Record heat and historic floods in China this summer have failed to ignite domestic public debate about how the world’s top carbon polluter can mitigate climate change, leaving campaigners frustrated at an opportunity missed.
While state media and officials have said in the past that climate change makes China more vulnerable to extreme weather, few have made the connection this year, and have been even more reluctant to link it to China’s own emissions – now around a third of the global total and rising.
“I actually see that as a big missed opportunity, actually, for the Chinese government to garner enough social support for its climate agenda,” Li Shuo, senior adviser with Greenpeace in Beijing, said.
“And at the very minimum to reach a sort of a new narrative that is closer to the reality on the ground.”
There was no major spike in searches for climate change in recent weeks on either the popular Weibo microblog platform or China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, according to their official search indexes. That’s despite widespread discussion about severe weather, in which at least 33 people died in Beijing alone.
Several residents in Beijing and flooded areas in surrounding Hebei province said that they were aware of changing climate trends, but were reluctant to say more.
“Extreme weather, nowadays, is becoming more frequent,” said a 53-year-old resident in the Hebei city of Zhuozhou, who gave his name only as Su.
“We can’t comment on that. We’re not the authorities. The summers are hotter than before, the winters are not as cold as before,” said Su, whose crops and home were damaged by the floods.
A Baidu search for the question “should China be more responsible for climate change?”, or variations of it, did not produce any articles critical of China’s climate policy in the first few dozen results.
Instead, the results, many from state media outlets, focused on China’s leadership in the fight against climate change and calls for developed countries to take more responsibility.
China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story, but government spokespeople have long defended China’s record on climate change and press freedom.
In developed countries, environment campaigners are also anxious as governments, seeking to be re-elected, have lowered climate ambitions in response to a backlash from those resistant to the life-style changes needed to curb emissions.
