Greenwashing in China

At the recent climate summit between April 22 and 23, which was supposedly wanted by the new US President Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping also spoke with a speech that put harmony between man and nature and “green development” in the first place. To this end, Xi Jinping confirmed the commitment, already expressed in previous months, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (China currently produces the largest amount, 28% of global emissions), and to achieve “climate neutrality” in 2060, i.e. zero net carbon dioxide emissions, when the carbon dioxide produced does not exceed that which can be absorbed, for example by forests and oceans.

To achieve this goal, China would focus on three factors: intensification of energy production from renewable sources, a sector in which China holds important world records; increase in the volume of forests on the national territory; and above all reduction in the production of pollutants, and therefore progressive reduction in the use of coal. However, China is highly dependent on coal, so much so that it consumes about half of the world’s total. Coal meets between 56 and 58% of the country’s energy consumption and two-thirds of electricity production.

In addition, China has financed projects using coal abroad, from Pakistan to Serbia, for an investment of 474 million dollars in 2020. Not even the economic and pandemic crisis has marked a reversal in China’s use of coal, even last year production returned to the records of 2015: according to official data, as much as 3.84 billion tons were extracted. The reason is, in part, due to a sort of trade war with Australia, which exports a lot of coal to China. Beijing has blocked these imports, and increased domestic production, in retaliation for Australia’s positions on major disputes involving China: alleged Chinese origin of the pandemic, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, 5G etc.

So the overall picture of China’s energy needs suggests that we won’t see any “major leaps forward” on the path to reducing coal consumption any time soon. It is Beijing’s own leaders who predict a peak in coal use in 2030, but without quantifying it. Despite the statements of principle on the “harmony between man and nature”, despite the claim of wanting to base the economy on “a sustainable model”, despite the long future plans to use “alternative sources”, a golden decade for coal in China is opening. Even the latest Chinese five-year plan, although painted green as is obligatory everywhere, does not set limits to coal.

On the other hand, neither could it, since, in a context of increasingly fierce commercial rivalry between capitals, reducing dependence on coal would put its economy at a disadvantage. The “energy question” thus becomes a weapon in the inter-imperialist clash. The war between competing capitalisms is hidden in an apparent clash between “defenders of the environment”, of the “climate”. This fake “defense of nature” sounds like this: Western capitalisms accuse China of being the main responsible for emissions and push for strong reductions; China responds that it is the old capitalisms, dragged for centuries before China in the industrial revolution, that are the real culprits of the current critical situation.

These “ecological” skirmishes can only be explained in the context of rivalries between states and the crisis of their economies. Specifically, bourgeois China, which arrived a century late to industrial development, feeds its factories, today’s power plants, with coal, as did the old capitalisms. The weapon of environmental defense is, therefore, wielded by Western capitalists only to harness the young Chinese industry.

For three centuries of world history, Western capitalism has imposed itself on the backward Asian economies by flooding their markets with its goods. “The low prices of its goods are the heavy artillery with which it flattens all the Chinese walls”, says the Manifesto of ’48, masterfully outlining the ineluctable extension of capitalism to the whole world. But capital cannot develop in a uniform way, the different world areas follow different development trends. This results in the modification of relations between countries. The current state of world capitalism presents a reversed situation compared to 1848, today are the Chinese goods that traveling to the West are overwhelming modern “walls”.

In the commercial war between countries competing on the world market, the climate and environmental issue is used to justify the imposition of barriers against the goods of rivals. This is the case of the European Union’s announced “carbon tax” aimed at hitting imported goods, in particular from China. Capitalism cannot preserve nature because it cannot stop the immense production of goods, mostly useless, that determine its rapacity in dispossessing the planet.

It is not a question of producing in a “different”, “sustainable” way, but of proceeding to the destruction of the capitalist mode of production. Obviously this perspective is rejected by the Chinese false communists. Under the red, which serves to cover the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat, they have discovered the usefulness of green, of ecologism, the ideology of capitalistically mature societies that, faced with the historical condemnation to destruction, take refuge in the possibility of a “different” capitalism.

But capitalism cannot be reformed, as the petty-bourgeois democrats delude themselves. Ecologism, like all bourgeois ideologies, mystifies the reality of capitalism to convince of its eternity. Ecologism is the ideology of an opulent and proprietary society, the expression of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes and the working class aristocracy. It is clear that from this future, modern, prosperous and harmonious, of high consumption and “eco” lifestyle, are excluded the Chinese proletarians, exploited and with starvation wages, crowded in unhealthy metropolis and forced to live in hovels of a few square meters.

These promises of reconciliation between man and nature can never be realized in capitalism. The “green” ideology, coupled with the propaganda of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, serves to perpetuate the capitalist hell and ensure the domination of capital.