There is a book, written by Gou Hongyang, that can be found in all good government-approved bookshops on the mainland. Published in 2010, it is called Low-Carbon Plot, and in it the author alleges that the theory of man-made climate change is hogwash. The whole business is a conspiracy concocted by Western governments and corporations, he says, to protect their own interests and way of life at the expense of the developing world.
No English translation has been made of the text, but other snippets of Gou's thesis may sound familiar to those attuned to the climate-change debate - such as it exists - elsewhere.
'After many years of repeated indoctrination from every kind of propaganda machine,' Gou writes in his introduction, '[and with evidence of] environmental pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources, people have already formed a conditioned reflex ... and quickly hang these things on the hook of 'carbon'.
'We must not get into too much of a fluster. It is with polluted water, acid rain, destructive logging and waste which we must struggle over the long term.'
It is probable that in the West, Gou would be branded a 'climate-change denier', a charge - suggestive of that most vile of moral perversions, holocaust denial - that is frequently levelled at anyone who dissents from the mainstream orthodoxy on AGW (anthropogenic global warming). But in China, even strident environmentalists such as Ma Jun, a former South China Morning Post journalist who is now director of Beijing-based NGO Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, are given to expressing the view that climate change is rather less of a concern than, say, water pollution.
In recent years, Beijing has made gestures towards 'legally binding' global agreements on carbon checks. That they have been undermined by delaying tactics and obfuscation only points to the reality that any approximation of a coherent Chinese position on the climate is likely to be something of a stab in the dark.
The same cannot be said of the European Union. Indeed, of all the tumult and brinkmanship the 27-member bloc has visited on global economic affairs of late, one episode stands out as constituting something of a feat: its dragooning of China, the United States and Russia onto the same side in a trade dispute. Following its decision to force all airlines flying in or out of Europe to pay a carbon tax, the EU has seen most of the world's powers close ranks in a sort of beachhead assault on the notion. And on this matter, at least, Beijing's position has been unequivocal. In February, an unnamed official announced Chinese airlines were banned from paying any such taxes.