Is an authoritarian regime that can restrict personal freedoms and implement technocratic decisions swiftly better equipped to mitigate existential ecological threats such as environmental pollution and degradation, and especially climate change? Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro's remarkable and long overdue book about coercive green policy-making in the People's Republic of China (PRC) provides an impressive range of perspectives to approach this old familiar question: the general theoretical debate about the notion of “authoritarian environmentalism” as it has existed for many decades, the features of the Chinese political system that leads some to view China as a real-life example of authoritarian environmentalism, an assessment of how effective the political leadership's environmental and climate policy-making is to this day, and the domestic and global influence of the state's green policies which stretch way beyond Chinese borderlands and the Belt and Road Initiative.
Their assessment of China's coercive environmental politics on the face of it is quite simple: while the government can demonstrate some achievements, after it put environmental protection, e.g. air pollution control, on its agenda and rolled out some rigid policies, none of them are systematic or sustainable. In their view, many more elements would have to be added and others altered in China in order to get anywhere near the ideal type and effects of green technocracy imagined by the concept of authoritarian environmentalism. This especially pertains to the way that the Chinese public is (so far not sufficiently) included in decision-making and the implementation of China's green policies, and to the fact that public supervision and evaluation is largely lacking. In fact, the many micro level studies published over the past decade definitively corroborate Li's and Shapiro's reading of the Chinese case.
However, Li and Shapiro are not interested in merely evaluating the outcomes of environmental policymaking in the PRC. Quite the contrary: they claim that “environmentalism” and the fate of the ecological environment and climate are not actually the target of the Chinese party-state's action, instead the endgame is to preserve power and to establish total social control. Most pointedly, they write: “By simultaneously expanding the regulatory scope of the state to encompass a growing range of environmental issues and co-opting non-state actors into the state's environmental agenda, the Chinese state uses the appearance of going green to consolidate its power over territory and over the individual” (p. 188). Similarly, this appearance of an environmentally friendly technocracy also helps to project soft power in China's global outreach. While it is unclear how much is won by replacing “authoritarian” with “coercive,” the authors’ main point is therefore that it is more accurate to use the term “environmental authoritarianism” than “authoritarian environmentalism” for the case of China.
The book's enormous strength is its comprehensive and well-balanced combination of ambitious theorizing and hard empirics. It treats the “authoritarian environmentalism” debate in length and depth and adds new threads for theory building, as well as heavily building upon the two authors’ outstanding expertise in the field (and the field quite literally). Li and Shapiro draw on a wide range of substantial information about the Chinese political system and the policy process down to the local level, which allows them to produce thorough and compelling analyses of China's green policies. Besides empirical depths, they also succeed in keeping the bigger picture in mind and in interweaving the domestic with the global perspective. Ultimately, their weighty argument for the relevance of the book is that “the future of the planet hinges on the Chinese state's efforts to go genuinely green” (p. 34).
With a critical eye, one could mention that, sometimes, the scarce use of references and multiple sources makes a few points in the book less compelling than they could be (e.g. when the status of different energy sources or citizen preferences in China are discussed without sharing any of the data involved in this analysis). It then becomes clear that this is a book for a general audience rather than for a specialized one that expects a lot of detail and sourcing. Moreover, the authors’ occasional “activist” language, e.g. “we must not,” strengthens the overall engaging style of the book. However, this style sometimes comes at the cost of any final clarity of argument that Li and Shapiro want to convey. Is the CCP now on an all-encompassing mastermind mission of greenwashed totalitarianism that the world needs to prepare for, despite the many deficiencies and internal sabotage also detected? What about the ultimate role of the public in all this? On the one hand, Li and Shapiro regard the public as a source of political pressure on Chinese policy-makers and an important resource for policy consultation, on the other hand the public is described by them as apathetic and mostly disinterested in environmental matters (pp. 203–204).
Altogether, among some other recent books about the role of China in the global climate crisis and the chances of China becoming the last hope in humanity's fight against this problem, Li and Shapiro's book stands out because of its scope, depth and all the other qualities listed above. It should be required reading in any class on contemporary China, and for any analyst of Chinese domestic as well as global politics.
