2016中国焦点征文大赛结果（下）

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The 2016 China Focus Essay Contest winners are Sara Lee from UC Berkeley and Angela Luh from UCSD. Their excellent essays answered the question, “What was the biggest missed opportunity for U.S.-China cooperation in the past two decades?” China Focus partnered with the UC-Fudan Center on Contemporary China to offer each winner $1000! Congratulations to our 2016 winners! The 2017 essay contest will open in March.

Below is Angela Luh's essay. She holds a BA in international politics and economics from UC San Diego.

Filling the Investment Gap for US-China Climate Change Cooperation

Recent years have seen a period of increasing tensions between the US and China. Security conflicts like the South China Sea and trade issues like the Transpacific Partnership have only intensified and remain largely unresolved. The highly anticipated Xi-Obama summit in September 2015, the first state visit by the Chinese president, was a symbolic gesture at best, with election-related anti-China sentiments looming in the backdrop.

In the sea of diplomatic frictions that have dampened US-China relations, climate and environmental policy has emerged as a focal point of cooperation. Despite domestic controversy surrounding climate change, particularly in the US, climate policy now symbolizes one of the few areas of progress on the US-China front.

The Paris Accord in December 2015 symbolizes this cooperation. The first-ever international agreement to lower greenhouse gases was signed by 195 nations, chief among them the US and China. Desperate for some common ground, the US and China used it as an icon of bilateral success.

However, colossal promises – like keeping global warming below 2°C – come with colossal gaps to fill. For China this means, by one calculation, a shortage of $6.7 trillion to meet their Paris goals by 2030. For the US, it means overcoming an indeterminate stay on the Clean Power Plan and backlash from the most powerful industries in the US economy. In other words, both countries urgently need ways to finance that handshake in Paris. Interestingly enough, the opportunity has been there for over a decade.
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