“When many people pass one way, a road is made.” – Lu Xun
In June 2010, former vice president and newly minted Nobel Laureate, Al Gore, arrived in Beijing to launch his Climate Project. In a ballroom at the China World Hotel in the city’s central business district, Gore delivered his famous slideshow on the climate crisis to an audience of 300 Chinese officials, business executives, NGO leaders and citizen volunteers. For nearly eight hours, he moved in his easy southern drawl from one arresting image to the next: glaciers collapsing, polar bears dying, mountainsides crumbling and bridges falling, explaining along the way how those gathered could use the slides to persuade others of the urgency of climate change.
After each section of the more than 150-slide presentation, Gore opened to the floor for questions. And each time he did so, almost everyone asked a version of the exact same question: we know the problem, but what is the solution? Gore had little to offer beyond vague invocations of wind and solar. He had come to teach the Chinese how to communicate the problem of climate change. His audience, however, wanted to know how to solve it.
There is a phrase that appears everywhere in Western discourse on climate and almost nowhere in China’s: “climate leadership”. As soon as the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the remaining global superpower, China, was expected to take up the mantle of leadership on climate change. That pressure on China to fill the vacuum intensified when the US did not attend the UN climate summit for the first time last year, with a Washington Post headline crowning China “the world’s climate champion”, and California’s governor lamenting that America was ceding its leadership to the country.
Yet, as the talks closed, commentators began to register their disappointment. In the summit’s negotiating rooms, Chinese delegates had kept their heads down, and they had resisted stronger language in the final agreement. China’s new climate pledge, meanwhile, known as NDC 3.0 in reference to the third generation of the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions, was modest. To many analysts, it was clear that rather than emerging as the world’s climate champion, China had declined to fill the role vacated by the US. As a New York Times headline read: “China offers panda totes, but no new commitments.”
China’s reticence to accept “climate leadership” has puzzled many observers. After all, shouldn’t it be pleased that, after the Century of Humiliation and years of being lectured about its smokestacks and “airpocalypses”, the world now calls it a leader? And, by any material measure, China does indeed lead the global energy transition. It installs more solar and wind each year than the rest of the world combined. It builds most of the planet’s batteries and electric vehicles (EVs). And it has driven the price of clean power down so far that decarbonization has become affordable for countries around the world. So what’s wrong with “leadership”?
Yet those in the West who are fond of asking “Can China lead?” seldom ask whether that is actually what China wants. In our conversations with Chinese experts, it has always been clear that China has little appetite for leadership as Americans like Al Gore understand it: sounding the alarm, setting the agenda, making the boldest pledges, holding the pen that drafts agreements. “Westerners talk about leadership like it’s a good thing”, a former climate negotiator said in the early 2000s. “We Chinese prefer to be neither the leader nor the laggard—we like to be in the middle.”