China rejects capitalist democracy and continues to develop its socialist democracy
This article in the Global Times quotes Jiang Jinquan, director of the Policy Research Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, discussing the question of democracy at a press conference on the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CPC. He observed the weaknesses and limitations of Western capitalist democracy and noted the hypocrisy of attempting to impose this model on other countries via colour revolutions. Jiang Jinquan affirmed that China will continue to develop its own whole-process people’s democracy rather than attempting to copy the Western model.
The US’ democracy summit convened next month with the attempt to “revive” Western democracy amid mounting democratic problems in their countries is a huge irony, as its purpose is simply to suppress other countries and divide the world into different camps, a senior Chinese official said on Friday.
Jiang Jinquan,director of the Policy Research Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks at Friday’s press conference on the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
He said democracy is not a patent of the West, nor can it be defined by the West. Western democracy is a democracy dominated by capital, a democracy of the rich, not true democracy.
Some Western countries have shown a hollowing out of democracy,triggering dissatisfaction among their fellow people, but they are still trying to impose their democratic model on other countries. Color revolutions in recent years have resulted in disasters to local people, which the people of the world have become increasingly aware of, Jiang said in response to a question on comparison between China’s whole-process people’s democracy and Western democracy.
Jiang listed several polls as an example. According to a new survey from the Pew Research Centre, 57 percent of global respondents and 72 percent of Americans said that US democracy used to be a good example but has not been recently.
According to an NPR poll, 81 percent of US adults say the future of US democracy is under threat.
In contrast, two recent polls released by a US polling agency show that Chinese people’s satisfaction with the CPC and the Chinese government is 95 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
Democracy is not for decoration, but for solving people’s problems. Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are the masters of the country, whether its people have the right to vote and more importantly, whether they have the right to participate widely. It depends on what promises are made during the election process, but more importantly, it depends on how many of these promises are fulfilled after an election, Jiang said.
“Democracy is not true if the people are awakened only at the time of voting and then fall into hibernation, if they can only listen to the election slogans but have no say after the election, if they are favored only at the time of campaigning and then are left out after the election,” Jiang said.
Jiang said the CPC has realized that China’s political civilization and political system must be deeply rooted in the mind of Chinese society. Copying other countries’ political systems will not work and may even destroy the country’s future.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has adhered to the path of political development under socialism with Chinese characteristics and upheld the leadership of the Party and the position of the people as masters of the country, has resolutely resisted the erosion and influence of the Western political trend of so-called “constitutionalism”, ruling party rotation, and developed a democratic road of whole-process people’s democracy, Jiang said.
The Chinese people have a high degree of confidence in their political system, and the fundamental reason lies in the fact that whole-process people’s democracy is highly democratic, fully fledged and deeply welcomed by the Chinese people. This is true people’s democracy, Jiang said.
https://socialistchina.org/2021/11/13/c ... democracy/
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China and Solutions to Climate Change
November 18, 2021
By K.J. Noh and Michael Wong – Nov 16, 2021
The Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations are at their highest levels in 2 million years, driving catastrophic climate change, and creating an existential threat to the planet. But there is a way out.
Last year, President Xi Jinping, pledged that China’s CO2 emissions would peak before 2030, and China would become carbon neutral before 2060.
China has a track history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them–often before deadline–so this pledge is significant. Under the CPC, China has already created “an economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world. It has virtually eradicated Covid through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 Billion) and distributing over 1 Billion-to the rest of the world. It has also been applying this incredible focus and national resolve to tackle Climate change.
China has the greatest program of renewable energy of any country. It generates more renewable power than North, Central, and South America–42 countries–combined. It has more solar parks and wind farms than any other country. Last year it built more wind power than the rest of the world combined.
It has more electric vehicles than any other country: it operates 420,000 electric buses, 99% of the world’s total; Shenzhen alone has 16,000 e-buses and 22,000 e-taxis. It aims to have 325 million electric vehicles operating by 2050. Its high speed rail network of 38,000 km is so extensive and effective that domestic air travel is starting to become obsolete. No country has as dense, large, and efficient system of clean public transportation and high-speed rail as China.
In addition, China also has the greatest carbon-sequestration afforestation program in the world, creating forests the size of Belgium every year. It has doubled its forest coverage to 23% over the past 40 years. Satellite analysis by NASA’s Ames Research Lab proves that China has contributed more to greening the planet than any other country in the world.
In other words, by almost every sustainability index, China a world leader–far ahead of the US–and is pioneering a way forward for the planet. It will likely hit its targets ahead of time.
These things are happening because the CPC has written sustainability and ecological development directly into its constitution. This is then implemented into regional and local policy, such as sustainable eco-city mandates, transportation policy, energy infrastructure, advanced research, as well as dedicated funding for alternative energy development for companies to start up and build clean energy technology.
These commitments exist despite the fact that China’s historical and per capita GHG and CO2 emissions are a fraction of the world’s total. According to the World Bank, on an annual per capita basis, China share is less than half of the United States; its household energy consumption is 1/8th of US’s.
Even more important, here’s a chart showing the cumulative emissions by country.
Source: Carbon Brief/No Cold War.
Cumulative historical amounts matter because CO2 does not dissipate but accrues in the atmosphere: stocks, not flows, are what matter. In accounting, you look at a person’s total accrued debt, not their daily credit expenditures, to determine what they owe to others. Likewise, you have to look at historically accrued GHG to accurately understand harms, liabilities, and mitigation responsibilities.
Note also, between 14–33% of China’s annual GHG emissions–are the West’s that has been offshored through manufacturing. This way, the West gets to have its cake and eat it, too: consume, pollute and destroy the planet, while virtue-signaling and blaming developing countries like China for the cost of its consumption.
Much, too, has been made of China’s coal plants, but the fact is that China’s plants are advanced supercritical or ultra-supercritical plants, which means they are much more efficient and cleaner than many of the industrial-era legacy plants of the US. China has a more sustainable approach along the entire chain of production and consumption. That said, China understands coal as a transitional source that it wants to phase out, except that the US has an explicit military plan to choke off China’s alternative fuel imports at the South China Sea. China needs to maintain back-up capacity in clean coal, as it leapfrogs into renewables, which will constitute fully 80% of its energy portfolio by 2060. As for overseas coal plants, 87% of that funding comes from the West or Japan, and China has committed to not fund any foreign coal plants. With these commitments, China has demonstrated that it is dedicated and committed to both national and global sustainability and carbon neutrality.
Lastly, most calculations of GHG emissions leave out the US military boot print, the single largest institutional emitter in the world, ranking higher than the emissions of 140 nations. Add the cost of endless US wars, and subtract offshored GHG from the West from China’s total, you get a different picture of responsibility for global emissions.
Despite the hypocritical finger-pointing at China at COP 26 by the worst polluters, the US and the West, the simple facts refute the lies. China is a net GHG creditor nation, not a debtor. The Lancet showed that 92% of emissions above the safe level of 350ppm can be attributed to the Global North, of which 40% of these emissions are the US’s alone. By contrast, China is a net creditor nation. In other words, the atmosphere (atmospheric carrying capacity), a global commons, has been colonized and monopolized by the West to the detriment of the rest of the world. In this, the US bears the greatest individual responsibility for the Global Climate crisis.
Despite all this, China leads in solutions–in technology, policy, transition planning, and implementation. It is not only pulling its weight, it is showing the world a way forward.
This is in stark distinction to the US, where 25% of the US Congress still refuses to believe in human-caused climate change and where the last President claimed that “Global warming was a Chinese hoax”. The US was also responsible fordisabling the original 1997 Kyoto protocol by lowering targets, engineering carbon indulgences (“carbon trading”), exempting military emissions, and unjustly trying to offload responsibility to developing countries. (After all this cynical, rapacious, profit-driven sabotage, led by Al Gore, the US still refused to ratify, demoralizing global efforts for decades). These cynical actions by US leadership, along with US overshoot of its share of the carbon budget, bear a large responsibility for the current critical state of affairs.
Despite decades of denialism, evasion, and sabotage by the US, there is still a path forward to tackle Climate change. But the US needs to step up to do its part and it needs to engage honestly with China’s sustainable, ecological model of development. With low-carbon eco-cities with 40% greenspace, pollution-free mass transit, mass afforestation, GHG capture technologies, mass shift to renewables, ecological mandates written into their constitution, China offers an inspiring and feasible policy model.
But this cannot happen if the US continues to threaten China militarily, encircle it with hundreds of bases–all emitting GHG–and resorts to carbon intensive military Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and denigrating and attacking everything positive China does. By constantly bashing and attacking China, instead of engaging and learning from the structural solutions they are implementing, the US is abdicating its duties as a responsible global stakeholder and undermining—yet again–the world’s chances of tackling Climate Change.
In the recent China-US Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action, the US momentarily dropped its China-bashing, and pledged to strengthen implementation of the Paris agreement.
However, the constant demonization of China by the US leadership, not only on Climate change, but on all fronts, along with endless echo-chambering in the MSM, would suggest that this is not a good faith change of heart, but only a temporary tactical reset. The fact that the US still bans Chinese polysilicon for environment-critical solar panels on fraudulent charges is evidence of this dishonest opportunism.
For the sake of the planet, sanity must prevail to seek real win-win cooperation on all fronts to tackle the existential threat of our time. China is doing its part by demonstrating what an ecological, sustainable civilization based on socialist common prosperity could look like.
Will the neoliberal West and the US follow suit, learn and cooperate, or will they play at politics and war, doubling down on the suicidal Carbon-fueled endgame?
Clear-sighted citizens must challenge the lies, the mendacity, and the escalating demonization, and urge their governments to work for peace and cooperation.
The future of the world depends on it.
Featured image: Panorama of Envision’s wind farm in Shanxi, China. Photograph Source: Hahaheditor12667 – CC BY-SA 4.0
(Counter Punch)
https://orinocotribune.com/china-and-so ... te-change/
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Ecological civilization flourishes under Xi's vision
By HOU LIQIANG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-11-19 07:00
An excited girl feeds a black-headed gull on a riverside walkway in Kunming, Yunnan province, on Sunday. The Communist Party of China and the entire nation have made great efforts and progress in pursuing green development. [Photo by Yang Zheng/For China Daily]
The Communist Party of China, with General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping at the core, has made unprecedented endeavors in the history of the development of mankind to promote institutional design for ecological civilization, according to a document. Xi promoted a concept for balanced and sustainable development that features harmonious coexistence between man and nature.
Since the Party's 18th National Congress in 2012, the CPC Central Committee has made greater efforts than ever before on ecological civilization, said a landmark resolution on the major achievements and historical experience of the Party over the past century.
"The whole Party and the entire nation have become more conscious and active in pursuing green development, and made significant progress in building a Beautiful China," said the document, which was issued on Tuesday and adopted at the sixth plenary session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, held in Beijing from Nov 8 to 11.
The 18th CPC National Congress was key to China's environmental governance progress, said Qian Yong, director of the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization.
"Ecological civilization construction and the institutional systems for environmental protection have been promoted in an accelerated manner since then," he said.
The congress saw ecological civilization inscribed into the CPC's Constitution. In addition to giving high priority to ecological development, the congress pledged to incorporate ecological civilization into all aspects of economic, political, cultural and social advancement.
Qian said the Chinese government has been advocating and working to advance ecological civilization against the backdrop of the serious challenges presented by industrialization, such as environmental pollution and ecosystem degradation.
In 2017, Xi said in his report to the 19th CPC National Congress that building an ecological civilization is vital to sustaining China's development.
"We must realize that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets and act on this understanding, implement our fundamental national policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment, and cherish the environment as we cherish our own lives," Xi said.
In 2018, ecological civilization was included into the nation's Constitution. At a tone-setting national ecological and environmental protection conference held in the year, Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization was officially established.
Addressing the national conference, Xi said China will push for coordination between economic and social development and ecological civilization.
The country will channel more energy into promoting ecological civilization and resolving environmental problems, backed by the political advantages of the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC and the socialist system, as well as the achievements made during the 40 years of reform and opening-up, he noted.
Thanks to all-out efforts of the CPC, a series of institutions for the construction of ecological civilization have been established in the country, according to the recent landmark resolution.
"We have promoted the enforcement of red lines for ecological conservation, set benchmarks for environmental quality, imposed caps on resource utilization, and launched a whole raft of pioneering initiatives that will have fundamental and far-reaching significance," it said.
It said China has set up effective systems in many areas, including performance evaluation and accountability for ecological conservation, compensation for ecological conservation, and the designation of river, lake and forest chiefs.
Hu Kanping, a researcher at the Chinese Ecological Civilization Research and Promotion Association, said people can hardly find another country like China that sees its central leadership vigorously promoting top-level design for ecological civilization.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 762a0.html
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China’s sponge cities are a ‘revolutionary rethink’ to prevent flooding
We republish below this interesting article from Euronews about China’s innovation and investment in the development of sponge cities – an urban water management system that conserves water and protects natural habitats.
The survival and development of human society depends on water. In fact, global water demand increased nearly eightfold between 1900–2010 as a result of factors like population growth, economic development and a shift in diet.
But in China, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, the vital resource is running out. The country’s 1.4 billion population needs water to thrive but it has become limited and unevenly distributed.
After decades of urbanisation and pollution, the country is now faced with both water shortages and flooding – only made worse by the effects of climate change.
And pollution is making water quality worse, meaning much of the water available is unusable. Insufficient management of local resources plays a part too.
North China is particularly impacted. It suffers from water shortages throughout the year, whereas South China, despite sufficient quantities, experiences only seasonal scarcity. One of the problems is that 80 per cent of water is concentrated in South China, yet the North is the core of national development.
Flooding is also a huge problem. Climate change is causing heavier rainfall and storms, affecting large areas of southern China including the Yangtze basin and its tributaries. In July 2021, the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, Henan, battled the heaviest rain in a millennia and devastating floods that killed at least 300 people and displaced 1.24 million residents, according to the NY Times.
So what is being done to address this water crisis and stop flooding from getting worse?
‘Sponge cities’ are trying to solve the water crisis
A ‘sponge city’ is a nature-based solution which uses the landscape to retain water at its source, slow down water flow and clean it throughout the process.
The focus is to retain rainwater in urban areas by waterproofing the paved floor so that part of it evaporates and the rest is gradually drained. As well as proofing the roads and pavements, more trees are planted and smart buildings are constructed to adapt to the city’s sponge. This means roofs are covered in grass for greater absorption of water and buildings are also painted in light colours to reflect more heat instead of absorbing it.
The point is that this keeps floods at bay.
These are being built as new eco-cities and offer a strategy to incorporate the water cycle into town planning.
The sponge city concept was proposed by Chinese researchers in 2013 and Professor Kongjian Yu is the mastermind behind it.
Yu is an ecological urban planner and landscape architect. He’s also a professor of landscape architecture at Peking University and the founder of the planning and design office Turenscape in Beijing.
Taking inspiration from international integrated urban water management (IUWM) strategies, including sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) seen in the UK or low-impact developments (LID) in the US, Yu’s sponge cities aim to control urban flooding, water pollution and recycle rainwater.
Scientifically speaking, the main features of the sponge city include being:
*Environmentally adaptive
*Systematic and comprehensive
*Environmentally friendly
“Though grey infrastructure of concrete, steel, pipes and pumps, can be necessary to solve urgent individual problems, it consumes huge amounts of concrete and energy, lacks resilience and often accumulates a higher risk of disaster. It breaks the connection between man and nature,” Yu tells Euronews Green.
“More than ever, facing global climate change and destructive industrial technologies, we have to rethink the way we build our cities, the way we treat water and nature, and even the way we define civilisation.
“Sponge Cities are inspired by the ancient wisdom of farming and water management that use simple tools to transform the global surface at a vast scale in a sustainable way.”
Qnuli Stormwater Park, China
Where are China’s sponge cities?
The 34-hectare ‘Qunli stormwater park’ in the city of Harbin in northern China is one example of a successful sponge city. It collects, cleanses and stores stormwater, while also protecting the native natural habitat and providing a beautiful green public space for recreational use.
“A sponge city follows the philosophy of innovation: that a city can solve water problems instead of creating them. In the long run, sponge cities will reduce carbon emissions and help fight climate change,” Qiu Baoxing, a former vice-minister of housing and urban-rural development, told the Guardian.
The Chinese government has already chosen 16 pilot cities and allocated to each of them between 400 and 600 million yuan (around €55 million) for the implementation of innovative water management strategies. These include Wuhan, Chongqing and Xiamen.
With more and more demand growing for the sponge city model as we near 2030, 70 per cent of Chinese cities are scrambling to draw up plans, according to design company Turenscape.
“China is implementing these projects on the district and city scale, e.g. urban wetlands or eco-corridors,” Nanco Dolman, who works in the Water Resilient Cities group at the Dutch civil engineering firm Royal Haskoning DHV, tells Turenscape.
“It is showing that ecological design can be about more than just green roofs and rain gardens – it can be a revolutionary rethink of the very texture of a city.”
https://socialistchina.org/2021/11/18/c ... -flooding/