Douglas Todd: Can China save us from ecological destruction? | Vancouver Sun
Douglas Todd: Can China save us from ecological destruction?
DOUGLAS TODD More from Douglas Todd
Published on: May 3, 2016 | Last Updated: May 10, 2016 8:43 AM PDT
A woman wears a mask as she rides her bicycle along a street on the third day of a 'red alert' for pollution in Beijing last December. Scenes like these have led China's leadership to promise an 'ecological civilization.'WANG ZHAO / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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Before he became Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau was hammered for saying he had some admiration for Mainland China’s “basic dictatorship” because it made it possible for the country’s leaders to “turn their economy around on a dime.”
Like most remarks that end up roundly condemned, however, Trudeau’s risqué comment contained a difficult truth.
China’s authoritarian Marxist leaders are indeed often able to quickly solve the kind of societal problems that can drag on for decades in Western countries tied to electoral politics.
Which leads us to ask: Could China’s leaders also be more effective than those in the West in turning around our path toward ecological destruction?
China is, after all, the world’s largest polluter, with the U.S. close behind.
This Changes Everything, the best-selling book by Naomi Klein, along with the film adaptation by her husband, Avi Lewis, argues that China’s strong leaders are already doing impressive things to combat environmental degradation.
China’s “unbelievable smog crisis,” fuelled by its incredible economic growth, has served as a wake-up call within China, Lewis says. Canadians no longer have a scapegoat for dodging hard questions about our own tepid environmental efforts.
“We can’t point to China to let ourselves off the hook anymore because Chinese people and even the Chinese government are doing more and doing more proactively — for lots of different reasons — but they’re doing more than some of the governments in the West.”
Klein and Lewis argue that unbridled capitalism – with its profit motive, commitment to unlimited growth and increasing concentration of power in the hands of an elite few – is incapable of solving the environmental crisis.
Reluctant to fully endorse China’s autocratic ways, however, Klein and Lewis champion a model somewhat like that of Germany and the Nordic countries; a form of democratic socialism.
Yet what about China’s Marxist leaders? Can they do better than Western capitalists in responding to environmental threats?
Canadians are highly skeptical. We not only directly feel the effects of smog from the U.S. and, even from China, we’re buffeted by how both these powerhouses’ are fuelling global warming.
Media coverage of China in Canada also doesn’t inspire confidence, for good reason.
News stories focus on how wealthy Mainland Chinese, including corrupt members of the 88-million-member Communist Party of China, are illegally sneaking their money out of their own country in search of havens. Scholars have shown it’s contributing to unaffordable housing prices in Metro Vancouver and Toronto.
But the illegal international transfer of Chinese currency is only a small part of what makes up the complex mega-power that is Mainland China, which in the past two decades has been combining Marxist egalitarianism with the global marketplace.
The authors of the new book, Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe, are among those wagering that China’s Marxist politicians are uniquely positioned to rescue the planet from environmental calamity.
Although philosophers Philip Clayton and Justin Heinzekehr recognize Karl Marx made theoretical mistakes, the two see potential for the rise of a new kind of environmental Marxism.
They’re particularly encouraged that Chinese officials in 2012 committed in their constitution to becoming an “ecological civilization.”
Organic Marxism, which is a bestseller in China, attempts to help China achieve that goal by building theoretical bridges between Marxism, Western “constructive post-modern philosophy” and ancient Chinese philosophy.
Organic Marxism quotes American eco-philosopher John Cobb, co-author of For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, who says: “China is the place most likely to achieve ecological civilization.”
Canadian political philosopher Frank Cunningham is doubtful, however. He has become increasingly disenchanted with global manifestations of communism.
Whether it’s the former Soviet Union or China, Cunningham says, Marx’s egalitarian principles – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” — are too often used to justify dictatorship.
Yet Cunningham, who is now associated with Simon Fraser University and Douglas College after a career at the University of Toronto, acknowledges China has recently made ecological strides.
He backs the authors of Organic Marxism in noting the rise of model “eco-villages” throughout rural China. China has also extensively developed wind power, and he says it could be working on mass-producing electric cars.
Cunningham is also impressed by how China has “gone further than any other Western country” in constructing ecological buildings. China now creates energy from the wind tunnels formed by skyscrapers (which often create havoc in downtown Toronto).
Given how slowly Canadian politicians have been to provide Metro Vancouver and even Toronto with rapid transit to get polluting drivers off highways, Cunningham adds he’s been stunned by what’s happened in Shanghai (population 24 million).
“In one and a half years, China built a subway system for Shanghai that is as extensive as London’s. They said, ‘Let’s just bloody well do it.’ And they did it.”
Yet Cunningham remains disturbed by the prospect of China becoming a kind of “environmental dictatorship.”
An admirer of the social-democratic principles of Canadian political scientist C.B. Macpherson, Cunningham believes Chinese Marxism has lost much of its idealism and is “under the siege of pragmatism.”
He worries that China is combining the “worst of two worlds:” Unbridled capitalism and Stalinist despotism. Marx’s ideals, he says, shouldn’t be taken to such a dark place.
At its best, socialism is a commitment to equality, he said, to individuals being allowed to reach their full potential as long as it does not impede on the ability of others to achieve their potential.
Given his lack of trust in China, Cunningham joins Klein and Lewis in believing Germany and the Nordic countries offer superior examples for combining the redistribution of wealth with sustainability. “They’ve done a lot better than Canada and the U.S. in regards to environmentalism and egalitarianism.”
The authors of Organic Marxism remain more hopeful than Cunningham about what China can accomplish by bringing together environmentalism with Western political thought and Eastern philosophy.
Since Marxism is often known as “dialectical materialism,” Clayton and Heinzekehr maintain that it is always evolving. They believe Chinese Marxism is capable of adapting to circumstances.
To that end, the authors of Organic Marxism, and their colleagues at China institutes in the U.S., have been working with thousands of Chinese scholars and officials to dovetail the insights of Marx with Taoism and Buddhism and the constructive post-modernism of Harvard philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Like most people, however, Canada’s Cunningham wonders how China’s leaders can talk earnestly about constructing an “ecological civilization” at the same time they aim to become the world’s most powerful economic force. The two goals are not necessarily compatible.
Can China have it both ways? Can North America? As a middle power, Canada clearly needs the capitalists who run the U.S. to step up their fight for the planet. But Canada may also need the Marxists of China to succeed at creating an ecological civilization.
Trudeau might be right that China can turn problems around more efficiently than the West. But as Cunningham says, “The trouble with dictators is they’re unpredictable. You never know which way they’re going to go.”
dtodd@vancouversun.com
