ABSTRACT
When the lives of giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) were endangered by massive bamboo die-offs in southwest China in the early 1980s, the Chinese government invited Dr George Schaller, then World Wildlife Fund (WWF) staff conservationist, to investigate. One of the first foreign field biologists invited by the Chinese government since 1949, Dr Schaller worked with Chinese scientists to assess the ecological habitat of the giant panda. This opened doors for the WWF to launch many more conservation projects in China. By the end of the 2000s, WWF China had grown to a team of over 60 overseeing regional offices in 15 provinces, working on a wide range of issues: sustainable forestry, conservation policy reform, energy efficiency, industrial pollution control, nature resource management and climate change (Wu, 2005: 108-115). Pioneered by the WWF, various multilateral and bilateral agencies and
over 50 international NGOs have arrived in China to battle against ecological degradation and industrial pollution since the 1980s. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, the World Bank, together with the Asian Development Bank, provided USD 800 million in environmental loans to China on an annual basis (Turner, 2004). Between 1996 and 2000, China received bilateral environmental aid close to USD 4 billion from the United States, Korea, Canada, Japan, Germany, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands (Wu, 2005: 125). The above used to be the familiar side of the China-global ecological linkage:
as China is home to a quarter of global biological diversity, the international community cannot afford to ignore Chinese governmental policies that could cause irreversible damage to the land, water, air, flora and fauna, and biodiversity in the country. However, the other side of the China-global ecological linkage has emerged
since the dawn of the new millennium. By 2010, China had maintained extraordinary economic growth rate for over three decades, become a net oil importer and an active member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and most recently ‘championed’ carbon emission in the world. Alarms have been rung: this time, the world needs to take China seriously not because of giant pandas but
because of the impact of the Chinese economy on land, water, biodiversity and local communities in the great Amazon, Mekong and Congo basins. Outside China, there is increasing fear that the Chinese global quest for
resources mainly carried out by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) will cause resource scarcity, uncertainty in commodity prices and unpredictable turbulence in global markets. While some resource-rich countries benefit from Chinese investment, they still worry about the grave consequences on their environment, labour force and social governance. Many scholars, security experts, government officials and politicians also worry about potential resource wars arising from Chinese strategic and political control over global resources. Economy and Levi best summarize the alarmist view in their 2014 book that China will pursue natural resources overseas ‘by all means necessary’ at the expense of devastating ecological and social consequences in developing countries and will change the existing order in global resource governance.1 This alarmist view is where this current book project began, but not where it has arrived at. The final findings based on comparative analysis in three highly relevant sectors: water, energy and food present a different, less bleak and more patterned picture.
