A Comparative Study of Energy White Papers between China and Britain from the Perspective of International Ecological Discourse

From a perspective of international ecological discourse, energy white papers are deemed as an important type of energy ecological discourse. Two small corpora consisting of energy white papers by China and Britain are created. Word frequency, collocation and keywords are analyzed and compared with the assistance of corpus software. Analysis reveals that both countries prioritize technological innovations as solutions to the fossil fuel impasse. Affected by energy endowment, energy development stage, and social, historical and cultural context, the white papers by China and Britain also show large differences. Facing energy impasse and uncertainty in future development, China's white papers are more action oriented, and solution-driven with strong international as well as domestic concerns, while Britain's are more entrenched in antagonism, on which world energy transition is deemed as a battlefield with energy technologies and polices as weapons. From the perspective of international ecological discourse, in comparison, China's energy whitepapers are more positive in terms of ecological stance in that it views state as an organic agent and all states in the world should be in harmony and in that mankind should save and use energy, the natural resources, efficiently. This paper ends with a suggestion that human beings should adopt a firm ecological stance by which reshaping man's life style, habit, ways of organization and value orientation is fundamental for the effective energy transition from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy dependence.