Richard Smith has suggested articles of his for further reading.
On Contradiction
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Can Xi Jinping’s Chinese model supplant democracy?
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China is responsible for over 30% of GHG emissions. It is responsible for more emissions than the next 5 highest emitting countries combined (USA, India, Japan, Russia, and Germany). However, China’s population is two-thirds the combined population of those countries and its GDP is 32% of their combined GDPs. Is there something special about China’s economic model that makes this the case? This is the conundrum that Richard Smith tries to answer in China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse.
The book was written in 2020 and covers the extent of China's environmental destruction, with a focus on the past 20 years. Richard Smith covers how from 1978 China has ramped up its emissions. He covers a range of topics from pollution of soil and rivers to excessive building and construction, to the inner workings of the CCP. The book was published before the Covid-19 pandemic and so does not cover the period of China’s ultra-lockdowns.
China is now fully integrated into the world economy. It has played an ever-increasing role in the renewable technologies market. Since 1978, China’s economy has grown on average 10% per year. Its rapid growth and growing share of world manufacturing (now at around 30%) has been due in no small part to its ever expanding capacity to burn coal. Coal plays a massive role in China’s economy not only in its energy supply but also in its iron and steel production. China leads world production in the latter and is the third largest producer of iron-ore after Australia and Brazil.
A significant part of the left cheer on China and play down its authoritarianism. Smith’s book is a useful antidote for anyone who needs a reminder of the extent to the Chinese state suppresses national minorities, intimidates and elilinatesn political opponents, leads the world in executions, and regularly crushes dissent with police violence - whether this to repress Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans or to attack and crush the labour and other progressive movements.
Smith paints a vivid picture of China’s environmental destruction. He describes at length China’s excessive construction projects that have led to entirely redundant office blocs, railway stations, airports, districts of cities, and even so-called “ghost cities” that lie completely empty. In its populated cities, Smith describes the extent of the air pollution, the heavy use of cars and massive multilane motorways that nonetheless have not abated China's massive traffic and congestion issues. China’s rivers, lakes and soils are massively polluted and in large part this due to a combination of unenforced but existing environmental and health and safety legislation, corruption within the CCP bureaucracy, and of course a rapacious drive to grow the economy at nearly any cost.
Since 2017 Xi Jinping has announced his intention to make China into an “ecological civilization”. This has included promoting the State Environmental Protection Agency to ministerial rank, which gives the agency more powers to intervene and the real steps being taken to tackle small polluters, limit combustion vehicles, tackle issues of plastic and e-waste, and bring in more protections for natural reserves. Yet as Smith argues even if Xi Jinping were serious about tackling environmental issues, he runs a state and economy where it is near impossible to decarbonise without a massive overhaul of the political system. As Smith puts it Xi Jinping “runs a politico-economic system characterized by systemic growth drivers which are, if anything, more powerful and more eco-suicidal than those of “normal” capitalism in the West.”
Smith’s explanation of what drives China’s internal growth and environmental destruction is in parts clear and in other parts confused and contradictory. In his earlier writing Smith argued that China was a bureaucratic-collectivist. He has since revised this position to argue that it is some mix of bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist. And he breaks down the drivers of China’s emissions as being: intra-bureaucratic competition, nationalist and imperialist ambitions, employment maximisation, consumer maximisation, and corruption. These are all major drivers, however, an important aspect of China’s growth that Smith leaves out (or at least understates) is its integration into the world capitalist economy.
Moreover, at various points in the book Smith seems to be at pains to say that the mix of the economy being both bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist provides a more potent mix when it comes to growth and environmental destruction than if it was just capitalist or just bureaucratic-collectivist. Broadly speaking Smith argues that there is something qualitatively different about China’s political-economic system from that of capitalist states in the rest of the world.
I am not convinced there is something qualitatively different about China, so much as the world is more capitalist and more capable of driving development from a low starting point - and China provides a prime example of this.
Much of what Smith claims about China being uniquely different from capitalism does not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Smith argues that Xi can’t stop his party subordinates and other officials from wasting resources and polluting because if he did, he would have to challenge their economic interests. Do we not have this in the West and nearly any capitalist economy? If states try to impose regulations on waste and pollution they get push back from sections of capital and reactionary political forces. Smith does not account for why the supposed bureaucratic-collectivism in China makes this so qualitatively different.
On a different occasion Smith argues that the main driver for growth under capitalism is competition. The only limit to growth is if profits can't be made. So far so good. Smith goes on to argue that this is not the case for China. He maintains that because China is a hybrid of bureaucratic-collectivist and capitalist, the system is “largely exempted from the laws of capitalism”. He argues that exemplary of this is that not one SOE has gone bankrupt or failed. Smith seems to have blinded himself to all the ways in which companies and banks under capitalism are regularly kept afloat, subsidised and saved by the state - in fact it is something distinct about how how a capitalist state acts. If anything, China under the rule of the CCP does this aspect of capitalism better than other countries. And if anything its combination of lack of regulation in health and safety and the environment and its willingness to keep SOEs going at any cost, along with China’s nationalist ambitions to be dominant on the world stage, account very well for why it has outdone itself in economic growth and environmental destruction.
Smith’s book is a great primer on China’s environmental and economic record. While I think Smith’s analysis of China in part is confused and the analytical conclusions he draws are mistaken, his insights into how the CCP functions and what ambitions drive it are valuable. Anyone who wants to learn more about China and the environment should make time to read and discuss this book.
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