an aside, I wonder who is going to break it to Modi that India must effective not reach for development upgrade?
Pointless to break it to Xi, for he no longer care to take Bloomberg advice
bloomberg.com
Copycat Asian Nationalists Threaten to Overheat Earth for All
The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India chasing a toxic 19th-century fantasy of wealth and power. They should know better.
Pankaj Mishra
16 August 2021, 08:00 GMT+8
As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution.
Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the universally urgent goal of decarbonization in the 21st century increasingly faces a greater obstacle than climate-change deniers in the West: the mimic nationalists of India and China chasing a 19th-century fantasy of wealth and power.
It is no coincidence that both countries, still heavily reliant on coal and among the world’s top carbon-emitters, declined to endorse the 1.5 degree Celsius limit on global average temperature proposed by President Joe Biden at his Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in April. Xi Jinping speaks of building an “ ecological civilization,” but the Financial Times reports that China has accelerated its building of coal-powered industry in the first half of 2021.
Humiliated by Western imperialists, both Asian countries set out in the 1940s to match the economic and military power of their tormentors by building powerful nation-states through industrial revolutions of their own.
Successive leaders, whether Mao Zedong or Jawaharlal Nehru, Xi Jinping or Narendra Modi, capitalist or communist, democrat or authoritarian, built their legitimacy on a promise of delivering the fruits of industrial modernity and inviolable sovereignty to their citizens.
Insecure themselves, some of them have nurtured an insecure nationalism that credits unique glory and power to self and conceives of others, the rest of the world, as jealous and malevolent.
It need not have been this way, and it still doesn’t have to be this way.
“God forbid,” Mohandas Gandhi warned, “that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West.” In 1928, he wrote, “If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
Back in 2004, when China’s rise did not seem so assured, the country’s pioneering environmentalist Liang Congjie was already worried about the resources needed to bring 1.3 billion Chinese up to the consumption levels of Western societies. When I met him that year I remember him saying that China’s project to become as powerful as the West by using Western methods was not environmentally sustainable.
Indeed, Liang’s own grandfather, Liang Qichao, one of China’s leading modern intellectuals, had been among the first anti-imperialist leaders in Asia and Africa to caution against imitative developmentalism.
Asian leaders and thinkers in the 20th century were already worrying that the global system of mutually competitive and often unviable nation-states — the legacy of Western imperialism — was ill-equipped to deal with challenges, most crucially ecological imbalances that do not respect national borders.
They posited other communities of identity, both local and global, with flexible notions of sovereignty, and they offered alternative models of development that did not disrupt the delicate balance between human beings and nature.
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As it happened, their ideas were discarded in the post-war rush to build and fortify nation-states. Nehru as well as Mao conceived of the natural world as something to be subdued by science and human will. That attitude — “development is the only truth,” as Deng Xiaoping famously put it — has entrenched itself, leading to extensive degradation of ecosystems, poor environmental awareness among ordinary citizens and a hard-line stance at international forums.
Since the early 1990s, a homegrown prickly nationalism has received unexpected ballast from a consensus reached by globalizing politicians, businessmen and journalists in the West: that India’s and China’s convergence on the Western model of growth and consumption is both desirable and attainable.
Escape from this dangerously stubborn delusion in India and China may prove very difficult, though the Western model has proven to be politically, economically and environmentally unsustainable in the West itself.
The main reason why Indian and Chinese leaders fail to match their rhetoric about the environment with policy is because they fear undermining their legitimacy as purveyors of superpower grandeur to their citizens.
Climate change, and the existential threat it poses to all life, today has affirmed the ideal of cosmopolitanism that the earliest Indian and Chinese leaders upheld against racist imperialism: that all human beings belong to a single community.
To expect their present-day successors to open up their narrow conception of national interests to cosmopolitan notions of identity and belonging, and visions of human coexistence on an endangered planet, is probably very unrealistic.
However, meeting the aim of net-zero emissions requires not only technocratic changes, greater coordination between nation-states and even new institutions of global governance. It needs, too, a deeper intellectual and moral shift: a renunciation of us-versus-them nationalism and a reconfiguration of collective identity as human beings everywhere thrust together in a global community by the threat of apocalypse.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
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