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The answer is that many things were lost. China’s move to terminate all official bi-national cooperation with the U.S. to mitigate the effects of climate change was not only short-sighted. It was, for China, a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The action was purely political — to protest a visit to Taiwan by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, a visit that had ampled precedent going back to 1977 when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan. The consequences of China’s unprecedented and over-reactive action — eliminating countless programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote improve water quality, conserve natural habitats and bio-diversity — will have as much of a detrimental effect, if not more, on developing China as it will on the United States’ developed economy.
Here’s a case study of one opportunity — built for scale and speed — that has been lost …
(click for original, free to read version of this article from Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy)
by Doug Barry, Senior Director of Communications, U.S.-China Business Council
(view original article in USCBC’s Fifty States, Fifty Stories series)
Policy entrepreneurs are plentiful in America. You can find them everywhere, devoting ideas and energy to getting things done. Terry Cooke founded the non-profit China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia with a focus on getting the United States and China to cooperate on climate change. Getting what he wants done has become more challenging as the two countries ping pong between cooperation, competition, and conflict.
How did he get here and how is he managing multiple challenges simultaneously? He’s been interested in global affairs for a long time, starting in 1988 when he joined the US Commerce Department as a foreign commercial service officer in Shanghai. His two-year posting there bracketed the Tiananmen Square convulsion. Years flew by with postings in Tokyo, Berlin, and Taiwan. In 2002 he took leave from the foreign service and started a consulting business focusing on Taiwan and high tech.
In 2006, Cooke joined the World Economic Forum (WEF) as Director of Asian CEO Partnership with a focus more on Japan than China. He left in 2008. “It was too much travel,” he recalled. “I worked in New York, had my family in Philadelphia, commuted to Geneva, and had responsibility for multiple events in Asia.”
One of the best parts of the WEF job was sitting in on multiple sectoral meetings with CEOs. His main takeaway was that many of these corporate leaders were talking about the challenges of climate change, not as PR or greenwashing, but about the need to transform their companies into low-carbon leaders. “I decided that was the hook that I wanted to hang the second half of my career on when I came back to Philadelphia.”
Cooke recalled his time in Berlin and the impression made by comparing what was then called West Germany with the East, which at the time was terribly polluted. When the Berlin Wall fell, the country united and the cleanup of the Eastern part of the country began. The lesson was that great progress to improve the environment is possible if the political will exists and if clear policy creates predictability for businesses and investors.
The good old days
In 2010, Cooke joined the Wilson Center, a Washington, DC think tank, as senior fellow for US-China climate cooperation. His research there led to publication of his book Sustaining US-China Cooperation in Clean Energy. Coincident with this research, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu introduced a “national labs program for the 21st century” for clean energy technologies as an outgrowth of the 10-year framework for US-China cooperation on energy and the environment pioneered by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in the waning years of the George W. Bush administration.
President Barack Obama and Secretary Chu worked to expand Paulson’s program, adding three US-China clean energy research centers in different industrial areas: electric vehicles initially at the University of Michigan, clean coal at the University of West Virginia, and energy efficient buildings through a Penn State-led program at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
“Disappointing as these decisions were, there was still potential in the climate change mitigation space, even as other areas like micro-electronics drifted further off-limits.”
To support and expand the energy-efficient buildings program, Cooke founded in 2011 the China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia whose mission was raising awareness and facilitating collaboration to create and bring to market low-carbon solutions for the built environment. For the first years, things went great with lots of local and Chinese partners, mayoral visits, and stakeholders to plan low-carbon futures for urban centers in the United States and China. In 2014, China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia and its partner organization in China, the TEDA EcoCenter, were competitively selected for and awarded a prestigious U.S.-China EcoPartnership Award, administered jointly by the U.S. and PRC Governments.
“We had some fits and starts, including an unfortunate near-death experience involving IP piracy.” Isn’t this ironic given the long-standing concerns the US government and private sector have about “collaborations” that lead to forced technology transfers and outright pilfering? “It would be if that’s what happened. Instead, the main culprit was an American in an American company.” The company did not want to make a public fuss because of reputational concerns. “We had to shift focus and change our business model to make sure that would never happen again, but it was a one-off, not something endemic with the work we were doing.”
Pulling the plug on energy cooperation
If not as immediately dire, there were other experiences that could have been crippling to his non-profit. Two of them involved former president Donald Trump, who pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords and in 2020 terminated the US-China EcoPartnership program just seven days before leaving office. “Disappointing as these decisions were, there was still potential in the climate change mitigation space, even as other areas like micro-electronics drifted further off-limits.”
The shifting binaries involved with competition and cooperation were making the scope for business cooperation more limited and the non-profit’s work more problematic. Competition is now spilling into the space previously marked by cooperation. The shriveling of discourse between government leaders has only made things more difficult.
“What used to be very effective work through industrial cooperation in lowering emissions is now off the table, though some academic and some intergovernmental climate cooperation continues.”
Early in the Biden administration, excitement was generated by the appointment of John Kerry as climate envoy. Kerry and his PRC counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, had worked closely and cooperatively under Biden’s vice presidency during the Obama administration but Biden administration policy would not be a simple reset to that period. While cooperation continues in areas such as scientific exchange and standards setting, industrial cooperation toward low-carbon goals now enjoys little federal-level support. This even as the planet continues to warm and nations like China and India continue to struggle reducing their addiction to coal.
Kerry recently pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article that there’s still time to avoid disaster but that in the coming years many trillions of dollars will be needed to fund and field clean energy technology. The money, he said, must largely come from the private sector which stands to gain from what could amount to a new industrial revolution.
Cooke worries that the emphasis on zero-sum competition with China over recent years will make broad cooperation in climate change extremely difficult. “The competition drive is spilling into areas that used to be defined by cooperation,” he said. One example is the network of 11 national-level eco parks organized through the Greater Philadelphia-Tianjin EcoPartnership. Germany invested in one such park in 2020, focused on green maritime technology, to the tune of more than $3 billion. The PHL-TJ EcoPartnership had defined a focus on energy-efficient, securely smart and healthy buildings at sustainable-city scale for this network of 11 eco-parks. The emphasis was on large-scale opportunities supported by very large companies and leavened by the innovation of smaller, entrepreneurial companies. “Given the problems in the bilateral relationship, that large scale opportunity has receded for the foreseeable future at least.”
Enter the contradiction
Cooke is highly attuned to the potential for contradiction between commercial competition and climate cooperation, worrying that when Kerry steps down, the space for commercially led environmental solutions to be applied at scale and speed in the two largest global economies will shrink even more.
“What used to be very effective work through industrial cooperation in lowering emissions is now off the table, though some academic and some intergovernmental climate cooperation continues.” He concedes that the continuation of even these relationships is not assured given the political environment in both countries.
“My organization was about creating a platform for a US-Sino Eco-Park in China bringing advanced energy efficiency services and technologies to the park. That is viewed negatively now in Washington. What’s disappointing is that other countries friendly to us are now established in China in commercial areas that we’re better at but won’t be able to contribute to because official reluctance for cooperation.”
Cooke says: “The United States needs to be smart about its clean energy approach to China. Yes, China wants to dominate an emerging 21st century industry. But if we out-innovate and out-compete China technologically, we can access their market profitably and also collaborate commercially to forestall the worst effects of climate change. Is it really in the US interest not to have active engagement with China, aside from discrete small companies that are more easily taken advantage of? I’d prefer to see us going in with a convoy approach of large companies and smaller innovators protected by US government policies and focused on delivering measurable, low-carbon solutions at a globally impactful scale. To my mind, this is a huge missed opportunity.”
Cooke’s non-profit, which he recently rebranded as ReGen250 to accommodate additional, non-China-focused environmental programs, continues to assess options for low-carbon partnerships with China. What elements would a US private sector partner want to support that his organization could strongly endorse? “Alternatively, we can just decide we’re only going to focus on local programs in the Mid-Atlantic to increase access to a greener built environment.”
What about the Department of Energy’s prior interest in cooperation? “I have had some high-level discussions within the Department. The entire group that previously supported the commercial exchange at this high level between the national government and subnational actors, including Eco-Partners and city level groups, is not active right now. It was disappointing to learn that.”
“Despite the challenges in the US-China relationship, subnational initiatives, especially in energy and climate change mitigation solutions, should be encouraged and supported.”
Despite the setbacks, Cooke believes there are still areas for engagement with China regardless of the government in power. One involves people-to-people exchanges, albeit challenging at the present moment given China’s zero-COVID policies. Examples of programs that deserve to survive are the adoption of Chinese children, music (he helped the Philadelphia Orchestra create an artist residency program in China) and artistic exchange, student exchange, and most importantly, business. He believes that the once promising universe of business cooperation has constricted but there still remain spaces outside of sensitive technologies where businesses can and must connect.
As a member of the local ecosystem that support US-China commercial relations, he’s not giving up. Rather, he envisions the different China business-related ecosystems across the United States networking and sharing best practices. He said that one such effort was made recently at a Midwest university, but he expressed some disappointment at the fact that the focus turned out to be on a recently discovered vulnerability involving WeChat. It was a security-led briefing, not the commercially minded dialogue that is needed.
Cooke isn’t ready to walk away from his gift of multi-stakeholder cooperation on climate change or the imperative for non-profits like his to act locally and globally. “Efforts at the subnational level have an important place in helping American companies navigate a complex environment in China. They have a great potential impact because they can organize a well-protected convoy in the place of one isolated boat, big or small.”
“Despite the challenges in the US-China relationship, subnational initiatives, especially in energy and climate change mitigation solutions, should be encouraged and supported.”
(view original article in USCBC’s Fifty States, Fifty Stories series)
Among the few dozen officially-awarded U.S.-China EcoPartnerships, the PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership is unique in its design as an open platform to facilitate collaboration among businesses, local governments, universities and non-governmental organizations (NGO). On the U.S. side, the platform is anchored by China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP, a 501c3 non- profit) and its public sector partner, the Commerce Department of the City of Philadelphia. The first stage of this collaboration has involved bringing sustainable-city-type BE Better technologies (built environment technologies that are more energy-effiient, smarter and healthier) to our EcoPartnership partner in Tianjin (TEDA). Our longer-term objective is to scale these BE Better technologies throughout China through the network of its national-level industrial parks. The initial stage of this scaling effort focuses on China’s northeastern Jing-Jin-Ji region (comprising Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province) through collaborations with Green Development League-member National Economic-Technological Development Zones (NETDZ) in Beijing, Tianjin and Langfang. The longer-term goal is to position for second-stage, nation-wide expansion of the BE Better model through the Green Development League’s 36 member- NETDZs nationwide and through the Ministry of Commerce’s national Eco Park program.
On January 13, 2021 — a scant week short of President-elect Biden’s inauguration — President Trump turned off the lights on this decade-old government-to-government program between the U.S. and China to advance climate change mitigation efforts in both countries. Nonetheless, the PHL-TEDA effort was always conceived as a private-sector driven effort and — with continuing legacy support from the U.S. Departments of Energy and State — we are advancing our BE Better program with our TEDA partner in China and exploring possible broadening of the program to the state of Maharashtra in India.
The complete story of where we have been and where we are going is presented in the attached peer-reviewed article published online earlier this month by the Wiley-owned journal Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy. The print version of the article will be published in the next few weeks.
The full article can be read by clicking here or on the image below:
We encountered headwinds along the way — a fraudulent bid procurement, Trump’s announced intent to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accord, the Tariff War — but, by tacking and keeping our eye fixed on our destination, we have gotten to calmer waters and now have a following wind. Stay tuned for the next leg of the journey.
President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive — known for its signature vow to target both ‘tigers’ (top-level officials) and ‘flies’ (low-level functionaries) — shows no sign of abating. It may even be gathering momentum with the early April announcement that former Politburo Standing Committee member (and security portfolio chief) Zhou Yongkang will be standing trial in Tianjin on charges of bribery, abusing power and disclosing state secrets, This announcement followed a slow-motion public ensnarement of Zhou as, for almost two years, a tightening noose methodically drew in business associates from Zhou’s time with China National Petroleum Corporation, provincial associates from his time as Party Secretary in Sichuan Province, associates from the security establishment and close family members.
As a member of the PSC for five years from 2007-2012, Zhou Yongkang was one of the seven most powerful people in China. Not since the 1976 arrest and subsequent trial of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four at the end of the Cultural Revolution has such a high-level Chinese official been brought to public trial by the Chinese Communist Party.
The beginning of Zhou Yongkang’s fall is associated with Chongqing, a provincial-level ‘city’ (see Direct Controlled Municipalities) in China’s far west immediately adjoining Sichuan Province and erstwhile power-base for Bo Xilai, Zhou’s protégé. Until the death of British citizen Neil Heywood followed by the failed attempt by Bo’s police chief to seek refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province) followed by the conviction of Bo’s wife on charges of ordering Heywood’s poisoning, it had appeared likely that Zhou would be able to get Bo onto the Standing Committee, thereby protecting his ‘retirement flank’ after stepping down. Bo’s candidacy faltered under the weight of these events just as Xi Jinping was consolidating power and his new Standing Committee taking final shape.
Now that formal charges against Zhou Yongkang have been announced, attention is swinging to Tianjin, another of China’s four Direct Controlled Municipalities (直辖市) and venue for Zhou’s upcoming trial. It is perhaps not surprising that, for months now, the mood in Tianjin — Philadelphia’s Sister City (since original establishment of “Friendship Cities” link in 1980) — has turned decidedly grim. As reported by my friend Tim Weckesser and his fine team of professionals at Sino-Consulting International (SCI):
(begin extract from SCI Report)
The city of Tianjin, our main base in China, recently became a focus in the news media as it fell under scrutiny by Beijing’s powerful anti-graft campaign. This happened not only because of the sudden downfall of Tianjin’s long time police chief, Wu Changshun, based on corruption charges, but also because Tianjin courts have been chosen for the trial Zhou Yongkang, the highest ranking official ever to be charged with corruption. China’s state prosecutors formally charged Zhou, the country’s former top security czar, with accepting large bribes over a long period of time. At the height of his power, Zhou controlled China’s police, spy agencies, court systems, and prosecution offices all across the country. And he wasn’t shy about using these powerful assets to crush dissent in the name of “preserving social stability.”
And now, to add to Tianjin’s notoriety, the city’s former mayor, Dai Xianglong, is “cooperating” in an “investigation”. From 1995 to 2002, before becoming Tianjin’s mayor, Dai was already well-known as the governor of China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). The investigation, so far, is focused on the vast wealth amassed by Dai’s relatives, not on Dai himself. But this may well be just a tactical move with Dai himself as the real target. This new investigation comes on the heels of the 15 year prison term meted out to Nanjing’s former mayor, Ji Jianye, for corruption. The court found Ji guilty of accepting 11.3m yuan ($1.9m) in bribes between 1999 and 2013, when he was dismissed.
President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign aims at trying to clean up China’s graft-riddled government at every level, with examples being set at the top. And so far, we have to say it is successful. In our experience, government officials as well as executives in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are all keeping their heads down. No big banquets, no gifts – given or received – and strictly limited international travel are basically the norm, at least for now. The question is – will this nationwide campaign eventually help China’s economic development? We hope so. Here is some very recent China market news taken from a variety of public sources.
(end extract from SCI Report)
These then are the dangerous riptides which have been tugging at our PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership‘s Chinese partner, TEDA, since the end of 2014. Given the fathoms-deep nature of Chinese political and legal process, many of these currents have been swirling in hidden depths while the surface continued to appear placid. The U.S. side of our PHL-TEDA EcoPartnership has unmistakably felt the power of these currents, though.
While Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive remains immensely popular with the general public, there is a growing concern among many close observers of Chinese politics inside and outside China that these hidden forces can as easily become uncontrollable and destructive as they can be purging and restorative. At the heart of all this is the crucial difference between ‘rule of law’ (with due process, standards of proof, checks and balances, etc) versus ‘rule by law’ (political power plays being managed under a thin veneer of legal process). As Liz Economy wrote in an earlier post on this blog (see “Time for Xi to Reform his Reforms” in Feb. 6, 2015 post):
“Certainly, (Xi’s) anti-corruption campaign has hit its target—hundreds of thousands of them to be exact—and shows little sign of slowing down. He has cast a wide net, leaving little doubt that no sector of society—party, military, business, or other—is completely safe. Still, Xi remains vulnerable to accusations that the campaign is at least partially politically motivated, given that almost half of the senior-most officials arrested are tied in some way to his political opponents, and none of his Fujian or Zhejiang associates have been detained. He might want to bring some transparency to the process: uncertainty and fear of running afoul of some regulation or another are driving many officials to avoid making decisions or taking action.”
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 