China View: How will the “Mandate of Heaven” adapt to climate change?
Kevin Frayer / Stringer
Crisis and disaster provide an opportunity for the leadership of any organization to show its resilience, aplomb, and compassion. And there are plenty of potential crises on the horizon. Given the impact of climate change, demographic challenges, and geopolitical tensions, it is likely that national governments will be under severe pressure to respond.
Every government (for that matter, any organization) has concerns about its durability and possible vulnerabilities. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has explicitly stated that history has chosen it to rule China. The language hints at a pre-ordained right to govern. In China, this is historically known as the “Mandate of Heaven.” The premise suggests that a government may seem to collapse from an outside power (a mobile peasant rebellion, or experience famine, etc.) when actually its collapse was inevitable, always fated, as was its rise. In this sense, the Mandate of Heaven resembles a Divine Right of Kings, which may, at some point, be withdrawn. In any case, how the “Mandate of Heaven” interplays with a government response that requires it to confront the issues of our time – climate change, for example, and demographic challenges - is something to consider in calculating China’s trajectory in the 21st century.
Engineers and the “Mandate of Heaven”
Many of the leaders of the Communist Central Party (CCP) are engineers. One could argue that their response to major crises or long-term challenges is influenced by the field of engineering itself – its political structures, regulations, areas of concern, and overarching philosophy. In contrast, a substantial percentage of the U.S. House of Representatives is comprised of lawyers. The U.S. system tends to be legalistic (small “l” --referring to the legal code) and also emphasizes the balance of power among its three branches. This is in contrast to the Chinese system, which is Legalist with a capital “L” – combining a centralized, disciplined system, with a charismatic leader and aiming to concentrate force. This matters in terms of the execution of policy. It is hard to imagine a Western democracy forcibly moving a large swath of its population as China has for major projects, as it did, for example, for the 2008 Summer Olympics and the Three Gorges Dam.
The massive Three Gorges Dam project was controversial both in regard to its scale in altering the environment and the number of people it displaced. The hydroelectric dam spans the Yangtze River and is the largest dam in the world. Unfortunately, the project has displaced over 1.2 million people. What allows China to accomplish such an engineering feat? Again, the country has a highly centralized government, few protections for private property, and a lack of an independent judiciary. This allows for less deliberation in the proposal and planning stages and projects are “shovel ready “with less delay. An abundance of labor is also a significant factor. With a massive population of migrant workers, China is able to finish projects much more rapidly. These factors, combined, lead to greater efficiency and larger projects. Projected demographic shifts will make this less likely in the future.
All these things contribute to the government’s power. But finally, the state needs legitimacy: the Mandate of Heaven, so to say, which can be withdrawn. A poorly performing democracy can, in most cases, cast off its leadership, and the people, who voted in the unsuccessful leaders (after the collective conversation) can choose new ones; but the CCP has no such mechanism (only voting inside the Party).
How will China respond to climate change?
The concept of the “Mandate of Heaven” is that the crisis itself can portend to be a negative sign for the leadership. Formerly, this was seen as a sign of displeasure from a higher order. However, in the 21st century, and viewed from afar, a crisis may be seen as a sign that the leadership of a country has been negligent or lacked foresight. In both instances, the Mandate of Heaven view and the more secular view, a leader has the opportunity to regain respect for himself or herself by responding well to a crisis. This seems to acknowledge that even the best leader is challenged by forces beyond control.
The Chinese government’s first response to the crisis, a response not unknown in other countries, is to wipe negativity from the Internet. This notoriously occurred in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. The case of the beloved 33-year-old Wuhan ophthalmologist, Li Wenliang, is illuminating in how it galvanized public opinion against such tactics. Dr. Li, aware of the dangers of the virus, along with other medical school students, attempted to alert colleagues. His critique of the state response, and subsequent death due to the virus, was seen as a crack in the veneer of the stability of the Chinese state, exposing its inability to control a severe crisis during the Chinese New Year. Such actions taken by authorities have not aged well. The Supreme People’s Court in Beijing reprimanded the local police of Wuhan, who had forced Dr. Li and several other doctors to sign a pledge stating that they would stop spreading rumors. Medical professionals in Shanghai were quoted on the news stating that they hoped Communist Party Members would put their vows of self-sacrifice for their country to use in the pandemic. The state response was a draconian lockdown in Wuhan, Hubei, the initial center of the outbreak of Covid-19. In keeping with the factors noted above, centralization and lack of balance of power, the Chinese strategy at containing the outbreak was more targeted than that of Western nations and much harsher.
However, discontent due to climate change and the destruction that comes from it will neither be easily repressed nor hidden. Locally, censorship might be effective. However, the broad nature of climate change will mean that the Chinese state will have to respond to the mass displacement of populations. In responding to climate change, a highly centralized government will take local preferences less into consideration and have a heavier hand in suppressing discussion. There will likely be mass displacement of the Chinese population on the low-lying Yangzi Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region on the East Coast of the country due to rising sea levels. There will be towns and neighborhoods that protest, and they will be crushed by the CCP. In a democracy, tactics taken by China such as sealing the door of an infested apartment building would be poorly received. Social media would exacerbate the anger at such totalitarian tactics and the government would suffer a legitimacy crisis and lose elections. One reason for China’s increasingly heavy hand on Internet censorship is that the internet has become a primary democratic outlet for people to register displeasure at fumbled leadership.
Aesthetics or Action?
Dust storms in Beijing due to a combination of sandstorms blowing sand from the Gobi Desert, car pollution, and heavy industry, are a reminder of the perils of nature, pollution, and climate change. Such hazy optics make the Party uncomfortable. Often, during the annual CCP Congress in Beijing, a vast effort will go into seeding clouds with silver dioxide before the event to such a degree that a blue sky in Beijing is often benchmarked against the blueness of the sky during a particular forum or conference.
To its advantage, China will have the resources to respond to climate change in a way many countries do not. However, the temptation of its engineering-tilted leadership will be to engage in massive projects and vast internal displacement of its people and the need, subsequently, to suppress dissent. The legacy will be populous that is unhappy with its leadership because, despite its power, it cannot suppress the miseries of climate change – and many of the solutions will seem worse than the punishments. The harsh reality of climate change is such that its impacts cannot be censored, and the “Mandate of Heaven” will be challenged.
