As China assumes world leadership in so many areas, the state of its biophysical environment presents an ever more salient paradox. Economic development has made China a leading despoiler of the Earth and the most powerful heater of our common atmosphere. At the same time, however, China has recognized this despoilation and become a leader in mitigating environmental degradation and global warming. In Search of Green China, by environmental journalist and activist Ma Tianjie, former editor of China Dialogue (now Dialogue Earth), gives us a political insider version of how this paradox has arisen and evolved.

In Search of Green China is not an environmental history, though it presents considerable information about the environment. Instead, it is a political history of environmental policymaking and the conflicts, successes, and failures that result from and contribute to that policymaking. Telling this history as a saga of insider politics, Ma proceeds from the assumption that policy making and policy implementation are the prime movers in the interactions between the social and ecological worlds. Agency in Ma’s account belongs almost exclusively to human actors rather than to the other biotic and abiotic inhabitants of China’s piece of the planet.

Ma narrates this story of the human actors in China’s environmental degradation and partial remediation in a series of six chapters, each focusing on a single, usually well-known environmental crisis and attempts by bureaucrats, scientists, and activists to deal with it. “The River” deals with industrial pollution in the Huai River and its tributaries beginning in the 1980s. “The Dam” follows successive disputes, beginning in 1991 and intensifying through the turn of the century, over plans to build massive hydropower dams on the free-flowing Nu River. “The Hurricane” narrates bureaucratic measures to include environmental impact reviews in development planning after an immense petrochemical spill in the Sungari River in late 2005. “The Incinerator” portrays conflicts over waste disposal in Guangzhou and Beijing in the late aughts and early 2010s. “The Smog” quite expectedly speaks of the air pollution crises of the early 21st century, and “The Peak” refers to efforts to currently ongoing efforts to achieve “peak carbon” (tan da feng) and begin to reduce China’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Each chapter in Ma’s narrative roughly follows a script: we first visit the site of an environmental problem – polluted river, potential dam site, chemical spill, smoking incinerator, belching steel mill, avant-garde conference hotel. Then we are introduced to a hero – a photographer, journalist, bureaucrat, community activist, scientist, diplomat – who leads an effort to mitigate the problem portrayed in that chapter. Next comes the story of how that hero, sometimes aided by comrades, sidekicks or rivals, fights against what Ma calls the “development bloc” of industrial ministries, entrepreneurs and local officials, all of whose interests lie in pursuit of GDP growth above all else. At the end of the chapter, we return to the original scene, observing in most cases an inconclusive result – the Huai River is cleaned up and then re-polluted, the Nu is not dammed but remains under threat, the incinerator is moved out of a wealthy community into a poorer one, China gives the world a weak promise of peak carbon “around 2030.” Ma links these chapters together as a cumulative narrative in which the same problems, the same heroes and the same villains all reappear, and the overall situation improves a little. Ma’s conclusion is cautiously optimistic, but with plenty of caveats.

Ma’s account is captivating. His insider knowledge of who accosted whom in the corridor of a meeting hotel, who was dressed down by a higher-ranking or more powerful leader, who enlisted which newspaper to publish a piece promoting their position, is unmatched in any other work in what is becoming a crowded field of journalistic and scholarly books. A reader who knows the basics of what happened in each of the crises portrayed is still drawn into the account of who did it and how. For a reader who knows the environment better than the human players, Ma’s insider stance fills in a complementary side of the story. His writing style (which he admits was polished by a large language model) is fluent and easy, without being over-simple. Ma’s presentation style is marred only by his failure to include more Chinese originals for terms that he gives in translation.

At the same time, the book at times inclines toward a Manichean perspective – the good guys are the environmentalists, whether journalists, community activists, scientists, or environmentally conscious bureaucrats. The bad guys are the “developmental bloc” who do not see, or more damningly, see but don’t care about, the harm and the unsustainability of their policies and actions. Ma mentions that structural factors in the system, such as the “cadre evaluation” (kaohe) standards for bureaucratic promotion, encourage the short-sighted and self-centred actions of the bad guys, but he still seems to be assigning moral blame to individuals, in contrast to the brave actions of the environmental heroes, thereby de-emphasizing structural obstacles to reform, even as he does mention them.

Perhaps the most intriguing claim in Ma’s book is that Xi Jinping belongs firmly in the camp of the heroes. Constrained as Xi is by his own overwhelming ambition and his need to preserve his own power, Ma still maintains that even though central authorities recognized the seriousness and pervasiveness of environmental crises beginning in the 1990s, it was not until Xi took power in the early 2010s that the scales really tilted toward cleaning up the messes. Xi, according to this account, realized the gravity of the situation and the glaring fact that economic development and thus the Party’s ultimate legitimacy could not be maintained unless the relationship between society and environment was stabilized.

Ma points out, fascinatingly, that among all the environmental slogans from the “environmental culture” (huanjing wenhua) and “scientific outlook on development (kexue fazhan guan) of the Hu Jintao era to today’s “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming), there is one that stands out as a theoretical basis for the regime’s developmental environmentalism or eco-developmentalism: “Green waters and verdant mountains are gold and silver mountains” (lüshui qingshan shi jinshan yinshan). This superficially vacuous line is, Ma explains, a fundamental revision of Marxist theories of capital formation: green mountains and clear waters have use value in themselves and, in contrast to classical thinking, this use value does not have to be converted into exchange value by dams or mines or sawmills.

At a time when the China-bashing of much current Europhone discourse extends to China’s environmental degradation and world-leading greenhouse gas emissions, In Search of Green China provides a needed perspective that might best be described as “anti-anti-China.” As Ma freely admits, China’s environmental mitigation still has a long way to go and faces formidable human and natural obstacles. But its attempts to fix its environmental problems are neither hypocritical nor futile.