Book Review: Ma Tianjie's "In Search of Green China"

A guest post by Calvin Quek, Executive Director, Nature Finance, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group. Director, Transition Asia

“Crazy Bad”, “Airpocalypse”, “Cancer Villages” – these are bleak descriptions of China seared into the public’s consciousness. Even today, old memories die hard, and “how’s the air quality” remains a common inquiry for new visitors to Beijing. However, the truth is that air, water quality, food safety, and urban cleanliness have greatly improved. And with the steady drumbeat of news regarding China’s explosive growth in clean energy and electric vehicles, Ma Tianje , a seasoned environmentalist and former director of environmental media site Dialogue Earth, has written a welcome and timely update of China’s remarkable reinvention in his new book In Search of Green China.

Ma does this in 8 bracing chapters, each titled to capture the key issue. “The River” — water pollution in the 1990s, “The Incinerator” — waste management in 2000s, “The Smog” — air pollution in 2010s, and so on. And after setting the stage, Ma dives in to uncover the policies and the personalities that shaped these issues.

Starting with the Reform and Opening period, Ma recounts how the authorities in the 80s and 90s allowed farmers to trade surplus crops after meeting state quotas. The huge increase in surplus crops resulted in new feedstock for burgeoning wheat, food, and paper production in Henan, but also resulted in endemic waste dumping into the Huai River, devastating local habitats and communities, to which common citizens responded. We read of Huo Daishan, a former army photographer, who traveled 1000 kilometers up and down to the Huai River to document its rampant river pollution, and who is later cautioned by a friendly contact that “we won’t be able to rescue you if you encounter serious trouble thousands of kilometers away.” Later, on other issues such hydropower development and waste management, we hear of other groundbreaking citizen activists such as Wang Yongchen, whose media savviness and mastery of public communication pioneered environmental journalism, and of Liang Congjie, whose vision of an informed Chinese citizenry led him to found one of China’s largest and most well-known NGOs, Friends of Nature.

But In Search of Green China involves not just common citizens (and indeed how could it?). Paramount are the exhortations of China’s top leaders: President Hu’s call for a “Harmonious Society” and later President Xi’s “Ecological Civilization”, which strengthens the voice of several individuals in government, such as environment officials Mu Guangfeng, Pan Yue, and Xie Zhenhua, who later becomes China’s climate envoy. They feature prominently in a dialectic between development and conservation, pitching economic-focused interests against stakeholders and regulators challenging the orthodoxy of unbridled economic growth without restraint, and the notion that poverty alleviation could only be achieved through the exploitation of China’s resources – rivers for hydropower, forests for wood, coal for power. On these multiple fronts, contention between sides reached a fever pitch and spilled into the public sphere; by 2012, “environmental mass incidents” had increased by 29% a year. And while public discontent is broadly managed and each pollution issues reaches resolution, the abovementioned officials face both unpredictable professional highs and lows. And over time, China develops a system of pollution control and industrial clean-up measures that Ma and other political scholars characterize as “environmental authoritarianism” or more colloquially, “environmentalism with Chinese characteristics”.

Indeed, a key insight Ma’s book posits is that environmental activism seeded ideas, tactics, and political momentum that led to crucial institutional building, such as the State Energy Environmental Agency, later upgraded to the Ministry of Environment and Ecology. Environmental activism also seeded innovation in development theory, provided openings for cleaner technology, and faced with each new pollution challenge, China’s regulators demonstrated pragmaticism and flexibility with — my description — “Chinese characteristics”. Tsinghua University professor He Kebin pioneers pollution modeling tools that helps policymakers take direct action that halves China’s air pollution levels in seven years. Economist Ma Jun shows that only aggressive shifts to renewables and low-carbon technology could bring air pollution levels to within acceptable limits, and energy expert Jiang Kejun models and demonstrates the feasibility for China’s dramatic uptake and deployment of renewable energy. These innovative ideas set the stage for China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua’s cooperation with his US counterpart John Kerry that underpinned the Paris Agreement of 2015, and later President Xi’s announcement that China would be net zero by 2060.

Throughout Ma’s book, his voice shines in descriptive, lyrical prose, as he unpacks key obtuse concepts such as the “center-periphery” (the dynamics between central and local government), and “Two Mountains Theory” (a theory which refutes the neoclassical thought that the biophysical stock of natural resources can be replaced by human-produced assets). Copious annotated references also aid readers who wish to dive further into primary sources.

The book is not without flaws. I was less convinced by certain speculative leaps, such as the claim that “(the) modern (Chinese Communist) party ideology has made significant progress in Marxism’s environmental message”, a point of political historiography that warrants a deeper and larger arc of inquiry. Also, sentences such as “the winter morning sun was irritatingly slow as it climbed over the majestic peaks to spray its warm beams over the surface of the candy floss deep in the valleys” show the limits of English in conveying a Sino-aesthetic. But these blemishes are minor, and Ma’s book as whole conveys a voice of personal authenticity, in a style and voice all his own.

In sum, In Search of Green China is a welcome addition to a canon of books about China’s environmental issues, such as Economy’s 2004 The River Runs Black, Watt’s 2010 When a Billion Chinese Jump, and Shapiro’s 2012 China’s Environmental Challenges, that charts China’s remarkable “green leap forward” from polluted dystopia to renewable energy juggernaut. We can only hope that China continues this clean and low-carbon transition in a world that continues to face ongoing geopolitical strife. Indeed, towards the end of the book, there is a poignancy in Ma’s retelling of Xie Zhenhua’s final official climate meetings with “his old friend” John Kerry in 2023, as if drawing a curtain to US-China friendship and foreshadowing more ominous events to come. Yes, China is now less polluted than before, but is the world any greener or more peaceful, and what is China’s responsibility as a stakeholder?