What is China playing at on climate change? That may be the most important question in the world right now, thanks alone to its status as the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gasses. But what Beijing is – or is not – prepared to do will also determine whether the rest of the world can reach a deal on combating global warming that is worth the paper it's written on.
So it's hardly surprising that reading the Chinese approach has become the latterday equivalent of cold war Kremlinology. Britain alone has more than 20 diplomats in Beijing devoted to monitoring and nudging the Chinese position ahead of December's United Nations Copenhagen summit. The United States has twice as many.
A flying visit to Beijing (3.9 tonnes of CO2 to offset, before you ask) does not fill you with optimism about the prospects for a deal. For some months now, the mood music from China has been distinctly upbeat: a massive renewable energy drive that could see it surpass Europe's challenging targets for clean power by 2020, a climate change resolution passed for the first time by the country's top legislative body, the beginnings of a public debate about when Chinese emissions should peak and begin to fall. Beijing even retained London PR firm Freuds to try to polish its image on the issue.
But at a conference on reporting climate change last week, senior Chinese scientists and negotiators were in an altogether less emollient mood. The official Chinese position is snappily summarised as "shared burden, differentiated responsibilities", which roughly translates as: We're all in the same boat but it's your fault that it's taking on water, so you'd better do most of the baling.
And both publicly and privately, Chinese officials seemed at pains to emphasise just how differentiated those responsibilities should be. "The developed countries have the money, they have the technology and they think it's an important issue," one told me. "So why don't they do something about it?"
As the Guardian reports today, a leading government adviser has sounded another disconcerting note. China will not sacrifice its economic growth, he warned, to prevent the world from warming by more than 2C, the threshold beyond which scientists warn we could face disastrous effects.
European diplomats say they have noticed a hardening of the Chinese position during the summer. "In the past they used to refer to rich countries cutting their emissions by between 25% and 40% [by 2020]," said one. "Now they only talk about 40%." Some speculate that it is little more than pre-summit gamesmanship, designed to increase pressure on developed countries desperate for a deal. But it may also reflect a deeper ambivalence about the issue within the Chinese leadership, the diplomat suggested. "They are caught between a fairly recent understanding that climate change is real, and going to do them real damage, and the competing idea that they don't fully believe that it's possible for industrial economies to grow without producing lots of carbon."
Understanding China's approach to climate change involves negotiating a number of apparent contradictions. The country that insists it can only begin to tackle its emissions with the help of western technology and cash is the same one that is spending billions on an ambitious space programme, an industrial behemoth intensely proud of its technological prowess. Meanwhile it is, as my colleague Jonathan Watts puts it, on course to become "both a green superpower and a black superpower" – simultaneously the world's green energy giant and its carbon villain.
One western expert who advises the Chinese on climate policy says the messages from Beijing may not be as contradictory as they seem. China's talk of decarbonising is genuine, he says. "They are bloody serious about this. Their planning is more advanced than anywhere in the world." But at the same time, Beijing is determined to make the rich countries cut deeper and hand over more technology and cash to developing nations.
Some of this may have more to do with strategic powerbroking than climate change. According to the senior diplomat, China's aim is to emerge from Copenhagen as the protective uncle that brings home the bacon for the developing nations – which just happen to have a lot of the resources that China needs to fuel its continued economic growth. But there are less calculating reasons why most Chinese do not consider CO2 emissions the burning (sorry) issue we do – they are more worried about the noxious pollutants they face every day. At the Beijing conference a Chinese journalist pointed out that there were 20,000 chemical plants along the course of the Yangtzee river. A year or so ago I asked a leading Chinese environmentalist why he was not making more noise about greenhouse gas emissions. "Because I'm more concerned about whether my son is going to be able to breathe in the morning," he replied.
No one is expecting Beijing's negotiators to undergo a Damascene conversion during the late nights of cajoling and compromise in Copenhagen. Instead, it is hoped that China will make a unilateral move in the run-up to the summit, probably spelling out targets to cut its carbon intensity (the amount of greenhouse gases produced per unit of GDP, rather than the total emissions) under its next five-year plan. This would theoretically allow China to continue to enjoy the economic growth it maintains it is entitled to, while beginning to move in the right direction.
Then the hard wrangling will switch to the question of how binding any such commitments are: too strong and Beijing will balk at them, too weak and the deal will look toothless in Washington, London and Berlin.
What does all this mean for those of us trying to decide whether to do our own humble bit to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, as the 10:10 campaign urges, for instance? The relentless rise of Chinese emissions is often cited as a reason why small-scale unilateral efforts, or even large-scale ones in small countries like Britain, are pointless. If the new power plants that China is building between now and 2020 alone will produce about 25bn tonnes of carbon over their lifetime, what is the point of me saving one tonne by not flying to Málaga on holiday?
The answer is that small signals can matter, even to very big countries. Again and again last week I heard Chinese officials bemoan the failure of the west to lead by example on tackling emissions. There had been no shortage of targets, they complained, but precious little action. After one session with a group of Chinese science journalists, one young reporter approached me looking quite angry. How could westerners tell Chinese people that they would have to make sacrifices in future to tackle climate change? "And how are you getting to the airport – by taxi or on the Airport Express?"