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The Chinese Communist Party and its supporters are increasingly using social media platforms to shape China's public image. This online image is a means of strengthening domestic nationalism and of projecting "soft power" abroad. This paper examines various forms of anti-Westernism that are central to this image-making. It analyzes several recent topics—the Belt and Road Initiative, climate change, the COVID-19 vaccine, the Beijing Olympics, and the conflict in Ukraine—on the r/Sino subreddit page of Reddit and compares them with two online news outlets, the South China Morning Post and China Daily. The paper focuses on how these media frame the contest between a rising China and a failing West, so creating a discourse that competes with the negative portrayals of China outside the country. The paper contrasts the aggressive strengthening of China's image against the West on social media with more sober accounts of the same topics in China's official media and in commercial news outlets. The contribution of the paper is to document an emerging online anti-Westernism that is playing an increasing role in the changing geopolitical landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global climate change has caused governments worldwide to take actions to improve their energy efficiency. This paper investigates how China's Top-1000 program, a command-and-control type of energy-saving mandate, has affected the operational choices of firms, and in turn, their profitability. We apply the propensity score matching method to find "identical twins" for the participants in the Top- 1000 program, then conduct a difference-in-differences analysis on the matched sample. Our findings suggest that the profitability of the enterprises targeted for energy savings decreased by one-third, mainly due to increased production costs. The targeted enterprises tended to increase their fixed assets per capita, which was associated with improvements in energy efficiency. Furthermore, compared to similar untargeted enterprises, there was a significant slowdown in the production growths of the targeted enterprises, raising concerns about carbon leakage due to increased production by less efficient producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon neutrality is an important policy in the current global response to climate change and has been widely recognized by various industries. In the process of promoting carbon neutrality, new energy plays a pivotal role. In this study, the definition and connotation of new energy and its role and specific operation in the energy transition of carbon neutrality are firstly explained. Promoting new energy development requires significant green and low-carbon investments. Taking China as an example, this paper analyzes the opportunities brought by the carbon neutral process to the field of green finance and analyzes the main features and development trends of green finance in China at present. Then this paper proposes policy recommendations to strengthen the development of green finance in China in terms of improving the green financial policy system, enhancing the supply capacity of green financial services, and optimizing the supporting environment for green financial development. Finally, this paper analyzes the measures and experiences of the United States in promoting low-carbon development and proposes countermeasures for China's low-carbon development on the basis of the five major relationships that need attention in China's carbon-neutral process. That is, strengthen the top-level design and improve the regulatory policy system; optimize the energy structure and increase the proportion of clean energy; optimize the industrial structure and reduce energy consumption in key industries; build a complete low-carbon technology system and promote low-carbon technology research and development and demonstration applications, and encourage local conditions to explore low-carbon development paths. The development of green finance can contribute to the advancement of new energy technologies, thus contributing to the achievement of carbon neutrality goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to global agreement on carbon emissions are strategic interactions amongst regions over abatement policy and the benefits to be shared. These are re-examined in this paper, in which benefits from mitigation stem from a meta-analysis that links carbon concentration with region-specific measures of economic welfare. Implementation costs are then drawn from a highly disaggregated model of global economic performance. Multiplayer games are then constructed, the results from which are sensitive to embodied temperature scenarios and discount rates but robustly reveal that the U.S. and China would be net gainers from unilateral implementation in net present value terms. The dominant strategy for all other countries is to free ride. Net gains to the three large economies are bolstered by universal adoption, which could be induced by affordable side payments. Yet the downside is that net gains to all regions are negative over two decades, rendering commitment to abatement politically difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, China agreed to slash its carbon intensity (carbon dioxide emissions/GDP) by 40% to 45% from the 2005 level by 2020. We assess whether China can achieve the target under the business-as-usual scenario by forecasting its emissions from energy consumption. Our preferred model shows that China's carbon intensity is projected to decline by only 33%. The results imply that China needs additional mitigation effort to comply with the Copenhagen commitment. The emission growth is more than triple the emission reductions that the European Union and the United States have committed to in the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's political environment offers limited space for critical debates on domestic politics. In such a constrained environment, people tend to represent and articulate climate change issues without explicitly addressing their political aspects. The aim of this paper is to examine this political ambiguity in climate change discourses. Q methodology was employed to elicit the subjective positions of forty-five young and educated Chinese individuals. Three discourses were extracted: namely, prosaic environmentalism, co-operative economic optimism and actor scepticism. These discourses do not indicate critical intent and deep engagement in the political arguments regarding climate change. This raises concern about the growth of climate citizenship within the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of human capital on CO2 emissions using the Chinese provincial panel over the period 1997-2016. Allowing for cross-sectional dependence and structural breaks, we find a negative association between human capital and CO2 emissions in the long run and attribute it to the influences from younger workers and workers with advanced human capital. In particular, our results suggest that a one-year increase in average schooling reduces CO2 emissions by 12 per cent. Using disaggregated emission dataset by energy sources and end emitters, we demonstrate this negative association is likely to manifest through technology effect and the improvement in energy efficiency. These manifestations are limited to production sector. Our finding suggests a promising avenue for abating greenhouse gases without impeding economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. However, the Chinese public's willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation is, at best, under-researched. This study draws upon a large national survey of Chinese public cognition and attitude towards climate change and analyzes the determinants of consumers' WTP for energy-efficient and environment-friendly products. Eighty-five percent of respondents indicate that they are willing to pay at least 10 percent more than the market price for these products. The econometric analysis indicates that income, education, age and gender, as well as public awareness and concerns about climate change are significant factors influencing WTP. Respondents who are more knowledgeable and more concerned about the adverse effect of climate change show higher WTP. In comparison, income elasticity is small. The results are robust to different model specifications and estimation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]