Interaction Of Chinese Environmental And Foreign Policy

China has become the largest emitter of CO2and Greenhouse Gases in the world, due to its ever growing energy needs for continued development. Chinese cities regularly are dominating the top10lists of the most polluted places on earth, experts say that around60%of Chinese ground water is undrinkable and news of Beijing, Shanghai or Harbin, etc. chocking on thick layers of smog are becoming routine in major international news outlets. Not to mention the disastrous effects experts are prognosticating the consequential ensuing climate change is going to have on the People’s Republic of China.This is why environmental protection and combating climate change have been given increasingly more attention from the government in Beijing in the last couple of years. Over the course of the1lth and12th5-year plans, many policies-such as shutting down inefficient power plants, creating a renewable energy law, making key industries more efficient-have been enacted to mitigate China’s contribution to climate change. Additionally, Beijing has undertaken steps to restructure its bureaucracy to give bodies like the MEP or the NDRC more authority. What’s more, the government is giving out large sums of financial aid to push environmental projects around the country as well as give domestic green companies an edge internationally, resulting in China amongst other things becoming the largest producer of solar panels worldwide.However these domestic efforts do not at all reflect China’s international engagement. On the contrary, China is often times regarded as a blockading tenacious member of international climate change mitigation. Especially at the biggest forum for this endeavor, the UNFCCC, China continuously and repeatedly refuses to take on any form of binding commitments or emission caps. This discrepancy is puzzling, seeing as how dire China’s situation will become, if climate change is allowed to continue like it is currently. Many scholars simply reduce this phenomenon to economic reasons. They argue that the PRC and especially the CCP is prioritizing continued economic development as a means of maintaining social stability over environmental issues. In this thesis, the author will employ the IR theory of Wendtian constructivism, to show that there are more mechanisms influencing China’s international behavior regarding climate change than just that, and that indeed China’s core identity is prohibiting it from effectively participating in these talks.