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In Search of Green China: Ma Tianjie on Pan Yue and the CCP’s “Ecological Civilization"
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- [00:00]
Gordon Caddick
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Marshall Poe
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Gordon Caddick
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Marshall Poe
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Gordon Caddick
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Ma Tianji
Cut the camera. They see us.
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Gordon Caddick
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Ma Tianji
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Gordon Caddick
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Ma Tianji
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Gordon Caddick
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Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Gordon Caddick
Hello, New Books Network. My name is Gordon Caddick and I have a very brief message before we get going. If you're hearing this, it's because you've discovered cited syndicated across the nbn. Now, cited is a reference to academic citation. So I think this is a show that you're going to like. We have a whole new season and it is called Green Dreams. Green Dreams is telling stories about influential environmental theorists and explor the impact that they have had on environmental movements, sometimes for good and other times for ill. You're going to find the episodes across the network, but if you like this, I really recommend that you subscribe to our main feed. That way you won't miss an episode. You can find that wherever you find your podcasts or@citedpodcast.com that's C I-T-E- dash podcast.com okay, on with the show.
- [03:00]
Ma Tianji
Foreign.
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Gordon Caddick
I'm Gordon Caddick and this is Sighted. You'll remember that our second episode of this season was about the development of sustainable development. That is the reigning Green Dream out here in the West. But like I said on that episode, it's not a dream that has delivered a more sustainable world just yet. Could there be a better way? Sustainable development has one major challenger from out East. It's called ecological civilization. That was first proposed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Now it's the reigning Green Dream of the Communist Party of China. Ecological civilization bills itself as a radical step beyond sustainable development. It's not just about sustaining our existing order, but fundamentally changing proposes a cultural, social and economic transformation to produce a new world order, one that transcends industrial civilization and replaces it with ecological civilization. The person most responsible for this green dream is somebody named Pan Yu. Pan Yu was a journalist throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s, and while doing that, he had a firsthand look at a number of China's major environmental disasters. He then went on to become a party researcher and bureaucrat in the mid-90s. He quickly rose the CCP ranks, and in 2003 he became a deputy director at the State Environmental Protection Administration. Eventually, he became their chief spokesperson. Hahn was widely celebrated as an environmental dove, especially by the international press. In 2008, the Guardian called him a hero, and they named him one of the 50 people who could save the planet. Through a series of his journalistic writings, policy reports, and public speeches, Pon developed and popularized the idea of ecological civilization, and it took off concurring with Pon's rise. Ecological civilization steadily rose to become a central plank of the CCP's ideology. President Hu Jintao first put it forward in 2007. It was then elevated as a core objective in 2012, and in 2018, President Xi Jinping made it one of China's major constitutional principles. Seventy years on, under the Leadership of the Communist Party of China. China is now the world's second largest.
- [06:10]
Ma Tianji
Economy, engaging actively with almost every country on earth.
- [06:15]
Gordon Caddick
This is Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American investment banker and TV producer who has been working in China since the 90s. He's the star of a CGTN propaganda series that examines the history of the party. On the third episode of that series, he interviews Pan Yu through a translator. Ecological civilization is a critical part of socialism with Chinese characteristics for the new era. What is the theoretical sources for ecological civilization? In a nutshell, there are three theoretical.
- [06:51]
Ma Tianji
Sources of an ecological civilization.
- [06:54]
Gordon Caddick
First, it is a Marxist ecology.
- [06:57]
Ma Tianji
Marx once said that a harmonious development between man and nature depends on transformed relations between man and man and man and society. The second is China's traditional culture, which calls for cooperation and harmony between man and nature and see them as a harmonious whole, just like sustainable development.
- [07:19]
Gordon Caddick
The prescriptions of ecological civilization are somewhat vague. In practice, it's become a mix of developmental environmentalism, environmental nationalism, and some small experiments in steady state economics. Pon also championed a number of major green policy reforms, including a green GDP and China's first major environmental impact assessment law. Between 2005 and 2007, those impact assessments resulted in the slowdown of more than 110 large scale industrial projects. To learn about the story of ecological civilization, I turned to Ma Tianji. Tianji is author of the new book In Search for Green China. He's a longtime journalist and environmental activist based in Beijing. This episode is going to be an extended interview with Tianji. In Search of Green China recounts the story of Pan Yu and the birth of China's modern environmental movement. Pan developed ecological civilization alongside a growing cadre of environmental activists, journalists and bureaucrats. But Tianji also recounts the struggle over ecological civilization. In 2008, Pan was largely sidelined by the party. Now ecological civilization has become a site of political struggle and contestation. In its more radical articulations, the idea looks like a call for an engaged green citizenry that would live in harmonious relation with the land. And it also suggests a fundamental rethink of Chinese society and indeed our world. But in its more conservative articulations, the idea looks like nothing more than ideological cover for muscular eco authoritarianism, for naive techno solutionism, and also for bellicose nationalists waging a new cold war where climate politics is just another front. So is eco civilization a green dream worth pursuing or just another green nightmare best avoided? After the break, I speak with Ma Tianji about China's reigning green dream. Where does your water come from? What does it really mean to break up with fossil fuels? And what could life in 2100 actually look like? These big questions and more are at the heart of the Climate Dispatch. That's a new podcast from the Sierra Club's Los Angeles chapter. Made in collaboration with Stranded Astronaut Productions, the Climate Dispatch explores the climate crisis from both global and local perspectives through the lens of life in Southern California. Hosted by Taya Jeannette, the show features intimate, thought provoking conversations with leading voices in the climate movement. Together they share hard truths, hopeful visions and real wins from the front lines of climate action. Plus, each episode ends with performances from LA based musicians. Tune in to the Climate Dispatch at sc.org Climate Dispatch or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, back to our regular scheduled programming. Ma Tianji is a journalist and environmental activist based in Beijing. His career coincides with the development of modern Chinese environmentalism. For a long time, CCP leaders debated whether environmental problems were even possible in China. They claimed that these problems were just the products of corrupt capitalist societies. But it was obvious to Tianji that that just can't be true. During his studies in the late 90s and early 2000s, he became a prominent environmentalist. After graduating, he became one of the first members of Greenpeace's China Office, and he eventually became their program director. He then went on to become director of China Dialogue. There he reported on Chinese environmental politics. He's also a frequent contributor to a range of publications, both domestic and international, including cgtn, South China Morning, and Foreign Policy. Tianji's book In Search of Green China begins around a particular place, the Huai River, a place that rapidly industrialized.
- [12:00]
Ma Tianji
So that was in the early mid-90s, and that was really the result of, I think, China's first round of economic liberalization after the Cultural Revolution, when Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to the world and allowing basically private enterprises to prosper across the country. And a few particular things that Deng Xiaoping did which were basically credited for the Chinese economic miracle for the Chinese economy to take off is first of all creating this really strong incentive system for every level of local governments to become basically business developers. So in the Huai river basin, what they did was they set up all kinds of paper mills or food processing plants that can use the agricultural produce of their provinces and to upgrade the economy into more industrialized ones. But the problem is that the technologies, those little enterprises they use, were really primitive, so there was no attention paid to the environmental consequences. The effluents and all those pollutions they're creating because everybody was just in this mode of get rich fast. So very quickly, the river became kind of a sewage for, like, four very large provinces. And by mid-1990s, it became really kind of an awful scene. The newspapers and sort of writers around that time were documenting really stunning stories. One of the stories I always had in my mind was the blinded monkeys. So there was in the middle of the river, there was the little island, and there used to be a zoo there with a bunch of monkeys raised there. But because the ammonia nitrogen in the river was so strong, and the one effect these ammonia nitrogen have is on membranes, on eye membranes, and you literally have monkeys blinded by the river. And that is the kind of story that everybody like. It's so common in the river basin at the time. And it was, I think, first time that people heard the concept of cancer villages, where entire villages, people got cancer because of the exposure to highly polluted water that they relied on for everyday life. And this sort of became sort of the first, I think, environmental crisis for the party as a consequence of the economic liberalization.
- [14:41]
Gordon Caddick
One of the people that you write about is a photographer, Hua Daishan, if I have that right, who takes thousands and thousands of photos and meets with some of these villagers. Could you tell me a little bit of him and what is his role in kind of bringing light to this issue?
- [14:59]
Ma Tianji
So Hu Daishan is a photographer, right? So he used to be in the Chinese army as an army man. Then after his career in the service, he became sort of a communications, low level communications bureaucrat for the township government, right, where he was responsible for writing little articles for the local newspaper. Huo Daisan has been fighting against pollution in China. He used to work as a journalist, but now he's one of the country's best known environmental activists.
- [15:32]
Gordon Caddick
This is a report from DW News, Germany's public broadcaster. They follow Hua Daisan as he wields his camera and speaks to local villagers along the way.
- [15:43]
Ma Tianji
The villagers call this Cancer Street.
- [15:45]
Gordon Caddick
Says Hua.
- [15:48]
Ma Tianji
At least one member of every family has cancer. And through that, I think he was the first person to basically systematically document the scale of the pollution. Because when he visited those villages, he noticed just the number of people getting cancer was abnormal. We gathered data for eight years. When we evaluated it, we determined that many more people die here than elsewhere. The cancer rates in the villages are 15 to 24 times higher than in comparable areas. And his mother and some of his very close friends also died in the same kind of cancer. So he really began to investigate the story Farmer Liu Youzhi is unable to work. She's been confined to bed for years. Every time I drink, I get a rash and the water leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, she says. I can't eat. I don't have the strength to walk. Liu says that since she's been ill, her whole body hurts and her bones and joints are swollen, which actually led him to quit his job in the local government and sort of became the first dedicated and full time kind of activist for the Huai River.
- [17:04]
Gordon Caddick
And I'm curious about at this time if really there's not much of an environmental movement. I mean, maybe that's an overstatement, but you do sort of characterize it as this sort of awakening. How would have officials and just kind of regular people even kind of understood this kind of advocacy for the environment?
- [17:26]
Ma Tianji
I think for a lot of people at that time, it was really a kind of first time experience hearing about the environmental plight, right? Hearing about water being polluted, water looking like soy sauce, right. And the people actually dying from a polluted river. So in 1993, the National Television station for the first time ran the Huai river story as part of National Congress, like a fact finding campaign to look around the country for the kind of pollution stories. So one of the visionaries inside the National Congress called, who was China's first environmental bureau chief. He sort of led this tour for journalists to go around the country and report whatever you can see about environmental pollution. And they collected all the materials and sent it to national television and some of the highest level media outlets to report it as kind of awareness raising for the public and for some of the earliest environmental policies. So I think it's basically around early 90s that a lot of the Chinese general public became aware of environmental pollution and environmental problems in China. And I think it was quite shocking for many of them because if you look at some of the letters that were published by readers to newspapers, or what people sent to some of the founders of earliest Chinese NGOs, they were really shocked and moved by what they've seen, right? And they sort of became the base that launched a lot of those NGOs, the supporting base that launched a lot of those environmental efforts.
- [19:10]
Gordon Caddick
In one part of the book, you describe the controversy here as reckoning with two different Marxes. And I'm curious if maybe you can expand a little bit on that, on what sort of Marxisms were being kind of fought over in this particular controversy.
- [19:30]
Ma Tianji
So around that time there were already, I think, the tensions right between two, I think, two components of what people think of as kind of a socialist ideals. One is the growth of productive forces, the growth of the economy, the power of a socialist state. But I think increasingly there was also this recognition that nature has its limits. And there is kind of a materialistic understanding also from the Marxism that you cannot grow the economy infinitively. Right? The economy is based on a solid physical biophysical foundation. And that biophysical foundation has limits. But I think the generation of Xu Keping and some of the early Chinese environmental visionaries within the government has been, I think for their own eyes, they've seen that this is probably not how the economy could grow forever. They were already feeling that the economy is hitting a barrier. And that barrier is very physical. I mean, the Huai River. They toured the Huai river quite systematically around 1993. And what they saw was basically the people, which is your labor force, a generation of your labor force, were dying right in front of your eyes. And how could you say that by growing an economy like this, you can just ignore those costs and you can just substitute them with whatever new capital you created, man made capital you created with that kind of growth. I think they couldn't convince themselves that this is something that is durable.
- [21:08]
Gordon Caddick
How did they respond to that crisis?
- [21:10]
Ma Tianji
So I think one of the earliest responses, and I think that was quite uniquely Chinese, was this so called industrial structural change, right? So instead of jumping to like the usual pillars of environmental governance, which is, okay, let's shore up the court, right, let's give people a chance to sue polluters or let's put up regulations. I think one of the earliest thing they did was actually developmental instead of regulatory. I think that's one of the key, unique thing that came out of all those environmental debates. So from the beginning they thought of, okay, there was a structural problem of how the economy was sort of being constructed. So too much of this kind of food processing or paper making industries, we should leapfrog, we should create incentives or create policies that encourage other types of industries. So from the very beginning there was a very developmental angle to those interventions. Rather than relying on regulations or economic incentives to let the market correct its wrongs. They already take a very state centered, top down and developmental approach to clean up the Huai river, including using quite a bit of coercive measures to just close tens of thousands of small paper mills. So the government basically coerced the local economies into shifting their gear into building some other new industries or taking a different path to development. And that sort of became sort of a model for later environmental interventions made by the government.
- [22:56]
Marshall Poe
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- [24:04]
Ma Tianji
The.
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Gordon Caddick
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Ma Tianji
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Ma Tianji
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Gordon Caddick
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- [26:11]
Ma Tianji
I think there's definitely merit to the arguments about China's approach being authoritarian, right? Because as I mentioned, there were definitely coercive measures being taken closing up small paper mills that were perfectly legal at the time. But I think by only describing it as authoritarianism also kind of risks missing a bigger point, which is this kind of guided developmentalism also embedded in that approach. Because it's just it was not kind of very arbitrary measures that only had this coercive side to it. There was also a kind of enlightened side which is based on this understanding that there was a limit in those provinces. It was also actively seeking to create new opportunities for those economies. It's not just a purely destructive move, it's also a creative destruction. Because by destroying, for example, the most polluted paper making companies, the government was also creating industrial policies that encourages technologies that it considered more favorable to the environment. And it creates, for example, tax rebates, favored loans, all kinds of encouraging policies to try to attract a new generation of industries in this region. And it's partially successful because of that technology upgrade. So it's I think this guided kind of developmentalism that differentiates China's approach to a purely kind of arbitrary, capricious and kind of authoritarian approach.
- [27:50]
Gordon Caddick
And one of the key kind of figures in this struggle is the person I was really interested to speak with you about, Pan Yu, who you describe in your book or other journalists have described as the Green Hurricane. Someone who got a lot of international press as a kind of environmental dove. Where was he throughout this River Basin story that we've been discussing? And what is his background to becoming kind of vice minister in the environmental Bureau, but before that being something of a journalist. Interesting story that he got to, where he got at a very young age. So what accounted for his rise?
- [28:30]
Ma Tianji
Yeah, so Panyu is really a unique figure, right? In China's environmental history. When he was young, I think one of his first jobs was actually a journalist, environmental journalist for a party affiliated newspaper called China Youth Daily. So I think in the 1980s, he was also at the front line as a journalist, witnessing some of the pollution problems on the Huai river basin, but also in, for example, Yunnan Province, where I think he recounted about reporting the pollution of Dianshi Lake, which was also a. A very famous pollution case. So he got sort of a first education in China's environmental challenges. Then he moved up the ladder into policymaking. And one of his, I think, important stops was the Institutional Reform office of the State Council as kind of a Yang policy director. So moving to SIPA, the environmental agency in the early 2000 was considered a demotion of panieu because the environmental agency at that time was so marginal in the government hierarchy. And as someone who a very young, talented official who was already thinking about macroeconomic issues, moving to the Green Agency was considered really a bummer, not good for his career. But he somehow turned that career into kind of a podium for his national fame by becoming the spokesperson for the environmental agency and grabbed that podium as a vice minister. He really launched his political career as a national figure because of all the press conferences that he held, and also by using the national media as his kind of platform to promote a lot of very bold policy reform ideas, many of them above his pay grade.
- [30:27]
Gordon Caddick
One of the broad theoretical approaches is this idea of ecological civilization of which he's a kind of standard bearer. He's not the first, certainly not the first theorist, maybe not even a theorist at all, but someone who's carried this idea forward. I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit, for people who don't know, just kind of a broad summary of what is ecological civilization and how is it distinct from other ideas that may be more familiar to our audience, like sustainable development, for instance.
- [30:58]
Ma Tianji
So I think there was no clear definition of what ecological civilization as an idea is, because even though it was kind of used frequently, especially today because of its elevation into the party's official platform as a phrase, it was never clearly spelled out. There was no book written on, okay, what is the theoretical kind of basis of ecological civilization? But I think Panyu was the first person to articulate a set of ideas. I would say that collectively, I think, make it kind of distinct. One thing that is, I think, differentiate from a more common concept of sustainable development is this kind of civilizational element, right? So it is called eco civilization because pioneer think of environmental issues as kind of a civilizational survival. As he and his generation of Environmental leaders and visionaries had witnessed tragedies like Huai. They were really thinking that if you squandered the environment this way, we are really hurting the foundation of China as a nation and also as a civilization. So people talk about in Chinese, this idea of which is translated literally as killing the nation and eliminating the race. They see the environmental crisis as of this kind of civilizational threat of hurting China's prospect of reviving or rejuvenating the Chinese civilization. And this is why I think the word civilization was put alongside ecological and become kind of a term. And also they also think of making China the kind of torchbearer of an effort that would replace Western industrial civilization. So they see ecological civilization as the next stage of industrial civilization. So I think there is a very kind of national element or nationalistic element in that idea. And under that idea then they become to think about environmental or nature more as kind of a national asset or civilizational asset that you need to safeguard for future generations of basically the Chinese people as kind of the treasures that you need to keep carefully for future generations. So I think from that kind of idea came this whole philosophy of stewardship. I think in Western environmentalism you talk about stewardship and people often, I think, refer to the, for example, religious idea of human beings being the stewardship for God's creation, right? But I think in the Chinese ecological civilization concept, the stewardship concept came from this idea of protecting the civilization for its future potential competition with Western countries for a civilizational advantage. And they often talk like, I mean especially Panyue often talks like this. And under this idea of stewardship, then came a whole set of concepts like, okay, so if you are to become the steward of nature for future civilization, then you probably need to set up a state control across China of all those natural assets. So there's this long term view being applied and this effort to put a cap or a control over all the natural assets in China and making the distribution of those natural assets kind of the responsibility of the central government. And this is kind of quite revolutionary in the sense that it's really a step on the toe of the developmental block because they were in the mode of, okay, let's grow the economy, I mean, GDP growth, growth as fast as we can. I mean, damming all the rivers, digging up all the coals, burn them and generate the economy today, because that was mattered, right? But Pan Yue was basically arguing that you should slow down, right? You should take a long view. You should take also a more holistic view of the Chinese civilization.
- [35:29]
Gordon Caddick
The other thing that he does is he positions ecological civilization as sort of a, in keeping with a larger traditional Chinese culture of environmental stewardship and very out of my element here. But if I understand correctly, he, you know, he interprets certain strands of Confucianism and Daoism and Buddhism and looks through these traditions and finds evidence of traditional Chinese stewardship and says sort of, this is us. So it speaks to that distinctly Chinese kind of national culture that you were talking about earlier. But also I've seen criticisms from folks who have looked at it have said, for instance, Hansen et al. Writes about eco civilization as being incoherent, self contradictory and a partial interpretation of Chinese eco tradition and looks at some critiques from these various schools that say, ah, this isn't exactly right, or this is a particular self serving reading of the Chinese traditional Chinese culture. I'm curious if you could speak to that. To what extent is eco civilization kind of an outgrowth of traditional Chinese thinking and to what extent is it Pan Yu's kind of clever positioning or public relations move to make it seem like it is?
- [36:49]
Ma Tianji
I think it's a fair critique of the idea of eco civilization, right? Because if you look at Chinese history from the ancient times, if you look at the record of, for example, the retreat of forests across the country and the way, for example, a lot of the agricultural practice was done, you can also argue that there is very little evidence that any consequential environmentalism was actually practiced throughout Chinese history. There were definitely elements of stewardship as Panyue like to quote, for example, a Qing dynasty law 2,000 years ago banned, for example the killing of young birds or a kind of conservation ideas embodied in those ancient literatures. But there are also more destructive sites also to the Chinese culture at that time. So we can say that he's borrowing some of the Asian ideas and packaging them to, as I mentioned, this more fundamental idea of environmental nationalism. I would say so seeing the environment and nature as a national asset, a national treasure that is important for China's future competitiveness as a civilization, especially vis a vis Western industrialized civilizations, as Pan Yue sees it. So he definitely borrows a lot from Asian Chinese culture and he reads, I think extensively right in those literature, trying to get ideas that would get people on board of, okay, we are a civilization that has traditionally taken care of the environment and we should continue to do so because it's in line with how the Chinese civilization has been running and it should be to the benefit of the Chinese civilization going forward. I think that's sort of the whole idea of economics, logical civilization. And he want to educate people about or sell people that idea. Because as I mentioned, the two Marxists, the tension is always there because they're always another school of thought saying that we should develop our way into the future and grow productive forces, grow our industrial might. That's the actual thing we should do instead of doing stewardship, conservation and things like that. So I think in order to compete with that kind of more muscular idea of development, I think he needs to package it in a different way. And I think he borrowed a lot from traditional culture. He reads also like Western green socialism and all those ideas and packaged them into something that sometimes I think you can argue can be incoherent.
- [39:36]
Gordon Caddick
Yeah. When I first started to research this story, before I came across your work, I read these eco socialist sort of like theory papers and these process philosophy that cast eco civilization in these very sort of radical ways. And then kind of like in the very beginning of your book, you kind of squash all that kind of excitement. I can't remember the exact quote, but you kind of pitch it as it is, not fundamentally. I hear, see, in one session you say there's little evidence to suggest that the Chinese state is pursuing comprehensive eco Marxism and we are galaxies away from organic holism or completely reconciling the human nature relationship. And you say, like process philosophy. And these sorts of things don't really capture what is going on here. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the perception of eco civilization from the outside. I mean, obviously there's a lot of critique of it being kind of authoritarianism and nationalists and just kind of a PR job. But then there's also a lot of kind of radical excitement. And I'm wondering what's perception and what's reality from kind of left scholars who have looked at eco civilization and taken some excitement from it.
- [40:59]
Ma Tianji
So I think there's definitely kind of a more romantic take right on what China has been doing, particularly in the past few years, because of some of those more progressive environmental policies it has pursued. Especially compared to, for example, the climate denialism that we're seeing in some countries like the United States. China was seen in those light as more progressive. And I think this leads to a more kind of romantic reading of what China has been doing by saying that, okay, it is actually practicing some really radical, fundamental, fundamentally green ideas like process philosophy, basically seeing all beings as one and kind of really deep, like philosophically green way of thinking about nature and human beings. And in my book I actually noted Paneer actually had a kind of friendship with John Cobb Jr. Who is this environmental theologist from the United States who also I think co authored one of important books on green gdp, even though he is more of a theologist and process philosopher. But I think when they visit, for example, when John Kopp Jr. Visited China, right, and he depicted China as have already reconciled the conflict between human and nature because he visited some of the pilot projects in Zhejiang Province where they actually practiced the idea of green gdp, discounting pollution and more destructive businesses out from GDP accounting and things like that. But I think this is probably too romantic a view of what China has been doing, because if you look at the contradictions that we are still seeing in the economy, the old growth model is far from being transcended completely. For example, a lot of the Chinese local governments these days are struggling to get enough revenue to keep the economy afloat. The debt issue is really becoming critical in the Chinese economy. And they have yet to find the actual substitute for the growth formula, industrialization formula, or a real estate driven, a debt driven economic growth formula to a more like a balanced growth model. To say that China has already discovered the perfect solution for resolving the conflict between growth and environmental destruction. I think it's a fantasy, it's far from there, even though it's making an effort. And it appears to have kind of a philosophical foundation of pursuing that path. So what we're looking at is kind of a partial story, right? There are some progressive element that appears to be balancing growth and conservation, but there are still deep rooted contradictions that we're still seeing.
- [43:56]
Gordon Caddick
I want to kind of take it back to Pan Yu because he has a kind of rise, fall and return, right? And we've talked a little bit about the initial rise, but his fall happens quite precipitously. There's a big kind of petrochemical accident. It creates quite a bit of blowback for sipa, the environmental agency that he's working at at the time. Could you tell us a little bit about that story and what does it mean for Panyu?
- [44:26]
Ma Tianji
The explosion, right, the big explosion at a major petrochemical plant in Jilin Province at the end of 2005 did not directly affect Panyu, but it directly affect his boss, Xie Zhenghua, who at the time was the, the actual Minister for Environment. That pollution became kind of a national scandal, an international scandal, because it leaked, I think, 100 tons of this highly toxic carcinogen benzene into a major river, the Songhua river, that Actually also flows into Russia. And it became sort of an across boundary pollution incident that the Environmental Ministry actually didn't tell the public or its neighbor Russia, 10 days after it happened. And that cover up, which I think was in the end exposed, caused Xi Jinhua to lose his job as environmental minister. He resigned from his post. So the incident didn't affect Panyue directly, but he lost a key ally and sort of a a patron in the system because he's directly above him. And Xi Renhua kind of shared a lot of his environmental ideas and they were really close, I think. So after Xie resigned, there was a new minister being appointed. And I think that sort of created some difficulties because Panyue's style of being a maverick isn't everybody's taste.
- [46:03]
Gordon Caddick
Sorry to jump in here just to clarify for the audience, because Pan Yu is the vice minister, so he's not the boss, but he's kind of the hype man, right? He's like the front, the spokesman, but then he's taken off of that podium, right?
- [46:20]
Ma Tianji
Yes. So one consequence of I think Xie's departure was the arrival of a new minister who probably didn't like how Panyu conducted his business as a vice, as a deputy. And in the end, I think one big sign of Pan's sidelining inside the Ministry was the removal of him as the ministry's spokesperson. And the actual cause, nobody actually knows, right? Because it's all like kind of internal politics. There was no public information about what exactly caused that removal. But the publicly available information was that at the end of the 2008, one of Pan's close allies and right hand man was arrested, jailed for corruption. Pan himself was never implicated in any of those investigations. But it was seen as the turn of the fortune for Pan and kind of a warning for him to be more careful. So since the end of 2008 and kind of the removal of him from spokesperson role, he became very silent, right? You seldom saw him in national media anymore.
- [47:39]
Gordon Caddick
In your book, you kind of chart a shift. Now Panu is quiet and then you look at. You return to sort of some of the activists and NGO energy around the environmental movement. And in particular you look at local environmentalists who are fighting against incinerators.
- [48:00]
Ma Tianji
Around 1,000 demonstrators are taking on the power of the city state.
- [48:04]
Gordon Caddick
They forced their way into a government office in Kedong, smashing computers and throwing.
- [48:09]
Ma Tianji
Office papers into the street.
- [48:11]
Gordon Caddick
They're upset about plans to build a waste discharge plant. This is from an Al Jazeera report from 2012. They were covering a protest movement that had grown since 2009. There was massive public opposition to these large incinerator projects that would turn waste into energy.
- [48:28]
Ma Tianji
The protests and kind of the campaigns against incinerators was very much around the idea of how you manage wastes, urban waste, particularly in those big Chinese cities that were growing really fast, and against this kind of simplistic method of just burning all the garbage. The waste of the factory must be polluting, and if it's dumped in the river, it will then pollute the sea. It will have an impact on the environment.
- [48:57]
Gordon Caddick
We must think about the future.
- [48:58]
Ma Tianji
We can't just focus on millions of dollars of benefits which will very likely be put into the pockets of the officials anyway. There was a big wave of protests against those planned incinerators. But I think the bigger story and its linkage with Panyur was those activists were sort of emboldened and being powered by some of the regulatory tools left by plan US reforms, especially the environmental Impact assessment tool, because they were trying to actually apply that tool in reality by asking for a public hearing, which was written in law but never practiced in a particular place, and actually running public hearings, challenging officials in those public hearings, or sending in letters to ask for a reconsideration of an EIA report, or finding flaws or even fabrications, environmental impacts assessment. So I think the movement right after Pan's sidelining was about, I think, hashing out some of its policy legacies and making it a really governance kind of reality for a protecting Chinese environment. Even after the political career of Panyu has sort of dimmed. I think that's sort of the biggest, bigger story of the years. I think after 2008, I think it was the activists who were really holding the line, trying to defend some of those policy legacies or even push the envelope further against the developmental bloc in making use of the tools that Panyu had left them.
- [50:40]
Gordon Caddick
One of the fascinating elements of these particular kind of activist battles, maybe we haven't stressed it enough, but a part of Pan Yu's sort of stated vision is about encouraging public participation in this kind of environmental decision making. And other activists that you highlight in the book too, are calling for the emergence of a kind of green citizenship, environmental consciousness of the broader public and in these incinerator battles. Now you mentioned the public events, the letter writing, the kind of activist movements. It seems like they're mobilized, but they don't quite get. I mean, Panyu certainly doesn't quite get the kind of fulsome public participation that he wanted, right it's kind of. I mean, you talk about it being a little bit shallow in terms of the way that the government responds to public pressure.
- [51:43]
Ma Tianji
Yeah. So I think after the sidelining of pan, basically, a lot of those policy ideas lost one of their biggest patrons, their biggest supporters in the system. So even though they were written into regulations, into rules, into some of them, even into laws, you need the actual bureaucrats, the local governments, to actually implement them. And that's, I think, a big challenge. Right. So it was left to the public and some of those activists to test them. And I think the reactions from those local governments really varied. Right. In some cases, like in Guangzhou, for example, some of the more progressive local government officials would embrace a dialogue with the public to work together on some of those projects. But in many other cases, it's a gradual kind of hollowing out of those public participation tools. So even though, for example, the law says you need to give the public a chance to file an opinion or having a public hearing on a major development, these kind of things only happened sporadically or superficially.
- [53:11]
Gordon Caddick
Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao to become President of China in March 2013. He then went on to make ecological civilization one of the core constitutional principles of the CC. In his 2017 address to the 19th National Congress, Xi reported on how he had sped up the development of an ecological civilization. He argued, we as human beings must.
- [53:41]
Ma Tianji
Respect nature, follow its ways and protect it. Only by observing the laws of nature can mankind avoid costly blunders in its exploitation. The modernization that we pursue is. Is one characterized by harmonious coexistence between man and nature.
- [54:00]
Gordon Caddick
After the break, we'll look at President Xi's interpretation of ecological civilization. I want to take this opportunity to recommend another show on the Harbinger Media Network, the Environment in Canada podcast from Sierra Club Canada. The Environment in Canada features expert interviews on, well, the Environment in Canada. They cover basically every environmental story in this country, from oil pipelines to nuclear waste, renewable energy, indigenous law, climate misinformation, and more. And their podcast covers some green dreams, things like renewable energy, democracy, the rights of nature, and other radical ideas. So it is a good complement to our season. Check out the Environment in Canada podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio and @SierraClub CA. Okay, back to your regular scheduled programming. President Xi has a bit of a catchphrase when it comes to ecological civilization. He says over and over again, green waters and clear mountains will provide gold and silver hills. Which has actually led to some criticism. Is eco civilization just a kind of souped up environmental modernization? Is it a political ideology used to justify the same basic development model with just the help of some green tech thrown in? Like, how radical is this idea really? Several scholars have also noted that Xi especially emphasizes those nationalistic elements of ecological civilization. Thibo Chen argues that China's green imaginary is really one that is defined by techno nationalism. And Hanson, Lee and Svarvarud have called eco civilization a sociotechnical imaginary that basically just stresses science and technology and never argues for a more radical overhaul of Chinese political and economic life. Plus, the very activists who provided the political impetus for Chinese environmentalism, well, they're largely out of the picture. Xi has called for a top down ecological transition and concentrated power under the leadership of the CCP to win the tough battles over things like air and water pollution. Ma Tianji's book In Search of Green China recounts this sidelining of environmental activism. Tianji writes that Xi has responded to environmental concerns but quote, rejected other societal aspirations for participation and consultation. So that's where we'll pick up our story of ecological civilization. And I want to ask you more about Xi in a second. But just sticking to this kind of theme of public participation in one part in your book, you raise an interesting question that I'm just going to cite back to you because I'd like to hear you answer it. You ask how does a lack of bottom up domestic support for China's environmental Dr. Affect the long term trajectory of its green transition which is so crucial to the future of the planet? How do you answer that excellent question that you just raised?
- [57:24]
Ma Tianji
I think it's problematic, right, if you only rely on what I call supply side environmentalism to drive the transition. Because there's a limit to how much the state can do in, for example, single handedly shut down coal fired power plants or give really good financial incentives for EV manufacturers to produce more EVs? There's a limit of that approach because in the end you will need the demand side to catch up. You will need, for example, a Chinese middle class that are willing to pay a premium for a piece of food that actually protects the environment. You cannot only rely on the supply side to solve all those problems. And this, this is becoming more serious because after industry, if you look at all the projections, the next phase of China's decarbonization would need to rely on sectors like transportation or household consumption. And you will need to rely on more individual consumers to become the engine of China's green transition. So if you don't mobilize them. If you don't engage them and keep them only indifferent, agnostic participants to whatever the government is promoting, you will hit a limit to how deep the green transition would become.
- [58:53]
Gordon Caddick
I think you've already partly answered my question, but I wanted to ask you about Xi Jinping and what happens to the idea of ecological civilization and some of the instruments that Panyu has been implementing.
- [59:06]
Ma Tianji
Yeah, so I think one of the big environmental theme of the current administration of President Xi Jinping is that he really picked up the ecological civilization concept and elevated it into the Communist Party's platform by making it like part of one of the five key pursuits of the Chinese Communist Party alongside, let's say, economic development, social stability, and all those cultural prosperity. You have ecological civilization as one of the party's core pursuit. And I think he really also buys this whole civilizational sustainability element. He really make that clear and advanced with his own power some of the bigger ideas China is currently now experimenting with. One big idea is this whole natural accounting system that he's promoting, which I think is close to the green GDP idea that Pan Yue once promoted. So asking basically China's statistical apparatus to begin to account for whatever value that natural products generates and factor that into your GDP accounting system. And I think another idea that the current administration really developed is using the cap on some of those environmental elements like carbon as kind of a developmental instigator, so finding ways to turn limits into kind of developmental indicators. So one thing they find, for example, join the campaign to clean up the air, is that if you use air pollution level as a hard indicator for the economy, you can actually push the local governments to really carry out the kind of economic structural changes that the central government has been advocating for, but failed to achieve for many years. So I think under President Xi, there is really an advancement of this environmental technocratic apparatus that can manage the economy better and implement some of those ideas that integrate environmental stewardship with kind of an economic developmental strategy.
- [61:37]
Gordon Caddick
Throughout this period, thinking internationally now, there was a brief thaw in relations between the United States and China under President Obama. But very quickly under the Obama administration, there was a pivot towards a more aggressive China policy. Decoupling continued throughout the Trump years into what some people call a kind of new Cold War. And I'm curious about how these shifting geopolitical realities either limit or accelerate even how do they affect the ideas of ecological civilization and China's sort of green imaginary.
- [62:19]
Ma Tianji
I think in general, those geopolitical challenges, especially since the Obama years, was a confirmation for especially the Chinese elites, political elites, that pursuing an environmental agenda is actually rewarding even at the international level. First of all, because of China's shifted perception of the environment as more of an opportunity than as kind of a limiting factor, especially under President Xi, by discovering that actually controlling air pollution or decarbonizing the economy actually generates probably more benefits for China than putting more limits on the Chinese economy. They also find that doing so would give China a lot of political capital internationally, especially in the international environmental governance area. And I think that sort of fed back into domestic policymaking by, I think, giving the environmental policies a lot of credit because it's also winning China points internationally and diplomatically. So why not pursuing it further?
- [63:36]
Gordon Caddick
That's interesting. I feel complicated about that because on the one hand, if that encourages genuine environmental stewardship, great. On the other hand, you know, critics can call this not environmental stewardship necessarily, and maybe a kind of techno nationalism, but there's something about the framing of this as when I think of environmental governance and the climate movement, I tend to think of it as more of kind of in universalist terms, in kind of cooperation terms, and some of the kind of framing of essentially great power games. And hey, this is a win. This is a PR win for us if we can be seen as sort of environmental leaders. Do you think there's sort of drawbacks to that, to that kind of approach, that sort of very green nationalist approach, essentially?
- [64:32]
Ma Tianji
Yeah. So I wouldn't characterize the current Chinese policy as only being driven by that motive of being seen as green internationally. I think, again, the shift, especially in the Obama years, that we saw in China's environmental approach, especially to climate change, was more internal driven, I would argue, because there was a really strong push to clean up the air. Air pollution became really dominant, like the huai river case 20 years earlier, becoming a dominant political issue domestically. And then because of that realization, they became more receptive to international pressure or international calls for China to take more actions on climate change. And I think, incidentally, they also earn a lot of political score by agreeing to that. For example, by agreeing for the first time to peak its carbon emissions by 2030. That was in 2014, alongside with Obama. So I think the logic order was more from the domestic political shifts. I think the international dimension of that idea is also interesting because when Pan Yue, for example, think about ecological civilization, one argument he also made which was related to international competition, was that if we don't do it, when the west masters all the green technologies, all the low carbon technologies, they will certainly throw trade barriers at us. Penguin wrote that around 2004, he was already seeing this as another race that China is having with the West. So he said if the west wins the green race by having solar panels EVs ahead of China, he had no illusion that they would make this a universal thing for the world. He would say these guys would definitely erect all the trade barriers to pin us down. So we cannot afford to lose that race. I think that kind of mentality also was later embedded in a lot of those industrial policies, items that, for example, Xie Zhenghua and then President Xi pursued.
- [66:50]
Gordon Caddick
Prescient. I'm curious about what these ideas have delivered. I mean, in your book, in the conclusion, you kind of recount some of the mixed results, right? Fluctuating pollution levels, carbon emissions really shrinking that much. What do you think this form of ecological thinking and environmental governance has delivered and where hasn't it delivered?
- [67:18]
Ma Tianji
So I think what we are seeing is the slowing of the truly destructive model that we are seeing in the era of the Huai river pollutions or the air apocalypse in Beijing, this really reckless, one dimensional, single minded pursuit of growth. That model has definitely been moderated by the introduction of this whole idea of ecological civilization and all the associated policy innovations and policy experiments that we're seeing today. But I think we are still far from finding the actual answer that a lot of those more romantic outside observers were hoping that we can find in China, that we have a totally different model of development that really reconciles economic growth, economic development with the stewardship of nature. We're still seeing conflicts there. The slowing down of the old growth machine is creating challenges. And I think the new green growth machine hasn't really catched up. There are experiments with trying to, for example, generate more money, generate more value, generate more revenues from nature friendly models. But I think these are still very much experiments and small trials here and there in Zhejiang province or in Fujian province in those pockets. It hasn't been mainstream yet. And there's also questions of whether they can be mainstream, whether the new models can actually substitute the old engine. And I think in my book, in the end, I think there's this balancing act we're seeing because when you slow down the old model, the old engine, to create some space for the new engine, you also have the risk of the old engine just stopped completely. And that is also something that the current state wants to avoid. And it's a difficult one because there's always the temptation to, to go back to the old model and go back to the old growth formulas. To re stimulate the economy, making for example, the real estate sector to roar again, to building more high rise buildings, building more roads. So there's always that temptation. But I think there's also this whole vision of creating a greener economy. And I think we're at this crossroad of what you choose, whether you are really committed to finding the new path for China and probably for the world.
- [70:03]
Gordon Caddick
Maybe I wanted to end just to echo some of what you said in looking at some of the excited proponents of ecological civilization. For instance, the philosopher Aurangar, I'm not sure if I have the pronunciation of that right, Australian philosopher written about ecological civilization. But when he looks to China, you know, his optimism is, you know, sort of rather muted. And other scholars have said this too, that some of the kind of radical edge of ecological civilization has been blunted. In the words of Gar, the career of ecological civilization manifests the tendency to domesticate it. He writes, established intellectuals would redefine the idea as a purely technical problem and marginalize intellectuals with a broad, broader vision who recognize its political and cultural dimensions. He goes on to say they would attempt to change the meaning of ecological civilization and use it to their own advantage. Just as in the west the notion of sustainable development in 1972 was appropriated and transformed by the global corporatocracy to just serve capitalist interests. And I'm wondering how you feel about that sort of sentiment. Is there a possibility to revive a more radical definition of ecological civilization and have it serve Chinese environmental governance and indeed the world going forward?
- [71:35]
Ma Tianji
It depends on whether there is a version of true ecological civilization that can be translated into actual politics, especially in a context like China. And when writing my book, I definitely realized that, for example, there is affinity of Pen Yue's idea and some of the current ideas, thinkers like Herman Daly, who advocate for, let's say, development without growth. And if you look at those ideas, I mean, I struggle to see they can be fully picked up in the context of China's political economy today. Even if there are some, I think, sympathetic voices like Pioneer, that are not advocating for de growth, but advocating for smaller growth today or slower growth today so that we could grow more long term in the future. And I think that's already kind of a moderated idea because the Chinese political economy is very much also intertwined with the world economy today. Pursuing I think those kind of radical ideas actually takes more concerted and coordinating efforts at a global scale. I think it's not something that one country can just do and we're already seeing for example, China already dealing with some of the dilemmas when it wants to have some more breathing space by pursuing some more, less destructive models. But who is going to pay the bills of the local government salaries? Who is going to foot the bills of public services? And if not by exporting to the US Market with all those goods, then by what? And those are hard questions, especially for one of the largest manufacturers of the world. So I think that kind of shift is definitely not just a theoretical question. You can have a perfect formula, a theoretical framework to say, okay, you can actually do this and still get human development and human well being out of that. But where is the next practical step? I think it's really a challenging question for an integrated world that we're living in.
- [74:07]
Gordon Caddick
Ma Tianje, author of In Search of Green China Great book. Thank you so much for this really delightful chat and for helping me make sense of Chinese environmental governance.
- [74:20]
Ma Tianji
Thank you. It's really my pleasure to talking to you. Gordon.
- [74:28]
Gordon Caddick
That was Ma Tianji, author of In Search of Green China. That's out now from Polity Books. And that's it for this episode of Green Dreams. The lead producer on this episode was me, Gordon Katic, with help from Nadine Shaker. Our technical producer is Jay Kober. Dakota Koop is a graphic designer and said its theme song was composed by Mike Barber. There were also a couple of China scholars that helped me get a better sense of Chinese politics. Thanks very much to Sibo Chen of Toronto Metropolitan University and Sigurd Schmaltzer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thanks also to the two podcast networks that helped distribute the CITED the Harbinger Media Network and the New Books Network. Cited is a project in collaborative academic journalism. That means we partner scholars, students and journalists together in production. On this episode and in this series, we had research, consulting and support from Professors Amra Zieman and Tana Mirlees. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding to support this partnership. My own time was also under written in part by a grant from my Tax Canada. For more and for a complete list of credits, visit the series page to Green Dreams. You can find that@sightedpodcast.com and linked in the show notes. Thanks for listening. This has been a production of Cited Media, the academic podcasting company. For more go to citedmedia Cat.
- [76:07]
Ma Tianji
It.