift.  The main thing which struck me was their heightened sense of style.  The woman’s hair was immaculately coiffed and she wore a green mini skirt over black tights.  The man wore purple jeans, a matching purple top, and had his hair styled into a dyed-blonde mohican.  His shoes were one purple and one green.  On inquiry, it transpired that he had bought two pairs of shoes in different colours and was mixing and matching for effect.  For these young people, at least, it was clear that a certain percentage of income, perhaps even a large percentage, was spent on current consumption, not saving or transfers back to the village.

-Dongguan is not a particularly pleasant city.  The woman in the information office at the bus station was slightly perplexed when we asked for suggestions on areas of local interest.  The air is resolutely grey.  Major roads push up against residential areas and some of the waterways we saw were black and iridescent.  All of that said, the city center boasts a modern library, concert hall and museum.  Modern apartments and villas with gardens are under construction.  And on the main conduits into the town, there are well maintained beds of flowers, trees and bushes to at least remind the visitor of the existence of something called nature.

-Retailers have arrived in force, and we saw a fair few gleaming new car show rooms, including a large show room devoted to selling Buicks.  There has been a lot of debate in the last few months on where the surge in car sales in China this year has been coming from, with some arguing that it is government purchases that are driving the very impressive sales figures.  An alternative argument is that government subsides have made cars affordable, for the first time, to a whole new strata of society, and this lower middle income group have been rushing to the shops to buy.  One business journalist we spoke to last week, thought that much of this purchasing was taking place at 3rd tier cities that are off the radar for most China watchers.  The large number of shiny new dealerships in Dongguan provides anecdotal evidence in support of this argument.

Environment, Labour markets, Regional, Trade

A few reflections on China’s national day parade, before it fades into memory.

First, why no spectators?  As the complete absence of onlookers in this picture makes clear, ordinary people where not able to view the parade in person, only on CCTV.

Second, who designed the women soldiers’ outfits?  Fuschia pink, with inappropriately short skirts, white leather boots, and machine guns.

Third, blue skies in evidence - but how sad that Beijing can only manage blue skies when the eyes of the world are watching.

Communist Party, Culture, Environment

Polysilicon is the base product for both semiconductors and solar panels – it’s the sheet steel of the information age. Only a year or two ago, with solar power installations mushrooming around the world, polysilicon capacity seemed completely inadequate to supply both industries. Prices had gone from $40 per kilogram in 2003 to over $400, and material shortages were seen as a critical stumbling block for solar as it tried to become an established part of the world’s power mix. China was producing a majority of the world’s solar panels, but 95% of the necessary polysilicon had to be imported. State planners saw polysilicon as a key industry for strategic and environmental reasons, the high prices attracted investors, and money poured into new capacity.

But by the start of this year things had changed. The world economy had skidded off the road, many new solar projects had lost their funding, several key solar subsidies around the world had disappeared, and polysilicon prices had fallen a ledge-jumping 95% to $30 per kilogram. Meanwhile, Chinese polysilicon capacity was on a course to increase to 86,000 tons per year, as compared to 500 tons per year in 2006 – an increase of 172 times. And the rest of the world has been adding capacity too.

State planners are now looking for ways to limit the damage. The State Council announced on August 26 that it plans additional scrutiny and guidance for China’s polysilicon industry, including “resolving the problems of overcapacity and additional construction.” On August 31, the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s chief economic planner and an arm of the State Council, removed polysilicon (as well as wind turbine manufacturing equipment) from the list of encouraged imports.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the month imports of scrap polysilicon, which competes in the solar industry with virgin polysilicon, were banned. However, the ban came not from economic planners but rather from the ministry of Environmental Protection, citing the dangerous chemicals used in its processing. The effect of the ban, and even its enforcement, is somewhat disputed, but scrap polysilicon represents something between 10% and 30% of the market for solar power, so it will definitely help domestic virgin polysilicon producers. This is where the questions start, because virgin polysilicon production also involves toxic chemicals – as indeed do many of the industrial processes in which China has established a dominant position. Last year the Washington Post ran a horrific and widely circulated story about one Henan polysilicon producer’s dumping of silicon tetrachloride, in which it was pointed out that not installing the closed-circle reprocessing equipment that eliminates the toxic waste can reduce production costs by 50% or more. Given the context of the other economic interventions in the polysilicon industry, and the ongoing environmental crises in polysilicon and in other industries (most recently the lead poisoning of children in Hunan, Shaanxi and Kunming,) it’s hard to take the Environmental Protection Ministry’s ban at face value.

There is a good side to the collapse in polysilicon prices, even for China – Caijing reports a recent tender for a 10 MW solar project in Gansu province surprised government developers by coming in at $1.09 per kilowatt/hour, when the previous subsidy price had been $4 – and this was after pushing out a bid that was so low the government thought it would stifle the industry. At that price solar power is still more expensive than coal or even wind, but it’s within striking distance.

Other Sources:
Ministry of Commerce announcement
China’s Solar Energy Industry: Polysilicon 2007-2011
China Retracts Blessing for Clean Tech Imports
Confusion Reigns over China’s Polysilicon Import Policy”

- Don Johnson

Competition, Energy, Environment, Guest contributor, Industry, Trade

The environmental cost of China’s very rapid industrialisation and urbanisation is increasingly evident.  With the cost of pollution a daily reality in people’s lives, the trade off between economic growth and environmental protection is the subject of lively public debate.

This is a translation of an article on the subject in a middle-brow weekly magazine called Xinmin Zhoukan (New People’s Weekly).  It doesn’t contain any startling policy revelations.  But I find it interesting for the light it shines on the way China’s chattering classes think about environmental issues, and for the authors colourful vocabulary:

‘Do you want GDP growth or do you want to stay alive?

In a few years time, future generations are going to look back and judge us, just like we look back and judge the generation of the cultural revolution.  They are going to think we were foolish beyond belief.

Rapid GDP growth has certainly brought added zest to our lives.  But in many places, spiralling growth and spiralling pollution has left the land stinking like rotten meat, people wandering like refuges in a war zone.

It’s like in a dirty kitchen.  The soup in the spoon might have the beautiful taste of chicken, ginseng or swallows, but everywhere else is all chicken entestines, ducks arses, fetid oil and other disgusting inedibles.

Chemical waste, nuclear waste, metal slag, but we labour on undaunted.

We are like the frog that stays in the slowly heated water till it boils to death.

In the past, China was the kind of place where if you saw something was wrong you would say it, and if someone needed help you would stretch out your hand.  Now, China is the kind of place where if you see something wrong you stay silent, and it someone needs help you hide your hand in your sleeve.

If a neighbour needs help we don’t offer it.  If we need help we can’t go to the man above because he’s probably the cause of the problem.  We can only complain to the man at the top, and then we are contented with the slightest hint of compensation.

That’s the culture in which the rivers run with filth, the hills are barren, and the air is blurry with smog.

Why can’t we go to the courts to sort the problem out?

The justice system is twisted like a snake.  Getting judgements on environmental issues is no easy matter.  As everyone knows, the manufacturing companies that cause the pollution are often the pets of the local government and the pillars of the local economy.  Can you really expect the courts to punish the pet and knock over the pillar?

Confronted with ‘GDP’, ‘law’ tends to run home like a snivelling school boy, nose driping with snot.’

Powerful stuff, and from what I can see New People’s Weekly is not a particularly radical publication.  I don’t follow environmental issues closely but think this speaks pretty loudly for a growing awareness of the causes and consequences of environmental pollution, and the awareness that an attitudinal shift from Chinese people will be required to address the problem.

Original Chinese article here.

Environment, Social Policy

China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001 was a landmark in its development and the culmination  of a negotiating process which stretched back to its attempt to accede to the General Agreement on  Tariffs and Trade in 1986.  I just read an interesting essay on the subject by Margaret M. Pearson entitled ‘The Case of China’s Accession to GATT/WTO’.

One popular theory of international relations is that bureaucratic links, business ties, and cultural exchanges are good because they open a country to a process of learning which will ultimately catalyse positive change.  So getting China to participate in scientific exchanges will help them learn about climate change, student exchanges will teach the benefits of free speech, business to business ties will create a constituency opposed to government control of the economy, and in the end, through a process of social osmosis, China will have transformed into an environmentally friendly, capitalist, democracy.

Pearson’s essay suggests that the process might not be that straightforward.  She argues that it is initially a very small elite who decide that joining the GATT then the WTO is a good idea, and who drive the process forwards.  When China engages seriously with the international community in the negotiation process this brings more players into the debate - notably industry groups and the ministries that represent them.  These groups, through the process of learning about the WTO and the benefits of free trade, decide that actually they don’t like the idea at all. For the industry groups, free trade would represent the end of easy profits in closed national markets.  For the ministries, it would mean surrender of many of their regulatory powers and some revenue from tariffs on imports and exports.

According to Pearson, the elite then decided it would be a good idea to outflank these narrow sectional interests by educating the people about the national benefits of membership.  There was a concerted educational and outreach effort.  One Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation official reports traveling the country for a year speaking to audiences twice a week on the subject.  But the people too were hostile to the idea.  According to Pearson ‘views of the WTO became linked in the public mind to other ‘evidence’ that the United States was trying to keep China weak, including Beijing’s failed effort to the win the bid to host the 2000 Olympics.’

Ultimately, opposition by interest groups and either indifference or hostility from the public meant that Jiang Zemin and them Premier Zhu Rongji had to step in to make the decisions to bring China into line with the requirements for accession.

All of this has a few interesting implications for some of today’s big debates about China and the international economy.

First, more international engagement won’t necessarily mean China is more likely to move in the ‘right’ direction.  More international engagement will sometimes mean that powerful interest groups within China learn more about the costs to them of membership of international organisitons or adherence to international regimes.  For example, learning about the costs of climate changes has also meant Chinese industry learning about the cost of emissions reductions.  International learning is a double edged sword.

Second, even if a change would be overall welfare maximizing for China doesn’t necessarily mean that China is going to make that change.  Free trade is welfare maximizing but for China, and other countries, it is welfare reducing for large and powerful interest groups.  Sometimes these interest groups are sufficiently powerful to prevent change from happening.  The politics of concentrated costs and diffuse benefits works as powerfully in China as it does anywhere else and continues to impact decisions on climate change, exchange rates, liberalisation of financial markets, and so on.

EU-China Relations, Environment, History, IFIs, Industry, Social Policy, Trade, US-China Relations

As part of preparations for writing an article on the forthcoming US-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue I spoke to one of the leading US experts on China’s environmental issues, Elizabeth Economy.  She was kind enough to agree that I could reproduce the whole interview here.

Chinatranslated: In your discussion of China’s participation in the framework negotiation on climate change (published in The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy) you characterised the Chinese position in 1998 as reflecting the same set of interests as in the early 1990s: the need for developed countries to take action first; continued technology transfer from developed countries under favourable terms; and no commitments or timetables for emissions reductions. 

More than 10 years on, what has changed?  What would need to happen for China to take a more proactive stance?
 
Elizabeth Economy: There has been virtually no change in the Chinese negotiating stance on climate change in over 25 years: the Chinese will play if the world will pay. That is why the Clean Development Mechanism is such a hit in China.

Beyond that, however, much has changed. On the downside, in the late 1990s, the world thought China would double its coal consumption during 2000-2020; instead it doubled its coal use by 2007 from 2000, making it the largest emitter of CO2 in the world. In the late 1990s, the greatest challenge China posed to climate change in terms of deforestation was within its own borders. Today, China is the largest importer of illegally logged timber in the world, contributing to serious deforestation throughout Southeast Asia and Africa in particular.

On the upside, China has a far more extensive climate change bureaucracy in place to manage both the technical and political aspects of climate change, it is ratcheting up the role of renewables in its energy mix, and it is taking steps to reduce energy intensity in significant sectors of the economy.
 
For China to adopt a more aggressive climate change policy will require someone within China’s leadership to champion the issue. What former Premier Zhu Rongji did for China’s accession to the WTO—in essence saying that there will be serious short term pain for long term gain—someone needs to do in China in the lead- up to Copenhagen. 
 
Chinatranslated: In your recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee you stressed the importance of building on and working with existing mechanisms, especially the Strategic Economic Dialogue.  What prominence do you expect climate change to have within the new Strategic & Economic Dialogue and is there a danger it will be lost in the middle of discussions of economic and security issues?
Your testimony also suggests various ways in which the US can exert positive pressure on China to step up its climate change strategy, including leading by example, listening to Chinese concerns, and focussing on urbanisation as a key issue.  What other sticks and carrots does the US and the world have to exert positive pressure on China on this issue?
What is the best outcome we can hope for on climate change from the first round of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue?

Elizabeth Economy: With the new U.S. administration, climate change has jumped to the top of the agenda, along with economic and security issues. Climate is, itself, an economic and security issue. I think initially, there was a seriously mistaken impression that working on climate change with China would be easy—somehow there had been a missed opportunity over the past eight years. I think the administration now realizes that climate is every bit as difficult an issue to negotiate as any trade or security issue. I don’t think the issue will get lost. I just don’t anticipate a true breakthrough.
In addition to working with China, the most significant potential leverage the United States could have would be to work with other developing nations to put pressure on China to do more. China considers itself a champion of the developing world. In many respects pressure from the small island states or African nations that will be devastated by climate change will do far more than more lectures from the US or EU.
What I would like to see is a progress report on the energy and climate-related initiatives the two countries began at the last SED. What’s working? What’s not? I am not a big believer in simply launching new initiatives for the sake of having something to announce.
I think the best we can hope for, in addition to announcements of various small scale joint efforts such as the new clean energy research centers, would be for the Chinese to indicate that they are prepared to continue with steep cuts in energy intensity and dramatic moves forward on renewables as far out as 2025. These are the types of initiatives they are excited about because they can be done within the context of continuing to grow their economy and enhancing energy security. Otherwise, I don’t expect much.

You can see more of Elizabeth Economy’s work at the Council for Foreign Relations website here.

China - Africa relations, Energy, Environment, US-China Relations

Next week is the first meeting of the US-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue (S&ED), which takes place in Washington on Monday and Tuesday.  The main topics will be the financial crisis, climate change, and security, presumably with the security focus on North Korea.

I have an opinion piece on the S&ED in the Wall Street Journal China today, you can read it in Chinese here.  The main points are:

The financial crisis and the new administration in Washington has changed the terms of debate between China and the US.

On the economy, the US has in the past used the dialogue with China to apply pressure on the question of the undervalued CNY.  But with the CNY appreciating against the dollar in the first half of 2008, and holding steady against an appreciating dollar in the second half, the substantive case against the CNY has weakened.

In addition, the financial crisis has enabled Beijing to focus attention away from China’s economic policy and the value of the CNY and onto US economic policy and the value of the dollar.  The recent IMF board discussion on the Chinese economy might provide some useful mood music for the US side, with some IMF executive directors arguing that the CNY remains ’substantially undervalued’ (a retreat from stronger language that has been used in the past). 

But a spokesman for the Chinese government, in a press conference on the same day as the statement from the IMF discussion was released, said that China would use the S&ED to seek assurances from the US on the safety of their dollar investments.  The US monetary and fiscal expansion rather than the undervalued CNY looks set to be the focus of the economic track.

On the environment, the Obama administration initially believed that climate change would be an easy win for the bilateral relationship.  Faced with a recalictrant counterpart in Beijing they have come to realise that finding consensus here will be just as difficult as on the exchange rate.  One EU diplomat I spoke with thought that the danger for the rest of the world in the US-China talks on climate change would be that the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide would pre-cook an unambitious deal on emissions reductions in the run up to the post-Kyoto talks at the end of the year.

Finally, on the structure of the talks,  in the old Strategic Economic Dialogue it was Hank Paulson speaking for the US and Wang Qishan for China and the focus was on economic issues (though energy and environment crept in to the later rounds of the talks).  Now it is Geither AND Clinton for the US and Wang Qishan and Dai Bingguo for China discussing economic, environmental AND security issues.  Substantively, it makes sense to bring economic, environment, and security issues together, but procedurally it may mean the talks lack focus.

With considerable distance between the sides on the key issues, and a new and unwieldy structure to work with, my expectations for this first round of the taks are low.

Environment, Financial Crisis, Monetary Policy, US-China Relations

China and the US are gearing up for the first meeting of the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, which will take place in Washington the week after next.  The dialogue is the heir of the Strategic Economic Dialogue, which was initiated by then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, some say as a device to make up for China not being part of the G8.

The two crucial differences between the old SED and the new S&ED are 1) security now joins economic and environmental issues on the agenda with Hilary Clinton speaking for the US and Dai Bingguo for China 2) the SED took place twice a year but the S&ED will take place just once a year.  It remains to be seen if the new structure will prove more or less effective than the predecessor. 

Having more issues on the table makes it easier to cut deals across dossiers (I’ll give you a concession on climate change if you give me a concession on security).  But more issues also means more voices and more procedural complexity, which might be a barrier to effective decision making.

One of the key agenda items will be climate change.  China and the US are the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide.  The Obama administration promises a sea change in the approach to this problem taken by the US.  But environmental concerns have certainly not been the focus of the administration as they struggle with the fallout from the economic crisis.

The Chinese negotiating position starts with the point that it is emissions from the industrialised West that have got us to where we are today, and emissions on a per-capita basis in China are still far lower than in the US and EU (all of which is true).  Discussing China’s participation in negotiation in the framework negotiation on climate change at the end of the 1990s, Elizabeth Economy characterised the Chinese position in 1998 as reflecting the same set of interests as in the early 1990s.  In 1990 and in 1998, China argued that developed countries needed to take action first; that there should be continued technology transfer from developed countries under favourable terms; and that no commitments or timetables for emissions reductions should be made. 

More than 10 years on, it is once again difficult to see any change in the Chinese negotiating position.  One European diplomat I spoke with recently said that the danger was that China and the US would pre-cook an unamibitious deal in the run up to Copenhagen, making it diffiuclt for the EU to push for more ambitious targets for emissions reductions.

One final point on a procedural problem on environmental discussions.  Clinton speaks for the US on the environment, but her Chinese counterpart Dai Bingguo is apparently not well versed in, or responsible for, China’s environmental policy.  With no clear allocation of responsibilities for environmental issues within the talks on the Chinese side, the S&ED may be able to make only limited progress on this crucial issue.

Environment, US-China Relations