Paper short abstract:

The coal industry has been the backbone of Chinese economic development. But, it has also destroyed the Chinese environment. As Beijing aims to move away from coal use, how do state actors, capital, and civil society react in places where coal is king?

Paper long abstract:

China is the king of coal. Over half of the world’s coal was mined and burned in China from 2014 through 2016. But, since 2016, China has actively sought to dethrone king coal. Xi Jinping’s first Five-Year Plan made sweeping changes to China’s economic, social, and environmental policies. Chinese leadership has cemented the environment as a “prominent part of the central government agenda and discourse” (Ran 2017), which include the recentralizing attempts under Xi which has made local-level actors more responsive to environmental policies. Considering the substantial limitation on subnational actors’ discretion, we would expect there to be significant changes in environmental policy implementation. Local officials in Shanxi and Henan—two of the largest coal producing provinces in the country and world—implemented Xi’s policies and did so enthusiastically from 2016 until 2018. However, since then coal production and consumption has steadily increased. What does this sudden and enthusiastic implementation of environmental policies tell us about Chinese state processes and the role of the central state’s designs, incentives, pressures, and interests in meso-level implementation? Why are there different levels of pro-environmental policies implementation in provinces that rely on extractive industry for political and economic power? I conducted 93 interviews with key informants and officials and 53 with coal miners in Shanxi, Henan, and Beijing over 11 months and supplemented my interviews with participant observation. I propose a new way of studying the Chinese state in the Xi Jinping era called interstitial débrouillardise to theorize the mechanisms authoritarian environmental governance