Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu: Why Sino-European Collaboration on Eco City Development Suffers from European Misinterpretations of “Good Governance”

de Jong, W.M.; Stout, H.; Sun, L.

doi:10.3390/su9020151

Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu

Title

Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu: Why Sino-European Collaboration on Eco City Development Suffers from European Misinterpretations of “Good Governance”

Author

de Jong, W.M. (TU Delft Organisation & Governance; Fudan University; Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam)
Stout, H. (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam)
Sun, L. (University of Leeds)

Date

2017

Abstract

China faces a number of impressive challenges in dealing with climate change: rising energy use, growing emission levels of greenhouse gases, dangerous levels of air pollution over cities and low resilience against flood and drought. Sustainable urbanization has been adopted as a keyword in handling these challenges. The Chinese central government has undertaken a variety of measures, including the launch of large Sino-European programs to learn from ‘developed nations’. In the wake of these partnerships, a great variety of cross-national and cross-city agreements were signed. Sino-European cooperation does not often run as smoothly as initially hoped because of diverging interests, cultural misunderstandings and practical limitations. In the background, a mismatch in normative conceptions Chinese and European participants have of ‘good governance’ plays a role. In this contribution, insights taken from Montesquieu’s ‘The Spirit of Laws’ regarding checks and balances and trias politica (updated to ‘sextas politica’ for the 21st century) are used to comprehend how the exertion of power is distributed and expected to be distributed differently in Chinese than in European administrative traditions. The article will end with conclusions on how European misconceptions of Chinese governance complicate Sino-European collaboration in sustainable urbanization policies.

Subject

sustainable urbanization
Sino-European collaboration
Montesquieu
checks and balances
sextas politica
OA-Fund TU Delft

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9c9a2153-0f21-4aaf-bcb4-e2a137723486

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3390/su9020151

ISSN

2071-1050

Source

Sustainability, 9 (2)

Part of collection

Institutional Repository