Western media called it “Eco-Authoritarian!”
The rabidly neo-liberal, anti-China UK-based publication, The Economist, calls China’s amazing efforts to restore the ecological health of the mighty Yangtze River “eco-authoritarian”. This is a term whose entire function is to make successful environmental protection sound sinister.
The entire approach is an examplar of the way most Western media analysis is so enmeshed in ideological rigidity that is incapable of accepting anything done by China as successful, or good, even when the facts are unassailable.
Following are 2 excellent responses to The Economist by
Carlos Martinez (1) from the UK; and
Mencius Koay (2) from Malaysia.
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(1) Carlos Martinez: The Economist reports a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing 7 decades of decline.
A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. This is not Chinese state media talking; it comes from a study by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.
How was it done? A ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin. Thousands of chemical factories closed or relocated. Forests planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.
And then, inevitably, the pivot. China’s approach is “eco-authoritarian”, we learn, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, and “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. The Economist has coined a term whose entire function is to make successful environmental protection sound sinister.
China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen, who wanted to carry on fishing, and to environmentalists, who want fewer dams. So presumably The Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, and a species on the brink of extinction?
The Economist article notes that the fishermen who lost their jobs were given compensation and retraining.
The article is an example of the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost? China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost? China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost?
The real cost is, it seems, to Western hegemony. __________________________________________
(2) Mencius Koay:Ten years. That’s how long China shut down fishing on the Yangtze. Ten years sounds like forever until you realize the river actually needed every bit of it.
Strip the label off though and look at what happened – the fish came back. Not a little. A lot. Species nobody had logged in surveys for years showed up again. The finless porpoise – one of the more fragile things left in that river, is doing better than it has in ages. You can’t fake that with a slogan. Fish don’t read propaganda. They just show up, or they don’t.
Here’s what The Economist skips over, conveniently. You don’t ban fishing on the third-longest river on earth without wrecking somebody’s life. Over 100,000 people lost the only work they’d ever known. Not a footnote. A whole life, rearranged, no warning.
So what happened to them? By last September every fisherman able and willing to work had a new job. All 142,000. Every single one. Nobody left standing on the bank. And on top of that, 220,000 of the older ones got folded into a pension, because you can’t just tell a sixty-year-old to go learn a trade overnight.
Call that whatever you want. I’d call it planning. Boring, unglamorous planning – the kind that actually looks after people instead of just talking about looking after people.
Maybe that’s the story The Economist really doesn’t want told. Mocking a policy with a clever word is easy. Admitting the “authoritarian” country did the slow, thankless work of fixing a river AND feeding the people it displaced… that’s harder.
Ten years on. The river’s breathing again. The fishermen are working again.
Sources:
(1) Carlos Martinez, July 31, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/carlosmartinez1/posts/pfbid0KbPY8wv2BJSmHkTHof9CMsU8PnrTe9oNsj1PxWH2wiYhAPoRQ93aZKwfBKZd86vBl
(2) Mencius Koay on Facebook, Aug 4, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/mencius.koay/posts/pfbid0pcyMTGufvW6zYD9emr1CoGHkdVTRTNXqaZDPc6kPD6zya1x2HVWi3jX6JL32qUTYl
