A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by āfocusing on cutting carbon emissions⦠China willĀ promote green development, and continuously improve its ecologyā. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.
Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when theyāre attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led Chinaās delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Partyās supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the worldās biggest source of greenhouse gases ā and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britainās entire generation fleet.
What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the āforeign committee members and partners lauded Chinaās ecological civilisation building andĀ its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful worldā.
Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Whoās Who of British, European and American climate activists.
Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blairās Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a ānew growth storyā that āfits well with Chinaās vision of an ecological societyā.
Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Childrenās Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn,Ā a key financial backer of Extinction RebellionĀ and one of the worldās biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she āsupported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goalsā ā the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius ā and praised China for āsupporting green Covid-19 recoveryā.
Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, Franceās former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.
Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in AmericaĀ including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.
And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.
Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japanās Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination.Ā Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that Chinaās leaders have repeatedly shown they are not āmen of their wordā.
Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?
Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its āuseful idiotsā often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xiās avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.
Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets.Ā Perhaps this isnāt so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.
I asked Hamilton if Chinaās wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the worldās biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: āTheyāve fallen forĀ what the Party calls ādiscourse controlā ā to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.ā
For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting ā prematurely ā that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimedĀ in a paper for the World Economic Forum thatĀ China was āemerging as a global leader in climate policyā.Ā His co-author was He Jiankun, a ācounsellorā to Chinaās top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijingās Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: āThe world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.ā
Has Stern been naĆÆve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinpingās alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the Peopleās Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Sternās spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and ā of course ā Xie Zhenhua.
This year, for what itās worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this yearās CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained ākeen to learn from the UKās example of world-leading action on climate changeā and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, Chinaās emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.
On paper, at least, you might argue thereās no harm in that. After all, the CCICEDās āmissionā is to build āa more beautiful China and a green and bountiful worldā. Who could possibly object?
Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICEDās Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with Chinaās United Front Work Department, one of the CCPāsĀ main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of Chinaās late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese Peopleās Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries ā which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of Chinaās most important foreign influence organisations.
What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to āclose supervisionā by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling Chinaās secret police. Any organisation deemed to have āharmed the national interestā risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.
Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? āPicking quarrels and provoking troublesā for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, āit was no longer safe for us to work in Chinaā. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: āThey hope they can influence Chinaās leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise Chinaās policy would be suicide.ā
Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its āindependent adviser on climate projectsā. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of Chinaās puppet parliament, the National Peopleās Congress.
To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyoneās guess. But it is striking that the CIFF ā a registered UK charity ā gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an Ā£18 million grant to āhelp contribute to peaking Chinaās emissionsā, Ā£14 million to give China āevidence-based recommendationsā for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, Ā£8 million to assist China āin global climate governanceā.
This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given Ā£50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further Ā£150,000 from the CIFF.Ā When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: āI recently gave them Ā£50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.ā
But not, apparently, to Chinaās role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me:Ā āIt would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.ā
Yet the CIFFās China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated Ā£29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECFās deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFFās Kate Hampton.
Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK āgranteesā include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.
Its āglobal ambassadorā, meanwhile, is the Prime Ministerās father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared āSinophileā who said last year that China āwill come over to our sideā, and it was vital ānot to raise the temperatureā by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed āa wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassadorā, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song āMud, Glorious Mudā together, inspired by mudās supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on Chinaās terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the āChina modelā as superior to the Westās.
Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of Chinaās environment ministry. The meetingās attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed āthe building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destinyā. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of Chinaās Total State Security Outlook Research Centre ā an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.
Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCPās theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this yearĀ which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is āMarxist and scientific by natureā, and will have a big role in spreading the China Modelās appeal.
None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.
An ECF spokesperson told me: āClimate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.ā A CIFF spokesperson added: āChina is the worldās largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFFās work in China aims to accelerate this transition.ā
ClientEarth said: āAs a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account⦠We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.ā And a WWF campaigns chief added: āAll countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had āgiven an important signalā.
Ultimately, however, the meaning of that āsignalā remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?
Join the discussion
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe