‘Ecological Civilisation’: China’s Ideological Counter-View?

China’s Concept of ‘Ecological Civilisation’ After nearly three decades of frenzied capitalistic and ‘modernised’ development, the explosive burgeoning of an urban-industrial landscape, a network of road and rail communication connections serving 22 percent of the global population, Chinese officials recognise the toll its poorly managed development has had on the environment. [...] In 2007, the government proposed building an ‘ecological civilisation’; in 2012, the EC was included in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) constitution; and the Centre for Ecological Civilisation was established in the Chinese Academy of Governance. [...] The downside to this Chinese paradigm is two-fold; firstly is the Chinese concept of EC too Sinocentric (Marxist ideas of equality and a government-directed top-down approach) and hence difficult for other cultural communities to be participants? The irony is that the more Chinese officials try to domesticate EC (such as relying on its tradition of Daoist, Confucianist, and Chinese Buddhist though. [...] The EC concept is China’s attempt to counter the western capitalistic model of development and undergird the Beijing Consensus in two ways. [...] At the end of the day, the East-West clash will best be settled by the comparison of concrete results.