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China's Communist Party knows how to quell a restive population — but what about its environment? - ABC News

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China's Communist Party knows how to quell a restive population — but what about its environment?ShareIt's often said that China's rise will present one of the world's greatest security challenges this century.While China has promised the world a peaceful rise, its , fast-growing military, and territorial claim to most of the suggest otherwise. But there's another, less understood consequence of China's rise — and that's to do with the enormous scale of its emissions.Richard Smith, an author and US-based expert in Chinese history and economics, said China's rising emissions — constituting nearly a third of the global total — poses "the single biggest threat to life on Earth"."What's uniquely dangerous about the Chinese case is that its emissions are … growing so fast that scientists tell us they could eventually doom the climate on their own regardless of what the rest of the world does," Mr Smith wrote in Foreign Policy magazine."The atmosphere doesn't care about per capita emissions — only total atmospheric CO2 concentrations."In the most optimistic Chinese Government scenario, coal and other fossil fuels will still provide at least two-thirds of China's electricity until as late as 2050, by which time it will be too late to matter."China recently , but the country's sheer scale makes this very difficult.China is the world's largest emitter of CO2 — one of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming — and it is also the .However, its renewables capacity is nowhere near the levels that could allow China to wean off fossil fuels and meet its economic growth targets in the short term.Experts have said , as fluctuating weather patterns and increasingly scarce resources could exacerbate geopolitical tensions.For China, environmental issues could also have profound impacts on the stability of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian rule — and it's something Beijing is abundantly aware of."There's an assumption from a lot of people that China doesn't understand that its pollution is a problem, where I think actually, Chinese leaders are much more up-to-date and aware of all the issues surrounding climate change than most Western leaders," Jonna Nyman, an expert in international energy and climate politics at the UK's University of Sheffield, told the ABC."The issue is the scale of the problem they're actually facing, which is gargantuan."It's one of the things I imagine that keeps CCP leaders up at night."Pichamon Yeophantong, a political scientist and China expert at UNSW Canberra, told the ABC that environmental threats act as a "threat multiplier" on existing tensions such as China's urban-rural divide, rather than being the source of conflict.Mr Smith said environmental stress could add further tension in including Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia."In Tibet, locals have long resisted 'modernisation' efforts by China — Chinese efforts to introduce rice farming, their suppression of yak herding and forced urbanisation of Tibetan herders, the urbanised destruction of the countryside around Lhasa, the trans-Tibet railroad to China," Mr Smith said."In Xinjiang, Chinese resource extraction, the mines, oil drilling, the coal-to-chemicals plants have made pollution in Xinjiang worse than in Beijing."Local people are not happy about that, nor are they happy about the destruction of their mosques, their urban housing, but open protest is forbidden."A about 16,000 mosques have been destroyed in the region, which .The impact of climate change on China's diverse ecosystem could also make social and economic divides even more pronounced.For example, the vast North China Plain — a region with one of the highest population densities on Earth — may experience such severe extreme heat by the latter half of this century, it would .In the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH), it's predicted that about , even if the world keeps average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. If temperatures rise by 2 degrees, two-thirds of it will melt, which could intensify flooding and disrupt agricultural seasons for billions downstream.Meanwhile, recent research by not-for-profit Climate Central suggested that , even if emissions are reduced moderately."[Data shows] China is a country with high vulnerability to climate change and is more vulnerable to climate change than the global average in many ways, including sea-level rise," Hongyu Guo, assistant director at Beijing's environmental advocacy body Greenovation Hub, told the ABC. "According to the China Maritime Disaster Bulletin, China's coastal sea level has been rising at an accelerating pace in the past 40 years."From 1980 to 2019, China's coastal sea level rose at a rate of 3.4 millimetres per year, higher than the global average for the same period."In the short term, one of the most pressing issues for China is water scarcity.China is home to 20 per cent of the global population, but the country has access to only 7 per cent of the globe's fresh water, according to , a non-profit organisation looking into China's environmental challenges.About 80 per cent of the water it does have is concentrated in the south. Meanwhile China's north, which has 64 per cent of China's farmland and more than 696 million people, suffers from acute water stress (where total water consumption — including agriculture, industrial and drinking water use — drops below 500 cubic metres per person, per year).To ease this pressure, Beijing built the South-North canal, which transfers drinking water However, the sheer volume of China's water consumption means infrastructure like the canal isn't the silver bullet to solve the country's water woes.In 2017, government statistics figures showed agriculture and industry — also concentrated in the north — consumed about 84 per cent of the country's water.Meanwhile, the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers for agriculture has polluted 70 per cent of China's water table, according to government surveys.Charles Parton, author of China Dialogue's 2018 report and the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee Special Adviser on China, concluded that water scarcity could present a grave threat to China's stability."Clearly if a sudden water crisis were to hit, some very hard choices would be forced upon the Government between agriculture, power generation, industry and everyday use by the people," Mr Parton wrote."The threat is worse than just to food security, economic prosperity and social wellbeing: the likelihood of those and other factors leading to large-scale unrest is something which must terrify the [Chinese Communist] Party."Water has also been between China and countries downstream, including Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.To date, China has no formal water treaties with those countries.In April this year, American environmental consultancy Eyes on Earth accused China of withholding water during a 2019 drought that devastated communities downstream.The Mekong River Commission confirmed China withheld critical data from its Mekong water stations.Dr Yeophantong said conflicts involving Asia's largest rivers, including the Mekong, could turn into "a catastrophe that has spill-over effects on other countries", as climate change is tipped to exacerbate floods and drier monsoon seasons, which could significantly disrupt livelihoods.David Molden, director-general at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an inter-governmental panel for the HKH, said neighbouring countries — including nuclear-armed Pakistan, India and China — needed to establish "escape valves" to avoid conflict."You've got [conflicts between] India-China, India-Pakistan, and you've got Myanmar as well. So this is a conflict-prone region," Mr Molden said."There are important resources up in the high mountain, boundaries were never properly agreed on, and then there are ethnic tensions that are often behind the scenes."If we can focus on science, if we can focus on the environment, we can create important [multilateral] discussion platforms where [countries] can work together."Last week, the eight countries that make up the region — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Myanmar and Pakistan — signed a joint declaration at an ICIMOD-brokered summit to investigate the establishment of a HKH multilateral bloc.Dr Yeophantong said issues over the Mekong could prompt China to launch a similar initiative with its South-East Asian neighbours."The last thing China needs is negative publicity and very angry neighbours downstream," she said."But at the same time, both India and China are so focused on the military and security aspects they are neglecting the environmental dimension."When announcing China's carbon neutrality pledge last month, President Xi Jinping told delegates at a virtual General Assembly meeting that "".While his statement could have been read as an environmental call-to-arms, the pledge can also provide China with an edge over the US in their strategic rivalry."I could see [the pledge] being a key trigger for worries among some Western states, because I think the US under Donald Trump has really left a massive power vacuum," Sheffield's Dr Nyman said."Things like this new pledge, alongside other Chinese leadership initiatives, have really stepped in to fill that gap."But regardless of whether or not China wins in the geopolitical stakes, there's one battle Beijing ultimately needs to win. "In my view, the world really needs to mount a campaign against China's soaring emissions which lead the world by far. This is not to overlook the emissions of the rest," Mr Smith said."They just have to be confronted on this."Additional reporting by Dong Xing22 Oct 202022 Oct 2020Thu 22 Oct 2020 at 7:10pm, 22 Oct 202022 Oct 2020Thu 22 Oct 2020 at 11:19pmMore on:

China's Communist Party knows how to quell a restive population — but what about its environment?ShareIt's often said that China's rise will present one of the world's greatest security challenges this century.While China has promised the world a peaceful rise, its , fast-growing military, and territorial claim to most of the suggest otherwise. But there's another, less understood consequence of China's rise — and that's to do with the enormous scale of its emissions.Richard Smith, an author and US-based expert in Chinese history and economics, said China's rising emissions — constituting...

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China's Communist Party knows how to quell a restive population — but what about its environment? - ABC News

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