Comment: China pressed to reveal numbers

The air quality in Beijing was “excellent” on Tuesday, according to a local government website whose launch last year was hailed as a breakthrough in transparency.

The US embassy website told a different story, however. The Americans have their own machine to measure pollution levels at their fortified compound in Beijing and, at 7pm last night, the reading was “unhealthy”.

To be sure, the new US embassy is not far from a motorway and the 7pm reading catches the end of rush hour, which might explain some of the difference. But the main reason is that they measure different things. Beijing monitors coarser particles while the US measures the finer pollutants that are also potentially more dangerous to human health. It is not uncommon for the official figures to give the city a clean scorecard – “blue-sky days”, as the government calls them – while the US embassy figures are screaming “health risk”.

This particular Sino-American discrepancy is a small version of a much bigger dispute threatening the Copenhagen climate change talks. China is coming under intense pressure from the US, among others, to sign up to legally binding commitments on emissions which are – to use the jargon of the conference – “measurable, reportable and verifiable”. The bottom line is that plenty of governments in the developed world do not completely trust Chinese promises on climate change and want to be able to check the numbers.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, China has pledged to move much further than seemed imaginable even a year ago to rein in its emissions. Last month, Beijing offered to reduce the carbon intensity of its emissions – that is, the amount of carbon produced by each unit of output – by 40-45 per cent by 2020. “As we’ve made this commitment, well, Chinese people stick to their word,” said Xie Zhenhua, one of China’s main climate change negotiators.

China’s fierce opposition to outside inspection is shared by other developing countries sensitive about protecting their sovereignty. “The US would not allow other nations to inspect its biological weapons,” argued Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister.

There is also an element of posturing behind some of the demands on China. Many of the US politicians most reluctant to act on climate change used to argue that there was no point doing so while China did little. Now that Beijing is putting into place stronger policies, some question Chinese reliability instead.

But there is also some substance to this China version of climate change scepticism. Even though few economists doubt the broad outlines of China’s economic miracle over the past 30 years, there are plenty of questions about the statistics it produces. The same goes for the much-vaunted claims of Wen Jiabao, the premier, to have improved energy efficiency significantly over the past three years. “It is rather unclear how Mr Wen arrived at the [energy efficiency] numbers announced yearly in his government work report,” the Economist Intelligence Unit noted last week.

And there is anecdotal evidence that new environmental guidelines are not always being implemented. You can find steel plants that have supposedly been closed down because they are too polluting where the furnace walls are still hot to the touch. The work starts at night, once the inspectors have gone home.

In this important respect, the US and China are polar opposites on climate change. There is a strong vein of climate change denial in Washington, yet at the state level there is plenty of activism. In Beijing, the technocrats at the top of the political system are convinced of the reality of climate change and the risks it poses to China. But the hard battle is in pushing their policy directives down to the local level.

Beijing has tinkered with how it evaluates local officials so that increases in GDP are not the only criteria and air and water quality are included. Yet economic growth remains at the core of the planning-led system, especially this year, when the goal of an 8 per cent increase in GDP has become a national mantra.

There will always be sceptics who doubt China’s progress. But as long as Beijing does little to differentiate between good and bad types of growth and resists outside monitoring, the sceptics on China’s efforts to address climate change will retain plenty of valid ammunition.