Now, with the Party’s ability to manage the economy seemingly at stake, its stimulus package implies a green light to bypass environmental regulations if jobs or growth targets are in jeopardy.
A big loser here is energy efficiency. The proportion of new outlays devoted to energy conservation and reduction have been cut almost in half, just when reforms in the price structure of energy use were beginning to kick in. Some measures aimed at redistributing the energy load — such as solar and wind power — have been retained. But the funding for these efforts will rest largely on provincial officials, who will be reluctant to compel local cadres to disrupt production and lay off even more workers. Much of politics in China is local, but little of environmental protection is.
There is worse news elsewhere in the new plan. Nearly every industrial sector that, according to the stimulus package, deserves direct and immediate government support is energy-intensive and polluting (cement and steel, for example) or heavily managed by the state sector and therefore missing incentives to balance growth with environmental protection (as is the case with the oil industry). Political lobbies that oversee these sectors and overlap with certain factions in the Party are simply too powerful for nascent interests in society and the bureaucracy to parry.
The recent signal being sent from China’s leadership is that economic revival rests on decreased regard for the environment. This retreat also illustrates how little consensus there is among high-level government officials for making China green. The danger of the current crisis is not that China’s government is not doing something, but that what it is doing undermines recent hope that China can help save itself by saving the environment.
Russell Leigh Moses is dean at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies.
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