Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the Free Range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. The episode today is sponsored by the Program on Law, Communities and the Environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Alex Wang, Professor of Law at UCLA and co-director of the Emmet Institute on Climate Change in the Environment. Alex is an expert on the law and politics of Chinese environmental governance. And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. Hi, Alex. Thanks for joining me.
Alex Wang
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Michael Livermore
So, prior to joining UCLA, you worked in China for a number of years for the environmental group NRDC. In fact, you even helped to start up and established the Beijing office in 2006. And a lot has changed since 2006. In the world, in ourselves, you know, certainly the relationship between China and the US are very different. The landscape of climate policy is very different. You know, a lot has changed politically, economically and technologically. So maybe to just get us started, we could kind of go back in time a little bit. And, you know, what, what drew you to China at that time? And what was the vibe on environmental issues, kind of both in within the Chinese environmental, NGO community, such as it was at the time, you know, visa vie, the US and China? And yeah, just thinking back to that time, what was the sense that you had of the world?
Alex Wang 1:37 `
Yeah, absolutely. So thanks, again, for having me here, and really honored to be part of this podcast. So you know, the way I think about China, I went to China and was working for NRDC from 2005 to 2011. But my kind of work engagement with China goes back 30 years from right when I got out of college in the early 90s. You know, I first had spent a year in China, teaching English at a university in Wuhan in 1994, which now is very well known because of COVID. But back then was not known to really anybody. And so the changes in China from that time, over that three decades span, really informed the way I think about China, because the transformation is really generational, we’re not going to see such a rapid transformation in a place, I think, for a long, long time. And so, you know, when I first started engaging with China, it was- it had really just opened to the world, a little more than a decade before, after the Cultural Revolution, extraordinarily poor still, and China was at the beginning of kind of starting to focus on the economy as its way to modernize and to re-engage with the world. From my understanding, you know, Walmart, for example, started sourcing out of China in the early 90s, kind of post-Tiananmen Square. So flash forward, you know, a little more than a decade when I started working with NRDC, that was a really interesting time in that, you know, first of all, the kind of leadership was the Hu Jintao Wen Jiabao era, the predecessors that Xi Jinping. And China had not that long ago, just joined the WTO. So if you look at all the economic statistics, you know, that really, you know, hypercharged China’s economic growth and contributed to all of the environmental problems that are associated with that, due to the rapid growth of energy use, the rapid build out of coal fired power plants, and just, you know, all the pollution associated with manufacturing and heavy industry, and those sorts of things. And so when I first started working on environmental issues, I was just, you know, at that point, just four or five years out of law school and the opportunity I had, which I don’t think I fully understand-stood at the time where it was coming from, but what I now realize is, it was a period in China where they’d made a lot of commitments as part of their entry into the WTO. Some of you may remember that in the 90s posts in the decade post-Tianamen, there was a lot of back and forth, kind of political battles and debates in the US about whether to support China entering the WTO, to what extent to tie that to human rights commitments and these sorts of things. And when China joined the WTO, in 2001, there were a lot of commitments that China made. You know, in our world of law, a lot of them are associated with the types of things you think about that are just accepted parts of administrative law, you know, kind of transparency, the right to participate, the right to have judicial recourse for conflicts, these sorts of things. And so, when I first joined NRDC, it was we had gotten a grant to help Chinese actors figure out how to implement these commitments. So they had had some laws, you know, there was an administrative licensing law, which was all about transparency, and the kind of notice and comment types of things. And so we were running a lot of programs that were really just about the bread and butter, things that environmental groups and citizens do in the United States, just learning about some hearing that’s coming up, going and finding out what’s going on and submitting comments. And then, you know, if there’s conflicts down the road, bringing public interest, lawsuits, so I had a chance to work with some of just really impressive people in China, law professors and lawyers who are bringing the first public interest, lawsuits, environmentalists who are really pushing hard on transparency, and government officials, frankly, you know, lots of people in the government were interested in these things, for a variety of reasons, you know, for the sort of, kind of, I guess, participatory values reasons, but also for practical reasons of governance and trying to figure out what was going on in the hinterlands and then those sorts of things. And so I had a really interesting run during that time, and it was very open time, in terms of a lot of interest in the way Americans did things, Westerners did things on environmental regulation, and quite frankly, you know, extraordinarily serious environmental degradation right there, that was in the press quite a lot, and really shaped the way people thought about China. And so flash forward a few years, when I entered academia, in 2011, a lot of what I was thinking about was trying to unpack and unwind what I had experienced during a real whirlwind of a few years, you know, which now in retrospect, wasn’t that many years, but really felt like, an eternity, you know, just six years on the ground, but, you know, saw enough to pack, you know, several decades of life experience, I think, and you know, just really trying to understand what I saw, and understand the transformations. And you know, what I saw, part of what I saw, which might be interesting to our listeners is, in a sense, saw the flip side of what was going on in America, right? Like, if you think of part of the rise of Trump and the polarization as related to the shipping of the decline of manufacturing in the United States, which, you know, it has to do with automation. And besides that, but in part is due to the shift of business to China, I sort of saw the boom, on the China side, you know, I spent a lot of time visiting, you know, power plants, and, you know, textile plants and all sorts of factories, shirt, shirt, shirt, manufacturer, shirt, plants, and just to see what was going on, and you saw the boom and the energy on that side. And, you know, so my academic work has been all about kind of thinking about the way China runs things, how it’s different than what I had expected, and what I was advocating for during that time, and also thinking more broadly about how that makes us think about the way China runs things. You know, I was listening to your very good podcast with Jed Purdy, on kind of the state of democracy. And there’s a lot of connections with what you guys were talking about on that podcast, you guys were talking about the, you know, the sense in the 90s of the End of History, and the fact that we’ve kind of arrived at the final end state, and China is one of the big reasons why that is destabilized, you know, for a variety of reasons. And we can talk more about that. But, you know, certainly the party that the Communist Party in China is trying to really make the case that its way of doing things authoritarian, top-down, however you want to describe it, is at least as legitimate as democracy. And that’s really part of the kind of global political debates. So, happy to take this conversation in any direction. There’s lots of interesting things to talk about here.
Michael Livermore 9:36
Yeah, there sure are just kind of maybe, sticking with this, this last point that you raised, which is super interesting. And it may be dialing or, you know, casting yourself back to the perspective that you had when you know, during this period of time, you had a formative period of time when you were there, formative for you and formative for the whole world, really for sure. Yeah, you know, so yeah, there’s this kind of- there was this notion that some folks had this end of history stuff that, you know, after China’s entry into the WTO. And the big economic boom, and the growth of a kind of a, at least somewhat capitalist or market-based economy or the relaxation of state control over the economy, at the very least, that was going to lead this kind of classic thing that was going to lead to the growth of liberal democracy through some as yet to be fully specified process. But that was a natural thing that would unfold. Did you buy into that? Was that something that you thought seemed realistic at the time? And then, you know, now that we look back, maybe wasn’t? Or was it something that you were always kind of skeptical of? Or? And what about folks in China at the time that was on the ground? Was that a feeling that was realistic? Or was that a thing amongst folks in the US and Europe?
Alex Wang 10:51
Yeah, so that’s a really complicated question. I think it totally depends on where you stood at the time, you know, so, for me as really, I thought of myself as a public interest advocate. So it was a narrower brief, right, you know, I was working for an environmental group, we had pretty specific environmental aims that, obviously, we’re mixed in with sort of democratic kinds of approaches to things, right. So the transparency and the public participation, all are, can be grouped under a category of democratic. But, you know, we weren’t really thinking about kind of regime change or democratization or those types of things. But, you know, certainly if you’d run into people from, you know, like a USA ID or, you know, more government-oriented people that, you know, they probably did have those things in mind. And that was a pretty widespread notion, you know, not in the sense that people were sure it was going to happen. But the basic premise was, of course, the, you know, once you get richer once you sort of see the opportunities brought by some marketization and openness that citizens would sort of demand greater political liberalization, right. And we now understand a lot more about the way China has run things. And, you know, there’s been a lot more marketization but of course, while the party has maintained pretty tight political control, and that, of course, doesn’t mean that people’s lives, you know, that it’s sort of a totalitarian state. Right, this we can talk more about also, but, you know, I think what if you’ve spent time in China and or if you grew up in China, you know, what, what you experienced, and especially, certainly, my students, they’ve experienced decades during their entire life of basically rapid improvements on an annual basis in their economic well being and the choices that that offers, right, so I’ve been like, you know, I’ve Amartya Sen’s development is freedom, here in my office, and I’ve been looking about that, because clearly, there are certain civil freedoms you do not have and political freedoms you don’t have in China, but the economic growth allowed, you know, very basic transformations in the ability of people to control their own lives in terms of, you know, just, you know, choosing what you want to do for a living, going on vacation, traveling abroad, you know, sending kids to school in the United States, or in Europe, or, you know, all of the types of things that come with economic development. And so that part is, is such a important part of the Chinese story that I think maybe people outside don’t really understand. Because, you know, in the United States, sometimes it’s this feeling of like, you know, given the kind of human rights stories and things like that, that we see, there’s a sense that, you know, how could Chinese people really like living in that system? Right, and I think you have to understand that, you know, the political things are things that I think need to be changed. And, you know, I think that, you know, particularly the human rights violations, but, you know, if you look at the numbers of people that affects, it’s a smaller percentage of people, and then you have the mass majority of people often experiencing the economic growth and these sorts of things.
Michael Livermore 14:26
Yeah, that’s really interesting, because in a way, you know, I don’t know if it’s a cultural bias or what exactly, but, you know, this emphasis that, you know, it’s very important as a matter of, you know, just as important to people in some ways that they be able to exercise the vote or that the, you know, the press works in certain ways or whatever. But in a way, I don’t know, maybe this is to your point is, there’s something that’s kind of elite oriented about that. It’s like amongst elites, you know, in the US or let’s say in Europe, those kinds of issues are very important, right? If journalists are being cracked down on that’s a big deal, in part, because if you’re an elite, you might know some journalists, right? Are you human, it’s important to you that your news sources are reliable and credible like this. And that’s a luxury in some ways, like that’s after you’re fed, and your kids are fed, and your education is taken care of, and you’ve got a decent, you know, your transportation, you can get around, and, you know, these other things. And so, I wonder if that, you know, part of, you know, just- this is maybe just reiterating what you’re saying, but, you know, freedom was increasing along all these dimensions. And it just turns out that, you know, people, they were getting what was most important to them, in some sense. And so there wasn’t this big clamoring for political liberties in or that we would associate with a liberal democracy anyway, in part, because, you know, they were becoming more autonomous over time and had greater scope of their lives in the ways that kind of mattered most to them.
Alex Wang 15:58
Right, and certainly, they don’t have the right to select their leaders in the way that- the thing we associate mainly with democracy, right, but so there’s a number of ways in which I think you can account for the resilience of the party and a sense of growing freedom, some of it is about what I was referring to earlier, which is just the economic freedom to control your own life, apart from the state. But there’s also interesting developments, if you want to get more legal about, you know, this was the area I focused on, both at NRDC and in my academic work, which is the ways the state was responsive or not to citizen demands, right. So some of it was actually in the form of Administrative Law types of reforms. So hearings, transparency. And so there, for example, in the environmental space, that was one of the major main issues I focused on during my NRDC period, and there’s been massive expansions in the amount of pollution data disclosed and transparency in a variety of ways. But in ways that are less familiar to Americans, there were also all sorts of other ways in which the bureaucracy was able to gather information from society and to choose to respond or not, right. And so, in some sense, you just saw with the COVID protests. Yes, right. Yeah. So if you think of protests, often the media discussion turns to will the regime be overthrown or not? Right, which is a massive, you know, zero to 100 kind of discussion, but short of the overthrow, what’s going on with protests, right? What we saw, you know, during my time, and a lot of people have written about this is, you know, smaller scale protests as just a regular- sort of a regularized form of engagement between society and the state. And the way that the center also can monitor local governments, right, like Beijing. If they see an area that there’s a lot of protests, that’s a sure sign that there’s something going on, in which the local officials are not managing things. Right. And so, you know, local officials learn different techniques to manage and not get the signal sent up to Beijing, that they’re not handling their jurisdiction. Right. Sometimes it’s crack down. Right. So you’ve heard all sorts of crazy stories, you know, sometimes the local officials send kind of thugs to Beijing to hang around the letter- you know, the complaints office, and listen for people with the local dialects, so they can snatch them up and put them in black jails and ship them back. Right. So they prevent the data from reaching Beijing. But sometimes it does lead to just concessions, right, yeah. And there’s a great documentary called The Chinese Mayor, which I think is available on Amazon Prime, which is about a kind of Northern mayor. And the way he manages- it was a period where he was massively tearing down large parts of the city, which naturally led to lots of conflicts, people not wanting to be forcibly removed. Right, and showing how he dealt with it. So some of it was harsh and crackdowns. A lot of it was informal kind of engagement with people. And I would say, you know, describe it as this politician sense of who did he have to give concessions to, people who were, you know, squeaky enough wheels would get some sort of concessions, others might not get concessions, and there’s this very kind of fluid and formal aspect, which is, you know, there’s probably core parallels you could think of in our political system, but this looks quite different, right. The idea that a mayor would have in the United States, you know, the LA mayor would have 100 people swarming him after he leaves his office in the morning, and then he can sort of divvy up apartments to a few of them that just on his own personal whims, which would not play well in the United States, right. But this was kind of part of the formula. And it’s a form of accountability. It’s not really fair. And you know, it’s not procedurally fair and those types of things, but it was one way that they manage things. And it’s when you get under that hood, to see that there was this accountability, in conjunction with kind of hard control, right, so you’re seeing what the COVID protests now, like some of the news stories coming out was, you saw the concession of rollback of COVID crackdowns, but then now, they’re the new stories of, you know, those people who are visible leaders, to visible on the, you know, the Chinese version of Twitter or whatever, are now facing some repercussions, you know, they’re getting sought out by authorities. And, you know, so it’s that push and pull to kind of- where the party is trying to keep things within a band, I suppose would be a, you know, a somewhat neutral way of putting it. Yeah, so I think that part of it is really fascinating. And so you think of like, protests, statistics, letters and visits as kind of the kind of quasi-legal kind of complaints process or even like litigation numbers, you know, how much are you seeing certain types of lawsuits are all being sort of fed into the system and the Bureau, in the Chinese system, you might think of courts as more as part of the bureaucracy, rather than as a kind of separate from the government? You know, the judges are also being evaluated in, you know, how often are they being overturned? You know, how often does their decision lead to, you know, unrest or complaints or these types of things. So, it leads to judges being in complicated situations where they rely on the law, among other things to make their decisions, right. They’re also political targets and things like that, that and kind of political, just kind of the messaging that they’re hearing from on high that informs the way they have to grapple with, with different types of disputes that arise.
Michael Livermore 22:18
Yeah, yeah, that’s super interesting. I think it’s important, you know, reality, on the ground reality that a lot of folks miss in the US when they when they observe, you know, just kind of casually thinking about China or observe China, think about China, is this great, really complex, but I think would be fair to call it political system, you know, dynamic, right, there’s a lot of politics that happen, it just isn’t electoral politics in a way that, which isn’t a- can say that it’s the best or just to note that it is a reality. Right. And, you know, just with the COVID protests, very interesting. As you mentioned, that just occurred to me, you know, I’ve never seen in the United States a situation where large-scale protests, even big ones that we’ve had in recent years, including things like, you know, the BLM Movement, or BLM, and #MeToo, and the like, led to such an immediate and concrete policy change, as what happened, you know, like, it just doesn’t happen here. Like, it’s way too, it’s just too I don’t know what I don’t know why, exactly. I think we could probably talk about that. But like, it just, that’s just not how our system works, which is very interesting, because in a sense, it’s the Chinese government was showing itself to be actually quite responsive to at least some particular kind of demands maintenance in particular kinds of ways.
Alex Wang 23:38
Right. But, uh, you know, it also partly reflects how extreme the Chinese policy had been, right. And so, you know, it had gotten to a point where, you know, people were really upset. You know, I, this year, for example, our LLM students who came in from China, you know, we’ve during COVID, we for, I guess, two years, we didn’t really have many students from China, but they came back this year, and quite a few of them are from Shanghai. And so they were essentially imprisoned for the early part of 2022. Right, it was, there was a lot of news about people being locked up, not allowed to exit and then they had to rely on food, ration food and ration deliveries of food, and often, which often were pretty sparse. And so, so they had a pretty negative view. And, you know, the sort of complaints about governance were much higher than I’d ever seen from Chinese students who are normally pretty judicious, I guess, about being vocal about criticisms, especially to people that they’ve only just met and certain people were pretty- yeah, so I didn’t by any means predict the protests. But when they came, it was consistent with a turn and attitude I’d heard just a few months earlier from my students who had just kind of emerged from Shanghai. And so yeah, but your observations are Interesting. And, you know, this is the, the interesting debate about, you know, the Chinese authoritarian system, right. Like often when we talk about the West, to the extent that it’s spoken of in a positive way, it’s often as a foil to the difficulty of getting things done in our system, right. So, you know, particularly often you hear, you know, we I used to receive a lot of visitors when I was in Beijing, and often it’s, in particular, in response to how quickly China was building infrastructure, right. And so, it would often be like, Oh, I wish we could do that, you know, I wish we could get things done like they can in China. And, you know, that’s both an overstatement of what is possible in China. But, you know, when there’s uniform, when there’s not a lot of dispute about the direction, or it’s a very important issue, if things can move, particularly quickly, lots of other issues there, it’s much more fragmented. And so there’s, there’s also kind of stagnation and, you know, things get blocked up in, you know, in a way that would be familiar to us in our system. But of course, I mean, as we, as you guys discussed on the podcast with Jed, you know, that a lot of this is by design, right? In the US system to not allow kind of rapid change. And so rapid change is certainly possible in China, for better or for worse, right? Yeah, it can change in pretty dark directions, too, if you think of like Cultural Revolution times, and, and the Great Leap Forward and the famine during that in the early decades of the People’s Republic of China.
Michael Livermore 26:47
Yeah. And I, this kind of this notion of this envy of the, you know, the rapidity with which China can act. Yeah, that always struck me as, as there’s some- maybe there’s some element of truth that seems to strike me as misunderstanding China to a certain extent, but also, you know, like, we’ve had that at different times in US history. And, you know, Robert Moses is a very interesting figure in New York, right? Like, yeah, stuff got built, but like, a lot of it we now regret, and we certainly regret, like how it was done, and you know, like leveling, you know, African American neighborhoods and without any process, and then all this, you know, this car infrastructure that he locked in place, so yeah, it just, it always just strikes me as like- so Ezra Klein has been on a hobbyhorse about this,
Alex Wang 27:38
I just listened to their union online, which was very good. And it talks, it hits on some of the things we’re talking about. Now, you know, though, it’s interesting that you bring up the Robert Moses piece, because I’m really interested in like the, you know, the Robert Carroll exploration of American power. And I’ve been playing with this idea of, you know, he uses this, this idea that of China as a, you know, as a mirror image of United States, I’ve been thinking about that idea, but in a different sense. And, you know, in my China classes, I often show the famous, you can’t handle the truth scene from A Few Good Men. It turns out most of my, this is what makes me feel old, because most of my students have not seen that movie. I guess. But yeah, for me, it’s like such a seminal legal, right. And now, when you look at it, in retrospect, it’s such a full throated, you know, movie about the American way, right? The American rule of law, and you know, that scene in particular, it’s, you know, the law coming in and clamping down on this powerful military figure, right. And his speech is all about, you know, you ungrateful jerk, you don’t appreciate what I do for your security. And, you know, you can’t tolerate the way I get things done. To me, I- now that I’ve been studying China, that scene really plays differently to me in the sense that, you know, like in the Moses story, which is really all about how we can look back and really say, like, kind of criticize Moses. But in some sense, if I think if Americans were to be more honest about ourselves, right, like, you have to think about, you know, the FEW GOOD MEN seen and the Robert Moses story as kind of really the story of, you know, the uneven development of America, right, that we appreciate the good things that it’s brought, but oftentimes it was done in a way, you know, maybe, you know, at the time, certainly not even tacitly but explicitly sort of accepted as, as a way of doing things but in some ways a kind of tacit like it, the system will criticize that but it’s always been a part of the way things get done. China’s story is, in a sense, the reverse of that in that they celebrate, in a sense that you know, their party line is the Jack Nicholson story. And then what is the hidden part is actually the Tom Cruise part, in the sense that they’ve introduced a lot of kind of stuff on the edges. You know, it’s sort of like, the dominant story is the Jack Nicholson story, and it’s tempered by the Tom Cruise stuff. In my view, kind of insufficiently. Right? Whereas in some ways, the American story is really, you know, the story we tell about yourself, is the Tom Cruise story, but the dark secret is the Jack Nicholson stuff, which, you know, there’s lots of different ways you can frame that. But, you know, if you were more of a critic from the critical side, you’d say, you know, that’s, you probably said, you know, that’s just the way the American way, you know, and we don’t like to talk about that.
Michael Livermore 30:49
Yeah, that’s super interesting. And, you know, I think that if I’m just kind of see, because that’s, I feel like there’s a cool insight there. And, of course, I like talking about movies from the 1990s. So I’m trying to get more squeezed out of this, but in a way, there’s like something about the Tom Cruise line, the rule of law, you know, holding power to account, we do things by the book, thing, I wonder, like, if a, a more like critical theorist would say, it’s actually like, that story, in a way allows for the raw exercise of power, right, that you read the Tom Cruise in order for the Jack Nicholson’s of the world to be able to do their thing, and it’s completely dependent on it. And it tacitly allows it except for occasionally making a big deal out of, you know, holding someone to account. So that’s interesting. And I wonder if there’s like, again, trying to keep this with the inverse story with China, like, does the fact that they make a big deal out of kind of, you know, by any means necessary, doing the things that, you know, we want collectively to do, you know, achieve prosperity or social cohesion or whatever, somehow in power, the small moves of rule of law and, and regularization and proceed and fairness, procedural fairness or whatever that yeah, that kind of happened in the shadows, in some sense. Yeah.
Alex Wang 32:12
So that’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think you could answer that a couple of different ways. I mean, you know, one development that doesn’t fully map onto my kind of Jack Nicholson analogy is that there’s a way in which the Party is trying to essentially redefine language in ways that we may or may not agree with. So what the most- one of the most obvious ways is that there, a lot of the party rhetoric now just says we are a democracy, we’re just a different type of democracy, right. And what they really mean by that is that the party thinks about what the people want, right? So there are there’s always sorts of ways we could get into a long debate about how to critique that. Right. But it’s an interesting question, right? Because certainly, in some respects, party policy has dovetailed with what people want, in some respects, but certainly lots of other things that people want, or it’s completely excluded from that. And, but then how do you compare that to a democracy? In which of course, you don’t always get everything that you want? And what is? How do you define what the people want? Anyway, you know, given the diversity and such, so there’s a way in which words are just being redefined. The other thing I think, that you’re getting at is does it allow political space for people who are promoting more liberal kinds of policies? And, you know, there’s been some work in political science about a term, Kevin O’Brien at Berkeley coined, which is rightful resistance, which is this idea that, you know, people could take advantage of commitments at the top to, you know, the risk for the center of not listening to the demands is that, you know, for these things, like for rule of law, or transparency, is that the leaders look like hypocrites, because they’ve been saying that they want these things. And so they have to give some concessions. Because there’s that political pressure not to just look like complete, like, you’re saying one thing and just completely doing the other. And so, so there’s, that provides this kind of tenuous political space for people to push for things and there obviously limits to it, because if you push too hard, then it becomes easier for the state to crack down on you. But if you can kind of keep it within bands, there, there is some space, but you know, this kind of political game is constantly shifting, so that I would say that game was much more an active one during my period of time in China, so pre-Xi. So since Xi, and I haven’t spent as nearly as much time on the ground since in the last decade, but my- from everything I’ve heard and discussions and is that space has just become much tighter and much narrower, right, because of the direction of centralization and political tightening and these sorts of things. So all the signals, and all the actions have, have made it harder to play that game. And so the game will just continue to change. And we’ll have to see where it heads.
Michael Livermore 35:24
So you know, so that’s a huge transition, right? Since you were in China to today’s Xi’s rise and consolidation of power that’s massive. And I’m curious about the connection of that to you know, there’s maybe three things happening, there’s political change, there’s economic change, and then there’s environmental change, all kind of all happening simultaneously. So as you mentioned, like when you were certainly there in the 90s and early aughts, that, you know, there was all of this concern that spilled out globally, but I was I’m sure a very big deal in China about air quality and, and pollution, and just general pollution and so on is just starting to get figured out and addressed. And so I’m curious about the interaction of these things, like, you know, there’s been progress on environmental issues in China in terms of like outcomes, I assume I should be curious to hear your thoughts about that. And then how does that interact with kind of economic changes and political changes that have happened in the past couple of decades?
Alex Wang 36:28
Yeah. Yeah. So I think- so that’s a great question. And I think, you know, so for people who aren’t tracking this, the environmental story, in terms of like the political priority of environmental regulation, or environmental protection, there’s been a really big change in the last, say, 15 to 20 years. And so I think that change started when I was on the ground, in what the 2006 to 2010 period was China’s 11th, five-year plan you’re trying to use as these kind of Leninist five-year plans. And so that was a period where you started to see a shift towards greater prioritization of environment. And then that has continued over the last decade. And to the extent that now, kind of this idea of what China- the Chinese call ecocivilization, which you could just conceive of, as a sort of concept of environmental protection has been put in the Constitution. And it’s become a big political priority with a lot of bureaucratic targets attached to it, and, and all sorts of policies associated with it. And, you know, the way that I understand that transition is, you know, it’s partly environmental, but it’s also political and economic. So all three of those areas that you mentioned, are all wrapped up in the environmental story. And this is a lot of my academic work is kind of thinking about the intersections, there. And so the part that’s most consistent with the story we tell about environmental regulation. And we just had Richard Lazarus at UCLA a couple days ago, talking about his second edition of Making the Environmental Law. So I got to hear a refresher of our American environmental history. And, you know, just thinking about the kind of bottom-up story, right, that we’re very familiar with, you know, there was an aspect of that in the Chinese system in the terms of a lot of people were really unhappy with the air pollution, the water pollution, soil pollution, and it was leading to all sorts of hundreds, if not 1000s, of protests a year, all over the country. And, you know, from the position of Beijing, or the sub-national governments, you know, this was a massive governance problem, you know, stability problem, social stability problem, which is, is very prized as a political value within the Chinese system. So how they needed to get a handle on that, right. And so part of that was, drove some of the action. And, you know, that relates to how it’s a political story, right? It’s about like maintaining enough satisfaction so that you don’t lose legitimacy. You don’t have an unmanageable level of protests. And then it also dovetailed with the economic story, which was that China, the leaders have been very clear that they want to transform the economy into something more like the developed world economies, right, which is more services and less heavy industry and agriculture, right? I want to move upgrade the economy in a sense and so the environmental stuff really could be wrapped together with that piece, right? So if you think of just more economic kind of policies like trying to limit overcapacity in steel and cement or you know, trying to develop, you know, tech industries or tourism industries, those types of things are all- could be in part pushed through environmental laws, right. So if you ban some of the worst, you know, if you disfavor heavy industry, for example, which they’ve done in the wealthier provinces in particular, that can, you know, it can drive out some of that business and kind of lay the groundwork for that- it kind of sits hand in hand with subsidies for AI, or tech or advanced manufacturing and those sorts of things. And so, that has not, you know, that’s been a difficult thing to push. Andthe transformation has been halting in many ways, but the overall trend is towards more, you know, more services, less on heavy industry. And so the environmental story is in part about that, and, you know, improving efficiency, certainly of the industry you have, and also disfavoring, trying to essentially push kind of the transition, which we had in Europe and the United States, which was export of the most polluting stuff. So, you know, if you look at the California Environmental story, the story you will hear is very much about regulation and the ingenuity of policy and government. But a big part of it was the shift of, you know, lots of industries, we don’t have anymore in California, right? They just moved to China.. And now China is kind of doing the same thing. And a lot of this stuff is already, you know, within China, there is an export from the coastal, eastern and southern coastal provinces inland, that was the initial stage of it, it’s still happening. So and then there’s also now export to the so-called belt and road countries, or a lot of the South, global south countries, and it’s already happening. And then, you know, the scholars have been working on kind of quantifying that, and that sort of thing.
Michael Livermore 41:52
Yeah, really interesting, I think, you know, it’s very similar for the US where there was internal shifts in industry, and then ultimately, you know, stuff, you know, heavy industry polluting industry, you know, went elsewhere, went to Mexico, went to China. And I think that takes us into another kind of big, important thing that has shifted in that, in the last, you know, 20 years and thinking about governance in China and environmental governance, it’s just the relationship between the US and China and how China’s, you know, global profile has just shifted, right. So there was- in the 90s it was about, you know, bringing China into the kind of global world order, I guess, so to speak, that with the WTO, and the trading system and the like. And now China is pursuing a much more- I don’t know expansionist is the right term, but you know, it has been quite clear that it wants to take up a leadership role on the global stage. And, you know, working with countries throughout the global south and investment, and, you know, all of this is happening. So again, just thinking about the shifting geopolitics, I guess we could say, in the relationship between China in the US, how much of this do you think was, you know, you can think, again, casting yourself back to the, to that earlier time, you know, was this kind all on the cards? Or, you know, what is this it was, in that it just is just a natural evolution of a relationship? Or is this the result of kind of specific actors making specific decisions that kind of led us to the place that we’re in now, where there’s actually, you know, we’re, we’re maybe not at an a dear, in the relationship. But it seems to be a lot worse, a lot more conflict-ridden then than it was in the, you know, say in the 2000s.
Alex Wang 43:54
Yeah. Yeah. So I, you know, I don’t think we, you know, maybe people predicted exactly where we are, but I don’t- I certainly- when I think back to that time, I don’t think I foresaw where we are today, right, just how much China’s global kind of strength has grown, you know, their economic power has grown by such leaps and bounds. But, you know, in retrospect, you know, it’s been interesting to me again, why I say like, my mother, this kind of three-decade engagement in China really informs my view of China is, I really remember well, in the early 90s, when I was in Wuhan, you know, at the time, you know, there was some foreign companies or some foreign and you know, there were auto factories, there was a Budweiser plant and what happened there was a guy who worked for Enron. There was a guy we’d see at this local ex-pat bar and just I remember the tone of foreigners towards China was really just- it was very much a kind of weird, the kind of global leaders and this is a really backwards place, you know, there was a kind of disrespect, right. And that’s been really interesting just to see how that has gradually changed to recognizing China as a global player. And then to now this past decade, which is seeing China as a threat, right. And you know, we’re doing this podcast on the morning that this news that the spy balloon over Montana, is breaking all over the place. And Blinken has just canceled his trip to China. And so, who knows where this will take us, but things are in a really difficult situation. But yeah, it’s interesting, like to connect this question to what we were just talking about earlier about what motivated China to kind of embrace kind of environmental policies, like you only have to look at, like the cleantech area to see part of the story of how this developed and to lead us to where we are, right. So I think, you know, China, why did China, you know, they pass a renewable energy law in 2006. Why did they get into this? Right? It wasn’t purely for environmental reasons, right. Like we- the green groups and green people, like us will focus on that. But there was very much, you know, politics, energy security, not knowing that they had to import so much from outside and, and also there was economic opportunities. And, you know, what, were industries in which there were not dominant global incumbents, right. And so they thought, well, this might be a good place to invest some money and to put industrial policy behind on wind, solar batteries, these types of things, electric vehicles. And, you know, there’s no guarantee of success on that. But, you know, it has led to a situation now in which China just absolutely dominates the supply chains of these different things. So if you think solar, PV batteries, wind, electric vehicles, and you know, what was motivating at the time, in part, it was not, you know, there’s gonna be lots of post mortems to talk about how strategic it was, but in part it’s just going where there was less resistance, right? You know, why was China buying oil from like, human rights violators often was because the foreign companies weren’t able or willing to go there. And so that was where they could get good oil supplies, right? So they go to Sudan, or whatever. And so this was like, they were looking for places where there wasn’t just blinding competition from global multinationals. And they went to these, they invested a lot of money in these places where there just wasn’t a dominant player, right. And so it’s allowed them to really, in the short span of 10-15 years to really become globally dominant, and part of the tensions that arise out of that, right, like think about, like solar, like trade conflicts related to solar. You know, that’s a really interesting tension point, that I think we all need to understand better, like, how do we grapple with the supply chain dominance of China in batteries, and clean tech, right, like, I’m all for the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act provisions that seek to shift manufacturing, as a minimum to diversify manufacturing, but then try to reassure to the United States, but I have no idea whether that will work, right? Like I want to listen to the economist or business people as to whether that can actually work in the in the long run, you know, given China’s cost advantage, their manufacturing advantages these days, but that is part of the source of tension. And politically, of course, you know, given for example, what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine, Europe sees the risks of relying on natural gas from a kind of geopolitical rival, right, energy from and so that’s clearly in the mix in the US-China discussions and how we resolve it. You know, I think everyone’s thinking about it. Now, I don’t really have a good answer for that. But it makes it very interesting in terms of when you think about geopolitics and climate, right, because in- among some of the environmental researchers who focus on China, who I respect a lot, they’re doing a lot of work, showing the difficulty for our achievement of our climate goals that will be put in if we shut off, we tried to shut off China supply chains, it’ll just increase the cost of everything, right, at least in the near and medium term. And so how much does that slow deployment of the technologies we need? These sorts of things? You know, that’s all, you know, kind of troublesome dilemmas that we’re going to have to grapple with. I think in the short term, we’re gonna have to continue to, you know, if you think of cooperation with China as buying things from them where there’s no way we can stop buying a lot of these key things from them. And it’s going to take a little while to kind of get manufacturing up or diversify sourcing. But I think that’s the direction where we’re gonna head but probably in the near term, we’re gonna see, you know, there’s gonna be a lot of work for the lawyers and consulting firms on how to structure things so that they don’t run afoul of laws. But in fact, probably there’s still Chinese involvement, right, like, you gotta imagine there’s going to be a lot of that in the beltway.
Michael Livermore 50:29
Yeah, it’s really, really interesting, because it’s so hard given how integrated our global economy is to then try to delink it, especially on something as complex as in the energy space, just one example of this that I just saw was a bit of analysis on the EU energy markets, and you know, where they’re getting their natural gas, and you know, how, like liquefied natural gas markets are being affected by, you know, delinking with Russia, and so on. And I just saw this little, this tidbit, which was, Egypt has become a supplier. And part of, and they’ve actually reduced their domestic usage of natural gas in order to sell for export, but they’ve increased their usage of, like, dirtier fuels, including fuel oil, which is purchased from Russia. So like, you know, and I feel like, so for me, you know, just a, I have, I don’t know, if these days is a potential, possibly contrarian perspective on this. But, you know, one story that maybe we would have told 10 years ago, is, you know, globalization is how we’re going to achieve get out of from under climate change, like, we need all hands on deck, we need to find the cheapest sources for all of you know, our clean energy needs, we need to make this huge transition. And this huge transition is only gonna be possible if we can all work together and maximize the, you know, the productivity of the global economic system, which means, you know, you build, you know, one thing in China, you build another thing in India, you build another thing in Mexico, right, just a kind of standard comparative advantage story about globalization. And then the, I think the story, the old story anyway, used to be, and that’s a good thing for peace and prosperity, because, you know, China needs us, we need China, and so therefore, you know, we don’t go to war over Taiwan. And you know, and there, and it’s good that Taiwan makes all the microprocessors because then we don’t go, you know, no one wants to bomb them because it’s like key to like our- how everything functions. And it does seem like we’re moving away from that, and energy and the environment is kind of a leading example, where it’s not, you know, there’s other things like, like the chip stuff, and the, you know, the kind of reshoring, more generally of different kinds of technology, but the IRA, as kind of a core example of industrial policy is all about this, right? Where the subsidies are limited for, you know, to stuff is manufactured in the US, and as all these kinds of efforts to, to, to delink, in some sense, the clean energy manufacturing process from the, at least big chunks of the global economy. So, right. For me, this just strikes me, as you say, like, there’s risks associated with that. One is it’s going to be more costly, there’s just no way around that. And which drives up the price of electricity, drives up the price of clean energy, vis a vie, fossil, which is bad. And then the other one is, you know, this concern about delinking, you know, has a little bit of a precursor to a trade war kind of vibe. And so I just, I wonder if, as yeah, someone who follows us closely does, does this give you worrying? You know, kind of the shivers a little bit, it gives me the shivers a little bit, of course.
Alex Wang 53:48
Yes. Yeah, no that Egypt example is a great one. And I am totally on board with your comments, I think, you know, the short answer is, I don’t totally know how I think about all this, I’m just sort of trying to absorb the complexities of this, you know, probably will require me to dive more into trade law than I ever wanted to, right, but like, you know, for example, like forced labor in Xinjiang, right. So, part of, you know, there’s partly just the Human Rights story, which I’m totally on board with trying to try to stop that from happening, right. There’s the symbolic aspect of just politicians in the beltway, needing to talk tough about China, and what is their willingness then to follow it up with actual implementation and all these types of things? And then there’s the how do you then continue to achieve your climate goals in light of the economic consequences of that policy? You know, I suppose right now is just, I think you have to deal with all of them and you just try to create the best balance because, you know, there was some debates, you know, particularly among more lefty environmental groups of, you know, some people suggesting like, maybe we shouldn’t be so- we shouldn’t link these things to human rights so much because of the importance of the climate issue. And, you know, that kind of debate was happening in DC and it feels wrong to me, you know, like, if you’ve identified forced labor, you’ve got to deal with it. But you also have to avoid, you know, make sure it’s not like a cover for just, you know, American companies trying to gin up something to take on a shift business their way. So, I don’t know the answer to these things. But I think, in my work, I’ve just tried to sort of, you know, for example, I and a couple of other people have had a piece out in science recently that, you know, roughly speaking, tries to turn down the temperature, a little bit of about national security and an economic shock concerns and just to try to identify where the real risks are, and tries to warn people not to like over- not to inflate risks, because of the potential damage to climate action that that could lead to. But you know, all- the entire direction within the beltway these days is so anti-China, that it’s natural for us in the academic sphere to worry about kind of return on McCarthyism, and all of the negative things that that can bring, right, there is now a, the Republicans have set up a China committee, that we’re waiting to see what what they plan to do. But, you know, we’re always on the alert for kind of overreach, but also, you know, there’s obviously genuine policy concerns and risks that the politicians have to deal with.
Michael Livermore 56:42
All right. So, yes, this is all very complicated, moment that we’re in. So one of the, you know, another recent paper that you put together on kind of the cooperation and the prospect of cooperation and competition for, you know, the future prospects of climate change, one of the chunks of that, maybe we can kind of end with this conversation is the, this notion that, you know, the US and China are going to be in competition with each other for the foreseeable future in many different domains. That, in part, you know, as we were kind of talking about there, these alternative models of the world may be more similar to each other or more mirror imagery than either side might realize, but nevertheless, alternatives, models, and that, you know, maybe optimistically, there could be competition between these two models, on things that are, like socially beneficial, like addressing climate change, like, you know, restriction economy and a more, you know, decarbonizing the economy, so I guess, almost as a proxy battle, right, like, so, you know, it’s like the Olympics or the moon race during the Cold War. But now we’re going to race to decarbonize, I mean, that would really be wonderful. I guess the question is, you know, what happens to that, it’s a lot cheaper to send someone to the moon than it is to decarbonize the economy. Right. So what happens and this goes relates to the gold stuff, like where everyone says, okay, we’re going to decarbonize by 2050, just give us 10 years, and then we’ll start right. So like, you know, what happens when the rubber hits the road? And it really starts to get expensive? Do you think that you know, that this competitive kind of proxy battle over systems of governance is enough to fuel a really serious decarbonization? Or, you know, are we going to look back and say, you know, we got to look to and start building a cooperative model after all, because ultimately, we need a market or we need something else to fuel this thing.
Alex Wang 58:42
Yeah, so yeah, so that’s a tough question. I’m a terrible futurist. But I can think about, you know, I guess, you know, the, what that piece that you’re talking about it I was reacting to was the media framing was often, especially when Biden came, I started writing about when Biden came in, and the media was all talking about, oh, now we can return to cooperation, everything’s gonna be okay. And if we don’t get cooperation, then the world is going to collapse, like, roughly speaking, but that was the framing at least of the, or the underlying premise of a lot of the writing. And so this was partly, you know, I and a number of people have thought about the competition framing and the implications of that. And just to say, look, are we overplaying the role of certainly Beijing to DC cooperation, because there’s so much else going on and also the problems are really so much broader now as we’ve been discussing they’re now trade and human rights, things that like John Kerry doesn’t have power to really dictate, right. And you know, and so, in large part that was the impetus for that and you still see this kind of framing often in the media reporting and you know, I don’t blame and journalists, they’re writing on tight deadlines, they don’t have the time to recreate a new create a new framework for each article. But I think that needs to be a corrective to the way that we discuss this. And we’re also seeing, you know, on the competition front, like, of course competition can matter, right, like in the sense that if you think of China and the US as having like a business to business kind of competition, that’s the natural way we think of markets and business, right. And we believe that that can lead to faster development of things. And, you know, arguably, the Inflation Reduction Act is in part, you know, there’s a China component of that, right. And Biden has said as much in speeches, that part of the story is trying to outcompete China and, you know, would the IRA have gotten through without this China element, you know, maybe so. I have no idea but you know, the China politics in the sense that we need to outcompete China, which is dominating and that China dominance in these important industries will lead to their political power that will create security risk for us, that’s in the backdrop of all of this stuff in a way that if it leads to more our political willingness to invest more money, in these types of things, that seems like a good thing. Right. And arguably, we’re seeing it at work now. Right, that dynamic is contributing to movement in a way that, and you know, more broadly speaking, does it somewhat start to shift our notion of what the role of government should be? Right, like we’ve, you know, we’ve been in several decades, right, like 90s, in the 2000s of the role or, and even longer of, you know, everything that government does is bad, right? And so, to what extent do we need government to step in and help us to out-compete when you’re your geopolitical rival, uses so much of its government resources to enable and support its own industries? Right. And, you know, a lot of the trade stuff has been about complaining about those practices and trying to stop those practices. IRA, in part is an embrace of those practices of our own
Michael Livermore 1:02:20
Right, if you can’t beat them join them.
Alex Wang 1:02:23
Exactly. So that competition, you know, and we’re also seeing that competition play out in the kind of Foreign Affairs context, you know, China is certainly constructing part of its Belt and Road Initiative outbound investment policies in green framings. So that involves energy investments and rare minerals mining. And the US framing right now is an exact mirror opposite of China’s belt and road framing, which is green health and digital, but the US framing has added a democratic governance component as a fourth component. And so there’s clearly a competition there to see who can do that better. And, again, I think that that’ll be a really interesting area to just see how it plays out. And it’s going to play out differently in every single country, depending on the dynamics within a given country.
Michael Livermore 1:03:21
Yeah, and it might ultimately, I mean, one very optimistic read of this would be that the competition between the US and China will be really good for the global south as these kind of big economic players kind of compete for influence and, and so on, and that puts them in a better position to negotiate.
Alex Wang 1:03:39
Right, exactly. Yeah, people are in research of this are talking about the hedging strategies of the Global South. And so, you know, obviously, it doesn’t necessarily play to their advantage, it could just be to hedge Amman’s kind of fighting proxy battles and wrecking, you know, the battlefield, in which they’re playing. But, you know, again, we, it’s interesting to think about how it could play, you know, shift from a period where, you know, let’s say Americans, I think, are, you know, arguably, we’re neglecting a lot of these countries, and now they’re paying more attention, because China’s trying to get in there and so we’ll see how that plays out.
Michael Livermore 1:04:18
Yeah, well, very interesting stuff. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. It’s been a super, super interesting conversation and yeah, thanks for all the work you do to stay abreast and analyze these incredibly complex and important issues.
Alex Wang 1:04:33
Absolutely. And thanks for your podcast it’s such a broad-ranging set of topics it’s not just- I thought it was going to be more of a squarely environmental but uh, you range across so many topics it shows your breadth and depth as well.
Michael Livermore 1:04:47
Yeah, no, it’s been a lot of fun. And listeners if you enjoyed this episode, let us know. You can give us a like, a rating, subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media. It’d be great to hear from you. Till next time.
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