China climate policy fails.

Successful green policies in China share common elements, the book argues. They eschew rigid targets and top-down solutions that “cut everything with the same knife”, to borrow the Chinese phrase for one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Success stories also typically involve the state working with volunteer groups and seeking input from civil society. The book cites a reforestation scheme in the late 1990s in the Loess Plateau of north-western China. Designers spent two years consulting local farmers and scientists, tailoring their plans to local conditions. Orchards of walnuts and dates, shielded by desert willows and traditional landscaping techniques, slowly returned life to barren lands. Later, when impatient officials tried to scale up the scheme with the mass-planting of a few types of fast-growing, water-hungry tree, they failed.

As well as showing the limits of central planning, the book argues that China’s rulers use greenery to cloak their long-standing authoritarian ambitions. Nomads in Inner Mongolia or Tibet were once stripped of their herds and forcibly moved to drab housing blocks in the name of modernity. Now they are subjected to “ecological migration”, ostensibly to save grasslands from their grazing animals. Vast hydroelectric dams are still built over the objections of locals and environmentalists, but now in the name of fighting climate change. Abroad, China stresses the green credentials of its global infrastructure scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative. It delivers cheap technologies to developing countries. But its leaders’ green conscience is selective. In pursuit of national interests they send fishing fleets to pillage far-off seas. They sign opaque contracts with foreign governments to build coal-fired power stations, polluting mines and habitat-wrecking dams. They often rely on authoritarian allies to quell local protests.

Eco-authoritarianism as a means or an end?

In such cases, domestic and global environmental harms can be attributed directly to ruthless, top-down Chinese governance, suggests “China Goes Green”. That matters because a growing number of foreign observers ask whether China’s model of decisive, technocratic one-party rule might be Earth’s last, best hope, at a time when liberal democracies seem unable to act. Essays and books have appeared with titles like “Will China Save the Planet?” and “The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism”. Such works typically praise Chinese promises to fight climate change, and its hefty investments in wind farms or electric vehicles. But then, too often, some foreign admirers turn to wondering—with varying degrees of regret—whether the coercive powers of a dictatorship may be the only way to curb unsustainable ecological behaviours.

Examine the record, and in reality Chinese authoritarianism more often undercuts green goals. At moments, it is hard to tell whether the driving force behind a green policy is a desire for a cleaner environment, or an obsession with social controls. Take Shanghai’s recycling rules, which came into force in July 2019. Though the regulations address a real problem, they are fiddly and onerous and reek of distrust for residents. Li Yifei of New York University in Shanghai, the other author of “China Goes Green”, reports conversations with rubbish inspectors in that city, discussing their powers to rummage inside residents’ refuse sacks and to punish those who dump garbage outside approved hours. Soon, several inspectors boasted, bins will have facial-recognition cameras to catch violators, bringing an “orderly future” a step closer. Yet a truly sustainable future needs more than order and rules: it relies on citizens’ free choices. Coercion cannot save the planet.