Chen Xiang, Hong Kong University
Chen, where did you grow up, and how old were you when you first discovered a love for environmental politics?
Growing up in a very localized tier-four city in Hunan province of Mainland China, I went to one of the biggest cities – Shanghai – after a ruthless national college entrance examination. My major at Fudan University (Shanghai) was social sciences with an emphasis on international relations. To be honest, before choosing this major I only had a very preliminary idea of what international politics was and what I wanted to pursue in the future. So, my strategy is to ‘connect the dots’ and experience as many projects and courses as possible.
One day in my junior year, I randomly encountered a piece of information about environmental volunteer recruiting in Guatemala – the country that has not established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and without a doubt, never had I heard about it. The program focused on access to clean water in indigenous communities. Being instilled with global governance and policy implementation course contents, at that time, I was naively confident and thought I was able to help local people with their water security issues – and the expedition started.
After a 58-hour trip, my team arrived in Antigua, one of the biggest cities in Guatemala. I surprisingly realized that almost all lakes and rivers (around 97%) in Antigua were contaminated. Moreover, 95% of the water in Guatemala was dangerous to drink. As planned, we contacted a social enterprise on water filtration and I started to teach local people about how to use these filters. Despite the fact that I tried to approach as many indigenous people as possible during the several month volunteering, I realized the limitations of my own effort – without an improvement of institutional arrangement and state capacity (a top-down approach), it would be very difficult to improve the quality of drinking water in the least developed states. This is the ‘Aha’ moment for me: applying what I have learned from global governance and politics, and adopting an approach of environmental governance to solve real-life issues and address environmental justice.
What draws you to your current field – what makes you passionate about it?
Despite continuing my path on environmental governance, I found my reearch anchor point three years after the Guatemala trip, when I was a master student at the Free University of Brussels. In the class "Climate and Energy Governance in the European Union," Professor Sebastian Oberthur invited Professor Katja Biedenkopf to introduce the international diffusion of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. During the lecture, Professor Biedenkopf specified the process and mechanism of how the EU helped China to build its own emissions trading system. I was thrilled at that time for two reasons: theoretically, the carbon market initiative provides an alternative approach that can reconcile economic development and climate mitigations; empirically, China has seven carbon market pilots that can provide experiment measurement. Most importantly, in this field, I am able to apply what I have learned in the past seven years and apply them in the ongoing decision-making process and public policies.
Can you give our community a brief overview of your research project that you are pursuing while based at the Harvard-China Project?
China has recently pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060. To do so, it is almost certain that China will deploy market-based instruments to complement more direct forms of environmental regulation. My research focuses on the political economy of carbon pricing. Specifically, my research seeks to understand the role of carbon markets as a means to overcome weak incentives of carbon emissions mitigation in China. The preliminary findings show that political signalling, not market signals, drives China’s pilot emissions trading scheme. The findings suggest that current market-based approaches in China may not be qualitatively different to more direct forms of environmental regulation.
Another ongoing project here at the Harvard-China Project focuses on public attitudes toward climate change. Recently, a power crunch has swept over factory floors to households in China. Some people complain about the ambitious emissions reductions target in China, arguing China per se as a developing country – development comes first, whereas others support a stringent target that can establish China as a global climate leader. My research thus uses conjoint experiments combined with survey experimental techniques (n=5,000) to explore how China’s global climate leadership aspirations are disconnected across different local scales.
Where do you hope to take this research – will you expand upon it?
As for the first research, Political signaling drives Guangdong’s carbon market, most part of the manuscript has been finished. I hope to expand the research data and methods to other pilots and, to that end, measure the effects of seven pilots in China. Meanwhile, I plan to transform this series of research into a monograph, Political economy of carbon market: How political signaling drives China’s carbon market, a study of the impact of China’s political institutions and business-government relations on the implementation and effectiveness of the carbon market.
What are your career goals? What will you pursue next?
I am pursuing a professorship in environmental politics and economics in the future. In 2020, there were 61 carbon pricing initiatives in place or scheduled for implementation, covering 54% of global GDP and one-third of the global population. Across the range of policy instruments, the IPCC highlights that the carbon markets are the key piece of the puzzle for the coming years. This requires a robust estimation of the world’s largest ETS in China. To that end, I believe my research can be of great interest to the climate change policy and China study community as it presents some of the first robust quantitative data exploring how market-based instruments work in an authoritarian governance system.
How has the Harvard-China Project thus far aided your research?
The Project provides me with all-around support and companionship. The most important part is mentorship in an open and inclusive academic environment. Dr. Mun Ho has provided great advice on my carbon market paper. Several weeks ago, we had a long discussion on my second paper conducted by a national representative survey method. Almost every week, Chris Nielsen would come to me and ask about the progress of my research and what kind of help he could provide. Of course, he has introduced many professors that share similar research interests with me. In Professor Michael McElroy's class, I learned how to analyze environmental issues through a perceptive of natural sciences instead of a pure social sciences lens. Meanwhile, I met one of my best friends at Harvard during the classes.
What has been the best part of your time at Harvard so far? Any memorable experiences?
One day when I received a refusal letter for an academic position, all colleagues at our Project stopped their urgent job tasks and gave me companionship. Yingying Lyu told me, ‘it is not only about you. It is about our community.’