Will China be the first to initiate climate engineering?

Over the last 30 years, China has industrialized more rapidly than any other society in history and become the world's largest emitter of CO 2 . This has demonstrated unprecedented ability to change the socioeconomic landscape, produced great wealth, and led to some catastrophic environmental damage. This is the background that has motivated several authors to postulate that China would initiate geoengineering using solar radiation management. But will China be the first to pioneer climate engineering? The answer, we argue here, is likely to be “no!” We reach this conclusion from an analysis of the historic philosophical tradition that informs the Chinese world view, China's experience of mega‐engineering projects both ancient and modern, and the policies implemented over the last 60 years. The debate on geoengineering has to‐date been almost exclusively Euro‐American, but China has mega‐engineering experience, huge resources, and a radically different world‐view that needs to be acknowledged. Furthermore we contend that these experiences can be useful internationally in helping to frame the debate on climate mitigation from the perspective of the earth as shared, multiuse and finite.