Ecological Civilisation

Historical development

Chinese ecologists such as Ye Qianji used the term in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s Pan Yue, then deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, promoted it as a criticism of growth at any cost. The Communist Party adopted it at its Seventeenth Congress in 2007, and the Eighteenth Congress in 2012 made it one of the five pillars of national development. In 2018 it was written into the constitution, and a Ministry of Ecology and Environment was created at the same time.

Since then the doctrine has driven China’s “war on pollution”, its system of national parks, the world’s largest tree-planting programmes, from the Three-North Shelterbelt to the Saihanba forest, and the fast growth of its solar, wind, battery and electric-vehicle industries. China has also promoted the idea abroad. It hosted the UN biodiversity conference COP15 in 2021–22 under the theme “Ecological Civilisation: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth”.

Principal claims

• Economic development and environmental protection can and must go together. A protected environment is a source of wealth.
• A strong state that can plan over decades and enforce its decisions is the best driver of ecological change.
• Engineering ecosystems on a large scale, through tree planting, restoration and water management, can repair the damage done by industrialisation.
• Leading the world in clean energy and industry is an environmental goal and a national one.
• Some areas must be closed to development by binding ecological red lines.
• Ecological civilisation draws on Marxism and on Chinese traditions of harmony between people and nature.

Policy implications

The doctrine underlies binding targets for energy intensity, emissions and forest cover, and the assessment of local officials on environmental performance. It supports ecological compensation payments between regions, a national carbon market, and red lines that cover around a quarter of China’s land. It drives national parks, vast programmes of tree planting and desert control, and state support for clean technology industries. China’s pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 is presented as part of building an ecological civilisation.

Internal disagreements

Inside China, the debate is about which should win when growth and protection conflict, about how fast to move away from coal, and about whether to enforce environmental goals through campaigns and orders from above or through law and public participation. Scholars disagree about whether the doctrine owes more to Marxism, to Confucian and Daoist tradition, or to Western ecological modernisation.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics such as Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro call the model “authoritarian environmentalism”. It mobilises quickly, they argue, but tends toward coercive campaigns, sudden factory closures and the relocation of rural and nomadic people, and its environmental gains serve state power more than they serve ecosystems. Ecologists question how many trees planted in dry regions survive and how much water they use. Observers note that China is still the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and a major consumer of resources from other countries.

Supporters point to the sharp fall in urban air pollution, the scale of China’s clean energy build-out and its restoration programmes as results that few democracies have matched.

Relationships to other traditions

Ecological civilisation shares eco-authoritarianism’s confidence in a strong central state. It differs from the 1970s version in treating growth and technology as allies. Its faith in clean technology and decoupling links it to ecomodernism and green growth, and its management on a large scale links it to planetary stewardship and restoration-centred conservation. Traditions that put local autonomy, Indigenous rights or democratic participation first oppose it.