The Economist has reported a striking piece of good news: fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline, with a rare sturgeon spawning in the wild for the first time in two decades and finless porpoise numbers climbing again. The turnaround – confirmed by a peer-reviewed study – followed the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted, the closure of thousands of chemical factories, mass reforestation, and the compensation and retraining of some 200,000 fishermen.
Yet, as the following article argues, the magazine could not resist straining to make an ecological triumph sound sinister – branding China’s approach “eco-authoritarian”. It is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form: the reflex of a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West on both ecological and economic performance.
This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.
The Economist has reported a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline. A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of around 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. And this is not Chinese state media talking: it comes from a study, published in the journal Science, by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.
How was it done? Through a ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin – the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted. Thousands of chemical factories were closed or relocated. Forests were planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities were “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. And some 200,000 fishermen were taken off the water, compensated and retrained for other work. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.
The Yangtze programme is one component of China’s ecological civilisation strategy – written into the country’s constitution in 2018 and pursued through the same instruments that have sustained China’s economy: long-term planning, massive public investment, and a state with the capacity to override short-term private interest in the name of a collective good. It is the same capacity that has made China the world’s undisputed leader in renewable energy, reforestation and electric transport.
But at what cost?
Having reported all this, the good people of the Economist search desperately for a way to make it sound sinister. “The Chinese Communist Party, once famous for pillaging from the natural world, has set to protecting parts of it”, the magazine concedes – before warning that the country’s “eco-authoritarian” approach, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. This absurd framing drew an immediate backlash.
China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen – who wanted to carry on fishing – and to environmentalists – who want fewer dams. The complaint about dams is telling: hydropower is not only low-carbon but dispatchable, able to be ramped up on demand and, through pumped storage, to balance the wind and solar that cannot – which is precisely why it does work that would otherwise fall to coal. To oppose it in the abstract, without saying what should generate the electricity instead, is to lean in practice towards fossil-fuelled generation. So are we to understand the Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, a species on the brink of extinction, and a climate crisis that is accelerating because of the failure to decarbonise?
Such a line of reasoning brings to mind Michael Parenti’s observation, in Blackshirts and Reds, about the absurdity of Cold War propaganda:
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skilful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.
If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
The article notes, almost in passing, that the fishermen who lost their livelihoods were given compensation and retraining. It does not mention that this is an awful lot better than what Britain’s coal miners got in the 1980s, or what the cod fishermen of Newfoundland got in the 1990s – communities that their own governments simply abandoned to their fate once they had ceased to be useful.
This is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost. China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost. China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost. The real cost, evidently, is to Western hegemony – and to a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West in both ecological and economic performance.