China will now ‘actively participate’ in addressing climate crisis
BEIJING: President Xi Jinping used the phrase “actively participate” when describing China’s future role in addressing climate crisis in his speech at the Communist party’s 20th national congress on Sunday instead of his 2017 assertion that China would take the global “driving seat” in doing so.
Xi’s decision to seemingly reduce
China’s role in fighting climate crisis is a signal that the country has not only emerged bruised and chastened from crippling power shortages in the last couple of years but also that the China-us “climate honeymoon” is over.
“Deeply promote energy revolution, strengthen the clean and efficient use of coal, accelerate the planning and construction of a new energy system, and actively participate in addressing climate change and global governance,” Xi said.
Compare that to what he had said at the CPC congress in 2017, “Taking a driving seat in international cooperation to respond to climate change, China has become an important participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global endeavour for ecological civilisation.”
“There was no big surprise in the report (read out by Xi) on climate and environmental sections. The report did not provide any decisive answer on how to balance these competing priorities: It just laid this dynamic out,” Li Shuo, the Beijing-based global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, said.
The global situation has also changed in the past five years especially because of the Covid-19 pandemic; China’s economy has slowed down compared to its rate of growth five years ago. The US and China were still talking on climate crisis despite serious bilateral differences on other issues.
No longer. China suspended climate talks with the US in August as part of measures in retaliation for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
China’s own economic and power problems contributed to its apparent shift on international climate issues.
“The several power crises that China suffered for different reasons but the fact there were temporary power shortages just strengthened the perception, rightly or wrongly, that we (China) need to secure our energy security. “And, the way to do that is to embrace the resources that we have domestically, which are primarily coal-fired power plants,” Li said.