case study on china and japan path to modernization

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Why did japan succeed and china fail and isn’t modernization the same thing as westernization.

While walking through the hallways of a high school near the university where I teach, a set of posters hanging outside a classroom caught my attention. The posters had been drawn by students in a tenth grade world history class. Their assignment, I learned later, was to represent in visual form the differences between the modern historical experiences of Japan and China, particularly in relation to the two countries’ responses to Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. 1

The posters provoked in me two different reactions. One was admiration: the projects demonstrated remarkable creativity and insight, and I shuddered to think how my own tenth-grade work would have paled in comparison. I was also pleased to learn that the students were actually studying East Asia in some depth, especially considering the time constraints faced by high school world history teachers. 2 The students in this class were addressing, in a rather sophisticated manner, some of the same issues that professional historians of modern East Asia spend their time discussing— namely, imperialism, modernization, Westernization, and the differences between the historical trajectories of Japan and China since the nineteenth century.

Yet the projects also reminded me of the rift between popular and academic representations of East Asia. These projects expressed many of the central assumptions about East Asia and modernization that professional historians have spilled much ink over the past few decades trying to problematize. Two assumptions stood out prominently in the students’ projects: first, that Japan “succeeded” in modernization and China “failed” because the former embraced the West and China rejected it; second, that modernization and Westernization are synonymous. It was not really a surprise to come across these assumptions, since I see them in my college students all the time. In most cases, students acquire these assumptions not from high school history classes, but from a lifetime of input from popular culture. In the classroom I attempt to confront these assumptions whenever they come up, but I often feel my efforts are too sporadic to be effective. Precisely because these high school projects illustrate these assumptions so compellingly, I decided to use them in an attempt to address them in a somewhat more systematic fashion.

Mine is by no means an unprecedented endeavor. 3 Scholars of Chinese and Japanese history have been problematizing these assumptions since the 1960s. In fact, these assumptions have been so thoroughly critiqued that, at least when speaking or writing to other scholars, it might not seem necessary to argue against them anymore. Yet they persist tenaciously among our students—and, in fact, almost everywhere except within the academy. My goal in this essay is therefore to speak to a somewhat broader audience about why these assumptions are problematic, and about how we might teach the critical moment of East Asian history addressed in these high school projects—Japan’s and China’s nineteenth century response to Western imperialism—without falling back upon these assumptions.

“Success,” “Failure,” and the Reception of Western Influence

How do students view this topic?

Almost all of the students’ projects characterized Japan’s nineteenth-century response to Western imperialism in terms of “success,” while representing China’s response (or lack thereof, as most students saw it) in terms of “failure.” Furthermore, the projects explained the respective fates of the two countries as being a direct result of their attitude toward the West: Japan succeeded because it accepted Western influence, and China failed because it did not. In project #1, Japan before Western imperialism (depicted here as a yellow pickle) is shown resting idly but contentedly in isolation. This student’s depiction of Japan as surrounded by four walls is, of course, deeply familiar: the image of Tokugawa-era Japan (1600–1868) as a “closed country” ( sakoku )—an image that has been demonstrated to be misleading in many respects 4 —has nonetheless figured prominently in popular and scholarly discourse on Japan since the nineteenth century. In frame two of the project, Japan is awakened by a menacing Europe and America (depicted as blue potatoes), knocking on Japan’s walls seeking colonial concessions. In frame three, Japan’s walls have broken down, allowing “new ideas,” “Western technology,” and “industrialization” to come in. Due to these Western influences, Japan emerges in frame four as a powerful nation, to the surprise of the West and the alarm of Korea—who is still behind the same walls of isolation that had previously confined Japan. Japan is now represented by the color green, symbolizing its successful merging of Western (blue) influences and Japanese (yellow) essence. 5

In projects #2 and #3, students echo this characterization of Japan while contrasting it with a China that stubbornly refuses to accept Western influence. Project #2 juxtaposes a China that responds to Western imperialism by hiding under a bed, with a Japan that eagerly and excitedly opens its arms to Western civilization. In project #3, two Chinese men are looking back over their shoulders towards their past, while a Japanese man holding a telescope can see what the modern West has to offer; he is, in this student’s words, “always open to new ideas and looking ahead.” With his telescope he sees what the Chinese refuse to acknowledge: that Asia is the past, and the West is the future. In the narrative presented by all three projects, Japan accepts Western influence and succeeds, while China rejects it and fails. It is also noteworthy that the students view colonial conquest as a natural result of Japan’s successful modernization. In project #1, a triumphant Japan strengthened by its acceptance of Western influence is now able to menace its Asian neighbors. In project #2, a modernized Japan now holds the deed to Korea; colonial conquest is, in other words, one of the spoils of modernization, the reward for Japan’s decision to embrace the West. By contrast, China’s rejection of the West brings about its own victimization at the hands of modern colonial powers: Britain’s victory over China in the Opium Wars (represented by the sling emblazoned with the Union Jack) is China’s just punishment for resisting Western influence. 6

Why is this view problematic?

1 It is inaccurate to say that Japan accepted Western influence and China rejected it. In the two decades or so following the initial confrontations between East Asia and European imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century, one can identify in both China and Japan a broad range of ideas about how to respond to the new threat. Some commentators arrogantly dismissed the threat. Others responded with violent hostility toward the West. Others expressed the need to adopt Western technology while preserving some sort of Asian essence or spirit. Still others wanted to adopt not only technology but also social and political institutions and, to some extent, cultural values. On the whole, the range of attitudes towards the West was remarkably similar in the two countries.

One could argue that the similarity ended after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japanese leaders began to build a modern nation-state based largely on Western models. But this effort was neither unanimously supported by the Japanese people nor motivated by an unambivalent embrace of things Western. Furthermore, in China, too, one can identify a number of reform efforts at both the central and provincial levels that were similar in many ways to the Meiji state-building project—except, of course, that Chinese leaders were unable to carry out these reforms effectively on a national scale (a point I’ll return to in a moment).

2 If we view the acceptance or rejection of the West as the key factor behind East Asia’s modern historical path, we reinforce certain stereotypes of a “static” East and a “dynamic” West. These stereotypes were initially generated by a nineteenth-century Orientalist mindset that created an image of Asia to stand in contrast to the West’s own image of itself. While the West’s self-image was characterized by modernity, rationality, and progress, the Orient embodied tradition, mysticism, and resistance to historical change. 7

Even if we avoid the rhetoric associated with this mindset, the narrative of world history presented in both high school and college classes tends to reaffirm the assumptions of that mindset. When students first encounter East Asia in a world history class, they generally study it as one of the major civilizations of the pre-modern world. This “civilizational” approach provides students with a portrait of what East Asia was like before its fateful encounter with modern Western imperialism. To fill out this portrait, many courses focus on a number of recognizable historical figures or institutions or attributes commonly associated with East Asia— Confucianism, samurai, the family system, the imperial institution, Buddhism, the Tale of Genji, the examination system, the Great Wall, footbinding, and so on. All of these are indeed important, as they represent some kind of significant development in East Asian history. What is often lost, however, is the fact that these items belong to very different moments in the history of East Asia— moments often separated by hundreds of years of historical change. As a result, what students usually see is a portrait of a timeless, changeless East Asia composed of elements removed from their specific historical contexts. They often come away with a still-life portrait of “East Asian Civilization” that does not correspond to any actual moment in East Asian history.

After studying East Asia and other non-Western civilizations in this way, students in most world history classes then proceed to examine in some detail the “rise of the West,” focusing on the various changes (scientific revolution, industrialization, and so on) by which the West became modern and powerful. What is significant here is that after encountering non-Western civilizations that seem more or less changeless, students then study the West in a period of revolutionary historical change. Put another way, after seeing traditional East Asia as a still-life, they see the West as a moving picture. This tends to confirm students’ preconception that the West is characterized by historical change and the rest of the world by continuity. (Or, if non-Western change is recognized, it is usually portrayed as cyclical rather than forward-moving.) Since students see change as natural to the West and alien to the non-West, they come to the logical conclusion that nineteenth century East Asia could have changed only if it received change from the West. Japan’s supposed acceptance of the West and China’s supposed rejection of it thus provides a compelling explanation for what happened to the two countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.

3 The notion of “success” and “failure” that informs this view of East Asian modernization often carries with it moral connotations that must be problematized. Specifically, students too often interpret “success” in modernization as a moral good, and “failure” as a moral evil. We can identify such undertones in project #4, which states explicitly what the other projects imply: that China “lost” and Japan “won.” China’s failure to embrace the West and modernize condemned it to a future of opium addiction and a primitive way of life (symbolized by the ox-drawn carriage), while Japan’s success brought with it technology, which students already tend to see as an inherently good thing. In my own classes I frequently detect a tone of contempt or disgust on the part of students who castigate China for not accepting the inevitability of modernization. We need not avoid all moral judgments when teaching history, but we should challenge students to examine the assumptions on which those judgments are made.

How should we address these problems?

1 The issue of how China and Japan viewed the West is undeniably important, and teachers should explore this with their students. However, as I noted above, Japan and China exhibited a similar range of attitudes towards the West in the aftermath of their initial confrontation with Western imperialism. 8 There is no clear contrast between the attitudes of China and Japan as a whole (at least in terms of “acceptance” or “rejection”), and no simple correlation between these attitudes and the subsequent fates of the two countries during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Rather, the key issue is that, in the half-century after the initial confrontation with the threat of Western imperialism, Japan was able to build a centralized nation-state. On an administrative level, this involved the abolition of the more than 200 largely autonomous domains into which the country had been divided during the Tokugawa period, 9 and the subsequent creation of a nationwide administrative structure directly accountable to the new Meiji government. 10 It also involved the successful mobilization of a critical mass of local leaders to serve in this new government and carry out its initiatives at the local level. But in addition, the process of centralization in Japan involved integrating ordinary people into the institutions of the modern state and cultivating among those people a personal identification with the nation. Together, these centralizing efforts made Japan a nation-state, one whose strength was based upon the collective energies of individuals who believed they had a stake in the country’s future. This far-reaching process of centralization did not occur independent of influences from the West. Many of the institutional reforms carried out by the Meiji government—in schooling, the military, etc.—were indeed based on Western models. But this selective adoption of Western influences was only a part of the bigger and more consequential phenomenon of centralization.

When discussing the history of East Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century, then, the central question is why Japan was able to centralize in this way and why China was not. 11 This is a complex issue, and there are many ways to approach it. This makes it a wonderful opportunity for students to engage in historical analysis and debate. What was the determining factor in centralization? Was it geography? (China is big; Japan is smaller, and is an island nation.) Was it the difference between the two countries’ imperial institutions? (In Japan, the emperor was not tied inextricably to the existing political regime, and thus could be used to legitimize political upheaval; in China, the emperor was bound up in the existing regime in a way that precluded such a development.) Was it because of the political structures of the two countries? (One could argue, for example, that the decentralized nature of Japan’s political order at the time of its confrontation with imperialism brought the crisis to a head more quickly and encouraged Japanese leaders to envision a new kind of political order.) Was it the fact that Tokugawa Japan experienced such a remarkable degree of cultural integration that, after the fall of the Tokugawa regime, the impulse of local leadership was to move toward the new center rather than away from it? 12 Or should we look not to differences between Japan and China, but to those between the United States and Britain? (Scholars have argued that Britain’s interest in the China trade—particularly opium—resulted in more intrusive economic incursions than were exacted upon Japan by the United States.) 13

These are just a few possible factors students might address when studying nineteenth century East Asia. Some aspects of this discussion require more background knowledge of Japan and China than students in high school or college world history classes are likely to possess. However, students can try to answer the question with whatever knowledge they bring to the table. Even when their hypotheses are wrong, they will nonetheless be engaging in historical analysis using evidence. Furthermore, by organizing the discussion around the question of centralization (rather than that of accepting or rejecting the West), they will be forced to look within Japan and China—rather than simply at the West—to explain modern East Asian history.

2 How can we avoid confirming students’ assumptions about a passive and static East Asia and a dynamic West? If we retain the basic structure of most world history classes—snapshots of non-Western societies in their “traditional” state, followed by an examination of the internal dynamics of change that produced the rise of the West, followed by a discussion of the “reaction” of non-Western societies to the challenge of Western modernity—we fight an uphill battle. Nonetheless, there are a few simple ways to counter these stereotypes while working with the general structure of existing world history classes.

First, we can explicitly address stereotypes of a changeless Asia and a dynamic West. When we come across them in our students’ work—or, better yet, in the textbooks or videos we use in class—we can take a moment to talk about these stereotypes and where they come from.

Second, we can avoid presenting the rise of the West as a historical inevitability, as if Europe’s preeminence over the past two centuries emerged necessarily and predictably out of its history and culture. Of course, scholars continue to argue about this point. Some stress that Europe did possess a unique set of cultural values that enabled it to make a historic leap towards modernity, 14 while others portray the rise of the West as more accidental—the product of a fortuitous set of circumstances in the world economic system that Europe was ideally positioned to exploit to its advantage. 15 But even those who adopt the former position would agree, I think, that if one could be transported back to the year 1500—or even 1750—it would be startling, even unbelievable, to hear that Europe would by the late nineteenth century achieve worldwide economic and military dominance. In sum, we should portray the rise of the West as a recent, historically-contingent phenomenon, made possible (at least in part) by a specific set of historical circumstances.

Third, we can help undermine the image of a passive and static Asia by taking time to deal with changes in Asia during the period immediately preceding the Western incursions of the mid-nineteenth century. Both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan underwent major transformations in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: commercial expansion, urbanization, population increase, substantial growth in schooling and literacy, vigorous intellectual debate, and the emergence of new cultural and artistic forms. Emphasizing these changes will help counter stereotypes about an inert and static Asia. Moreover, if we ignore these changes we deprive students of critical information they need to help them analyze what happened to Japan and China during the second half of the nineteenth century.

3 How do we avoid conferring moral significance to the story of Japanese success and Chinese failure? First and foremost, by making sure that we don’t use morally-laden rhetoric when we present this topic to students. (In fact, it might be a good idea to steer clear of the terms “success” and “failure” altogether.) First, we should avoid the temptation to describe modern Chinese history strictly in terms of dysfunction and tragedy, even though the Chinese themselves have often described it in such terms. Conversely, we ought to avoid telling the story of Japan’s rise to the status of a modern nation-state in a celebratory tone, making sure to remind students that Japan’s “successful” drive to modernization had its own tragic consequences: ultra-nationalism, colonial aggression, militarism, and a catastrophic war. We might also take the opportunity to raise the more general question of whether it is necessarily a good thing to become modern. This issue, of course, requires us to discuss with students what it actually means to become modern—a question to which I now turn.

Modernization and Westernization

Most students tend to view modernization and Westernization as synonymous. They believe that the particular historical experience of the West represents a singular, universal model for becoming modern. To become modern, therefore, is to become Western—which, in the minds of most students, involves a wholesale adoption of Western values and cultural practices.

Students often articulate this idea through the metaphor of clothing. Specifically, the persistence of traditional clothing in China is used as both symbol and evidence of China’s failure to modernize, while Japan’s successful modernization is expressed as a process of shedding traditional clothes in favor of Western garb. In project #5, for example, a Japanese couple wearing 1920s-style Western clothes—the woman in flapper attire, the man with a business suit and briefcase—are depicted standing on the shoulders of Western political and military leaders against the backdrop of a globe. Japan’s emergence as a major world power is thus symbolized, or perhaps even made possible, by the donning of Western clothing and by the larger project of cultural Westernization. Project #6 draws a similar connection between Western clothing and modernization. Japan (represented here in what appears to be the dress of a Chinese scholar-official) is again portrayed as a country behind walls, with an American steamship anchored outside. Japan invites the West inside to master its technology and adopt its political and military systems. As Japan attempts to use its knowledge of the West to transform itself into a modern nation, it gradually abandons its indigenous clothing (robe and sandals) and dons a Western military uniform. Having completed this process, a westernized Japan is now able to “throw [the West] out.”

Project #7 states explicitly some of the assumptions behind these visual representations of the relationship between modernization and Westernization. The modern histories of Japan and China are depicted here as a board game in which the ultimate goal is modernization. The two countries begin at the same square, in a condition of static isolation. This condition could not last forever, however, because, in the student’s words, “change is inevitable.” In the next square, change comes from the outside in the form of Western imperialism; at this point the two countries’ paths diverge. Japan “gives in to Westernization,” and proceeds immediately to modernity. China, however, does not “give in” to Westernization, and as a result, must proceed down a troublesome historical path. This path includes the Opium wars, the rise of Communism, the loss of Manchuria to Japan, and the destructive reform efforts of the CCP; these are viewed as negative consequences of China’s decision to reject the West. China eventually arrives at modernity, but only after it recognizes the need to give in to Westernization. The message is clear: there is a single path to modernity, and it goes through the West.

Why is the view problematic?

1  This view, too, reinforces the stereotype of a dynamic West and a static Asia. Why? Because if modernization is the same thing as Westernization, then for the West modernization is a natural process; the West is defined by the inner capacity to become modern. Asia, by contrast, lacks that capacity. To become modern it must become something other than what it is, and always has been. It must abandon its natural, changeless state—usually referred to as “tradition”—and follow the historical trajectory of the West. That’s why the image of discarding indigenous clothing and putting on the clothing of the West is so compelling to students.

2 This view also fosters a Eurocentric view of world history, in the sense that the European historical experience becomes the lens through which all other areas of the world are analyzed. If we assume that all countries must inevitably follow the historical path taken by Europe, we will tend to think that what is important about European history should be equally important when examining the history of non-Western societies. For example, if we agree with Max Weber that the protestant ethic was instrumental in the rise of capitalism in Europe, we should therefore examine nonWestern societies to see if an analogous ethic can be located there too. 16 Studying non-Western countries becomes an exercise in plotting their history against a backdrop of the trajectory of the West. This methodology prevents us from seeing the history of other countries on their own terms. Moreover, it tends to idealize and oversimplify European and American history, too, making the experience of “the West” appear much more uniform than it actually has been.

3 This view accepts the universalistic claims of Western modernity as self-evident. The nineteenth century European and American concept of progress claimed a single path to modernity, and that the West stood at its destination. Therefore, everything that supposedly characterized European and American society at that moment—its economic system (capitalism), its values (for example, individualism), its political system (liberal democracy), its ideological underpinnings (a faith in science and reason), and so on— were viewed as being not just better, but universal. That is, people assumed that all societies must, and inevitably will, embrace these things, because they represent the destiny of humankind. Many instructors and students may still agree that those things are, in fact, desirable for everyone, but historical analysis requires us to stand outside of them and view them critically.

1 Engage students in an attempt to make analytical distinctions between modernization and Westernization. Are modernization and Westernization the same thing? If not, how are they different? These foundational questions, in turn, lead to other, more specific questions: Does a society need to be industrialized to be modern? Does it need to be democratic? Secular? Do societies inevitably become more alike as they become modern? Does a modern society need to have a capitalist economic system? Must it have a certain level of literacy? A mass media? Can a predominantly rural society be modern? Can a society with arranged marriages and multigenerational, extended family households be modern? Do the presence of McDonald’s restaurants and video games serve as markers of a modern society? Can you imagine a modern society that looks substantially different from American society? How would it be different? In what ways would it still be modern, despite the differences? While discussing these questions with students, teachers will at every turn run into undefined terms (like “modern” and “Western”) and unexamined assumptions. These moments provide great teaching opportunities, but instructors should not feel as if they have to clear everything up; the purpose, in my view, is simply to help students think critically about the issues at hand.

Instructors should call attention to the fact that China and Japan have struggled with these same kinds of questions. Following the expansion of European and American imperialism into East Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, both countries grew intensely concerned with the question of whether they could become modern without becoming Western. Such a discussion necessarily involved an attempt to distinguish between “modern” and “Western.” Usually, commentators did this by dividing the material realm from the spiritual or cultural realm—for example, by saying that Asia could become materially modern in terms of technology, institutions, and wealth while maintaining a cultural or spiritual uniqueness rooted in tradition. Most students tend to accept this notion at face value, believing that there is some kind of unchanging Asian essence underlying a veneer of modern material life. Instructors should, however, help students recognize some of the problematic assumptions behind such a view.

On the other hand, attempts by European and American scholars to distinguish between modernization and Westernization have been similarly problematic. In the 1950s and 60s, scholars attempted to create a generic definition of modernization, one not based exclusively on the historical experience of Western Europe and America. 17 This effort has since been widely critiqued, however, and many scholars would now argue that the goal of a culturally neutral definition of modernization is inherently suspect. 18 But even with no consensus on a universal definition of modernization, engaging students in an attempt to define it is worthwhile, as it requires them to hold the concept up to critical scrutiny.

2 Indeed, what is crucial is that teachers treat “modernization” and “modernity” as concepts —historically-bounded ideas that can be subjected to critical inquiry. In the minds of the nineteenth century actors we’re studying, these were not concepts as such, but self-evident descriptions of reality. For Europeans and Americans, “modern” described who they were, the stage in history to which they had evolved. And for the most part, China and Japan internalized this view, even though it placed them “below” the West and generated anxiety and ambivalence about becoming modern. For all parties involved, modernization and Westernization were inseparably linked, even though Japan and China struggled mightily to think about how to achieve the former without the latter. We, too, can try to separate and define them; as I note above, this effort is fraught with problems, but it can be a valuable exercise for students of world history. More importantly, however, we need to help students develop an analytical distance from what nineteenth century historical actors thought about what it means to be (or become) modern. This is not an easy task, particularly since contemporary American culture still views many of these ideas as commonsensical. In the classroom, however, we need to recognize that these ideas about the relationship between modernity and the West emerged at a specific moment in time, in a specific area of the world, and were generated by a specific set of historical conditions. In other words, we need to historicize these ideas, placing them within the context of a specific historical moment and making them the object of historical analysis.

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1. My sincere thanks to these students for agreeing to let me use their posters for this article.

2. These time constraints have always existed, but in Virginia—as in many states—they have become more pressing due to the increasing emphasis on “Standards of Learning” exams as a tool for determining teacher and student success.

3. A great number of articles and books aim to critique the assumptions that undergird both scholarly and popular understandings of East Asia, but one of the most accessible and straightforward is Paul Cohen’s Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

4. See Ron Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1984). Toby’s book reveals that the Tokugawa government actively pursued foreign relations in the seventeenth century in an effort to legitimize its claim to domestic power. Of course, in order for diplomacy to serve this legitimizing function, it had to be conducted on the Tokugawa government’s terms; as a result, the government limited its diplomatic linkages to Korea and the Ryūkyū Kingdom, while maintaining links of trade and information with the Dutch and Chinese.

5. This same color scheme was employed in a Chinese documentary called “River Elegy.” The documentary represented Chinese tradition with the color yellow, manifested concretely in the silt of the Yellow River; the West, by contrast, was represented by the color blue. The documentary ends with an urgent plea for China to merge with the path of modern Western civilization—a plea accompanied visually by an overhead shot of the Yellow River emptying into the blue ocean, producing a new, green, civilization.

6. Robert Eskildsen demonstrates that, from the very inception of the Meiji period, many Japanese embraced this idea that colonial expansion was an integral, natural part of the process of modernization. See Eskildsen, “Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 388–418.

7. The foundational work on this concept of Orientalism is Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

8. Instructors seeking to introduce students to Chinese and Japanese attitudes towards the West can consult Wm. Theodore de Bary, et. al, comp., Sources of Chinese Tradition , 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and the corresponding volume for Japan, Sources of Japanese Tradition , 2. Students can, for example, compare the excerpted writings of Japanese commentators Aizawa Seishisai and Hirata Atsutane with those of the Chinese Lin Zexu and Feng Guifen.

9. For a brief, synthetic discussion of the nature of the Tokugawa political order, see Mary Elizabeth Berry, “Public Peace and Private Attachment: The Goals and Conduct of Power in Early Modern Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 237–71; and Ronald Toby, “Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 56, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 197–237.

10. For a discussion of the project of political centralization during the first decade of the Meiji period, see Michio Umegaki, After the Restoration (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

11. Those familiar with Chinese history may find this question surprising, insofar as pre-modern China’s claim to fame has often been its centralized political authority. Some historians even argue that it was precisely China’s comparatively high level of centralization that impeded China from playing a more dominant role in the modern world economy. Conversely, they argue that Europe—which until around 1500 had been comparatively backward relative to China and marginal to the world economy—was able to achieve such economic and political dominance because of its decentralized political order. It’s important to point out that I’m speaking here of a different kind of centralization: not just a centralized political structure, but a centralized nation that identifies itself with such a structure. I should also point out here that, when discussing this issue in the classroom, we should focus on the question of why Japan was able to build a centralized nation-state, rather than on the question of why China did not. To focus unduly on the latter often causes students to see something “wrong” or “dysfunctional” with China, when in fact, China’s fate was much more typical of the experience of non-Western countries that faced the threat of European imperialism in the nineteenth century.

12. See Mary Elizabeth Berry, “Was Early Modern Japan Culturally Integrated?” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 547–81.

13. Frances Moulder, Japan, China and the Modern World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

14. See, for example, David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Others So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

15. See Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an excellent summary of this debate, see Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macro-histories,” in The American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 508–25.

16. I use this example because a seminal work on Tokugawa religious history attempted to do precisely this. See Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1957).

17. Since Japan was seen at that time as the only non-Western country to have modernized, it was of great interest to scholars seeking to create a culturally neutral definition of modernization. The definitive statement of the theoretical underpinnings of this scholarship is John Whitney Hall, “Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan,” in Marius Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 7–43.

18. For a description of the political context for this scholarship, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). For a critique of this scholarship as it relates to the study of Japan, see John Dower’s introduction to his book, Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); and Harry Harootunian, “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan,” in Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, eds., Japan in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 198–221.

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A Comparative Analysis of the Differences between Chinese and Japanese Modernization in the Mid-Late Ninetheenth Century, with Particular Regard to the Idea of 'Rich Nation, Strong Army'.

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This thesis aims to search for the whys and wherefores of success and failure in Japan's 'catching up' and China's 'slowing down' on the path to modernization / Westernization from the mid-nineteenth century to approximately the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. First, in the introduction (Chapter One) I state what is the aim of the thesis; the definition of 'modernization'; literature review; methodology; outline of the thesis; and problems and limitations. Chronologically, I divide the period into four phases for detailed discussion: legacies, formative, operative, and consequent. In 'the legacies' (Chapter Two), it is shown that elements of the legacies such as territorial integrity, population, and political, military, economic and social circumstances in Tokugawa Japan were relatively more conducive to modernization along Western lines than those in Ch'ing China. In the formative phase (Chapter Three), it is shown that the central government and regional provincial leaders in Ch'ing China knew little and did almost nothing to respond to the menace of the West. By contrast, the Tokugawa Shogunate and more particularly regional daimyō and samurai had a deep sense of crisis and early on launched a series of reforms. In the operative phase (Chapter Four), it will be seen that both nations pursued a national goal of 'rich nation and strong army'. However, the Self-Strengthening Movement in Ch'ing China merely undertook a superficial reform primarily limited to military innovation and introduction of Western industrialization in order to maintain the old dynastic stability. By contrast, in Meiji Japan, under the post-Restoration leadership of an oligarchy of talented and visionary individuals, the government launched a full range of reforms in pursuit of the West. In the consequent phase (Chapter Five), even though China had by now a better comprehension of the West and continued some reforms, its path to modernization was still frustrated because of the ineffective imperial leadership, and the ethnic antipathy and power struggling between the Manchus and the Han officers. In contrast with China, Japan's modernization had shown continuity, integrity, and accumulation and acceleration and it had successfully achieved the national goal of 'rich nation and strong army' by this stage. In Chapter Six, I reveal several famous scholars' comments on this issue of comparative modernisation. As well, I humbly set forth a set of criteria to consider what might be the best principles and model for a nation undertaking modernization. A conclusion reviews the thesis and it arguments in Chapter Seven, and is followed by a series of appendices and illustrations and bibliography.

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China’s path to modernization has, for centuries, gone through my hometown

Generations of Chinese intellectuals sought Western science and technology to build a strong homeland. In a new era of US-China rivalry, has their dream come true?

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One day in late March, People’s Daily , the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, shared a pair of photos on Chinese social media. 

The first, in black and white, was of the signing of the Boxer Protocol, a 1901 treaty between the Qing empire, which ruled China at the time, and 11 foreign nations. Troops from eight of these countries, including the US, had occupied Beijing following sieges on their embassies by a peasant militia known as the Boxers. Among a litany of concessions, the Qing government agreed to pay the eight occupying powers an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver (about $10 billion in today’s dollars), almost twice its annual revenue. The Boxer Protocol is etched into the Chinese consciousness as a searing reminder of the country at its weakest. 

The second image, in vivid color, was from the previous day, at an acrimonious summit held in Alaska between top Chinese and American officials. It was the first high-level meeting between the two governments during the Biden administration. The officials criticized one another’s governments for human rights abuses and belligerence on the international stage. At the end of the opening session, Yang Jiechi, director of foreign affairs for the Chinese Communist Party, scolded his American counterparts: “Haven’t we, the Chinese people, suffered from foreign bullies long enough? Haven’t we been penned in by foreign nations and stopped from progress long enough?”

The People’s Daily post quoted Yang as saying further: “You, the United States, are not qualified to claim that you are speaking to China from a position of strength.” This struck a nerve; the post has been liked almost 2 million times, and Yang’s quote has found its way to T-shirts, stickers, and cell-phone covers sold in China. To many in the country, the harsh words carry the sweet taste of revenge. China is finally strong enough to stand up to the most powerful nation on earth and demand to be treated as its equal. 

From the last Chinese empire to the current People’s Republic, generations of politicians and intellectuals have sought ways to build a strong China. Some imported tools and ideas from the West. Others left China for a better education, but the homeland still beckoned. They pondered the relationships between East and West, tradition and modernity, national allegiance and cosmopolitan ideals. Their accomplishments and regrets have shaped the path of China’s development and mapped the contours of Chinese identity. 

I’m a product of their complex legacy. I grew up in Hefei, a medium-sized city in central-eastern China. The Hefei of my childhood was a humble place, known for ancient battlegrounds, sesame snacks, and a few good universities. I spent the first 19 years of my life there and left in 2009 to pursue my PhD in physics in the US, where I now live and work. Watching my birth country’s ascent conjures up mixed feelings. I’m glad that the majority of Chinese people enjoy a higher standard of living. I’m also alarmed by the hardened edge to China’s new superpower status. Economic growth and technological advancements have not ushered in more political freedoms or a more tolerant society. The Chinese government has become more authoritarian and its people more nationalistic. The world feels more fractured today.

The Chinese government has become more authoritarian and its people more nationalistic. The world feels more fractured today.

Hefei is now a budding metropolis with new research centers, manufacturing plants, and technology startups. For two of the city’s proudest sons, born a century apart, a strong homeland armed with science and technology was the aspiration of a lifetime. One of these men was the late Qing’s most revered statesman. The other is one of the first two Nobel laureates from China. The Boxer Protocol marked the end of one career and laid the foundation for the other. I grew up with their names and have been returning to their stories. They teach me about the forces that propelled China’s rise, the way lives can be squeezed by the pressures of geopolitics, and the risks of using science for state power. 

In 1823, Li Hongzhang was born to a wealthy household in Hefei, then a small provincial capital surrounded by farmland. Like his father and brother before him, Li excelled in the imperial exams, China’s centuries-old system for selecting officials. Over six feet tall and with a piercing gaze, he commanded space and attention. He distinguished himself in suppressing peasant rebellions and rose quickly in the imperial court to become the Qing empire’s highest-ranking governor, its commerce minister, and its de facto foreign minister. 

After China lost to British and French forces in the Opium Wars, Li and his allies launched a wide range of reforms. They called it the Movement for Western Affairs, also known as “self-strengthening.” The strategy was best summed by the scholar Wei Yuan in an 1844 book, Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms : “Learn advanced technologies from the barbarians to keep barbarian invaders at bay.”

To the Chinese literati, the world was divided between hua , the homeland of civilized glory, and yi , the places where barbarians dwelled. British gunboats on the southern shore had shaken but not shattered this centuries-old belief. Proponents of self-strengthening claimed that Chinese tradition was the base onto which Western technology could be grafted for practical use. As the historian Philip Kuhn has argued, such logic also implied that technology was culturally neutral and could be detached from political systems.

A classically trained scholar and battle-tested general, Li championed both civilian and military enterprises. He petitioned the emperor to construct the first Chinese railroad and founded the country’s first privately owned steamship company. He allocated generous government funding for the Beiyang Fleet, China’s first modern navy. In 1865, Li oversaw the establishment of the Jiangnan Arsenal, the largest weapons factory in East Asia at the time. In addition to producing advanced machinery for war, the arsenal also included a school and a translation bureau, which translated scores of Western textbooks on science, engineering, and mathematics, establishing the vocabulary in which these subjects would be discussed in China.

Li also supervised China’s first overseas education program, which sent a cohort of Chinese boys aged 10 to 16 to San Francisco in the summer of 1872. After a promising start, the mission was derailed by anti-Chinese racism in the US and conservative obstruction at home. Some students, upon returning to China, were held and questioned by the authorities about their loyalty. After nine bumpy years, the program was shut down in 1881 on the eve of the Chinese Exclusion Act . 

Meanwhile, neighboring Japan had adopted not only the West’s technology but also its governing methods, transforming a feudal society into a modern industrial state with a formidable military. For centuries, the Chinese elite had looked down upon Japan, dismissing it as small and inferior. When the two countries went to war in 1894, ostensibly over the status of Korea, the real prize was status as the preeminent Asian power. Japan won decisively. It was six years after this devastating loss that Li signed the Boxer Protocol on behalf of the Qing government. He died two months later.

Li Hongzhang could not have imagined that after his death, the most shameful chapter of his career would, at the whimsical hand of geopolitics, contribute to his lifelong dream of bringing Western science and education to China.

By the start of the 20th century, the last Chinese empire had lost its legitimacy. Armed rebellions were erupting across the country. The Qing regime was overthrown in 1911, and the Republic of China was born. Progressive intellectuals saw Chinese tradition as “rotten and decayed,” a cultural albatross holding their country back. They believed that national salvation demanded embracing Western ideas. The few dissenting voices were sidelined. 

China’s path to westernization received some early assistance from the US. Hoping to improve relations between the two countries, the US government decided to return almost half the American portion of the indemnity China had agreed to pay in the Boxer Protocol. With the US side dictating the terms, part of the remittance went toward a program known as the Boxer Indemnity Scholarships, which provided one of the few pathways for Chinese students to study in the US. The bulk of the returned payment was used to establish a Western-style preparatory school, which became Tsinghua University , China’s premier technological institution. Li Hongzhang could not have imagined that after his death, the most shameful chapter of his career would, at the whimsical hand of geopolitics, contribute to his lifelong dream of bringing Western science and education to China. Tsinghua took its motto from the ancient text of I Ching, the Book of Changes: “The work of self-strengthening is ceaseless. The virtuous carry the world with generosity.” 

In 1945, a young man named Chen Ning Yang graduated from Tsinghua and arrived at the University of Chicago for his PhD on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. Inspired by the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which he had read as a child, the aspiring physicist from Hefei gave himself the English name Frank. 

After World War II ended, Nationalists and Communists continued to battle in China. Yang and his small cohort of overseas Chinese students faced a pressing dilemma: Should they stay in the West—despite its racism and anticommunist paranoia—and enjoy social stability, material comfort, and career opportunities? Or should they return to their impoverished homeland after graduation and help it rebuild? 

In a long letter to Yang in 1947, his college classmate Huang Kun wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine how intellectuals like us can affect the fate of a nation. Independent minds like us, once we go back, will certainly get crushed like grains in a mill … but I still sincerely believe that whether China has us makes a difference.” 

Huang was studying in England at the University of Bristol. He returned to China in 1951, two years after the Communist victory, and pioneered the field of semiconductor physics in the country. Deng Jiaxian, Yang’s best friend since adolescence, boarded a ship back nine days after receiving his PhD from Purdue. He became a leader in China’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. Some overseas Chinese scientists, dreading Communist rule, followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan, Yang’s former mentor Wu Ta-You among them. But Yang opted to stay in the US after getting his doctorate, moving in 1949 to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There he would spend the better part of the next two decades. He would not see any of his old friends for many years.

In 1957, Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, a fellow Chinese graduate of the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize for proposing that when some elementary particles decay, they do so in a way that distinguishes left from right. They were the first Chinese laureates. Speaking at the Nobel banquet, Yang noted that the prize had first been awarded in 1901 , the same year as the Boxer Protocol. “As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict,” he said.

Yang became a US citizen in 1964 and moved to Stony Brook University on Long Island in 1966 as the founding director of its Institute for Theoretical Physics, which was later named after him. As the relationship between the US and China began to thaw, Yang visited his homeland in 1971—his first trip in a quarter of a century. A lot had changed. His father’s health was failing. The Cultural Revolution was raging, and both Western science and Chinese tradition had been deemed heresy. Many of Yang’s former colleagues, including Huang and Deng, were persecuted and forced to perform hard labor. The Nobel laureate, on the other hand, was received like a foreign dignitary. He met with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government and advocated for the importance of basic research. 

In the years that followed, Yang visited China regularly. At first, his trips drew attention from the FBI, which saw exchanges with Chinese scientists as suspect . But by the late 1970s, hostilities had waned. Mao Zedong was dead. The Cultural Revolution was over. Beijing adopted reforms and opening-up policies. Chinese students could go abroad for study. Yang helped raise funding for Chinese scholars to come to the US and for international experts to travel to conferences in China, where he also helped establish new research centers. When Deng Jiaxian died in 1986, Yang wrote an emotional eulogy for his friend, who had devoted his life to China’s nuclear defense. It concluded with a song from 1906, one of his father’s favorites: “[T]he sons of China, they hold the sky aloft with a single hand … The crimson never fades from their blood spilled in the sand.” 

Yang retired from Stony Brook in 1999 and moved back to China a few years later to teach freshman physics at Tsinghua. In 2015, he renounced his US citizenship and became a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. In an essay remembering his father, Yang recounted his earlier decision to emigrate . He wrote, “I know that until his final days, in a corner of his heart, my father never forgave me for abandoning my homeland.” 

In 2007, when he was 85 years old, Yang stopped by our hometown on an autumn day and gave a talk at my university. My roommates and I waited outside the venue hours in advance, earning precious seats in the packed auditorium. He took the stage to thunderous applause and delivered a presentation in English about his Nobel-winning work. I was a little perplexed by his choice of language. One of my roommates muttered, wondering whether Yang was too good to speak in his mother tongue. We listened attentively nevertheless, grateful to be in the same room as the great scientist. 

A college junior and physics major, I was preparing to apply to graduate school in the US. I’d been raised with the notion that the best of China would leave China. Two years after hearing Yang in person, I too enrolled at the University of Chicago. I received my PhD in 2015 and stayed in the US for postdoctoral research. 

Months before I bid farewell to my homeland, the central government launched its flagship overseas recruitment program, the Thousand Talents Plan , encouraging scientists and tech entrepreneurs to move to China with the promise of generous personal compensation and robust research funding. In the decade since, scores of similar programs have sprung up. Some, like Thousand Talents, are supported by the central government. Others are financed by local municipalities.

Beijing’s aggressive pursuit of foreign-trained talent is an indicator of the country’s new wealth and technological ambition. Though most of these programs are not exclusive to people of Chinese origin, the promotional materials routinely appeal to sentiments of national belonging, calling on the Chinese diaspora to come home. Bold red Chinese characters headlined the web page for the Thousand Talents Plan: “The motherland needs you. The motherland welcomes you. The motherland places her hope in you.” 

These days, though, the website isn’t accessible. Since 2020, mentions of the Thousand Talents Plan have largely disappeared from the Chinese internet. Though the program continues, its name is censored on search engines and forbidden in official documents in China. Since the final years of the Obama administration, the Chinese government’s overseas recruitment has come under intensifying scrutiny from US law enforcement. In 2018, the Justice Department started a China Initiative intended to combat economic espionage, with a focus on academic exchange between the two countries. The US government has also placed various restrictions on Chinese students , shortening their visas and denying access to facilities in disciplines deemed “sensitive.”

My mother is afraid that the borders between the US and China will be closed again as they were during the pandemic, shut down by forces just as invisible as a virus and even more deadly.

There are real problems of illicit behavior in Chinese talent programs. Earlier this year, a chemist associated with Thousand Talents was convicted in Tennessee of stealing trade secrets for BPA-free beverage can liners. A hospital researcher in Ohio pled guilty to stealing designs for exosome isolation used in medical diagnosis. Some US-based scientists failed to disclose additional income from China in federal grant proposals or on tax returns. All these are cases of individual greed or negligence. Yet the FBI considers them part of a “ China threat ” that demands a “whole-of-society” response. 

The Biden administration is reportedly considering changes to the China Initiative, which many science associations and civil rights groups have criticized as “racial profiling.” But no official announcements have been made. New cases have opened under Biden; restrictions on Chinese students remain in effect. 

Seen from China, the sanctions, prosecutions, and export controls imposed by the US look like continuations of foreign “bullying.” What has changed in the past 120 years is China’s status. It is now not a crumbling empire but a rising superpower. Policymakers in both countries use similar techno-nationalistic language to describe science as a tool of national greatness and scientists as strategic assets in geopolitics. Both governments are pursuing military use of technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. 

“We do not seek conflict, but we welcome stiff competition,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at the Alaska summit. Yang Jiechi responded by arguing that past confrontations between the two countries had only damaged the US, while China pulled through. 

Much of the Chinese public relishes the prospect of competing against the US. Take a popular saying of Mao’s: “Those who fall behind will get beaten up!” The expression originated from a speech by Joseph Stalin, who stressed the importance of industrialization for the Soviet Union. For the Chinese public, largely unaware of its origins, it evokes the recent past, when a weak China was plundered by foreigners. When I was little, my mother often repeated the expression at home, distilling a century of national humiliation into a personal motivation for excellence. It was only later, in adulthood, that I began to question the underlying logic: Is a competition between nations meaningful? By what metric, and to what end?

After 11 years of designing particle detectors and searching for dark matter, I left physics at the end of 2020 for a position working on science policy and ethics. It was a very difficult decision, and I’m still reckoning with the sense of loss associated with the change. But with every passing day, news from my birth country and my adopted home reminds me of why I made the choice. Advancements in science and technology have created unprecedented wealth—as well as inequality and capacity to cause harm. In the fevered race for power and supremacy, concerns about ethics and sustainability are drowned out by jingoistic cheers. 

My mother has been trying to persuade me to move back to China. She tells me how Hefei has shed its rusty, blue-collar image to become a modern city. “It has a new subway system! Do you know how fast it is?” she says over the phone. The sincerity in her voice breaks my heart. 

I want to say that I do not care for fast trains or new buildings—I really don’t—but I also know that my mother does not care for these things either. Her pride in her country’s development is genuine. If there’s anything she loves more than her homeland, though, it’s her child. My mother wants me to come back not because of some lofty ideals of patriotism, though she believes in them; nor for my career advancement, though the Chinese government has been investing heavily in the fundamental sciences. My mother wants me to come back because she is afraid. 

My mother is afraid that the borders between the US and China will be closed again as they were during the pandemic, shut down by forces just as invisible as a virus and even more deadly. She fears for my safety in a foreign land that is in many ways increasingly hostile to my race and nationality. What my mother does not know, or refuses to accept, is that the homeland is not safe for me either. A state can command the world’s second-largest economy and a strong military, and still be too fragile to allow dissent. Sometimes, life as a Chinese person means following one’s conscience with no refuge in sight. 

At Li Hongzhang’s family temple on the outskirts of Hefei, there is an old yulan tree. Tall and fragrant, yulan was a favorite of royalty. Legend has it that this tree was a gift from the Japanese prime minister on Li’s 70th birthday. Li planted it himself. In less than a year, the two countries would be at war. The tree has outlived both men and the empires they served. It blossoms every year and occasionally bears fruit. It is a witness, and also a teacher. One day, when I’m able to go back to China and to Hefei, I hope to visit Li’s old residence.

I hope to be there in the spring, when the yulan blooms. Its flowers will be the purest white. Its petals will be thick and smooth. Its branches will lift into the sky. When the sun hits at just the right spot, its shadow will carry the shape of home. 

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Politburo meeting and study session; Signals for Third Plenum; Middle East leaders in Beijing

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May Politburo meeting - The May Politburo meeting follows on the symposium Xi held on his Hunan inspection tour about the central region and reviewed "Several Policy Measures to Accelerate the Rise of the Central Region in the New Era. It also reviewed "Regulations on Accountability for Preventing and Resolving Financial Risks (Trial)." Premier Li was in Seoul so did not attend. As the readout suggests, I think we are going to see an even harsher crackdown on local governments and the financial sector as policymakers continue to both grind through the massive debt problems and need to make examples to deter future bad behavior. I still think someone relatively senior has to be blamed for the stock market mess earlier this year, as former CSRC deputy chairman Yao Gang was for the 2015 crash.

Politburo study session on employment - Calls to “improve both the quality and quantity of jobs through specific pro-employment policies” but nothing specific, as …

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Studying regional low-carbon development: A case study of Sichuan Province in China

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation School of Business and Tourism, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China

Roles Data curation, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft

Roles Formal analysis, Supervision, Writing – original draft

Roles Data curation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Research Institute of Economics and Management, Southwest University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Roles Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation School of Economics and Trade, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

• Genjin Sun, 
• Rui Gao, 
• Ying Liu, 
• Yanxiu Liu, 

• Published: May 29, 2024
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

The unavoidable option for socially sustainable development is a low-carbon economy. One of the essential steps for China to attain high-quality development is reducing carbon emissions. It is necessary to realize low-carbon development in Sichuan, as it is not only an important economic zone but also an ecological protected area. The concurrent relationship among energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth was examined in this study using the Tapio decoupling indicator, and the factors affecting energy consumption and carbon emissions in Sichuan were broken down using the logarithmic mean Divisia indicator (LMDI). The findings demonstrate a fundamental relative decoupling relationship between Sichuan’s energy use and carbon emissions. Analysis of energy consumption and carbon emissions in Sichuan Province from 2005 to 2020 shows distinct patterns. From 2005 to 2012, in 2014, and from 2016 to 2020, the relationship between energy use and carbon emissions was relatively decoupled, with decoupling values ranging between 0 and 1. Absolute decoupling occurred in specific years: 2010, from 2013 to 2018, and in 2020. These periods are characterized by economic growth alongside reductions in carbon emissions. Factors affecting energy consumption and carbon emissions were consistently analyzed, showing similar impacts throughout the study periods. We find that population and economic growth are the main driving forces of these effects. The effects of energy intensity and industrial structure mainly play restraining roles, and the latter has a slightly weaker effect than the former.

Citation: Sun G, Gao R, Liu Y, Liu Y, Li C (2024) Studying regional low-carbon development: A case study of Sichuan Province in China. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0302733. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733

Editor: Mahdi Moudi, Chengdu University of Information Technology, CHINA

Received: November 9, 2023; Accepted: April 10, 2024; Published: May 29, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Sun et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data for this study is available at https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/workspace?goToPath=/openicpsr/200121&goToLevel=project .

Funding: This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Research Planning Program of China’s Ministry of Education (No.23YJA790070), awarded to GS; Li Bing Research Center (No.LBYJ2021-006), awarded to GS; Research Center of Tuojiang River Basin High-quality Development (No. TJGZL2021-14), awarded to GS; Chengdu Research Center for Integration into Dual - Circulation Development Pattern and Sichuan Research Center for Integration into Dual - Circulation Development Pattern(No. SXHY2023008), awarded to GS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

The greenhouse effect, significantly driven by human activities, has emerged as the principal contributor to global warming over the past century, with carbon dioxide emissions at the forefront [ 1 ]. This relentless warming trend poses a formidable challenge to the sustainable development of societies worldwide [ 2 , 3 ]. As main carriers of human activities, the cities are deviating from sustainable development goals under the effect of urban heat islands (UHIs) [ 4 ]. It makes sense to reduce temperatures, enhance biodiversity and sequester carbon by optimizing city planning and development strategies considering urban climate, especially expanding urban green spaces [ 5 , 6 ], but the fundamental measure is to reduce carbon emissions at the source. In response, nations globally have initiated national programs aimed at curbing carbon emissions. Amidst this backdrop, China, witnessing a surge in carbon emissions due to escalating energy consumption and an inefficient energy structure, has emerged as the world’s leading carbon emitter, accounting for 30.9% of global emissions in 2021 [ 7 , 8 ]. In a significant move, China announced its ambitions for achieving a "carbon peak" by 2030 and “carbon neutrality” by 2060, with a commitment to a gradual decline in carbon dioxide emissions post-2030. The strategic adjustment of its energy consumption structure and the reduction in energy consumption intensity underscore China’s dedication to fostering a low-carbon economy.

Sichuan Province is not only an ecological protected area but also an important economic zone located in southwest China (97°21′E-108°12E′, 26°03′N -34°19 N), with a total area of 486,00 km 2 Sichuan Province is located on the Sichuan-Yunnan ecological divide between the Tibetan Plateau and the Lesser Plateau, with greatly different landscapes and vastly complex terrain. It serves as a major center for the conservation of biodiversity worldwide in addition to being a key water supply area for the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and a key recharge area for the upper reaches of the Yellow River. It is a crucial element of the nation’s plan for environmental safety. Meanwhile, the economy of Sichuan Province has grown rapidly in recent decades, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Sichuan’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 was 5.39 trillion yuan, ranking sixth in China. However, energy consumption has been growing rapidly during the economic development process of Sichuan Province. Its average growth rate over the last five years has been approximately 2.96%. The total energy consumption in Sichuan Province will reach 230 million tonnes of standard coal in 2021. Of the total energy consumption, 25.9% will be coal combustion consumption, 17% will be oil fuel consumption, 16.7% will be natural gas consumption, and 40.4% will be primary electricity and other energy consumption (as shown in Fig 1 ). The province’s non-fossil energy consumption accounts for 39.5% of total energy consumption, and thus it more than 20 percentage points higher than the country as a whole, ranking first in China. These data show that Sichuan Province has been experiencing a high level of energy consumption and an irrational energy mix during the economic growth period. In terms of carbon emissions, Sichuan Province showed a fluctuating upward trend from 2005 to 2012, followed by a slowly declining period. However, it was still 78.9086 million tonnes by 2020 (as shown in Fig 2 ). Therefore, to support the growth of a low-carbon economy in Sichuan Province, it is of utmost importance to research the interactions between the use of energy, the release of carbon dioxide, and economic development. The findings of our study will provide useful inspiration for the development of low-carbon economies in ecologically protected areas around the world.

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Decoupling analysis is frequently used to examine the relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth and decompose the factors affecting carbon emissions [ 9 ], even though it was initially used to describe the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth [ 10 – 12 ]. In terms of the subject, some scholars have highlighted this topic with a certain country [ 13 – 16 ], or a certain region [ 17 – 19 ]. From the perspective of methodology, Tapio decoupled elasticity coefficient theory quantitatively analyses the situation where the pollution emissions growth rate changes as the economic growth rate changes, utilizing the decoupling factors proposed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) [ 20 , 21 ]. Meanwhile, index decomposition analysis (IDA), structural decomposition analysis (SDA), and production-theory decomposition analysis (PDA) are the main decomposition techniques for carbon emission components. LMDI is widely used in factor analysis and is regarded as a preferred IDA decomposition method [ 22 ]. The existing studies show that although there are many academic studies on the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth and on the distribution of factors affecting CO 2 emissions, the conclusions are not consistent due to different research topics or different research methods.

Research directions within the realm of environmental economics and sustainable development are diverse, unveiling the intricate interplay between economic activities and environmental outcomes. A pivotal focus among current research trajectories is the investigation of the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation, often contextualized within the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis [ 23 – 25 ]. This hypothesis posits an inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental pollutants and per capita income, suggesting that pollution levels increase with economic growth up to a certain threshold, beyond which they begin to decline. Through the application of econometric analyses, incorporating time-series, cross-sectional, and panel data, scholars assess the dynamics between economic development and various forms of environmental impacts. Sustainable energy transition emerges as another central theme, emphasizing the shift from fossil fuel-based energy systems to those relying on renewable sources and exhibiting lower carbon intensity. Research in this domain typically leverages scenario analysis and modelling techniques, such as the Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning (LEAP) system [ 26 , 27 ] or Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) [ 28 – 30 ], to explore future energy pathways and their implications for climate change mitigation and energy security. Concurrently, resource efficiency and the circular economy are increasingly garnering attention. Studies in this area apply methodologies like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) [ 31 , 32 ], Material Flow Analysis (MFA) [ 33 ], and Input-Output Analysis (IOA) [ 34 , 35 ] to comprehend the environmental impacts of products, services, and economic sectors throughout their entire life cycles. These methods aid in identifying opportunities for enhancing efficiency and implementing circular economy principles. Another significant research direction involves exploring the concept of decoupling, which refers to the capacity for an economy to grow without a corresponding increase in environmental pressure. Studies on decoupling utilize indicators such as the Tapio decoupling indicator to analyze the extent of economic growth relative to environmental degradation. This methodology is instrumental in evaluating the effectiveness of sustainable development policies.

However, these research endeavors are not without limitations. Firstly, many studies predominantly focus on the macro-level, with insufficient analysis at regional or provincial scales, overlooking inter-regional disparities. Existing research often emphasizes a single indicator or methodology, lacking attempts to comprehensively assess and analyze using a variety of tools and methods. Regarding strategies and measures proposed for effectively achieving a balanced and sustainable development between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth, further in-depth exploration and validation are necessary. Moreover, there is little research on the decoupling of energy use and carbon emissions from economic growth or, more specifically, on the decoupling of energy use and carbon emissions in Sichuan Province. Thus, our goal is to close this gap in the literature. The study contributes to the current work on the development of the regional low-carbon economy in three major aspects. To the best of our knowledge, this study sets precedence by analyzing the factors affecting energy consumption and carbon emissions and decoupling the connection between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth. The research field of regional low-carbon economic development will be expanded in this study. Second, this paper takes Sichuan Province as the research object. The special feature of Sichuan Province is that it is not only an important economic zone but also an ecological protected area. Many things are different from other regions in terms of balancing economic development and environmental protection. Therefore, our study enriches the case studies of regional sustainable development. Finally, as far as we know, this is the first study to find that the population and economic growth are the main driving forces for low-carbon economic development in Sichuan Province, and the effects of energy intensity and industrial structure mainly play restraining roles. The findings will not only offer a direction for Sichuan Province in terms of its pursuit of a low-carbon economy, but they will also provide a piece of advice for other environmentally sensitive emerging nations and regions. Besides, this study aims to delve into the concurrent relationships between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth, particularly focusing on the specific case of Sichuan Province in China. Based on the aforementioned analysis, targeted policy recommendations are proposed to promote harmonious development between the economy and the environment in Sichuan Province and beyond while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. It is hoped that this research will provide valuable insights and strategies for achieving sustainable development at both regional and global levels.

The remaining sections of this study are arranged as follows. Section 2 provides the methodology. The results of the decoupling analysis on the consumption of energy, emissions of carbon dioxide, economic growth, and the decomposition of factors are described in Section 3. We critically discuss the results and put forward policy recommendations and scope for future research in Section 4. Section 5 concluded our study.

In order to analyze the development of the regional low-carbon economy in Sichuan Province, the Tapio decoupling index is adapted to test the decoupling relationship between energy use, carbon emissions, and economic growth, and the LMDI is used to decompose the variables affecting energy consumption and carbon emissions. The former can visualize the degree of decoupling between energy use, carbon emissions, and economic growth, and the latter can analyze the main factors affecting energy consumption and carbon emissions in Sichuan Province, as well as the degree of influence of each factor. The methods are introduced as follows.

2.1 Tapio decoupling index

D E , Y and D C , Y are the elasticities of change in energy consumption and carbon emissions concerning GDP growth, that is, the change in energy consumption and carbon emissions per percentage point change in GDP. ΔE′, ΔE, and E are the rate of change, the amount of change and the initial value of energy consumption, respectively. ΔC′, ΔC, and C are the rate of change, the amount of change and the initial value of carbon emissions, respectively. ΔY′, ΔY, and Y are the rate of change, the amount of growth and the initial value of GDP, respectively.

The decoupling states of Tapio’s decoupling model can be categorized into eight categories: strong decoupling, weak decoupling, recessive decoupling, strong negative decoupling, expansive negative decoupling, weak negative decoupling, recessive Coupling, and expansive Coupling, as shown in Table 1 . Among them, strong decoupling is the most desirable state, and strong negative decoupling is the least desirable state.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733.t001

2.2 LMDI model construction

Decomposition analysis is an excellent way to visualize economic growth, and the LMDI is highly adaptable compared to other methods [ 36 ]. LMDI allows us to precisely quantify the role of the level of technology, industrial structure, inflation, and population growth in terms of economic growth over several years. The results can be used to summarize or confirm economic development patterns and provide guidance for future investment or reform policies. There are two main approaches to decomposition models: IDA (INDEX decomposition analysis) and SDA (structural decomposition analysis). The former is a progressive and improved version of the latter. The latter can be divided into two methods: the Laspeyres index decomposition method and the Divisia index decomposition method [ 37 ]. As one of the most frequently used carbon emission factor decomposition techniques, LMDI can produce a fair factor decomposition, and the findings do not include inexplicable residual terms. The number of decomposition factors mainly includes four-factor and five-factor decomposition. For example, Wang et al. (2005) used LMDI to decompose China’s carbon emissions into four factors: population, GDP per capita, energy intensity, and energy consumption structure [ 38 ]. Ma et al. (2008) decomposed the change in China’s carbon dioxide emissions into the effects of population, GDP per capita, carbon-free energy incorporation, biomass substitution, and fossil fuels [ 39 ]. The calculation formula for LMDI is given below.

According to the full decomposition model, the change in carbon emissions, (△C), can be differently decomposed into energy efficiency (intensity) impact (△I), industrial structure impact (△S), population size impact (△P) and economic growth impact (ΔGDP) from the base period “0” to the period “t”. Its calculation formula is as follows.

The decomposition of the influence factor on the right-hand side of the above equation can be expressed as follows.

2.3 Data sources

The information on population, GDP, total primary energy output, and total energy consumption used in this study is obtained from the Sichuan Statistical Yearbook. The primary industries are those related to farming, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishing; the secondary industries are those related to industry and construction; and the tertiary industries are those related to transportation, storage, postal services, wholesale, retail, lodging, and catering. The material balance technique is used in the computation of carbon dioxide emissions, and the data include information on the consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas. Because the energy consumption obtained in the statistical yearbook has been converted into standard coal data, it needs to be converted back into physical quantity. We use the conversion coefficient of standard coal published by the National Development and Reform Commission to calculate the physical quantity of various materials used in primary energy consumption. The carbon emission factors are calculated using information from the US Department of Energy (DOE), the statistical agency Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Japan Energy Research Institute (JERI), and the National Science Council Climate Project. The average values from these well-known institutions listed above are shown in Table 2 . This study did not use any kind of human participants or human data, which requires any kind of approval.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733.t002

3.1 Decoupling analysis

Fig 3 illustrates the decoupling of energy consumption, carbon footprint, and economic growth in Sichuan Province. Despite a weak decoupling, Sichuan Province’s energy consumption and economic growth exhibit overall strength. The decoupling value of energy consumption typically ranges between 0 and 0.8, signifying a weak decoupling state. However, in 2013 and 2015, it decreased to -0.6104 and -1.5752, respectively, indicating a strong decoupling state. This suggests that while energy consumption in Sichuan Province increased alongside GDP during this period, it did so at a slower rate than GDP growth, aligning the expansion of GDP with the decrease in energy consumption.

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The decoupling effect value of Sichuan Province’s carbon emissions fluctuates significantly, ranging from 1.2 to -4, with notable fluctuations. Specifically, carbon emissions in 2006–2008, 2010, 2012, and 2019 exhibited weak decoupling states, where carbon emissions increased alongside GDP growth but at a slower rate. In contrast, carbon emissions in 2011, 2013–2018, and 2020 demonstrated strong decoupling states, indicating a decrease in carbon emissions alongside GDP growth. The decoupling value in 2009 was 1.1104, reflecting expansive decoupling. It is important to highlight that the decoupling index for carbon emissions decreased to -3.559 in 2015.

3.2 Decomposition of factors affecting changes in energy consumption

According to the LMDI factor decomposition of energy consumption ( Fig 4 ), the average contributions of population size and economic growth are positive, indicating that population and economic growth are driving factors for the sustained growth of energy consumption demand. The effect of energy intensity is negative, suggesting that the decline in energy consumption intensity has slowed down with the growth of total energy consumption. The impact of industrial structure has been negative since 2011. From 2005 to 2010, the industrial structure had a positive driving effect on energy consumption, it shifted to a negative inhibitory effect after 2011.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733.g004

3.3 Decomposition of factors affecting changes in carbon emissions

Fig 5 presents the effect values of energy intensity, industrial structure, population size, and economic growth on carbon emission changes in Sichuan Province. Overall, economic growth and population size in Sichuan Province from 2005 to 2020 have shown positive impacts, indicating their significant roles in the development of carbon emissions. Energy intensity consistently exhibits a negative effect, acting as a suppressor in carbon emission growth. The influence of industrial structure has been relatively minimal, playing a weak role in carbon emission changes.

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4. Discussions

To gain more experience in promoting low-carbon economic development in the ecologically protected areas of developing countries, we will review and discuss the empirical results in this section.

4.1 Decoupling of energy consumption and influencing factors of energy consumption change

Overall, energy consumption and carbon emissions in Sichuan Province exhibit a mix of weak and strong decoupling from economic growth, showcasing a favorable trend. The study based on LMDI results reveals a consistent increase in energy demand driven by population and economic growth in Sichuan Province from 2005 to 2020. The effects of energy intensity and industrial structure have predominantly been negative until 2011, impeding the overall growth of energy consumption. However, post-2011, the industrial structure has played a significant role in boosting energy demand. These findings align with earlier research [ 40 ], indicating that the energy landscape in Sichuan Province is evolving under governmental and other influences.

These empirical findings are closely tied to Sichuan’s enhanced policy framework for energy consumption and the stringent implementation of energy conservation plans during the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plans. In terms of primary energy production, the share of coal is decreasing while direct electricity and natural gas percentages in clean energy are rising. Crude oil shares remain stable at 0.1% to 0.2%. This shift is attributed to the aggressive development of Sichuan’s hydropower sector during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, culminating in peak installed capacity exceeding 12 million kilowatts in 2013. Sichuan Province leads in China with an installed hydropower capacity of 89.04 million KW by the end of 2021. The growth rates of natural gas consumption, primary electricity, and other clean energy sources surpass those of coal, reflecting a growing market for renewable energy and changing consumer preferences toward clean and low-carbon energy sources. Despite advancements in energy consumption and production, the challenge of rising energy demand persists.

In Sichuan Province, population dynamics primarily exert a positive driving force on carbon emissions, albeit at a reduced level in recent years. Demographic factors interact with economic, resource, and environmental factors, with urban expansion and infrastructure development contributing to increased energy consumption [ 41 ]. While the implementation of new fertility policies has commenced, strengthening the positive impact of population size on energy consumption remains a challenge. The slowdown in population growth post-implementation of family planning policies has effectively managed the population’s impact on energy consumption.

Fig 2 illustrates significant GDP growth in Sichuan Province, accompanied by a general upward trend in total energy consumption. Despite a decline in total energy consumption during 2012–2016, energy consumption notably increased from 2005 to 2012. While energy consumption fluctuated in subsequent years, with decreases in 2013 and 2015, the pattern aligns with shifts in non-clean energy consumption and efforts towards energy conservation, emission reduction, and a carbon-neutral economy. This underscores the correlation between economic expansion and energy utilization.

The average effect of industrial structure on carbon emissions resulting from energy consumption in Sichuan Province is -13.25%. Initially a positive driver of energy consumption from 2005 to 2010, the impact of industrial structures transitioned to an inhibitory effect after 2011. This trend mirrors Sichuan’s industrial evolution, where the proportion of secondary industry initially rises before declining, leading to increased energy consumption per unit of GDP [ 42 ]. Similar conclusions have been drawn in previous studies [ 43 ], highlighting the evolving dynamics of industrial structure and its impact on energy consumption in the region.

Combining energy flows by sector and type for four time spans: 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020, as shown in Figs 6 – 9 . Based on these four graphs, it can be found that for the secondary sector in Sichuan Province, coal and electricity account for the largest share of energy consumption. The tertiary sector, including transport, storage, postal, wholesale, retail, accommodation, and tertiary industries, has a relatively fragmented primary energy consumption. The transport, storage, and postal sectors consume more oil due to the long distances involved in transport. In contrast, the household sector consumes mainly electricity. Among the three main sectors, the primary sector, mainly agriculture, forestry, and fishery, consumes less energy. The secondary sector, especially manufacturing and construction, generally suffers from overcapacity and very aggregated energy consumption, with significantly higher energy consumption than the other sectors. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, supply-side structural reform strongly contributed to the optimization and modernization of the industrial structure, increasing the role of industrial restructuring in curbing the growth of excessive energy consumption. Due to the dependence of the secondary sector on energy consumption, reducing overall energy consumption will require further restructuring of the secondary sector and a significant reduction in energy demand from traditionally energy-intensive industries. Overall, there were no significant changes in energy flows across sectors.

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As an indicator of energy consumption efficiency, energy consumption intensity can reflect the technical level to a certain extent [ 44 ]. The energy consumption intensity of Sichuan Province has maintained a downward trend from 2005–2020, from 1.6421 to 0.4359, and this trend is closely related to the consistent adherence to the promotion and application of low-carbon technologies [ 45 ]. Since 2020, energy consumption has increased in addition to the conventional statistics of coal, electricity, oil, and natural gas. Other types of energy are used for industrial and residential consumption in Sichuan Province, so the energy structure and variety have been optimized. In recent years, Sichuan Province has introduced several policies, such as the “Work Plan for Controlling Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Sichuan Province” and the “Action Plan for Energy Saving and Low Carbon Development in Sichuan Province (2014–2015)”, to encourage more research and development on low carbon technologies. Meanwhile, particular actions on energy saving and emission reduction technologies are vigorously carried out to promote green development.

To establish a “National Clean Energy Demonstration Province,” Sichuan Province should propose more reasonable planning for the energy sector to improve the efficiency of conventional energy consumption effectively. Some new types of energy technology should be accelerated, and a large amount of clean energy has been put into enterprise production and residents’ lives [ 46 ].

4.2 Decoupling of carbon emissions and influencing factors of carbon emissions

Based on carbon emissions and economic growth estimates, the decoupling effect varies widely between 1.2 and 4 in Sichuan. An examination of the decoupling of carbon emissions and economic growth in Sichuan Province and the factors influencing it shows a decoupling value of 1.1104 in 2009, indicating a strong correlation with economic growth. The growth rate of CO 2 emissions was higher than that of GDP, mainly due to the high coal consumption during these years. The higher the coal consumption is, the higher the energy consumption. Inefficient coal burning led to high emissions of carbon dioxide, soot, and dust, resulting in an increase of 10.99 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in Sichuan.

Sichuan Province has responded positively to the “double decarbonization” objective in terms of policy during recent years [ 47 ]. They optimally tried their best to vigorously promote energy savings, reduce energy consumption, and increase carbon sinks. Meanwhile, low-carbon development is promoted through industrial systems, production methods, lifestyles, and consumption patterns.

As seen from the carbon emissions of the three fossil energy sources in Sichuan Province ( Fig 10 ), raw coal carbon emissions dominate the total fossil energy emissions, and controlling coal consumption has always been the key to curbing the intensity of carbon emissions [ 48 ]. However, carbon emissions from crude oil and natural gas consumption in Sichuan Province are gradually increasing. Specifically, carbon emissions from raw coal, crude oil, and natural gas fluctuated from 2005 to 2010, with total carbon emissions rising and carbon intensity exceeding 0.5 tons per 10000 yuan. An analysis of the reasons behind this reveals that the period 2006–2010 was the period of the 11th Five-Year Plan, a critical period for building a moderately prosperous society, during which Sichuan Province focused on economic development and vigorously implemented the strategy of strengthening the province through industry, resulting in carbon emissions from significant fossil energy sources not being reasonably controlled. During 2012–2020, carbon emissions from raw coal gradually decreased from 70,042,787 tonnes in 2012 to 42,768,403 tonnes in 2020 due to the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans. Sichuan Province has continued to promote energy conservation and emission reduction and actively built a regional carbon emission reduction mechanism, thus leading to a planned regulation of coal consumption and a slow decline in carbon emissions from raw coal. At the same time, the carbon emission intensity has dropped to below 0.5 tons per 10,000 Yuan and has shown a continuous downward trend. However, given the acceleration of economic development, Sichuan Province’s energy consumption demand will not drop significantly shortly, and the energy conservation and emission reduction tests are still severe. From the perspective of the decomposition factors, it is evident that the driving effects of economic growth and population have significantly weakened after 2011, although economic growth and population have a positive impact on the development of carbon emissions. During the process, the effect of economic growth and population increased from 2083.7438 and 2193.5464 in 2011 to 254.2551 and 352.0754 in 2020, respectively. This is a positive outcome of Sichuan Province’s response to national efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions and promote a low-carbon consumption pattern, production, and lifestyle. Additionally, with the further implementation of the "Chengdu-Chongqing twin-city economic circle" strategy, Sichuan Province will gradually transform and upgrade its economic development, adhere to the low-carbon development path, and continuously improve the quality of its economic development [ 49 ]. It is noteworthy that the economic growth and population size effect values increased again in 2017–2018, most likely due to the rapid economic growth rate and the lack of reasonable limits on carbon emissions in economic development. In terms of energy efficiency, the effect of energy efficiency remains negative throughout the statistical years. The energy efficiency effect had a minimum value of -1927.6002 in 2013, indicating that energy efficiency had the most inhibiting impact on carbon emission growth in 2013. Subsequently, the energy efficiency effect increased between 2014 and 2020, resulting in a decrease in the inhibiting effect of energy efficiency on carbon emissions growth, further highlighting the existing issues in recent years regarding energy use in Sichuan Province and the necessity to enhance the conversion and efficiency of energy use in Sichuan [ 50 ]. With a few exceptions, the industrial structure impact has a negative value from 2005 to 2020, largely preventing Sichuan Province’s carbon emissions from increasing. The industrial structure effect particularly exhibited positive values in the early years of 2005–2010 and 2013, indicating that the industrial structure played a role in promoting the rise of greenhouse gases during this period. The secondary sector accounted for the majority of the province’s total energy consumption during this period, while the primary and tertiary sectors accounted for a smaller percentage. This aligns with the findings of the national sample [ 51 ]. The industrial structure of Sichuan Province has a weak inhibitory influence on the rise of carbon emissions, as evidenced by the negative effect of industrial structure in the remaining years, with effect values ranging between -213 and -31.

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4.3 Policy implications

In summary, in the context of Sichuan Province, the empirical findings reveal a complex relationship between energy use, carbon dioxide emissions, and economic growth. The findings underscore the effectiveness of "low carbon" strategies implemented since 2011 and the potential of industrial structure adjustments to limit the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. Theoretically, this study enriches the research content of regional economics by illustrating the intricate and dynamic relationship between economic growth, energy consumption, and carbon emissions through a detailed case study of Sichuan Province. In addition, this study contributes to an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms behind energy efficiency and industrial structure optimization, providing valuable insights for formulating sustainable development policies. More specifically. The following four recommendations are made for the future development of Sichuan Province, considering the “peak carbon” and “carbon neutral” targets and the requirements for low-carbon development in Sichuan Province.

First, the government should improve the top-level design further and effectively plan for energy conservation and emission reduction. Sichuan Province should dovetail with the national development strategy, listen to different opinions from various parties, formulate a scientific energy conservation and emission reduction plan, and establish an energy planning supervision system to ensure the plan’s implementation.

Second, Sichuan Province can fully play a role in the incentives and constraints of finance and taxation. Fiscal subsidies or tax concessions should be given to enterprises that use recycled and alternative resources, meet energy-saving and emission reduction targets, or carry out energy-saving renovations; heavy taxes should be levied on high energy-consuming and high-polluting industries to achieve a reverse reduction in production costs and guide enterprises to follow the path of a low-carbon economy.

Third, the government should deepen the monitoring and accountability mechanism while implementing supervision and inspection of energy-saving and emission-reduction work. Establish a long-term effective monitoring mechanism, investigate and publish the list of illegal units to ensure the effective implementation of emission reduction laws and regulations.

Finally, Sichuan Province should not only establish a platform for sharing information and technology on energy conservation but also rely on existing innovation platforms such as the Chengdu-Chongqing Comprehensive Science Centre and the Western (Chengdu) Science City to speed up vital standard technologies and steadily improve energy processing and energy use efficiency.

4.4 Scope for future research

Although this study has conducted an in-depth analysis of the relationship between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth in Sichuan Province using the Tapio decoupling index and the LMDI decomposition method, there are certain limitations to the research. Firstly, the temporal and geographical scope of the study restricts its universality and currency. Secondly, while the methodologies employed are effective, they have inherent limitations that may not fully reveal the more complex dynamics of economic, social, and technological changes. Therefore, future research needs to expand the temporal and spatial scope, employ more diverse methodologies, and pay closer attention to the role of policy and technological progress to more comprehensively understand and explain the driving factors behind energy consumption and carbon emissions.

5. Conclusions

This study delves into the necessity of a low-carbon economy for sustainable social development, with a particular focus on Sichuan Province in China. By utilizing Tapio decoupling indicators and LMDI analysis, the research reveals a relative decoupling relationship between economic growth and energy consumption as well as carbon emissions in Sichuan Province. In Sichuan Province, from 2013 to 2018, there was a decoupling trend observed between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth, with slower growth in energy use and carbon emissions having a lesser impact on the overall decoupling process. The key decoupling factors influencing the yearly changes in energy consumption in Sichuan Province are population and economic growth, while industrial structure and energy intensity act as crucial limiting factors. The decline in energy intensity negatively affects total energy consumption growth, whereas population and economic growth positively drive stable energy demand growth. Changes in carbon dioxide emissions drivers in Sichuan Province have been analyzed, with economic growth and population abundance playing positive roles, and energy intensity acting as a significant limiting factor. Industrial structure has shown a moderating effect on carbon emissions growth, particularly after 2011, indicating the impact of modernization and optimization efforts on curbing emissions growth. The paper emphasizes the importance of balancing economic growth with carbon emissions reduction and puts forward targeted policy recommendations to promote coordinated development between the economy and the environment. While the study has made contributions, it also has limitations, such as the need for more in-depth regional analysis and a focus on comprehensive evaluation methods. Future research directions could explore further strategies to achieve sustainable development and address the gaps in understanding the dynamics of decoupling between energy consumption, carbon emissions, and economic growth.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302733.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their greatest thanks to the editor and anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. However, the responsibility for the views expressed as well as any errors or omissions is borne by ours.

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Chinese New Model of Modernization

• First Online: 12 February 2023

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• Yu Jiang 2  

Part of the book series: Understanding China ((UNCHI))

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On the evening of July 6, 2021, at a summit of leaders of more than 500 political parties and political organizations from over 160 countries, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, delivered a keynote address, in which he stated that the Communist Party of China will unite and lead the Chinese people in pressing ahead with Chinese-style modernization to make new contributions to humanity’s search for ways to modernize.

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Jiang, Y. (2023). Chinese New Model of Modernization. In: A New World is Possible . Understanding China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8918-6_7

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