Why Xi dare not turn his back on king coal
ROGER BOYES

A Chinese state-owned coal-fired power plant in Liuzhi county, Guizhou province. Picture: Getty Image

Coal is at the heart of Chinese civilisation. Fuxin in northeast China claims to be the site of the earliest coal excavation in the ancient world and became the largest open-pit mine in Asia. The communists under Mao Zedong turned Fuxin into coal city, central to the industrialisation and modernisation of the country. Primary school children sang songs praising doughty pit-workers, proletarian heroes who kept their classrooms heated.

President Xi, it seems, has no intention of coming to Glasgow to sign coal’s death warrant. His absence from COP26 at the end of this month will be more than just an act of diplomatic brinkmanship (or as some have been suggesting, a Covid-era twitchiness about long-haul travel). It will signal defiant reluctance to let China be put in the dock as the world’s biggest polluter.

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The apparent contradictions in China’s positions, marked by Beijing’s increasingly toxic addiction to the black stuff, will probably turn Glasgow into a flop. If China can’t commit to an accelerated path out of coal in this decade then why, ordinary punters may ask, should others take on added costs of converting households? Xi’s reluctance to grasp the biggest nettle of decarbonisation makes a nonsense out of modest personal sacrifice elsewhere.

The Chinese leader surely understands that to westerners he will look like a Grade A hypocrite. He promised at the Paris climate conference to reach peak coal use by 2030 and then ease towards net zero by 2060, allowing wind, solar and other renewables to pick up from coal.

A coalminer in Liulin, Shanxi province, China. Picture: Bloomberg

As a concession – a “this is all we can do for you at the moment” gesture – he has added a pledge not to finance coal plants abroad.

Climate activists consider this gift to be not just profoundly conservative, but essentially a ruse, a way of making it look as if China is open to addressing global concerns about the continuing production of coal-fired plants without actually doing much about it at home.

They’re right. Anything that smacks of a Thatcher-like clash with mining communities and their powerful Communist Party protectors is regarded as taboo in the court of Xi.

There’s an awareness of middle-class urban discontent about air pollution and this gives Xi a constituency of sorts for pit closures.

But it’s brittle support and it melts away as soon as there’s another wave of power cuts, when the lift stops working up to the eighth floor of an apartment block. Then the call goes up: Give our miners what they need! Keep the lights on!

Xi doesn’t have to bow to public opinion but he needs to tread carefully in a country that is trying to cling on to socialist heroic stereotypes while operating a near-market economy. Xi has to be the master of fudge.

For the time being he is busy undermining his own pledges. Because some pits have been closed, he is facing a shortage of fuel at the onset of winter, the precise moment this week when the central heating is turned on in apartment blocks.

People climb a steep section of the Great Wall of China after a snowfall. Picture: AFP

Xi is having to face the reality that his economy is incredibly energy inefficient. Not only does China burn more coal than the rest of the world combined, it is also the second biggest oil-guzzler after the US. Factories in China consume twice as much electricity as the rest of the country’s economy. And factories in China need between 10 and 30 per cent more energy than their western counterparts.

Yes, it is the dominant producer of clean energy technologies and raw materials for clean tech such as polysilicon for solar panels. Yet this embrace of the green – the wind, the sun, the hydroelectric dams and the natural gas – hasn’t been able to fill the gap left by even the most tentative of retreats from coal.

China’s biggest provinces have just under two weeks’ stock of coal left and the global trading price for it is soaring. Result: mines are being reopened, even clapped-out ones. Banks have been ordered to dish out loans to coal producers. Street lamps are being switched off, lifts in provincial apartment buildings are grinding to a halt.

This is the transition period of course and most serious states, not only China, have been jittery about it. All the summer driving forces for COP26 – the wildfires, the growing deserts and the floods – have given way to the winter preoccupation of energy security.

A coal yard worker shovels a load of coal on to the back of a truck in Ningan in Heilongjiang Province. Picture: Supplied

And Xi’s instinct is not to give in to demands to declare peak coal in 2025 rather than 2030 and thus speed China’s pace towards carbon neutrality. Rather he wants to head off any possible revolt from party bosses in the coalmining provinces of the north. Xi seems to foresee a disruptive energy transition and fears the political risk.

All major participants in the COP process have similar anxieties because bets placed now can quickly turn bad, perhaps even within a single electoral cycle, such is the speed of green technology advances.

President Biden also has to find a balance between the lofty aims of his clean energy program and the stubborn opposition of coal-producing states such as West Virginia. For a dictator like Xi, though, the nightmare is more complex. As a child his life was turned upside down by the Mao-era Cultural Revolution. If he cuts coal subsidies, closes collieries, he could soon face street protests by miners, the salt of the proletarian earth, denouncing Xi for betraying the legacy of Mao.

Politics would become dangerously personal.