China assumes climate mantle as USA falters

Donald Trump has taken the momentous step of pulling the USA out of the Paris climate accord. The country where many of the world’s foremost climate scientists are based is, in the words of one journalist, “retreating from the fight”.

China, meanwhile, the world’s largest polluter, many of whose cities still lie under a thick blanket of smog, appears to be taking the lead. Xi Jinping, China’s president, has confirmed that the country remains committed to the accord, and to drastically reducing its emissions.

To many, this seems like a fundamental geopolitical shift.

After the second world war, the world’s divisions were clear. In the West, there were Western Europe and the USA: free, capitalist, prosperous. In the East, there were China and the Soviet empire: authoritarian, communist, poor. But a new, more confusing world order is taking shape.

This shift goes beyond environmental matters. Xi’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year set out his plan to transform China’s image around the world.

Without mentioning Trump by name, he attacked the president’s economic views. He said “no one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” and likened protectionism to “locking oneself in a dark room”. Liberals and free marketeers purred in response to his defence of globalisation.

Stephen Green, former chairman of HSBC, is a firm believer that China will dominate the next century. He says China has a “boundless and insatiable curiosity” that puts the West in the shade.

Citing a growing middle-class, a huge appetite for the best education and an economic miracle which has meant that since 1981 the poverty rate fell from 85% to under 10%, he believes that China’s rise will be “infinitely enriching” for the world. According to Green, China is transforming faster, and more consequentially, than the UK did during the industrial revolution.

To those with a Eurocentric view of history, this may seem alarming, but many Chinese people feel they are the world’s natural superpower. Should we welcome this rise?

Planet China

“Yes we should”, say some. As Europe’s economy slows and the USA becomes more insular, the world needs a new, energetic driving force. China will do that job well. It has a rich culture and, emerging from its authoritarian past, it is adopting the liberal principles of the West. Let us embrace this development.

“China has done an amazing PR job on the rest of the world,” reply others. Actually it is a dictatorship that has appropriated the West’s political language, while still exploiting workers, locking up journalists and executing thousands. If people realise that freedom is no longer needed to be rich, how long can freedom itself last?