‘China is beautiful’: What Trump saw — and what Beijing is building

Amid discussions on trade and tariffs during his high-stakes visit to Beijing in May 2026, US President Donald Trump offered a striking observation. Standing before the ancient architecture of the Temple of Heaven, he remarked: “China is beautiful.” While his praise was directed at the immediate grandeur of the site, the sentiment struck a chord with a nation currently in the green transformation called the Beautiful China initiative. 

At the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress annual session in 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to build a beautiful China where the skies are bluer, the land is greener, and the waters are clearer. The Beautiful China policy is not merely a slogan for aesthetic improvement — it is a foundational national strategy aimed at fundamentally modernising the country’s ecological environment by 2035. 

To change the image of prioritising development agencies while marginalising environmental departments in domestic politics, the top leadership in March 2018 restructured the Ministry of Environmental Protection into a new Ministry of Ecological Environment, which took power from the National Development and Reform Commission on issues like climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Chinese government has recently unveiled rigorous new measures to hold provincial-level leaders accountable for this vision. This policy represents a sophisticated shift in the Chinese ethos — one where the relentless pursuit of GDP is being reconciled with aesthetic and environmental criteria in the name of “Beautiful China” and “ecological civilisation” (生态文明). 

‘Make China beautiful, not just rich’ 

Xi’s directive to officials — to make China beautiful, not just rich — is rooted in his core philosophy that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets”. This represents a profound shift from viewing environmental protection as an expensive luxury to recognising it as a prerequisite for high-quality, sustainable development. 

For decades, China’s economic miracle was fuelled by heavy industry and extractive processes that left deep scars on the landscape. Towns in provinces like Shanxi and Shaanxi were defined by the polluting mining economy, leaving behind a landscape of pockmarked hills and toxic tailing ponds.

Datong city in northern Shanxi province was once infamous as China’s “coal capital”. Over the last decade, the local government clamped down on urban coal pollution and aggressively restored the Datong Ancient City. Concurrently, an abandoned, industrial-era coal mine was retrofitted into a coal-themed national park. Instead of extracting fuel, visitors now wear miners’ helmets and ride vintage mine carts 150 metres underground to learn about geological history, turning a toxic industrial scar into an educational tourism revenue driver.

The city of Shenmu in Yulin, Shaanxi province, is home to some of the largest coal mines in China. Under the Beautiful China directives, mining companies were mandated to fund the reclamation of the very land they disrupted. Local people built terraced orchards on gentle slopes, planted sand-fixing shrubs on steep ravine edges, and constructed silt dams at the base of valleys. This multi-layered approach has forced the desert to retreat hundreds of kilometres northward, transforming a heavily industrial, dust-choked mining zone into an area boasting over 60% vegetation coverage.

Today, policymakers increasingly view environmental protection as a prerequisite for, rather than an obstacle to, high-quality development. The new key performance indicator (KPI) includes a 100-point scoring system to grade provincial governments. Those who fail to meet targets in air, water and soil quality face “rectification” and public accountability. This institutionalised pressure ensures that the Beautiful China initiative is not a secondary concern but a central pillar of governance. 

Tourism and the service trade deficit

While the environmental perspective is paramount, the Beautiful China policy is also a shrewd economic strategy. China is increasingly looking towards its service sector, particularly tourism, to balance its service trade accounts. Despite its record-breaking merchandise trade surplus, China still has a substantial services trade deficit, which stood at 828.7 billion RMB (US$121.9 billion) in 2025.

Previously, China faced a significant service trade deficit as Chinese tourists spent billions abroad. By restoring its own natural beauty and cultural heritage sites, China aims to reverse this trend. Thanks to the influx of foreign tourists, China’s service export in tourism jumped 49.5% in 2025, helping to shrink the service trade deficit by large margins. In 2025, China’s service trade deficit dropped about 30% from a year ago.

The logic is clear: a “Beautiful China” attracts more foreign tourists and encourages domestic travellers to explore their own country. In 2026, as international travel becomes fully stabilised, the revenue from inbound tourism has become a vital tool in reducing the service trade deficit. Clean air, blue skies and restored landscapes are the new infrastructure of beautiful China. The development of “happiness industries” — a term often used by Chinese economists to describe tourism and wellness — is inextricably linked to the success of ecological restoration.

15th Five-Year Plan and beyond

The roadmap for Beautiful China is marked by clear and quantifiable milestones. China recently released its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), which ditched compulsory targets for GDP growth but maintained reducing major pollutants and carbon intensity, increasing forest coverage and improving water quality as mandatory ecological goals.

China has committed to peaking its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reducing emissions by 7-10% from peak levels by 2035. To reach these goals, China needs to expand non-fossil energy from 21.7% in its energy mix in 2025 to 25% by 2030, and over 30% by 2035. China also needs to expand forest coverage from 25.1% to 25.8% of the total land area in the next five years. 

The KPI assessment measures, which involve dispatch of inspection teams, serve as the “teeth” of this strategy, evaluating everything from atmospheric and water quality to public satisfaction levels. This ensures that the progress of Beautiful China is felt by the citizenry, addressing the ecological concerns strongly voiced by the public, such as urban smog and soil contamination. 

Beautiful China under pressure

Despite its ambitious framework, the Beautiful China strategy faces deep-seated structural challenges rooted in its very ideology. At its core, the policy functions as a natural extension of Beijing’s preferred “no-regret” strategy, which prioritises environmental mitigation only when it yields immediate domestic fringe benefits, such as local tourism growth, ecological restoration jobs, and visible public health improvements, independent of broader global climate change calculations. Because this development-centric ethos treats the environment as an economic asset rather than an existential crisis, it limits China’s willingness to undertake costly, structural climate actions that do not offer immediate financial returns. 

This vulnerability is amplified by contemporary geopolitical realities; confronted with the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck and subsequent critical energy shortages, the government’s instinct to ensure economic stability and energy security inevitably supersedes its green aspirations. While China’s crude oil imports plummeted by 20% in April 2026, its thermal power commissioning in the first two months of 2026 surged over 400% to a record high.

Without a robust, independent civic environmental activism to pressure the state from below, the top-down bureaucracy is highly likely to default to carbon-heavy energy survival tactics. Consequently, when confronted with severe macroeconomic or geopolitical shocks, the development-first ideology undercutting the Beautiful China strategy risks derailing concrete, long-term climate mitigation in favour of immediate national security.

As the world watches China’s environmental and energy targets unfold towards 2035, the Beautiful China policy stands as a testament to the idea that a nation’s greatest wealth is not what it can extract from the earth, but how it cares for it. 

Trump’s 2026 visit and his praise of China’s beauty may have been a diplomatic courtesy, but it reflected a physical reality that has been hard-won through policy and politics. The Beautiful China initiative represents an unprecedented attempt to decouple economic success from environmental destruction.

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