China’s Global Leadership Aspirations and Domestic Support for Climate Policy

• In Event: Institutional Design and Civic Engagement in China

Abstract

In recent years, China has pivoted towards a global leadership role in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Notwithstanding the complex political economic reasons underlying China’s global leadership aspirations, we are interested in seeing whether the associated national discourse championed by the state increases domestic support for climate policy. That is, does China’s international leadership role foster a unifying sense of national pride among the domestic population, thereby lending support to the legitimacy of the state and expediting the implementation of costly domestic climate policies? To test our hypothesis, we enumerated a vignette experiment embedded with conjoint analysis to a nationally representative sample (n=4,788). We found no evidence that exposure to China’s global leadership role increased domestic support for national-level climate policy, as proxied by a carbon tax. Indeed, we found that China’s global climate leadership role decreased domestic support for a carbon tax under certain scenarios. Our findings demonstrate a disconnect between global and local climate policy discourses and suggest that China’s policymakers need to exercise caution in ensuring that their global climate leadership aspirations do not come at the expense of decreased domestic support for the national-level policies required to meet China’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2060.

Author

• Chen Xiang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University