Jacob Dreyer , November 21, 2023

Empires Are No Gentlemen

The failures of Sino-American climate diplomacy Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. | Wikimedia Commons

Flooding in Beijing, heatwaves in Paris, air pollution in New York City—climate change events are increasing in frequency and severity around the world. One has the sense that the climate crisis and related mass migrations and geopolitical conflicts will be for our time what World War II was eighty years ago: a moment of extreme peril which may be eventually passed at great cost, with the world remade in its wake. Americans, heirs to a project of world domination which has faltered perhaps irretrievably, look at any problem and assume that we should probably decide upon the solution. Inevitably, the government of the historical biggest carbon emitter has some poor opinions of the biggest current emitter, especially of China’s climate change strategy, although their plan is in some ways more advanced than our own.

The Chinese Communist Party is without doubt profoundly concerned about climate change. Their actions in rapidly rolling out new energy infrastructure, while preparing for worst case scenarios, speak louder than words. When John Kerry visited Beijing in July, hoping to create a new “climate diplomacy,” Xi Jinping vetoed the concept, saying that “the pathway and means for reaching [reduced emissions], and the tempo and intensity, should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others.” While climate agreements buttressed the recent Xi-Biden meeting in California, there was a sense that Chinese leaders were simply taking credit for doing things they planned to do anyway, without modifying their plans for new coal plants. As the United States and China play the blame game while grappling with rolling crises increasing in severity, American progressives are all set for wishful thinking about some vague “cooperation,” to quote Bernie Sanders, whose form we can’t really imagine, while we simultaneously maintain a fatalistic attitude toward emissions which we can scarcely control.

Here’s a common progressive wish list: solve climate change without any real change in our lifestyle (OK, we’ll drive a Prius and bike around when we’re in the city), continuously lecture everybody from China to Texas about how wicked they are, and avoid great power conflict. In that context, does climate diplomacy of the kind pursued by Kerry and his Chinese friend Xie Zhenhua—which is to say nothing of Sanders’s “cooperation”—offer any hopes of arresting emissions and limiting warming?

The built environment of the United States came into being relatively recently; only in the 1950s did our autocentric way of life and the political economy of the petrodollar take their current form. Our current vision of the United States—its political configurations, its highways, its standard of living—are not permanent laws but the outcome of the post-World War II boom years of infrastructure building. Without historical precedent at the time, those years resemble nothing so much as China’s “reform and opening” decades in their transformation of a continent of distinct regions into a homogenized national space of gas stations and hamburger stands. Highways are to America as high-speed rail is to China, a one-off infrastructure of national unification and self-discovery, built in a moment of energetic optimism.

The conservative movement understands that carbon neutrality and an end to fossil fuels means an end to “the American way of life.” While the conservatives seem unwilling to confront the reality of the problem of climate change, at least they are in touch with the reality of the American supply chain, based on low-cost labor overseas and underpinned by technologically mediated military domination of the rest of the world that allows for the supersized American carbon footprint—the outsized houses, beef consumption, and automobiles. When pressed, many conservative business elites admit that the energy transition might be necessary but give a host of technical reasons why it cannot go any faster. The executives in America’s plastics and petroleum industries bring technocratic logic to bear on the reasons why decarbonizing is impossible; this logic must be met with material alternatives and concrete plans for our energy supply, agricultural system, and so forth.

It is precisely in this technocratic, corporate expertise brought to bear on engineering problems at scale that China has built a powerful lead in solar, wind, and battery industries. Where the American left tends to parry conservative deeds with pious words (at their most effective, words in regulations which legislate emissions), the socialist-with-Chinese-characteristics “new energy” sector competes with American car companies and energy companies on price. By leveraging domestic economies of scale, subsidies, and other aspects of a statist investment-forward model, Chinese companies have increasingly taken the lead globally.

On the left, we tend to find American life as such unsustainable, but also brutal and tedious. It’s difficult to really believe that a Costco is worth destroying the world for. Enter our relationship with China, to where much of the ugliness of mass production has been outsourced since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, with costs that have only slowly become apparent. In the global village that we imagined, we tended to project the economic geography of the gentrifying American city onto geopolitics. Russia was just a big gas station, somewhere on the way to the airport; China, some overpopulated and grubby factory district in an outer borough, with car parts in the front yard. The United States was something like the financial district and the upscale commuter suburbs simultaneously; we didn’t know or care where the stuff came from, just that it kept coming.

With the advent of geopolitical tensions with China and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the limits of such analogies have become clear. After all, gas stations and factories are pretty important places to the functioning of a modern community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, China has become the global workshop for the energy transition, from solar and wind to electric vehicles. This is true even as China the actual country continues to build coal plants at a ferocious rate. They’re worried that in the worst case, rivers will dry up, preventing the hydropower that gives Sichuan province at least 60 percent of its electricity, which happened last summer. God forbid what eventuality would make the sun stop shining, but if it happens, they’ll have coal plants to keep the AC pumping. The point is, China has all of the factories now. That includes not only the factories that make plastic Christmas trees but also those that make solar panels. We may find Chinese policies “disappointing,” but the Chinese government is unlikely to take American angst as a relevant factor in their policy process.

Last summer’s transitory hopes that China was experiencing an economic crisis were seized upon for their positive climate outcomes. An end to the Chinese real estate boom will massively impact global consumption of steel, concrete, and other significant emitters. China has remade itself from “factory of the world” of the WTO-driven moment to a real estate portfolio in recent years; as the latter is finished as the driving force of the Chinese economy, “green technology” and the energy transition increasingly look like the most plausible replacement. This has led to the country slowly becoming more “socialist,” as state-owned or subsidized energy transition companies rise and private entrepreneurs involved in building concrete-steel housing, or in exporting products made of plastic, decline. If we consider the “economy” to be a collective effort to change the built environment in a way that generates surplus value, China’s movement toward carbon neutrality can probably keep the country working away for a few decades. Driven by American threats and tariffs, Chinese leadership has decided to emphasize “security” and manageability in their food and energy supply—which means importing less from America and gradually ending reliance on exports to America as an economic driver. While war might be unlikely, a world of two parallel trains running on different tracks seems almost certain. Will China create the blueprint for a carbon neutral economy before we do? If so, what will that do to the global order?

Under Obama, the United States and China collaborated on the technology which has led to China’s current shift. Scholars today dream of a shared fund for the greening of developing countries or joint research on fusion and other new energy sources, but such prospects seem impossibly distant. With Kerry as emissary, the U.S. government under the Biden administration has pursued a sort of climate diplomacy in a void. A shared fund to help developing nations like South Africa, with its ongoing collapse of a coal-fueled electrical grid, install low-cost Chinese solar panels seems impossible, for example. The market is doing it by itself, but a lot more slowly than would have happened with concerted support from the rich world. While Kerry didn’t secure a meeting with Xi Jinping, California governor Gavin Newsom, whose late October trip centered around climate technologies and companies like electric vehicle producer BYD, was more successful; the Chinese government might be hedging their bets in case Newsom becomes president in 2028, even though his victory would demand that Sinophobia decrease and climate anxiety increase in the next four years.

Senator Sanders’s proposal that United States and Chinese military budgets be slashed to cooperate on climate issues would inevitably involve American dollars paying for Chinese products—even though many of those solar panels will soon be under tariffs even when sold to American homeowners. (Those shipped by Vietnamese shell companies are also under scrutiny, with the U.S. government adding additional tariffs on them.) In a certain sense, Sanders’s proposal is logical, but its political impracticability is due to a certain detachment from material issues. For example, the fact that the United States is a net energy exporter and China is not, or the fact that ambitions to decarbonize the U.S. transportation network will face domestic contestation—and in fact already are. Witness Trump’s message to striking autoworkers in which he invoked Chinese electric vehicles as the true enemy. Chinese state investment for decades has seen the energy transition as an opportunity for Chinese industrial exports, with the auto industry as central within that logic; if you can’t overcome an incumbent, change the terms of the race.         

U.S. diplomacy toward China proceeds as though from the Chinese proverb 君子之交，