Air pollution and climate change are environmental issues that challenge the exceptional economic growth seen in China since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Era in the 1980s. As the International Energy Agency has clearly explained, solutions to air pollution that do not address the structure of the production of energy are sure to fail. Some assume that economic development can continue in China without producing higher levels of air pollution as long as the proper configuration of the energy sector is established and relevant environmental policies are strictly implemented. This research asks how the energy sector has contributed to the historical formation of political power structures that currently exist in China. It will then explore whether that political power structure can guide the crucial changes needed to make the energy sector more sustainable in a just and equitable manner that is accepted by those affected by these changes. This is crucial context to understand as China plans to go carbon neutral by 2060. Theoretically, in conversation with scholars like Timothy Mitchell and Prasenjit Duara, the project explores a unique way of combining materialist and ideological conceptions of social power to help us better understand how economic development and environmental protection have become entangled in China. To support these arguments, the project draws on empirical case studies of a coal-fired electric plant in North China, hydroelectric projects on tributaries of the Yangtze River and the development of solar energy on the Tibetan Plateau. By integrating these case studies within a proper framework of social power, it is possible to see why it is so difficult for even an authoritarian country like China to make the transition from fossil-fuels to renewable energy.

This study was conducted as part of the Airborne Project at the University of Oslo. Many thanks are due to Prof. Mette Halskov Hansen and all those on the Airborne Project for their support of the study. The results of the project are currently being adapted to a monograph that I intend to submit to the Environments of East Asia series at Cornell University Press.