ChinaDialogue Latest Articles
China and the world discuss the environment



Restructuring China’s finances (Jul 29)
In its quest to build a low-carbon economy, China is seeking ways to channel cash towards green schemes. Zeng Gang outlines the latest developments.History teaches us that financial support is an essential ingredient in technological innovation and economic transformation. Finance – be it the funds required to facilitate technological invention or the rewards reaped by that invention – spurs the changes on. Meeting China’s emissions-reduction targets and developing a low-carbon economy will be no different. Recent data indicates that financial institutions are involving themselves in the development of sustainable technology. Meanwhile, the growth of carbon markets has provided some incentive for the development and application of that technology and attracted numerous businesses and financial institutions. This financial innovation is playing an increasingly important role in efforts to build a low-carbon economy.

Broadly speaking, financial innovation in the low-carbon sector is...


“Deng would back green growth” (Jul 28)
Hu Angang is a leading Chinese economist, government advisor and advocate of low-carbon development. He talks to Isabel Hilton about his country’s path to fiscal success – and how it can be painted green.The distinguished Chinese economist, Hu Angang, is noted for his radical approach to economic reform and, more recently, to the political economy of climate change. On a recent visit to the United Kingdom, he explained to chinadialogue how he has been examining China’s past – including the relatively unfashionable ideas of Chairman Mao – to help him formulate policies for China’s future. 

“I wanted to understand why Mao’s first period, from 1949 to 1956, was a golden age,” he said. “Why this period was the mother of his later failure and how Mao’s failure was the mother of Deng Xiaoping’s success. I wanted to explain why China took off for 30 years in the second golden age after 1978. If we want to maintain this growth for the next 30 years, we have to change the model now. We can’...


Credit where it’s due (1) (Jul 26)
Since groundbreaking green finance laws were launched in China three years ago, the country’s banks have made admirable efforts to clean up lending practices. But, says Adina Matisoff, transparency remains weak.Three years ago this July, the Chinese government introduced unprecedented financial regulations as a means to harness the power of China’s commercial banks to curb the country’s severe environmental degradation. The Green Credit Policy, created by the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), The People’s Bank of China and State Environmental Protection Administration (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection or MEP), was a bold idea to prohibit lending to dirty companies; and one that few governments internationally have had the power or will to pull off. With this tool, Chinese banks have made strides in the development of their environmental policies and have started to see the green results of their implementation measures. And yet poor transparency of lending pol...


Credit where it’s due (2) (Jul 26)
China’s commercial banks are making strides in domestic green finance but failing to show the same commitment abroad. In the conclusion of her article on sustainable credit, Adina Matisoff calls for new standards.In the three years since the Chinese government introduced the Green Credit Policy, progress has been made in sustainable finance on China’s home front. While green finance is gaining traction domestically, however, there are no such policies governing the investments of Chinese commercial banks beyond the nation’s borders. This is the time, as China’s financial powerhouses are increasing their overseas transactions and grappling with the associated environmental and social risks, to institute such policies.

Up to now, Chinese commercial banks have not played an influential role in financing Chinese business activities abroad. Instead, Chinese policy banks have filled this financing space, often with deals arranged at the highest political level. For example, China Export-...


After climategate: forward to reality (Jul 23)
Three reports on the leaked emails of British climate scientists allow a calm perspective on last year’s media storm and bring the real problems of global warming back into focus, says Øyvind Paasche.The bitter controversies swirling around the research findings of and communication between climate scientists seem to have reached a kind of turning-point in mid-2010. After the drama (and even near-hysteria) of the so-called “climategate” affair surrounding the leaked emails of scientists from or connected with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a number of reports have been published that enable a calm perspective on a bewildering storm.

These reports also make possible a more measured view of the role of the other institution that has been at the centre of the disputes of 2009-10: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body charged with producing “fair, comprehensive and objectively produced assessments of climate change”....


Equity begins at home (Jul 22)
Politicians must put fairness at the heart of domestic – not just global – climate strategies, argues David Nash, or the poor will end up bearing a disproportionate burden.Tomorrow (23 July), ministers from the BASIC countries – the powerful grouping of developing-country heavyweights comprising Brazil, South Africa, India and China – are to meet for the third time since the bloc’s formation prior to last year’s summit in Copenhagen. The sole theme of a special session taking place during their high-profile deliberations in Rio de Janeiro will be familiar to anyone involved in international climate-change negotiations.

“Climate equity” has a long and recurrent history in talks to agree a global framework for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that are deemed safe by climate scientists. The principles of “historical responsibilities”, “respective capabilities” and the “right to development” are engrained in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ...


China's search for greener values (Jul 21)
In his new book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, Jonathan Watts tells the story of an unfolding ecological crisis as seen from the ground. Here, he talks to Sam Geall about its economic and cultural implications.As the Beijing-based Asia environment correspondent for the Guardian, Jonathan Watts has reported on environmental issues in China for several years. His new book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, is a travelogue that tells the story of China's breakneck development and its consequences, from melting glaciers in Xinjiang and cancer villages in Henan, to dam projects in Sichuan and skyscrapers in Shanghai.  





Sam Geall: The urgency of China’s environmental situation has struck many people in the past year or so, especially since the Copenhagen climate conference, but you have been writing this book for four years. How did you become convinced of the importance of this topic?

Jonathan Watts: The book grew and it changed. Because the country is so big and changing so fast, I fou...


“Dumb plastic” is killing our seas (Jul 20)
In March, David de Rothschild set out on a mammoth Pacific crossing aboard the Plastiki to highlight ocean pollution. As the journey ends, even he was shocked by what he found, writes Tim Adams.“After 100 days at sea,” David de Rothschild suggests, “you realise that it should be called planet Ocean rather than planet Earth.” De Rothschild was speaking from the island of New Caledonia – “an odd little bit of France in the South Seas” – the night before his boat, the Plastiki, embarked on the final leg of a voyage that should finish in Sydney harbour any day now.

The Plastiki, a revolutionary catamaran, is kept afloat by 12,500 plastic bottles in its hulls; the "eco-adventure" has been designed to draw attention to our systematic pollution and over-fishing of oceans. Since de Rothschild, the 31-year-old son of the banking dynasty, and his crew of five set out from San Francisco on March 20, they have discovered many things, but mainly, he says, they have learned about the sea, about ...


System failure (Jul 19)
The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is a symptom of a sickly political economy, argues Tang Hao. Without wholesale reform of global structures, he says, the environment will always suffer.BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed a chorus of criticism. Some people say it was humanity’s desire for riches that forced open the earth’s crust and brought about disaster. But we cannot change human nature and overcome the urge for profit. The only real way to solve environmental problems is to improve political systems and our mode of economic development. (Likewise, we cannot do away with the human desire for power, but democratic systems have gradually helped to solve what were once vicious political struggles.)

To find the true cause of the pollution, we should look to the basis of the international political economy: that current global economic growth is oil-powered. This has led to economic problems, such as shortage of supply, as well as endless problems with envi...


China’s urban disease (1) (Jul 15)
Zhang Song is a Shanghai-based planning professor and urban-preservation expert. In the first half of a two-part interview, he talks to Zhang Chuanwen about the death of vitality in China’s flash new cities.Despite the “Better City, Better Life” theme of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, many argue China’s cities are becoming ever less habitable. Southern Metropolis Daily reporter Zhang Chuanwen discusses the problems facing China’s cities with professor Zhang Song of Shanghai Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP).


Zhang Chuanwen: For the first time, the theme of the World Expo is “the city”. What does that signify for China?

Zhang Song: China needs to pull together the mistakes made and lessons learned from building cities and look at advanced practices in foreign countries. The Expo has many showy buildings, but it doesn’t seem like any of them will become classics. The former dean of CAUP, Wu Zhiqiang, was the chief planner for the Expo, and at the...