As China pursues a startling array of energy, mining, logging, agricultural, and infrastructure projects on virtually every continent, it is having an unprecedented environmental impact on the planet.

It is difficult to find a corner of the developing world where China is not having a significant environmental impact.

China is the world’s biggest financer and builder of hydroelectric dams, many of which are being constructed in biologically diverse regions where the dams and their associated roads and power lines will open up new lands for exploitation. China is involved in the planning, financing, or construction of major dams in Africa, including the massive Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, now nearing completion. A consortium of Chinese companies is bidding to help construct the Grand Inga dam project on the Congo River, a series of dams that could become the largest hydroelectric project in the world. Although construction could begin later this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo has so far done no environmental impact studies. The scale of China’s international ambitions is stunning, as evidenced by the country’s “Belt and Road” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” schemes. These two initiatives would involve the creation of a massive network of transportation and other infrastructure projects designed to accelerate development and advance China’s economic and political interests. They will stretch across Asia to Europe and Africa, providing access to 64 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its gross domestic product. Developing nations clearly need better infrastructure, and Chinese investments are yielding sizeable benefits in some countries, such as the recently opened passenger line between the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and the port of Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden. Unfortunately, Chinese companies and investors rarely advance the type of equitable economic and social development, improved governance, and environmental sustainability that would promote stable, long-term growth in developing economies. An in-depth report by the Global Canopy Program, a UK scientific group, concluded that Chinese companies and financial organizations are among the worst enterprises in the world in terms of driving tropical deforestation. China has long been a black hole for the illegal wildlife trade, the biggest global consumer of everything from pangolins, to tiger parts, to shark fins and rhino horn. The promised ban on public trading of ivory in China is a good sign, but it’s only one facet of a thriving illegal wildlife trade that drives intense levels of poaching internationally. And China is a heavy consumer of illegal timber, despite belatedly taking steps to staunch the flow into its markets. In western Africa, rosewood forests are being illegally denuded, almost exclusively to feed high demand in China. The impacts are even heavier across the Asia-Pacific region, where native forests from Siberia to the Solomon Islands are being overexploited to feed Chinese timber markets.

More generally, there is little demand in China for eco-certified palm oil, timber, beef, seafood, and agricultural products, weakening global efforts to manage these resources more sustainably. And although China is one of the world’s biggest importers of palm oil — a major driver of tropical deforestation — the Chinese government charges import tariffs on environmentally certified palm oil, further undercutting domestic demand for its use. Of course, China is not alone in promoting its own economic interests over those of other countries and their environmental health. This is a story that goes back to the colonial era and beyond, when European nations ruthlessly exploited resources and local populations from Africa, to South America, to India. More recently, Western corporations — such as Shell Oil in Nigeria, Union Carbide in India, and Texaco in Ecuador — have caused numerous environmental crises. The difference with China is one of scale. With nearly one-fifth of the world’s population (1.35 billion people), a highly competitive business culture, little tolerance of criticism, and a stunning capacity to make decisive shifts in course, China is unmatched as a global force. No nation has ever changed the planet so rapidly, on such a large scale, and with such single-minded determination. It is difficult to find a corner of the developing world where China is not having a significant environmental impact. The factors that might restrain a U.S. or European country in foreign resource-development projects — intense press criticism, or laws governing foreign business practices — are largely lacking in today’s China. For example, while U.S. companies are bound by the anti-bribery laws in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, there is no comparable legislation governing the conduct of Chinese business people and corporations. Europeans in Africa frequently complain about the scale of Chinese graft. “They go straight to the top officials and bribe them lavishly, and then nobody can stop them,” a Dutch forester in the Republic of Congo told me. “We used to offer small ‘gifts’ to many people, but now the money is all concentrated at the top and corruption is out of control.”

The Tekeze Dam in northern Ethiopia while under construction. The project, funded and constructed largely by Chinese companies, began operating in 2009. International Rivers/Flickr

According to a major World Bank analysis of nearly 3,000 projects, Chinese foreign investors and companies often predominate in poorer nations with weak environmental regulations and controls, causing those nations to become “pollution havens” for Chinese enterprises. The magnitude of China’s international resource exploitation is only likely to increase. The Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is heavily capitalized and is moving rapidly to fund overseas projects with “streamlined” environmental and social safeguards. Alarmingly, last year the World Bank announced that it was softening its own environmental and social safeguards, in a move that was widely seen as an effort to remain competitive with the AIIB. As I argued recently, the AIIB and other Chinese development banks could force a “race to the bottom” among multilateral lenders — with potentially grave consequences for the global environment. Over the last decade Chinese government ministries have released a series of “green papers” outlining lofty environmental and social guidelines for China’s overseas ventures and corporations. The Chinese government readily admits that compliance with its guidelines is poor, but accepts no blame for this. Instead, it insists that it has little control over its corporations and blames the host nations themselves for not controlling Chinese corporations more carefully. The truth is that while China’s private firms enjoy significant autonomy from the Central Communist Party, China is among the most centrally controlled societies in the world. If China really wanted to reign in its freewheeling corporations, it could easily do so by making some strong official statements and visibly punishing a few extravagant sinners. It hasn’t done this for one simple reason: Despite their often-egregious environmental activities, China’s corporations operating overseas are enormously profitable. Domestically, China’s environmental impact is also profound. In terms of climate change, for instance, in recent years China has blown past the United State as the world’s biggest carbon polluter — and now produces twice the greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S., as well as larger amounts of dangerous air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Yes, China is investing in new wind and solar technologies, but it is plowing far more cash into big hydropower, coal, and nuclear energy projects. In addition to its monolithic Three Gorges Dam, the world’s biggest hydropower project, China is building or planning to build 20 mega-dams along its stretch of the Mekong River, which could have serious impacts on biodiversity, fisheries, and water users in downstream nations, such as Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

If China really wanted to reign in its freewheeling corporations, it could easily do so.