China’s Role in Solving the Climate Crisis

 

The world is sizzling.  With record-setting global temperatures and wildfires sweeping across Canada, the climate crisis has reached a tipping point. Environmental governance has been trumpeted as an area for cooperation between the China and the West. Yet, cooperation on emission setting and other environmental standards are not always easy to achieve, given unabated political tensions. This panel of top China environmental experts held a timely discussion on opportunities and constraints in China’s role to curb the climate crisis.

 

Denise van der Kamp is an Associate Professor in the Political Economy of China at Oxford University. Her research examines environmental policy, regulatory uncertainty, and bureaucratic governance in China. Originally from Hong Kong, she received her PhD from UC Berkeley and has lived and worked in China, Tajikistan, Canada, the United States, and the UK.

 

Iza Yue Ding is an Associate Professor of Political Science. Her research explores the paradoxes and pushbacks attending economic, political, and cultural modernization, such as creative resistance against institutional rigidities, lingering moral traditions against legal development, enduring historical memories against rapid socioeconomic transformations, and humans' simultaneous degradation of nature and attachment to nature. Ding is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph on global historical waves of environmentalism.

 

Juliet Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management and the School for Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She is a political ecologist focused on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources in Southeast Asia and beyond. Dr. Lu’s research examines conflicts and governance issues around resource extraction and intensive land use. She focuses on transnational land investments, namely Chinese rubber plantations in Laos, the promotion of monoculture plantations at the expense of more biodiverse systems, and the rise of private sector sustainable governance initiatives worldwide. She is looking to work with students interested in conducting grounded research around land conflicts, cash crop-driven land use change, and Chinese investments.

 

Diana Fu Diana Fu (Moderator) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The University of Toronto and director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China. She is author of the award-winning book “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (2018, Cambridge).