The Chinese Communist Party Is Climate Enemy No. 1

L eaders from around the world are gathering in Glasgow this week to discuss the global response to climate change. Amid a year of dramatic natural disasters, from deadly flooding in Germany to historic wildfires in the western United States, leaders are renewing their calls for global cooperation in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and preparing vulnerable communities for climate change. Yet Xi Jinping, the president of the world’s top polluting nation — China — couldn’t be bothered to make the trip to Scotland.

Rather than join his fellow heads of state at the United Nations COP26 conference, President Xi opted to send a brief written statement. In the note, he emphasized the importance of cooperation, highlighted China’s efforts to transition to clean energy, and pointed to the need for “solid action.”

President Xi’s statement is as empty as his chair at the conference.

In reality, China is responsible for 27 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, more than every other developed nation combined. Over the past three decades, China’s emissions have tripled, and there’s no sign that trend will reverse any time soon. Chinese officials often point to the historical emissions of developed countries. But since 2005, for every ton of emissions the U.S has reduced, China has increased its emissions four-fold.

China’s abysmal emissions record has not gone unnoticed. Recently, President Xi has been feeling the heat from the international community. In 2020, he made a surprise announcement that China would work to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 and aim to reach peak emissions around 2030. This fall, he announced that China would no longer finance the building of coal plants abroad. Yet, like the Chinese Communist Party’s assurances that there is no genocide being committed against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, President Xi’s promises of climate action should be met with skepticism.

Upon closer inspection, China’s climate overtures hide ulterior motives. While its investments in clean-energy projects and infrastructure in developing nations may appear benevolent, they are, in fact, an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s neocolonial Belt and Road Initiative. The announcement that the regime would no longer fund foreign coal plants made good financial sense, given the volatility of coal prices, and it distracted attention from the fact that China brought 41 gigawatts of coal power online within its own borders in 2020 alone. And as for the CCP’s vague promises of domestic decarbonization, aspirational statements are a cheap way to win praise from global leaders hungry for visible signs of climate progress.

In short, every seemingly positive climate-change-mitigation action China takes is either meant to fool the West, help the CCP, or both. The global community should understand President Xi’s absence at COP26 as a clear statement from the world’s largest polluter: “Climate change? You deal with it.”

During his speech in Glasgow on Tuesday, President Biden called President Xi’s absence “a big mistake.” But such mildly admonitory statements are not good enough. The United States, along with our allies, must name, shame, and aggressively pressure the Chinese Communist Party into acting on climate change. This should include targeting Chinese goods and firms with sanctions, tariffs, and other punishments; heading off the Belt and Road Initiative in developing countries through economic investment; and calling out the CCP’s theft of intellectual property and anticompetitive business practices. The existing global framework for collaborative climate-change action, the Paris Agreement, relies on voluntary reporting and nationally determined emissions-reduction targets. But on an issue as important as this, we cannot depend on China to follow the honor system.

Some will say that we cannot afford to antagonize China — that when it comes to climate change, and even human rights, we must coax President Xi into becoming a responsible global actor by playing nice. But this approach has been tried over and over again, and it has yet to work.

So it’s time for us to get tough: We must declare the Chinese Communist Party Climate Enemy No. 1. As sea levels continue to rise and heat waves ravage the developed and developing world alike, we simply cannot afford to wait for an authoritarian communist regime to wake up and realize its moral obligation to act. There’s only one strategy that will force President Xi to take responsibility for his nation’s destruction of our planet: overwhelming condemnation from the international community and aggressive economic pressure from the United States and our allies.