Launched in 2013, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative is not just about revitalizing the ancient Silk Roads connecting much of the world. According to researchers Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus, authors of the book “The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order”, the key goal is to use infrastructure projects and urban solutions to realize the country’s foreign policy objectives. The book shows how China is steadily building a new world order that overcomes western hegemony by constructing cities, roads, railways, ports, digital and energy infrastructure throughout the Belt and Road project. With the permission of Fortis Press, BRICS Business Magazine publishes an excerpt from this book.
More than most states, China is suspended between two worlds. China is currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Between 2000 and 2018, during years of booming growth, China’s emissions tripled. China burns a staggering half of the world’s coal, and is also busy building new coal plants. Between 2000 and 2019 the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China doled out $183 billion for energy projects, with most of that money going to coal-power stations and hydropower. Only about $6 billion went to solar and wind energy investments. 68 These have been years of voracious resource extraction, characterized also by pollution from the waste products of heavy industry, threats to marine conservation due to overfishing, and wildlife trafficking – all of which undermine China’s latest messaging on protecting nature and biodiversity. China’s vast state-owned enterprises are often extremely wasteful and inefficient.69
Yet despite its current dependence on carbon, China has many advantages as it makes the transition to new renewable energy sources. China is the world’s leading energy financier and energy market, which gives it considerable leverage in the world’s energy markets. In the wake of the COVID‑19 pandemic, China has been shifting its investments into renewables, so that by 2020, wind, solar, and hydropower made up 57 percent of its $11 billion investments in energy infrastructure.70 In just three decades, China has built three times as much wind, solar, and hydropower-generating capacity as the United States has. China also has the biggest domestic market for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, and is pushing the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles. It has expertise in the construction and running of nuclear reactors at home and abroad, playing a key role in the development of England’s Hinkley Point C reactor. And China holds the largest share of the green bond market, which aims to prioritize sustainable projects with cheaper financing – a share that rose rapidly from 2.4 percent in 2015 to 23percent in 2017. China is continuing to develop new “green” financial tools and products.71
Criticism of the environmental and social risks of the BRI have stung China recently into attempting to associate the BRI with sustainability. There is now a recognition that a fast transition away from carbon will need to happen. China joined the Paris Agreement in 2015, and in September 2020, at a speech at the UN General Assembly, President Xi committed China to carbon neutrality by 2060. Aiming to make 2030 the year of peak emissions for China, Xi proclaimed that “humankind can no longer ignore the warnings of nature.”72 Clearly Xi has decided that his flagship foreign-policy initiative, in which he has invested so much political capital, cannot be seen as backward looking when it comes to climate change.
China also has pressing internal motivations for shifting to a more sustainable relationship to the natural world. China’s urbanites suffer daily from some of the worst air quality in the world. Low-lying coastal urban mega-regions are at risk from sea-level rise. Fragile ecosystems face destruction from warmer temperatures. Periodic flooding of the Yangtze River in central and southwest China has already cost many lives and displaced millions. And it is not just flooding. During the summer of 2022 there was a prolonged drought that caused the Yangtze, the world’s third largest river, to lose over 50 percent of its normal water flow, and for many of its tributaries to dry up – which interfered with agriculture and shipping, and caused a crisis in Sichuan, which derives 80 percent of its electricity from the generation of hydroelectric power. The lack of preparation for the impacts of climate change – the so-called adaptation gap – that exists in most cities and regions around the world is a reality in Chinese cities as well.73
But China also sees in this crisis an opportunity to step into a leadership role that other major states have failed to offer. The dramatic policy U-turns and swerves of the United States during recent administrations have created a vacuum of global leadership on this issue that China has ambitions to provide under Xi. The Chinese Dream is one in which China reasserts its historical role as the moral leader of a community of shared human destiny. This is where the concept of an ecological civilization comes into play, as a structural shift away from industrial modernization and toward a new form of Chinese socialist modernization that will harmoniously balance economic and environmental objectives.
Building an ecological civilization, and expanding it abroad, represents a major shift for China from the past forty years of helter-skelter and inward-looking industrial development focused primarily on Chinese GDP growth. The concept has been enshrined in the constitution, within “Xi Jinping Thought”, and built into the 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans that guide policy.
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But if this concept of ecological civilization is to have the resonance and impact outside of China that China hopes for, it will need to be clearly communicated to other states. International legal scholars have emphasized that if any Chinese-inflected idea of ecological civilization is to have a chance of generating influence internationally, then it needs to be articulated in ways that can be readily understood and implemented by willing and like-minded foreign governments. It needs to be more than a slogan, requiring refinement of its definition and scope, and the technical and legal instruments that underpin it.
So far China has created goals for pollution reduction, biodiversity protection, low-carbon and “circular economy” models (systems designed to use fewer resources, and to capture as much waste as possible for reuse), protection of natural resources, and low-carbon cities and urban regions. Mechanisms to achieve these goals by 2035 include financing schemes, changes to taxation and legal systems, and the diffusion of new knowledge and technical skills. A set of priority areas have been identified: urban and regional spatial planning, technological innovation, land management, water and other natural resources, regulatory reforms, environmental protection, monitoring and supervision, public participation, and organizational implementation.
In the meantime, China has continued to work on developing these ideas at home, particularly in urban contexts, via experimental ecological-civilization “pilot cities,” and by plans for entire eco-city regions. Zhenjiang province, for example, has been designated an ecological-economic system, with the ambition to steer it toward the circular-economy model. Fujian, Guizhou, and Jiangxi provinces have all been earmarked as sites for ecological-civilization development, with pilot cities that include Shenzhen, Xiamen, and Guangzhou.75
Among the most interesting urban projects have been Guiyang and Xiong’an New City. Guiyang, the capital of subtropical Guizhou province in the mountains of southwest China, has gained plaudits as a show-case ecological-civilization city.
With a population of 3.5 million, Guiyang sits on the banks of the Nanming River, surrounded by verdant hills and valleys. Over the past decade, it has tried to become waste-free, low-carbon, and to emphasize ecological living and wellbeing. As with many such attempts at developing eco-cities, however, both within China and elsewhere, the rhetoric often outstrips the performance. Although Guiyang has certainly improved its environmental quality and earned much praise, research shows that it still has a way to go to realize its carbon-reduction ambitions.76
Xiong’an, meanwhile, is a new city built from scratch in the Baoding area of Hebei province – and it is intended as a model “city of the future” for other Chinese regions and for the world. Located about sixty miles from Beijing, it is envisioned as a green high-tech development hub for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei economic triangle. The emphasis is on green finance, sustainable energy, and large, open green spaces for ecological living. It will be a city of parks and tree belts, and will be surrounded by newly planted forests – thirty thousand hectares of new trees have been planted so far. At least half of the city’s power will come from renewables, solar power, and geothermal energy – and it will all be managed by a smart grid. The city is also intended to be an intelligent city, or Smart City, with driverless vehicles offering public transportation, and with every physical building and infrastructural component mirrored on a “digital twin” city that is represented on an ever-evolving virtual map. While it is meant to be the size of London and New York combined, Xiong’an’s urban diagram is also predicated on the idea of the “fifteen- minute life circle” – where all the goods and services needed for an urban citizen to live their lives should be available within the radius of a fifteen-minute journey. This idea has also popped up in other cities around the world, such as Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, illustrating how quickly new ideas about urban development travel around the world today.
Both Guiyang and Xiong’an, as pilot model cities, represent China’s moves to develop urban manifestations of the concept of an ecological civilization, with Xiong’an in particular pointing to a new model of urban development that might be copied elsewhere in China, and, via the BRI and other mechanisms, beyond its borders.77 There are also many other innovations coming out of the Chinese context, such as the “Sponge City,” in which low-lying and low-density urban areas within cities, and even across whole urban corridors, are redesigned with parks and wetlands that might absorb heavy rainfall linked to urban flooding, then recycle and rerelease that rainfall, gradually, back into rivers.
Renewable energy, it is increasingly clear, will be at the heart of China’s ambitious plans for gaining international influence. It is in this area that we see some of the more far-reaching and dramatic possibilities of the BRI for the future of international order and for urban development. One of the most ambitious and potentially transformative ideas is a long-term ambition to link up the Eurasian space and beyond with a series of globally integrated energy grids.78 The Global Energy Interconnection (GEI), if realized in its current vision, would be an eighteen-line global backbone of ultra-high-voltage transmission connections that would link over eighty countries in continent-spanning networks of clean, renewable energy flows. It would incorporate smart-grid technology, and link areas with ample sources of renewable energy – windswept steppes, sun-baked deserts, ocean tides – with distant centers of urban demand. In order for this vision of continent-spanning clean energy to become a reality, it would need continent-level integration – no easy task in regions where energy trading is generally low.
The GEI, as a concept and ambition, was floated in 2015 by State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the world’s largest energy utility company, and the operator of almost all of China’s domestic energy-transmission network. President Xi has thrown the state’s weight behind the scheme, and linked it to China’s international leadership ambitions on climate change and ecological civilization. In 2015 he gave a speech to the UN General Assembly at its Sustainable Development Summit, in which he proposed discussions on establishing a global-energy network to meet global power demand with sustainable and clean alternatives.
China has pushed for the development of GEI in the discussions for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and at the Gulf Cooperation Council, among other forums. If realized, the GEI’s continent-spanning energy grid would be composed of national transmission and distribution grids; energy bases in the polar region, equator, and on each continent; and a digital platform for allocating resources and facilitating market exchanges via digital communications networks. The ambition here is immense, with a half-century time frame to integrate all of these elements.79 SGCC has proposed a three-step plan: an initial phase would integrate national grids, construct new smart grids, and hasten the move to renewable sources of energy, while the second phase would connect continental grids together by the end of the decade. The third phase, from 2030 to 2070, would involve the development of “Afro-Eurasian” transcontinental grids linked by ultra-high voltage systems.
China’s interests in driving the development of such a system are multiple. First, as mentioned earlier, China is resource poor, with large, energy-hungry, urban concentrations along its heavily populated coastal regions. Stretching its energy reach well beyond its own borders is imperative, and the GEI would be a secure and stable mechanism for doing so. Second, China, as a result of robust, long-term state funding for research and development, has become a world leader in the development of technologies related to energy grids and ultra-high-voltage transmission – similar to its leading position in 5G. China is clearly hoping that its standards will play a central role, and so place it right at the core of global energy governance, where it can influence an immense energy infrastructure that it has played a key role in constructing, and that is integrated into the BRI and the Digital Silk Road.
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The GEI is indicative of the globe-spanning gaze that China has been developing in the last decade. China’s vision of developing global norms, and bringing its concept of an ecological civilization into existence, stretches south, from the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa, or the hydropower of South-east Asia, northward to the vast plains of Russia and beyond, to the melting ice of polar region. The renewable energy potential of Russia’s Eurasia’s expanding, power-hungry urban centers.81
68 Sheperd, “China’s Belt and Road”.
69 Moore, China’s Next Act.
70 Sheperd, “China Pours Money”.
71 BNP Paribas, “China Megatrends”.
72 Boyle, “China’s Zero Carbon Pledge”.
73 IPCC, Climate Change, 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, chapter 6.3.2.
75 Hanson, “Ecological Civilization”.
76 Peng and Deng, “Research on the Sustainable Development Process of Low-Carbon Pilot Cities”, 2382-2403.
77 Williams, China’s Urban Revolution.
78 Downie, “Powerring the Globe”.
79 Cornell, “Energy Governance and China’s Bid for Global Grid Integration”.
81 Liu, Global Energy Interconnection.