Given its large population, continued (if somewhat decelerated) economic growth and rising energy and resource demands, China is central to achieving the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that were agreed in Paris.Footnote 1 Climate change is expected to have extremely uncertain effects on the country. China is home to around 20 per cent of the world's population, yet has only about 5–7 per cent of global freshwater resources and less than 10 per cent of the world's arable land. There is the potential for severe water shortages, the further deterioration of aquatic systems and more flooding disasters.Footnote 2 China's mega deltas are particularly vulnerable to climate change and sea-level rise. Warming could lead to an increase in the frequency and level of inundation in delta megacities, such as those in the Pearl River Delta, owing to storm surges and floods from river drainage,Footnote 3 potentially affecting residents and damaging critical infrastructure in heavily industrialized low-elevation coastal areas.Footnote 4
Beyond climate change, earth systems scientists have pointed to other biophysical changes – for example, to nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, freshwater use, biodiversity and other “planetary boundaries” – which, it is claimed, threaten to push human development towards dangerous tipping points.Footnote 5 The scales of China's other environmental problems (related to some of these planetary boundaries but with localized effects) are also enormous. The Chinese government found that more than 62 per cent of the groundwater investigated in 2014 was rated “bad” or “extremely bad,” and that around 30 per cent of the country's major rivers were polluted.Footnote 6 Moreover, the air in 145 out of 161 monitored cities failed to reach acceptable air quality standards. The state of the country's soil is also a major concern: more than 40 per cent of the country's arable land is degraded according to state media.Footnote 7
Scholars argue that transformative innovation of many different kinds is required, and not only to bring the trajectories of global development into the “safe operating space” for humanityFootnote 8 and to address wider “sustainability” challenges around poverty alleviation and social-justice imperatives.Footnote 9 Both for reasons of its global impact (described above) and its dynamism, China is critical for unlocking the transformative innovation needed to reconfigure patterns of global development.Footnote 10 There is, however, little work on the evolution of Chinese narratives around sustainability (or sustainable development, kechixu fazhan 可持续发展), their relationship with narratives around science, technology and innovation, and the extent to which these intersect.
These questions have become particularly acute in the present conjuncture. US president Donald Trump's announcement in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change drew widespread criticism from governments and big business.Footnote 11 It raised questions not only for the future of US climate policies and the international agreement but also for climate action in China – now the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, having overtaken the United States in this regard in 2007. China and the United States, the world's two largest economies, together account for around 40 per cent of global emissions, and the historic agreement signed in 2014 between the two countries’ then presidents set in motion the cooperation needed for diplomatic success in late 2015 at the UN-led summit in Paris.Footnote 12
The Paris Agreement aims to keep global temperatures this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, countries’ commitments, as they stand today, fall short of even the 2 degree target.Footnote 13 Instead, the bottom-up architecture of the treaty requires a process of regular stocktaking, where ambition is jointly ratcheted upwards and national efforts are strengthened. Trump's withdrawal, particularly at a time when the European Union is fragmented and distracted, created a leadership vacuum. The United States was not known for ambitious policies on climate at home, but its size made it critical to mitigation and it had the diplomatic clout to successfully help broker a deal at Paris.
President Xi Jinping 习近平, however, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017, gave his pre-emptive response, calling the UN climate accord a “hard-won achievement” that “signatories should stick to.”Footnote 14 For this, he received almost universal praise. For some, the US retreat meant an easy diplomatic victory for China. Michael Klare believes that Trump has “opened the door for China to emerge both as the world's leader in green technology (while creating millions of new jobs for Chinese workers) and in international efforts to slow global warming.”Footnote 15 According to Fergus Green, we should now “expect China to strengthen its commitments under the Paris Agreement, expand its dominance in clean energy, and hence strengthen its international claims to climate leadership over the medium term, at least.”Footnote 16
Once cast as the villain of global climate talks – China was widely blamed for the collapse of negotiations at the UN summit in Copenhagen in late 2009Footnote 17 – the country now leads the world in the technologies needed for climate change mitigation. Five of the world's top six solar photovoltaic manufacturers are Chinese, and four of the five biggest renewables deals in 2016 were made by Chinese companies.Footnote 18 Under the Paris Agreement, China has pledged to develop the equivalent in renewable energy capacity by 2030 as the entire US electricity system today.Footnote 19 Its policies aim to reduce domestic coal consumption to a degree and at a rate that was once unimaginable.Footnote 20
Yet, without its US partner, it is unclear if China will act unilaterally and raise its ambitions. Isabel Hilton writes that China was thrust into the leadership role “prematurely and by default; it is unlikely to welcome the scrutiny that global leadership entails.”Footnote 21 Elizabeth Economy argues that China neither desires nor merits the mantle of leadership, given its continued reliance on coal at home and its financing of fossil-fuelled power overseas.Footnote 22 For François Godement, Chinese green leadership is “purely face. It's talk.”Footnote 23 Yet, this “talk” – the discursive shift in Chinese leaders’ statements towards a more proactive rhetorical stance on environmental reform and international environmental diplomacy – might, in the Chinese context, still be an important signal worthy of serious analysis and could even help to underpin a green transformation, one of great consequence if it can be properly harnessed.
This is not to suggest that a shift in discourse necessarily leads to substantive political action (in some cases, it can even be used as cover for inaction); however, it does help to shape narratives, which do help to shape pathways to action – a concept which the pathways approach helps to explore (see below). These shifts in leadership talk, significantly, might also be viewed as contributions to China's rising “discourse power” (huayuquan 话语权): a diplomatic ambition, also sometimes translated as “speaking rights,” for China to extend the influence of its own ideas and concepts as part of its soft power strategy. According to scholar He Yiting 何毅亭 from the Central Party School:
Along with the rise of Western discourse, ancient Chinese discourse was thrust into the dark corners of history, deprived of the light it had once enjoyed. The revival of discourse brings the hope of national rejuvenation, and the revival of discourse begins with national rejuvenation.Footnote 24
Foreign policy observers often note Xi Jinping's apparent abandonment of the “keep a low profile and bide your time” (taoguangyanghui 韬光养晦) doctrine, which has characterized Chinese diplomacy since the era of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, in theatres such as the “belt and road” initiative (yidai yilu 一带一路) and South China Sea.Footnote 25 Similarly, Chinese environmental diplomacy efforts once put strong emphasis on the country's developing-world status and consequent lack of readiness to shoulder the burden of environmental and climate action, beginning with the landmark 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, when a Chinese delegate was said to remark, “We must not give up eating for fear of choking, nor refrain from building our own industry for fear of pollution and damage to the environment.”Footnote 26
In promoting environmentally related Chinese themes at international fora, the leadership can also be seen reasserting soft or discourse power in environmental diplomacy.Footnote 27 Specifically, there has been a striking rise in new, Chinese-originated terms for the country's green ambitions, including “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming 生态文明); “clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver” (lüshui qingshan jiu shi jinshan yinshan 绿水青山就是金山银山); “greenization” (lüsehua/lühua 绿色化 / 绿化); and the “war on (air, water and soil) pollution” (xiang da qi, shui, tu mai wuran xuanzhan 向大气，水，土麦污染宣战).
Xi Jinping first coined “clear waters and green mountains” in 2005, when he was Zhejiang Party secretary, but it has since been echoed in policy documents and in speeches by top leaders including Premier Li Keqiang 李克强 and outgoing environment minister Chen Jining 陈吉宁. Xi has used the phrase in recent years at the APEC Leaders Forum, at the UN in Geneva in 2017, and at the B20 business summit in Hangzhou in 2016.
“Ecological civilization” emerged first as a site for the negotiation of contested futures but has since evolved into an official, high-level narrative – leading eventually to the term's inclusion, in early 2016, in China's 13th Five-Year Plan. It has also been echoed in other policy documents and in numerous speeches at international fora. For example, on jointly ratifying the Paris Agreement with the-then US president, Barack Obama, President Xi pledged that:
China, a responsible developing country and an active player in global climate governance, will implement its development concepts of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared growth; fully advance energy conservation, emission reduction and low-carbon development; and embrace the new era of ecological civilization.Footnote 28
In this article, we consider not only this narrative but also the pathways it implies.Footnote 29 We hope to illustrate the importance of narratives for driving the directions of eco-innovation in China, and – beyond technological innovation – in shaping social, organizational and cultural change that might also contribute to social and environmental goals. Through mapping the terrain of a high-level policy narrative, we hope to provide a basis for further, more situated, empirical studies of the implementation (and subversion) of Chinese policy narratives, and the processes through which single or plural pathways might emerge from such high-level statements of environmental leadership.
Why Narratives Matter
Chinese studies has typically considered narrative framings in the context of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) particular historical emphasis on top-down narratives and slogans, and their political effects in the Mao era.Footnote 30 Literature on contemporary political discourse in China has tended to note not only the continued existence of such dominant narratives but also their subversion.Footnote 31 Astrid Nordin and Lisa Richaud, for example, discuss the promotion of slogans and their “creative and ironic reappropriation,” particularly in online media. Such examples include the phrase “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会) being subverted with the humorous homophone “river crab” (hexie 河蟹).Footnote 32
The Chinese studies literature that has explored environmental and innovation governance narratives of the Mao era has tended to show how the party-state made extensive use of tightly controlled top-down narratives.Footnote 33 Among the studies on the reform era, Andrew Mertha's work examines the role of framing and reframing in putting environmental issues on the public agenda.Footnote 34 Bryan Tilt explores how sustainable development has been translated in a Chinese context and where blame has been apportioned in media coverage.Footnote 35 Anna Lora-Wainwright looks at how uncertainties around environment and health are intertwined with local economic and political configurations.Footnote 36
Beyond Chinese studies, however, there is an emerging literature on pathways to “green transformations” that more explicitly takes into account the link between system framings and pathways of action.Footnote 37 This literature, we argue, can illuminate dynamics in the Chinese context that have been largely overlooked.
The concept of “sustainable development,” first defined in the landmark report, Our Common Future, as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,”Footnote 38 later sparked academic debates around broader notions of “sustainability.” Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this term has typically been defined as “the capability of maintaining over indefinite periods of time specified values of human well-being, social equity and environmental quality.”Footnote 39
However, many scholars have explored the ways in which the institutionalization of particular framings of sustainability and sustainable development over the past two decades have marginalized, displaced or precluded certain motives and actors from the environmental arena.Footnote 40 Through their articulation of the “pathways” approach, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling together have contributed a particular understanding of the role of narratives in that process.Footnote 41 In this paper, we draw on this understanding of narratives as playing a central role in both enabling and reinforcing particular pathways (“the particular directions in which interacting social, technological and environmental systems co-evolve over time”)Footnote 42 and in closing down others.
Drawing on Emery Roe, Leach and her colleagues describe how particular framings of a system (that is to say, a manner of viewing or representing a complex system) often become “part of narratives about a problem or issue.”Footnote 43 “These are simple stories, with beginnings defining the problem, middles elaborating its consequences and ends outlining the solutions.” According to Leach and colleagues, these narratives suggest particular ways a framing and its dynamics “should develop or transform to bring about a particular set of outcomes.”Footnote 44 In other words, Leach et al. draw on constructivist perspectives to explain how actors’ situated knowledge, interests and understandings lead to different narratives describing the systems at play and how they are likely to change.Footnote 45
The way that narratives are employed thus has not only a descriptive but also a normative significance, shaping approaches to science and politics and, as we explore here, the role of innovation for sustainability. Powerful actors, institutions and discourses tend to shape dominant narratives, which “deploy knowledge as a means to justify, persuade, legitimate [and] very often force a process of ‘closing down’” towards particular visions of the future. In this process of closing down, “ideas, institutions and practices reinforce each other … certain pathways become ‘motorways,’ unrolling powerfully across the landscape of understanding and intervention, narrowing other tracks.”Footnote 46
This can have the effect of, for example, undermining other, potentially more locally applicable, pathways to sustainability. In the agriculture field, for example, work by Sally Brooks et al. on innovation pathways for responding to climate change in arid areas of East Africa has shown how narratives around maize (the primary staple, but not one that is particularly resilient to climatic stress) have locked food security responses in the region into a situation where alternative options that do not relate to that particular crop are often neglected.Footnote 47
Similarly, in their work on forest carbon and green grabbing, James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones have shown how, as “green markets” have emerged as an aspect of the “green economy” narrative, the trading of “discursive commodities” (for example, the particular framing of the “payments for ecosystem services” concept) has influenced the “material political–economic conditions on the ground.”Footnote 48 The bureaucratic monitoring approaches adopted by carbon sequestration schemes in Africa have thus put a value on carbon offsets, but as a result, people's livelihoods and access to land have been threatened.
Analysing another set of material political–economic conditions, Sarah Dry and Leach's work on epidemics has shown how responses to disease can be constrained by narratives and their implied assumptions, which may not capture the dynamics and uncertainties at play in the multi-scale interactions of people, animals and microbes, potentially threatening health and livelihoods.Footnote 49 In related work, Leach, Scoones and Stirling describe how powerful “outbreak narratives” have led to policies focusing in on stability at the expense of alternative strategies for resilience and robustness that respond to perspectives emphasizing longer term structural, land use and environmental change.Footnote 50
Here, we hope to add to what is, so far, a very small band of literature that has applied the “pathways approach” in a Chinese context.Footnote 51 For the first time, we apply this approach to the study of political narratives and slogans in China. We attempt to combine Chinese studies’ attention to rhetoric and ideology with a constructivist perspective on the role of narratives in shaping action and environmental change to explain why, in a moment of diplomatic uncertainty around the climate, Chinese slogans and buzzwords might matter more than is commonly understood.
Chinese Narratives around the Environment
As Richard Edmonds has noted, huanjing 环境, the Chinese term for “environment,” has a similarly wide application as it does in English. It refers not only to geographical spheres but also to social ones, such as the political environment (zhengzhi huanjin 政治环境).Footnote 52 The natural environment is thus often referred to as the ecological environment (shengtai huanjing 生态环境). Older ecological analogues are sometimes said to be found in traditional philosophical concepts such as tianren heyi 天人合一, or “unity of man and nature,” which has been described as an ancient root for environmental thinking in the Chinese context.Footnote 53
However, not all such environmental slogans have expressed ecological ideals. The Maoist slogan, “man must conquer nature” (ren ding sheng tian 人定胜天), also used the word tian 天, which can be rendered as heaven or as nature.Footnote 54 Environmental narratives and policies during the first decades of the PRC after its founding in 1949 were characterized by this and similar slogans, described by Judith Shapiro as reflecting a militarized discourse, the hallmarks of which included “utopian urgency” and “dogmatic uniformity,” as seen, for example, in the promotion of large-scale relocation and reclamation projects.Footnote 55
The year 1972 is generally identified as a turning point for environmental narratives in China. Two events are viewed as having spurred policymakers in the State Council to establish the first investigation and treatment committee on environmental issues, headed by the-then premier, Zhou Enlai 周恩来. The first was a red tide (a toxic algal bloom) in coastal waters near Dalian 大连, in north-east China, which caused substantial losses of shellfish. The second was the discovery that fish sold in Beijing had high levels of toxic chemicals in their flesh.Footnote 56 In addition, following rapprochement with the US, the PRC took on the China seat in the United Nations and participated in the influential 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, mentioned above.Footnote 57
The following year, the first national conference on environmental protection was held in Beijing.Footnote 58 This called for “overall and rational planning, reduction of harm, a reliance on the masses and both the protection of the environment and the enriching of the people,” and led to a series of regulatory decrees and targets on “end-of-pipe” pollution control.Footnote 59 China also founded its first environmental publication in 1973, Huanjing baohu 环境保护 (Environmental Protection), with the writer and official, Guo Moruo 郭沫若, providing the calligraphy on the masthead.Footnote 60
Nearly 20 years later, China's participation in the Rio conference in 1992 saw a renewed and official focus on sustainable development emerge. In official Chinese publications, sustainable development is rendered as kechixu fazhan 可持续发展 (development that can be sustained), and the official definition tends to follow Brundtland's (given above) word-for-word: ji manzu dangdai ren xuyao you budui houdai ren manzu xuyao de nengli guocheng weihai de fazhan 既满足当代人需要有不对后代人满足需要的能力过程危害的发展.Footnote 61
Throughout the 1990s, sustainable development became a key phrase in government literature.Footnote 62 The Ninth Five-Year Plan, from 1996 to 2000, was the first to include the phrase, and in 1997, China published its first National Sustainable Development Report.Footnote 63 In 1994, China became the first country to issue a national “Agenda 21,” which laid out the country's strategic sustainable development plan.Footnote 64 The 15th Party Congress, in September 1997, listed the “huge environmental and resource pressures caused by population growth and economic development” as major difficulties facing the nation.Footnote 65
In 2002, Jiang Zemin 江泽民 included sustainable development as part of the xiaokang 小康 (the “moderately prosperous,” or literally, “small comfort”) society of modest means that was a signature theme of his leadership, one aspect of which was expressed officially as:
The continual strengthening of sustainable development ability, improvement of the environment, clear increases in resource efficiency, the promotion of harmony between humanity and nature and putting society as a whole onto a development path of production, wealth and environmental-friendliness.Footnote 66
President Hu Jintao's 胡锦涛 administration promoted the “scientific view of development” (kexue fazhan guan 科学发展观), and the “two-oriented society” (liangxing shehui 两型社会), which conserves resources and is environmentally friendly. This era also saw Pan Yue 潘岳, outspoken vice-minister of China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection, MEP hereafter), promote the study of “eco-socialism” (shengtai shehuizhuyi 生态社会主义). Pan, who was later sidelined and left the MEP, defined sustainable development as economic growth, environmental protection and social justice. The social justice imperative, in particular, meant that, “in theory, socialism is more suited to the realization of sustainable development than capitalism.”Footnote 67 Current patterns of development in China had gone against socialism, he said, since “the rich consume and the poor suffer the pollution.”Footnote 68
However, despite the fact that such concerns about China's environmental deterioration have been incorporated into narratives at the highest levels of state, there have been chronic problems with the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations.Footnote 69 At local levels of government, contradictory laws, collusion between officials and polluters, misaligned political evaluation metrics for officials, and restricted scope for citizen oversight have all thwarted environmental initiatives.Footnote 70 And, at the elite level, vested interests, interagency rivalries and an overriding focus on high growth rates, encouraged by cadre evaluation systems that value growth above environmental concerns, have worked against green policies.Footnote 71
The Evolution of “Ecological Civilization”
“Ecological civilization” is effectively the fourth in a series of slogans that started in the 1980s with “spiritual civilization” (jingshen wenming 精神文明), “material civilization” (wuzhi wenming 物质文明) and “political civilization” (zhengzhi wenming 政治文明). Previous “civilizing” slogans placed a strong emphasis on changing individual behaviour in the interests of national development; ecological civilization was, by contrast, the first of such slogans with a global dimension.Footnote 72 Environmentalist Ma Jun 马军 drew on this aspect, for example, to argue that ecological civilization reflected the “state of Chinese thinking on the future of global civilization in the light of the world's shared environmental challenges,” founded on a belief that “our model of industrial civilization is unsustainable.”Footnote 73
The potential meanings of ecological civilization were diverse, and others conceptualized it differently. For Chinese officials like Pan and scholars influenced by ecological Marxist ideas, it represented a novel challenge not only to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to take ecological responsibility but also to capitalism itself, and even to the anthropocentric worldview advanced by Western modernity, which could help “the Chinese people revalue their own traditional ecological wisdom.”Footnote 74 Wen Tiejun 温铁军, a prominent intellectual in the “new rural reconstruction” movement, described ecological civilization as reviving “China's long tradition of agriculture” to cushion a future economic crisis.Footnote 75 For others, it was better viewed in the context of the green economy, such as the large green investments in China's financial stimulus package in 2008, and in the implementation of 125 local “ecological civilization construction” pilots.Footnote 76
In 2007, the phrase “ecological civilization” made its debut appearance at the CCP's 17th Congress, the Party's highest body, which meets about every five years. Hu Jintao, the-then president, declared that the “construction of an ecological civilization will be given a prominent place and included in all aspects and processes in economic, political, cultural and social development.”Footnote 77 According to an editorial in China Daily, the English-language Party mouthpiece, “[Ecological civilization] is not a term the Party has coined just to fill a theoretical vacancy in its socialism with Chinese characteristics, but rather a future-oriented guiding principle based on the perception of the extremely high price we have paid for our economic miracle.”Footnote 78 The phrase later became highly prominent. In December 2016, for example, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang attended an event in Huzhou 湖州, Zhejiang province, at which they commented on the construction of ecological civilization. Xi claimed that ecological civilization was key to China's overall development strategy, and government at all levels should remember that “clear waters and green mountains” are invaluable assets. Li spoke about ecological civilization's key role in achieving sustainable growth, and how the country would continue to optimize its industrial structure, cut excess capacity, reduce pollution and improve air, water and soil quality.Footnote 79 Li's work report to the National People's Congress in 2017 also noted the strengthening of work on ecological civilization construction and green development through the implementation of new methods for measuring targets and establishing ecological civilization construction trial regions.Footnote 80
The mention of such methods is important. As James Oswald notes, for a long while, the “aims, goals and methods” of achieving ecological civilization were “hazy.”Footnote 81 Instead of being codified into an implementable narrative, the slogan served, at first at least, as a site for negotiation among different actors, institutions and discourses. However, under President Xi Jinping, the slogan has been codified. This process of closing down a period of debate and negotiation in order to articulate a slogan as an implementable narrative presents a novel insight into processes of environmental decision making and governance in China.
In April 2015, “Central Document No. 12: Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on further promoting the development of ecological civilization” (hereafter, Central Document No. 12) was published.Footnote 82 It was the highest-level state policy document to have then discussed the term, although the phrase was later included in the 13th Five-Year Plan and a range of other policy documents. In this document – not a legally binding text, but one that led to the term being included in a series of subsequent policy documents and will shape its implementation – ecological civilization is set initially in the context of two high-level political slogans that have emerged as the signature of Xi Jinping's leadership: the “Chinese dream” and the “two centenary goals.” The twin ambitions of these slogans is to double GDP and per capita income by 2020 on a 2010 baseline (in time for the centenary of the CCP) and to turn China into a “socialist modernized country” that is “rich, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious” by mid-century (the centenary of the PRC).Footnote 83
Much of the text of Central Document No. 12 is florid and serves to underscore the scale of the challenge. But it also details for the first time the policies and approaches the government now proposes to comprise ecological civilization. These include targets, principles and plans for various sectors of the Chinese economy and society, including regional development and urbanization, innovation policy, resources use and ecosystems conservation. It also closes down around certain approaches: readers looking for the re-agriculturalization of the economy, along the lines of Wen Tiejun's vision of ecological civilization, would be disappointed. Agriculture is rarely mentioned, and when it is, the text puts an emphasis on continued agricultural modernization. Similarly, there is little focus on redistribution, as in Pan's vision of a “socialist ecological civilization.” Instead, the document emphasizes “technological innovation” and the need to “adopt advanced and applicable energy-efficient, low-carbon and environmentally friendly technologies to transform and upgrade traditional industries,” as well as the need to “develop green industries,” themes consistent with those emphasized under the “new normal” of state-led economic upgrading seen in the 13th Five-Year Plan. To understand “ecological civilization,” therefore, requires an understanding of the narratives and pathways around innovation that preceded the concept and continue to intersect it.
Chinese Narratives on Innovation: Technological and Social Change
While science (kexue 科学) and technology (jishu 技术) have been central to Chinese development narratives over much of the past century, and certainly since the “four modernizations” (si ge xiandaihua 四个现代化) formulated by Zhou Enlai and later championed by Deng Xiaoping, innovation (chuangxin 创新) has only more recently become an important concept. Translatable more broadly as bringing forward new ideas, innovation has been used in various ways including to describe China's approach to policy experimentation and reform.Footnote 84 Here, we first focus on technology-related uses of the term.
China's science and technology policies since the reform and opening up period have explicitly moved from a catch-up model largely based on importing new technologies from overseas towards a model that focuses on “new-to-world” technologies emerging from Chinese firms themselves.Footnote 85 Narratives of “indigenous innovation” (zizhu chuangxin 自主创新) became commonly used under President Hu Jintao, in particular, with regard to the country's Medium to Long-Term Science and Technology Plan (MLP).Footnote 86 This identified priorities for 2006–2020, including setting gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) at 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2020 in a range of strategically important areas linked to China's economy and development, including energy, environment, agriculture, manufacturing, transport and public health.Footnote 87 Observers identified three different formulations of the “indigenous innovation term” in the MLP (see Figure 1).Footnote 88
Figure 1: Formulations of the Term “Indigenous Innovation” in the MLP
In January 2006 in a speech unveiling the MLP, President Hu Jintao called upon China to become an “innovation-oriented society” (chuangxin xing shehui 创新型社会).Footnote 89 Indigenous innovation also contributed greatly to the science and technology components of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015), which highlighted seven new strategic emerging industries, including renewable energy technologies and electric cars, that were to receive sustained investment and preferential policies.
Central Document No. 12 also addresses technological innovation, pointing to continued government support for strategic industries in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), while suggesting the government give “full play to the decisive role of the market in determining the orientation of green industries and choosing technology routes” rather than specifying specific technology goals for state supported innovation, as was the case in the 12th Five-Year Plan.Footnote 90 The text notes that in order to “radically mitigate the contradiction between economic development and resources and environment,” China should create an industrial structure “featuring high scientific and technological content, low resource consumption and little environmental pollution,” as well as accelerating “the process towards green production modes.” It also commits to strengthening “research on major science-and-technology issues,” making “technological breakthroughs in energy conservation, resource recycling, new energy development, pollution prevention and control and ecological restoration,” and making “breakthroughs in basic research and the R&D of cutting-edge technologies.”Footnote 91
Beyond innovation for sustainability and competitiveness in individual technologies, Chinese narratives are also beginning to allude to what some scholars in the international literature call “system innovation,” which may lead to a transition or transformation of the entire economy.Footnote 92 System innovation often requires innovation beyond the high-tech, strategic sectors to include bottom-up and emergent innovations;Footnote 93 low(er) technology, below-the-radar, disruptive or frugal innovations;Footnote 94 and social aspects of innovations.Footnote 95 The governance of these transition pathways has been a key challenge for academic study and policy alike for over a decade.Footnote 96
Some earlier Chinese narratives point towards this more systemic level but without explicitly referring to both social and technological change. One such narrative is cleaner production (qingjie shengchan 清洁生产), an established concept in international debates,Footnote 97 which was explicitly linked to technological change in the academic literature in Europe throughout the 1990s.Footnote 98 The Law of the People's Republic of China on Promoting Cleaner Production was passed by the National People's Congress and came into force in June 2002.Footnote 99
Similarly, narratives of the circular economy (CE) (xunhuan jingji 循环经济), which parallel earlier Western notions such as industrial ecology,Footnote 100 emerged in China following the use of the term by former president Jiang Zemin at the Members’ Assembly of the Second Global Environment Facility, held in Beijing in October 2002. The term has been repeated by leaders such as Hu Jintao and featured as an aspect in the 11th Five-Year Plan.Footnote 101 According to the National Development and Reform Commission:
the theme of the CE concept is the exchange of materials where one facility's waste, including energy, water, materials – as well as information – is another facility's input. By working together, the community of businesses seeks a collective benefit that is larger than the sum of the individual benefits each enterprise, industry and community would realize if it intended to optimize its performance on an individual basis.Footnote 102
In 2007, China initiated its first wave of CE trials in ten different provinces and, later in 2009, passed the Circular Economy Promotion Law.Footnote 103 Some scholars have suggested that the national approach may have drawn lessons from experiments at the level of municipal regulations in Shenzhen.Footnote 104 As well as targeting resource/energy efficiency, the national law has spawned research around indicators and metrics associated with the CE.Footnote 105
Whilst the CE narrative implicitly suggests changes across technical systems, there has been a notable absence of discussion around interacting socio-technical systems and changes in, for example, individual user/citizen behaviour.Footnote 106 Beyond this, none of the discourse on innovation described above (prior to State Council Reference Council2015) acknowledged or appeared to question whether or how institutional structures or governance arrangements might need to be reformed in order for the kinds of system-wide transition pathways that are necessary for required emissions reductions to actually emerge. This is discussed further in the following section, where we review recent developments and ask whether these are beginning, through more clearly articulated visions of system change, to enable a move from narratives to pathways.
Conclusion: From Narratives to Pathways
In contrast to analyses that suggest Chinese leadership on the environment might be “all talk,” we have suggested that a discursive shift – particularly one that is projected internationally as part of a soft-power or “discourse power” strategy – might be instead meaningful, as it is constitutive of narratives that create real pathways of change. To explain this, the article has employed Leach and colleagues’ pathways approach by examining some of the narratives associated with innovation and sustainability commonly used by China's political elite and exploring the role that these may play in promoting and constraining particular pathways.Footnote 107
In particular, we identified that Central Document No. 12 represented the first official articulation of the ecological civilization narrative that focused on building specific pathways and, also importantly, on fostering potential system innovations that made those pathways more likely to emerge.Footnote 108 For example, it proposed a “comprehensive system of ecological civilization,” including improved legislation and enhanced compatibility between China's many environment-related laws. It cited the “need to improve the system of monitoring,” including closing illegally polluting factories and reforming “the system of government performance assessment,” the report card that judges the performance of Chinese officials against criteria set by above, to address the local enforcement challenge.Footnote 109
The document also committed China to abandoning “the concept of regarding economic growth as the only criterion in government performance assessment” and promised to align targets, assessments, rewards and punishments “to the requirements for ecological civilization.” It also committed to promoting active “public participation,” referring to non-governmental oversight of environmental regulation, supported by accurate and timely environmental information disclosure; the expansion of the scope of this transparency; guaranteeing the public right to know; safeguarding the environmental rights and interests of the public; and improving the systems of whistle blowing, public hearings and public environmental interest litigation.Footnote 110
The text, therefore, seemed to signal that China's efforts to achieve system innovation, linked to technological innovation but incorporating social change and governance reform, were set out at a high-governmental level under the rubric of ecological civilization. Subsequently, a pathway for ecological civilization appeared in central government documents and, significantly, in a document for the United Nations Environment Programme, which suggested, in a demonstration perhaps of “discourse power,” that China's efforts to “build an eco-civilization” will:
not only contribute to addressing [China's] own resource and environmental challenges but also serve as demonstrations for other developing countries that may wish to avoid the dependence on, and the lock-in effect of traditional development pathways. This is conducive to promoting the establishment of a new global environmental governance system and benefitting the noble course of sustainable development for all people, men and women.Footnote 111
Further government documents have fleshed out implementation. In August 2016, the State Council issued its “Opinions on the establishment of a national ecological civilization experimental zone.”Footnote 112 This set a target to establish successful environmental management models, to be rolled out nationwide by 2020, with the first pilots planned in the provinces of Fujian, Jiangxi and Guizhou.
In discussing the rise and codification of the ecological civilization narrative, this article points to a discursive shift that brings environmental concerns together with powerful contemporary narratives around innovation – not only in terms of new technologies but also social change and government reforms. Whether or not the governance changes that are proposed will be effective or well implemented is still uncertain. For example, while the recognition in these documents of the important role of the public is to be welcomed, it remains to be seen how the role of non-government actors articulates with traditional top-down approaches. However, the ecological civilization narrative has implied specific pathways, and has laid out pilots and a set of implementable changes in governance that can help achieve them. The directions in which these pathways emerge deserves ongoing research and analysis, and not only by those concerned with the future of China itself. The success or failure of these pathways will influence the country's “discourse power” and, as such, the potential for a more assertive and confident China to assume a stronger leadership role in global environmental debates.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ES/K006002/1– Low Carbon Innovation in China: Prospects, Politics and Practice; and RES-588-28-0001 – The STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability)) and the Transformations to Sustainability programme, which is coordinated by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and implemented in partnership with the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant No. ISSC2015-TKN150224114426). We are grateful to Isabel Hilton, Marina Rudyak, Mark Xie and Jessica Tang for help and comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Biographical notes
Sam Geall is executive editor at chinadialogue.net, associate faculty at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, and an associate fellow at Chatham House.
Adrian Ely is a senior lecturer at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. He has been a member of the ESRC STEPS Centre since 2006, leading its impact and engagement work and acting as deputy director. His primary research interest is the governance of innovation for sustainable energy and agri-food systems.
