In China, a Push for Cleaner Air

China’s State Council announced an ambitious package on Friday of 10 measures to combat air pollution. On Monday, Jun Ma, chief economist for greater China at Deutsche Bank and the author of the June 9 report “Big Bang Measures to Fight Air Pollution,” wrote in a note:

It is the most aggressive policy effort to address air quality issues in China’s history. Within these 10 broad measures, there are nearly 20 more specific actions. We believe these measures represent the beginning, rather than the full package, of China’s anti-air pollution campaign. Its sectoral implications will include a reduction in coal consumption growth; faster growth of clean energies such as gas, solar, wind and nuclear; faster growth in the adoption of environment-related technologies; faster growth of public transportation; and a faster reduction in polluting and technologically outdated capacities in the steel, cement, aluminum and glass sectors.

Air pollution is a major problem in China (remember the January “airpocalypse”?) and steps to alleviate the problem are vital to the government’s stated goals of building a “beautiful China” and improving people’s welfare. Implementation in China, however, tends to lag behind lofty policy pronouncements, and a recent academic study found that investment in environmental projects lowers mayors’ career prospects.

Still, Vance Wagner, an American clean transportation engineer with long experience in China, found reason to be optimistic about these new measures. He argues that the language in the official Chinese announcement of the new measures “indicates for the first time that local leaders in China will be on the hook not just for vague, gameable targets like total emissions reductions, but actual improvements in measured ambient air quality.”

Any efforts to address one of China’s environmental crises is welcome but progress will come over decades, even with aggressive implementation.

The same State Council meeting also promised support for China’s solar industry through easier financing and policies to increase demand for electricity generated from solar. The industry is one of many struggling with significant overcapacity and it now faces a possible trade war with Europe.

Perhaps the most concrete announcement from the Sunnylands summit meeting between President Obama and President Xi Jinping was an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by committing to phase out the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons.

But whatever good will generated at the summit meeting might have been quickly overshadowed by Edward J. Snowden.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures of the National Security Agency’s cyberactivities and his flight to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China have been a boon for Beijing. Official media is starting to have a bit of a field day with his revelations.

A Xinhua columnist wrote that as a whistle-blower he was “welcome in China” in an online article accompanied by a cartoon of a rat dressed as the Statue of Liberty peeking into a computer covered by a Chinese flag. Another cartoon, this one in The China Daily, showed the Statue of Liberty with the shadow of a spy with eavesdropping equipment.

What is more serious, the official People’s Daily on Monday published a commentary on Mr. Snowden’s leaks under a pseudonym frequently used to express the paper’s foreign policy views. The author wrote that Mr. Snowden had helped to expose American hypocrisy and that America’s “exceptionalism is an impediment to the transformation of international relations.”

The effect on American business in China from Mr. Snowden’s actions are unclear. Over the years, there have been occasional discussions in Chinese media about the risks to national security from a reliance on United States software, networking and telecommunications hardware.

Just as Huawei is now effectively blocked from selling its networking equipment in the United States, we should not be surprised to see more aggressive moves from Beijing to shut out American firms like Cisco Systems, which one Chinese news report on Monday noted had significant market share in core parts of Chinese networks.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures may also explain why certain parts of the United States government have been so concerned about Huawei; they fear the Chinese government could use Huawei to do what the N.S.A. already does. Protests from Washington will be much harder to take seriously now if American technology firms start getting “Huawei’d” in Beijing on national security grounds.

Accusations that Mr. Snowden may be a Chinese spy are beginning in Washington. The former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News that Mr. Snowden was a traitor and possibly a spy. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, told MSNBC that he suspected Mr. Snowden could be “in cahoots with the Chinese government” because, among other reasons, he studied Chinese. This is clearly a serious case, but we should hope it does not lead to “Red Scare 2.0” on Capitol Hill.

To Washington, Mr. Snowden may be an enemy of the state, and to civil libertarians, he may be a hero. To Beijing, he is at least a significant propaganda prize, if not much more.