The Rise of New Green Industries: A Dynamic View of China’s (and India’s) Eco-Modernizing Experience

Professor Emeritus John A. Mathews has contributed a chapter, The Rise of New Green Industries: A Dynamic View of China’s (and India’s) Eco-Modernizing Experience, to the newly published book, Reform and Development of China: After 40 Years. This book is a collection of newly revised papers from a 2016 conference held at the Institute of Public Policy (IPP), South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou. Professor Zheng Yongnian, Director of East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, was the principal organizer of the event; he also contributed his paper, China as an Innovative State and its Implications for the World, to the same book.

In his chapter, Professor Mathews expanded on his two articles in Nature, ‘Manufacture renewables to build energy security’ in 2014 and ‘Circular Economy: Lessons from China’ in 2016. He argued that green growth shifts happened in China and India were motivated not just by environmental and climate concerns, but even more importantly by economic imperatives, such as cost reduction, energy security and constraints of the traditional fossil fueled development pattern. The green shifts that are under way in China and India, now emerging as large centers of manufacturing, are well captured by a Schumpeterian perspective, where new industries arise through creative destruction of the old.

This chapter was later developed to the book, Global Green Shift: When CERES Meets GAIA, which won the 2018 Schumpeter Prize for Professor Mathews.

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