In the 21st century avoiding catastrophic climate change demands a more ambitious climate action agenda. Xi Jinping’s recent pledge to strive to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 signals a stronger commitment towards de-carbonising the Chinese economy while meeting enhanced obligations under the Paris Agreement. Whether China can increase the pace of its domestic energy transition while de-carbonising investments abroad remains a critical concern for its global climate leadership. Of equal importance, yet often overlooked, is the question of how China is responding to the climate emergency from a security perspective. The official line, repeatedly endorsed at the United Nations Security Council, is that climate change is essentially a development issue. In a post-pandemic world, this paper argues that China’s ambition on climate change can no longer be assessed simply on the basis of its national contribution alone. Instead, China’s climate actions need to be understood in a global context, taking into account the high stakes involved in managing the shift towards a green recovery while simultaneously preparing for a less stable strategic environment.
The Biden administration has made building back confidence in the United States as a source of global security and stability a central goal of its foreign policy. As this objective is pursued in the Asia Pacific within the framework of the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, it is closely intertwined with competition with China in the region and beyond. Biden officials have promised to engage vigorously in regional diplomacy and deepen the US role in regional multilateralism. However, the competitive thrust of the administration’s policies in the region make it prone to pursue coalitions of like- minded countries in activities that counter China’s regional initiatives. The risk is that this weakens the hard-won regionalism that enables regional collective action, ultimately leaving the region more vulnerable to exploitation by a regional hegemon.
Intra-regional economic interactions in East Asia were broadly compatible with the global liberal order from the late 1970s into the mid-2000s. Despite many national barriers to incoming trade and investment, more were coming down than going up. World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) rules and norms generally prevailed. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) adhering to longstanding global standards were the key sources of infrastructure loans. An array of challenges to that congruence between global and regional trade and finance have arisen within East Asia, particularly since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-09 and the current Covid-19 pandemic. New institutions of trade and investment threaten to compete with one another and with existing global institutions in ways that pose challenges to the existing global liberal order and threaten the competitive opportunities for non-Asian corporations from both Europe and the United States. Whether policy-makers there can respond effectively to offset these challenges is a central question for near-term action.
Access to global markets is increasingly conditional on meeting social and environmental standards in a number of strategic economic sectors relevant to Southeast Asia. Although linking trade to environmental and labour standards is not new, what has changed is the extent to which diverse, often competing public and private socio-environmental standards are reshaping, albeit unevenly, global supply chains in key commodities produced in these countries while cross-cutting demands to improve socio-environmental practices in these sectors enter supply chains from many sources and levels, often taking by surprise targeted economic actors and their governments. Such pressures have been in the making for over two decades but were uneven, diffuse, and mostly emanated from non-profit actors, and so governments missed, misinterpreted or dismissed these until about some years ago when their combined, interactive effects became visible and significant. In such complex situations, economic security requires industry resilience, which at the least, requires fundamental recognition that socio-environmental standards are here to stay, will likely escalate and will, therefore, require changes to local production processes even as states use various diplomatic tools to address more immediate barriers to market access.
Recently, the Chinese government released the White Paper on China’s International Development Cooperation, considered as a response to the international pushbacks resulting from the Chinese aggressive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The White Paper clearly aims to address international concerns such as transparency, project ownership, and financing efficiency. Based on the above, this paper aims to address the question: why did China modify its international development cooperation, and to what extent will this modification make a difference? The paper argues that, by reshaping the narratives of the BRI as a public good for development, China aspires to achieve two major goals: continuing international integration to serve both domestic and international markets and setting international standards. It further argues that China’s modifications in improving transparency, returning project ownership to local governments, and financing efficiency of its overseas financing show that the international pressure works. Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that extreme pressure would fundamentally change China’s behaviour. Modifications of China’s international development cooperation show China’s gradual recognition of international norms and standards, especially through the engagement with multilateral mechanisms. In a context where geopolitical rivalry prevails on state-to-state relations, perhaps, development cooperation and engagement through multilateral mechanisms is a good start to depoliticize the tension.
