It is not China’s style to let the green inspectors rummage around

Leo Lewis

For nations of a nervous disposition, there is an ocean of difference between “transparency” and “scrutiny”: a commitment to the first is a sop, a commitment to the second is a surrender.
The climate change debate has blazingly illuminated China’s stance on the issue.
There are many reasons why emotions in Beijing run high over allowing outsiders to verify China’s adherence to its emissions promises.
The first is universal — no nation is fundamentally happy about the idea of having its domestic activities judged by interlopers. In China the unease is especially acute.

The country is run on the principle that the Communist Party is almighty: the minutest detail of Chinese policy-making has this as its starting point.
The severe external shock created by the financial crisis has dramatically increased Beijing’s domestic need to appear in control, so this was never a moment where any smidgin of jurisdiction was likely to be ceded.
Included in that logic may well be concerns over domestic anger on environmental issues.
The Government already faces a persistent barrage of protest over a grim variety of air, soil and water pollution. It does not want the reports of foreign inspectors adding fuel to those fires.
The second reason — about which China is open — is the related matter of priorities.
China, for all its astronomical growth and increasing diplomatic heft, is a developing country and is hell-bent on completing that process.
The masterplan involves lifting tens of millions of people from poverty, and increasing the living standards of more than a billion.
That ambition will consistently trump all others (including climate change reduction) however genuinely China believes them to be valid.
The third factor may be Beijing’s private calculations over the prospects of a “green economy”.
Numerous governments have talked about the jobs, skills and profits that will be created through fighting climate change with technology.
China has pushed ahead impressively with hydroelectric, wind- and solar-energy projects, but a harsh truth may now be dawning: none of these is going to create anything like the jobs that dirty energy and dirty industry do.
More than 70 per cent of China’s power is still produced from burning coal, and new plants are still being constructed. Heavy industry accounted for 71 per cent of industrial output in 2008.
But beneath it all, a more basic issue may be at stake. By shunning scrutiny and claiming transparency, Beijing will in effect shove climate change numbers into the giant black box that is official Chinese statistics.
These figures — everything from GDP growth to fertility rates — are the “transparency” by which China is understood both domestically and by the outside world.
If China ever allowed scrutiny of how well it had adhered to its carbon emission promises, it would be opening the door to something far more subversive: the idea that the “official” numbers are anything but cast-iron fact.