China’s Green Innovation Strategy under Xi Jinping

The “Green Dragon”: China’s sustainable development strategy under Xi Jinping, 2021

China is nowadays a global leader in manufacturing clean energy. Unexpectedly, the serious environmental degradation that has been occurring since 1990s is now under control, as well as the critic air pollution's situation. Many steps still need to be taken in order to fix all the problems linked with the long-aged environmental crisis. However, since Xi Jinping’s advent to power in 2012, Beijing has undertaken a solid ecological path. As evidence of this, China has recently been labeled as the “Green Dragon”. This paper, besides examining the environmental crisis occurring in China before Xi’s presidency and the measures adopted by him to tackle the disastrous consequences of pollution nationwide, will analyze the high Electric Vehicles (EVs) diffusion in China. After comparing Chinese EVs market with western nations, I intend to shed light on the “green revolution” occurring in the Asian demographic giant since 2012.

2016

CHINA IS TODAY THE WORLD’S LARGEST USER OF NATURAL RESOURCES, SUCH AS FOSSIL FUELS, BIOMASS, MINERALS ANDmetal ores, but also a leader in environmental innovation for sustainable development. China is today alsothe world’s second largest user of freshwater resources, and the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasesthat lead to climate change (World Bank, 2015). As per capita natural resources are limited and below the world average (Pamlin and Baijin, 2007), innovation in the environmental field is crucial for enabling sustainable de-velopment. Recently, China has become one of the global leaders in environmental innovation, for example in the fields of hydropower, solar energy, wind energy and electro-mobility (Urban et al., 2012; Lema and Lema, 2012). At the same time, the lack of sufficient domestic natural resources has driven China to invest overseas in low and middle income countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to access natural resources such as energy and minerals, ...

In 2012, Bruce Gilley of Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government published a paper entitled, “Authoritarian environmentalism and China's response to climate change”. This paper was an exploratory analysis of China’s environmental policymaking structure and its position on the democratic environmentalism and authoritarian environmentalism spectrum. Gilley’s analysis examines several case studies of Chinese environmental policy developments through this construct, attributing each particular case as authoritarian or democratic. Gilley’s work is an important step in deepening scholarship on China’s approach to climate change and environmental regulation, and also offers a brief analysis on China’s transition towards a more-inclusive and democratic policymaking framework. Since Gilley published his work, there have been several important political developments that have taken place in mainland China. A new regime under President Xi Jinping has come to power, overseeing the greatest leadership purges since the Cultural Revolution. New leadership has taken over at China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), while a landmark Environmental Protection Law (EPL) has come into force as of January 1, 2015. Many leading academics, including U.S. Scholar David Shambaugh, see Xi’s rise as a hard tack towards greater authoritarianism, which may even cause the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic. In this context, this paper refutes these analyses, and instead posits that at least in environmental policymaking, Xi Jinping’s China is still transitioning towards more inclusivity and grassroots engagement on pollution enforcement and policy generation. This assessment builds on Gilley’s scholarship, examining these developments through the lens of his environmental framework, while also undertakes an exploratory content analysis of the MEP’s phraseology in speeches during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras to further elucidate a shift towards democratic environmentalism. This paper comes to the conclusion that, even in the post-Xi era, Chinese environmental policymaking does appear to be shifting towards a more “democratic model”, though there remain several caveats towards the nature, goal, and structure of this “democratization”. These analyses illuminate China’s next steps for policymaking, and provide a foundation for further content analyses examining Chinese environmentalism in a post-Xi political environment.

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Ely, Adrian, Geall, Sam and Dai, Yixin (2019) [Editorial] Low carbon China: emerging phenomena and implications for innovation governance-introduction to the special section of environmental innovation and societal transitions. Journal of Environmental Innovation & Societal Transitions, 30. pp. 1-5.

Global Environmental Change, 2015

2018

From 2015 China has started a green revolution; with reforms that change the internal economic-administrative system.The Chinese economic growth of the last thirty years has entailed extensive environmental damage, which must be quickly and urgently remedied. The rapid and intense industrialization and the use of technologies with a strong negative impact on the environment have created one of the most unsustainable atmospheric pollutions in the world, perceived as a serious threat to the health of the Chinese people. With the twelfth Five-year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2011-2015), the Chinese government has shown a completely new focus on the issue of environmental protection and upgrading, launching important policies to support investments in the alternative and renewable energy sector. The thirteenth Five-year Plan for Social Economic Development (2016-2020) was defined as the "green" five-year plan of all time, and is part of a phase of profound transf...

Based on current conditions of China, it analyzes some environmental degradation cases from domestic and international perspectives and identifies domestic and international causes for environmental problems. The impacts of international market technology barriers on the Chinese development and environmental protection, represented by the three directives of the European Union, have been particularly discussed. The key role of innovation in the construction of environmental protection is singled out because of its casual contribution towards environmental protection. It is proposed to constantly improve legislations and regulations to properly handle the interests of the state, enterprises and individuals, and to enhance the cooperation with all countries in the world to jointly cope with environmental issues at international level.

This article reviews the development of current environmental policies in China: their initiation started following the United Nations Conference on Human Environment (1972 in Stockholm), and got great progress during 1979-2006. Learning lessons from industrialized countries and combining own situation, China realizes the main features of its environmental policies as follow: (1) explore command and control measures to its full extent; (2) strive to raise funding for environmental protection; (3) identify who should take the accountability for environmental protection, (4) encourage"combination of prevention and control" and "integrated utilization", (5) Open in field of environmental policy and international cooperation earlier. For the past 30 years, China's environmental policies have been evolved and deepened: status from national basic policy to sustainable development strategy; focus changed from pollution control to combination of pollution control and ecological protection; method changed from end control to source control; scope changed form point treatment to watershed and territory treatment; management style changed from using executive power to using legal and economic measures. At last, this article introduces the evaluation of policies by the international community and the prospects of them.