Is there still hope for China’s ‘climate change diplomacy’?
Environmentalists lament Beijing’s failure to bridge differences with the European Union to tackle global warming, but some say there is still a chance
Despite pledges to jointly tackle global warming following President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the historic Paris climate accord, leaders from China and the European Union were unable to close the gap on issues including Beijing’s market economy status and China’s steel overcapacity at their annual summit over the weekend.
“They were simply unable to narrow differences on other issues and that’s the reality of China’s relations with Europe,” said one source familiar with matter. The source noted that the abandoned statement had been upbeat about the prospects of China-EU cooperation on implementing the Paris deal.
In Barack Obama’s last years in the White House, Beijing and Washington had used the common cause of cutting greenhouse gases as a way to salvage relations mired in mistrust over conflicting security and trade interests.
China’s President Xi Jinping had worked closely with Obama to bridge differences between industrialised nations and their developing counterparts in the lead-up to the Paris deal. Such cooperation was widely seen as one of the few bright spots in often turbulent US-China relations.