President Xi Jinping has won international praise and media plaudits for his announcement on Tuesday that China aims to be carbon neutral by 2060.
Xi’s pledge should not be taken seriously — it is nothing more than a base public relations stunt.
The true measure of the Chinese Communist Party chairman’s insincerity is reality. While Xi talks a good game about joining with the world to reduce carbon emissions dramatically, his actions are rather different. Since Xi’s 2014 pledge to President Barack Obama that China would stop increasing emissions by 2030, his regime has constructed hundreds of high carbon-emission coal power plants. These plants reflect the party’s priority focus on economic growth and steady improvements to living standards.
Still, the plants also reflect a broader political understanding: Xi’s awareness that the international community isn’t terribly concerned with his vast carbon footprint, just as long as he claims that reduction reforms are underway. The free pass China was given at last December’s COP-25 climate change summit offers a grand example of this dynamic in action.
While the world lambasts the United States for leaving the Paris climate accord but simultaneously ignores the U.S. for its record carbon-emission reductions, China is saluted for actually increasing its year-on-year emissions!
As wide-ranging and unrepentant as they are, Xi’s lies aren’t simply about countering criticisms of his regime. They’re also about earning the concessionary favor of other nations.
After all, Xi knows that any Biden administration will view carbon emissions action as a top foreign policy priority. The same is true of the European Union. This gives Xi an opportunity to pretend to do something about carbon emissions, just as long as the price is right, which is to say, just as long as the EU and a prospective President Joe Biden are willing to make concessions to China in other areas. Xi will play this game cleverly, as he did with Obama. He’ll offer a pretense of sincere interest in reducing carbon emissions but will say that he can’t move as quickly as the international community would like. Then will come the dangle. China might be able to make bolder pledges, Xi will offer, but only if the world shows Beijing some reciprocity. Thus, Xi hopes, he’ll get some greater U.S. and EU appeasement on issues such as his South China Sea imperialism, intellectual property theft, and his policies toward Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
It’s an easy game to see through, but Xi’s words carry excess weight on the center-left of the international foreign policy intelligentsia. Just as Xi’s pledge to cap emissions by 2030 earned Obama much-adoring praise in the media, so also would any bolder Xi pledges earn Biden and EU leaders a hat tip from their colleagues and supporters. But as with Xi’s actions toward the world’s oceans and rivers, earthly reality will be measured somewhat differently.
