In an exclusive interview for CABAR.asia, Dr. Jennifer Turner talks about the Choke Point Initiative in China, how China addresses the water-energy challenge, and its implications for Central Asia.
Dr. Jennifer Turner has served as Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum for 23 years. She is a widely quoted expert on U.S.-China environmental cooperation, as well as climate-related challenges and governance issues in China. As head of the Center’s Global Choke Point multimedia reporting initiative, Turner’s work combines on-the-ground research with visual storytelling.
China is structurally deficient in water resources and electric power to maintain its economy. As widely cited, China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of the world’s freshwater resources. Between 2010 and 2020 you led the Wilson Center’s Global Choke Point Initiative. Could you tell me please what are the main narrative and facts about China’s choke point – competition between water scarcity and energy demand in China?
The big part of the story is, of course, that coal is king in China, but the king is very thirsty. Most of the coal is in northern China, which gets only 20% of the rainfall. And coal is also competing with a huge grain sector. So, you have not a lot of water, a lot of coal and a lot of food (grain crops). They had to define the options. But in China, they are also really big into big technical solutions. The South-North Water Transfer Project is a supply side solution, as opposed to demand side management, which reduces how much people consume. China has made a lot of progress in energy efficiency. It’s been harder in terms of water efficiency.
To achieve efficiency, consumers and companies need to create the right incentives. Back to the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, when China was doing economic reforms, the main priority was to develop fast. Develop energy and cities, at any cost, and clean up later. The problem is that Chinese cities have been massively expanding since the 1980s. Chinese people had come to expect development. The government prioritized economic development. Have you heard about huge smog in Beijing in 2012-2013, complete smog all the way down to the ground? People were getting sick. The citizens got angry because the air quality was so bad. The Chinese standards for the air quality were too low. There was a lot of anger, people protested. The government decided in 2014 that they had to declare a war on pollution. Part of it was to promote even more clean energy, renewable energy, moving coal from the east coast, which is not solving the problem completely. They burn the coal further inland (Xinjiang) and then they distribute the power through transmission lines, so there is more pollution is the inner part of China than on the coast.
You partly answered my question. How exactly does China address the water-energy challenge? What measures, what policies does the country adopt?
I worked with journalists and they taught me the power of good storytelling. We didn’t tell stories only about China, we gave talks about Choke Point US, Choke Point India and then Choke Point China to help Chinese policymakers, business people to understand that it’s not that foreigners are saying that “you’re bad”, but that it’s a common challenge. The Ministry of Water Resources started following the issue. My favourite example is a Chinese NGO called IPE which is run by a friend of mine Ma Jun. Their NGO started its work about 15 years ago. They started creating online pollution maps using government data. The government had the data that was open-sourced. They created such cool maps where you can even see which factory polluted how much.
It surprised a lot of international companies because suddenly they could see that their supply chain was really dirty. People in this NGO started visiting international companies talking about how they need to clean up their supply chain water and air pollution. Because of our Choke Point work, he did a study that was looking at the water risk of seven big coal plants in China (coal companies). He, Greenpeace and other NGOs tried to create more transparency about the bad behavior of the companies. It’s hard to lobby or pressure the government in China as an NGO, but some of the companies started improving their water-efficiency. Because there were some water shortages in northern China, some of the steel and other heavy industry plants had on their own become more water-efficient. There were no regulations, but China started becoming much stricter on companies as a part of the war on pollution and war on environmental degradation. But it’s still not perfect when everything is managed top-down. The state can’t control everything. They worked to create incentives.
You reduce CO2, you protect water as a national CO2 emissions trading program. It’s just the power sector now. They are doing lots of things. So there are NGOs, research sector and government policies. But what could be interesting for readers is that there was a lot of public pressure that pushed the government to act. There was a Chai Jing’s TED-like talk called “Under the Dome”. It was about China under the dome of pollution. It went viral in China, it was telling cold hard truth of why the air is so polluted. She also had a nice cartoon about how the pollution is killing us and threatening our children. It was promoted by the Chinese news media, they released her talk on all their platforms. It was not a government-approved broadcast. This was in 2013-2014. So many people in China realized, “we are killing ourselves.” Chinese state media were even a little naughty- they released it and a couple of weeks later the Communist party said there was kind of a ban on it. She is somewhere in the United States now. I was trying to give you a sense that the Communist party is responsive to public opinion. Even the journalists got into the act. There is definitely green journalism in China.
What are the implications of China’s choke point for Central Asia and for the world? As it’s known, two major rivers flow from Chinese Xinjiang into Kazakhstan: The Ili, in the south, feeds the country’s largest lake, Balkhash; the Irtysh runs through Kazakhstan’s northern industrial heartland before continuing into Siberia. How can Kazakhstan discuss water distribution with China?
It’s a really tough question. I am new to Central Asia, but I’m here to learn more, because I’m really interested in water. I’m hoping that I could do Choke Point Kazakhstan or Central Asia, contract journalists to do reporting. When you look at China, they have problems with their own transboundary rivers (Mekong). There is the Tibetan water tower. A lot of these great rivers start in Tibet. China put dams on the Mekong. They see hydropower- it’s low carbon, it’s renewable energy, we need this power. It’s ironic that within China they become much cleaner and greener, starting to work on better managing their natural resources, but when they go outside the country – not as much. They haven’t been good at having a dialogue with South-East Asian countries about the dam in the Mekong. This is what I actually want to learn about.
I know that years and years ago China came with border agreement with all of the Central Asian countries. I think that one thing that we need to keep in mind is that Beijing doesn’t run everything. It’s not all central government control of things. It could also be local governments. Western China is very poor and they are trying to use any resources that they have to promote their economy, and water is a resource. We know that northern China is very dry. They have the Tarim water basin which doesn’t flow to Kazakhstan. The World Bank worked in Xinjiang, they had a model of integrated management of Tarim watershed. The Chinese provinces can manage the water sustainably but I think there may also be incentives for the local governments not to take care of the water. Even within China, until regulations got better the provinces just didn’t care about their pollution going into the water and going downstream because it wasn’t their problem. The Chinese economic miracle happened because Beijing decentralized power to the local governments. Deng Xiaoping said “get rich quick” and they did it.
It is interesting to know later what incentives do work for local governments. Let’s talk a little bit more about Central Asia. As you might know, climate change is already affecting water, energy and land systems in Central Asia. The Central Asian region is warming faster than the global average. Upstream glaciers are already experiencing an accelerating loss of ice due to warmer temperature. Considering the experience of China, can China itself serve as a model for Central Asia to tackle this challenge in the region?
It’s how China has pivoted over the last 8 years moving to clean energy. Their development model made them rich, but made their people sick, they were choking on the pollution and realizing China can’t be sustainable. Fun fact, Xi Jinping came into power in 2014, one of those years with huge smog and that’s when they declared the war on pollution. So Xi Jinping has put a lot of political capital on being clean and green. In 2014, he signed the Climate Agreement with the US. His political standing is very much connected to making sure that China gets cleaned up, becomes sustainable. Clean energy is also important to become a global power on these higher technologies. Solar panels are all made by China.
You mentioned renewable energy and green technologies. What ways for cooperation with China in this regard could be appropriate for Central Asia?
Because China is developing its clean energy technologies, even its high-speed trains are more energy efficient. But when they are investing in other countries, the host country preference is important. In the initial years of BRI, poor countries wanted coal because it was cheap but now China said that they are no longer supposedly building coal- fired power plants. As Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries are dealing with China in terms of foreign investment, they need to ask for the investment that they want. China can deliver, it takes time. When China started building a lot of wind and solar farms in Inner Mongolia, it was what we call garbage wind and garbage solar power. They gave incentives to the industries to build these farms but they hadn’t yet built yet the transmission lines. They did a lot of catch up and now most of the farms are connected to the grid.
What recommendations would you give to the governments of Central Asian countries, to the scholarly community, civil society who explore the climate-related issues?
Every country is facing some kind of water-energy-food choke point. Maybe you are not at the crises yet but it’s coming. The climate is changing. From what I can tell, Central Asia’s economic development, urbanization, expanding cities, government efforts to enhance livelihoods by developing more industry and economic development, require energy. I did enough reading before I came to know that you are very dependent on the fossil-fuel energy supply and not that big in renewables, not that developed in energy efficiency. One of the first steps needed is for policymakers and activists to look broadly to understand the water-energy connection. During my talks here, I talked mainly about better management of the water-energy footprint. But if you waste water, there are simple things you can do to conserve water, to manage it better (low cost-no cost). Have you ever gone to the restaurant, gone to wash your hands and the water is super hot? If that happens, they are overheating the water, which means that they are wasting electricity.
Broadening the understanding of the interaction between water and energy is a good place to start. My project did a broad review of what was happening. Since then, some NGOs, researchers, and journalists have done reporting to paint a whole landscape of the choke points in China, and then the government can figure out its actions.