Just days before, He Yafei, China’s vice-foreign minister, had accused Todd Stern, the US special envoy on climate change, of a “lack of common sense” and said the developed world’s attitude towards China’s footing its own bill for climate change initiatives in its own backyard was “extremely irresponsible”. Of course, this rather undiplomatic outburst is singularly unhelpful in developing a global response to climate change. However, with China having blurred the lined between what constitutes a developing country vs a developed country (see previous post), new thinking will have to come to pass to qualify who pays and who gets money from richer nations.

Though China seems to have changed tack and is no longer pushing to have developing countries bankroll its emissions reductions implementation, the CCP still continues to play that “poor pitiful us, look what those rapacious Western countries did to us (and are still doing to us),” card. Unless, of course, Mr He is simply a devoted viewer of the pap CCTV and local Chinese TV stations insist on airing in China about how victimized the Chinese have been over a century and a half (with, of course, blind spots to their own self-inflicted social disasters large enough to push an Olympics stadium through).

China wants to have its industry and eat its pollution, too. One day, however, as a modernized and – in gross terms, at least – increasingly wealthy country, it will one day soon find itself clearly on the “developed” side of the line. What then will it tell its poor relations when they come cap in hand?

Further reading:

FT (Dec 11, 2009), FT (Dec 14, 2009)

New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World