Content area
Full Text
Environment and climate issues have become increasingly important in China’s foreign policy, particularly following China’s first carbon emission pledge in the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference. Since President Xi Jinping took the helm in 2012, China’s environmental activism has reached a new height. At home, China has ramped up a vigorous push for carbon emission control and renewable energy installation. Abroad, it has made ambitious environmental commitments at multilateral forums from the 2015 Paris Climate Summit to the 2020 United Nations (UN) General Assembly, where President Xi vowed to make China carbon neutral by 2060. These series of high-profile actions have intensified media and public discussions on whether “China will save the planet?” (Finemore 2018). A growing body of academic work is devoted to explaining China’s rapid move to the center stage of global environmental governance, with many scholars highlighting China’s “authoritarian” approach to environmental policy reforms (Beeson 2010; Gilley 2012) and others pointing to its state-led strategy to build the world’s largest solar and wind power industries (Dent 2012; Chen and Lees 2016). Still others underscore the growing significance of environmental issues to China’s national interests at a time when China increasingly seeks to play a leading role in global economic governance and gain “soft-power” in the developing world (Qi 2011; Liang 2012; Freeman 2021). Particularly, China’s rising prominence in global environmental issues coincided with the leadership vacuum following the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017.
While China’s new environmental activism is clear, what is unclear but increasingly important is how it may influence or reconcile with an economic diplomacy that is focusing on infrastructure development, especially under President Xi’s signature policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As illustrated by President Xi’s BRI inaugural speech that addressed the importance of ecological protection, the environment has been part of China’s policy discourse surrounding the BRI from its launch (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013). This “green” discourse is demonstrated at the two Belt and Road Forums in 2017 and 2019, where China vowed to help BRI countries acquire “sustainable,” “affordable,” and “accessible” infrastructure (Xinhua Net 2017a; China Daily 2019). Moreover, in line with its pledge on climate issues at other multilateral forums, China vowed to promote a “revolution in energy technologies to...