China is one of the most significant and necessary players in addressing global climate change. Further, China is a country comprised of complex heterogeneous socioeconomic conditions, a wide range of ecosystems, diverse cultures and geographically differing access to energy and resources. Because of these diverse factors, it is difficult to take a generalised stance on how China ought to address climate change as an internal matter. It is important for actors and institutions inside and outside of China to comprehend these obligations across the nation’s governmental levels, economic sectors and ecosystems. Assuming that all nations have an ethical obligation to reduce emissions to their fair share of a global target, it is therefore imperative that an analysis be conducted of China's ethical obligations to address climate change both as a nation and at various scales of governance within the state.

In this chapter, ethical obligations play out across various political-economic sectors at multiple scales in China. To develop an ethical baseline, in this chapter China's national obligations are analysed according to the eight ethical dimensions first developed in a White Paper on the ethical dimensions of climate change (hereafter referred to as EDCC White Paper) (Brown et al, 2006). Then, a framework is provided for further granularity in scalar analysis of ethical imperatives, which is referred to here as China's ‘climate box’. The conclusion is that the ethics of China's climate problem should be understood in terms of a series of interrelated issues requiring the consideration and coordination of policies across multiple scales.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) assumes nation states to be the main actors in negotiations on global limits (Harris, 2010). However, producing a normative analysis only of China's national obligations does not fully reveal clear ethical directives for regional, local or urban governance. While China may eventually arrive at a clear ethical directive as to how much it needs to mitigate to reduce overall national emissions, it is less clear how to ethically distribute mitigation efforts to regions with diverse geography and distribution of wealth. The lack of procedural clarity here comes about mainly because of China's economic geography and how wealth is distributed within the nation.