China's Promise of "Green Olympics" -- The Green Leap Forward/Washington
Monthly

The Green Leap Forward

Environmentalism is China's fastest-growing citizen movement. Beijing
isn't cracking down on these new activists―it's empowering them.

By Christina Larson

China is on its way to becoming not only the world's largest economy,
but also its largest polluter. Of the world's twenty most polluted
cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country's cities
have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next
fifteen years, China's shortage of clean water will create 30 million
“environmental refugees.”

China's pollution problems, moreover, are no longer solely its own.
Winds that whip up over the Gobi Desert sweep dark clouds of mercury,
soot, and carbon monoxide to South Korea and Japan; as much as 40
percent of the air pollution in these countries can be traced to China.
The toxic plumes travel further afield, now detected by scientists in
San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. On bad days, a quarter of Los Angeles's
smog originates in China. Later this year, China is expected to overtake
the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases;
within twenty-five years, its annual contribution to global warming
could triple.

One of the most polluted cities in China is Lanzhou, the capital of
western Gansu Province, situated at the point where the Silk Road
crosses the Yellow River. Historically a remote trading outpost, Lanzhou
was transformed in the 1950s and '60s in keeping with Mao Zedong's
vision for China's future prosperity: “The machines are rumbling, and
smoke is rising from factories.” Adopting the adage of the time―“Pollute
now, clean up later”―Lanzhou became northwest China's primary hub for
oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Today, the city stretches long
and narrow between the Gaolan and White Pagoda mountains, but on many
days thick smog masks their peaks. Just by breathing the city air,
Lanzhou's 3 million residents inhale the equivalent of a pack of
cigarettes a day. Ten percent of the Yellow River near Lanzhou is now
sewage, and last year three industrial spills turned its waters an
ominous red.

One snowy morning in March, I drove along the river in a rented white
van with Zhao Zhong, a twenty-five-year-old nuclear engineer by day and
grassroots environmentalist by night. He wore a blaring red imitation
North Face jacket, and his cheeks, resembling polished apples, pushed up
the lower rims of his glasses when he smiled. As we drove, he pointed
out factories that defile the river. Since last fall, Zhao has been
mapping the coordinates of these factories with a GPS device borrowed
from a local university, and unearthing public but hard-to-find
pollution data. He slowed the van near one imposing gate, and we peered
through the bars at the Lanzhou Petrochemical Company plant, a
state-owned facility that Zhao has been watching closely. Construction
on the plant started in 1956 under Mao's first Five Year Plan, a massive
facility churning out lubricating greases, petroleum resin, and
antifreeze. Today, it's the largest petrochemical campus in northwest
China, with tens of thousands of employees and a calamitous record of
fires, explosions, and chemical spills. Several years ago, its drainage
system leaked forty-five tons of heavy oil into the Yellow River,
followed last winter by a discharge of engine oil.

I had met Zhao the previous night in his office, a two-room apartment on
the rundown western side of town. This modest flat is the headquarters
of Green Camel Bell, Lanzhou's first environmental group, which Zhao
founded three years ago. On the wall, there was a tidy whiteboard with
assigned tasks and a giant map of the city, hand-drawn in Magic Marker,
which showed the course of the Yellow River and the locations of
factories near the water. A group of mostly twentysomethings, along with
an unassuming fifty-something-year-old woman, sat around a table,
discussing an environmental curriculum for local schools. I later
discovered that the older woman was Zhao's mother, and one of Green
Camel Bell's most dedicated full-time volunteers.

Green Camel Bell's mission is the “protection of the Mother River,” a
motto that evokes the history of the Yellow River basin as the cradle of
Chinese civilization. Among other activities, the organization's two
paid staffers (Zhao draws no salary) and several dozen volunteers
assemble the environmental records of factories across Lanzhou: culling
newspaper articles, academic studies, and reports prepared by local
environmental officials, many of whom Zhao knows. They send the
information to a partner group in Beijing, which feeds it into the China
Water Pollution Map (www.ipe.org.cn/english), a free online database
that allows users to access information about water quality in their
region. The site also publishes a list of factories that violate
national environ- mental standards―including many state-owned enterprises.

In most other spheres, Beijing's government remains intolerant of this
sort of scrutiny and criticism. It silences journalists deemed overly
energetic in their investigations of official malfeasance; it jails
human rights activists and religious leaders whom it sees as subversive.
Nervous that I might get Zhao in trouble, I asked him if it was okay to
use his name in print. He nodded. Then he grinned and put his arm around
two staffers, posing in front of the map on the wall. “Please,” he said,
“if you would like to take pictures.”

It turns out Zhao has little to fear from Beijing. Not only is China's
emerging environmental movement tolerated by the central government; for
the most part, it's encouraged. More than 3,000 groups like Green Camel
Bell currently operate in China, constituting the largest and most
developed segment of the country's budding civil society. Some NGO
leaders are even consulted by government officials and praised by the
state-controlled media.

The kid-glove treatment China's environmental activists receive is not a
sign that Beijing is willing to relinquish political control. The
Communist Party's agile leaders are well aware of the role that civil
society groups have played in the fall of other authoritarian systems.
Rather, the government is taking a calculated risk. It is opening space
for political participation in the hope of preventing what it sees as an
even greater threat: that the country's rapidly deteriorating
environment will imperil China's vibrant economy―and perhaps, one day,
the party's own hold on power.

Like other cities in China, Beijing has a daily weather report and a
daily pollution report. On the increasingly crowded freeways, drivers
can see only so far ahead; each car leaves a wake in the smog. The dank
air creeps inside buildings, into cars, into hotel rooms, leaving you
nowhere to escape the distinct smell and the feeling of a weight always
on your chest. The sun looks like a flashlight wrapped in cotton gauze,
and the sky remains beige no matter the time of day. Most days, the city
has no discernible skyline. Most nights, no moonlight or starlight
pierces the darkness.

To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the
country's growing environmental problems, you must first remember that
they live here. Pollution is one by-product of China's thriving economy
that can't be evaded with influence or cash. One former U.S. Energy
Department official told me that his Chinese counterparts rave about the
air on visits to Washington, bemoaning Beijing's bleak skies.

More important, environmental problems now threaten the sustainability
of China's economic expansion. Already the costs of environmental
cleanup, property damage, and lost productivity are staggering. China's
State Council, the nation's highest administrative body, reported that
pollution cost the country more than $200 billion in 2005, almost 10
percent of the country's GDP. Industry releases 2,000 tons of airborne
mercury each year, which settles into the soil, contaminating 12 million
tons of grain each year and threatening food safety, including China's
$31 billion agricultural export market. (Time reported that only 6
percent of Chinese agricultural products imported to the United States
are free from pollution.) The future portends to be more alarming still.
Water scarcities could shut down paper mills and petrochemical plants.
Air pollution in Hong Kong could force a mass exodus of talent (already
hedge fund managers are fleeing the smog for Singapore). The country's
deputy environmental director, Pan Yue, has warned, “China's economic
miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.”

Even more troubling, the effects of pollution―poisoned water and
contaminated fields―are provoking riots in the countryside. Or, as
China's environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, has observed, the
environment has become an issue that “triggers social contradictions.”
In 2005, the government reported 51,000 pollution “disputes,” many of
them violent. More villages each year form local militias to guard water
rights. This makes Communist Party leaders deeply uneasy. After all, for
millennia China's history has been defined by dynasties rising and
falling, the ruling powers frequently toppled by angry peasants whose
welfare was neglected. As Minxin Pei, the director of the China Program
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained, “The
government is willing to tolerate anything but social instability.”

Beijing, therefore, has recently become determined to clean up its
act―if not for the environment's sake, then to avert economic woes and
social unrest. Indeed, it has issued environmental targets that, at
least in some areas, are among the most progressive in the world. Last
year, the government set goals of reducing air pollution 10 percent and
increasing energy efficiency 20 percent by 2010. And it has put more
money into meeting those targets, increasing its environmental
protection budget by 60 percent. As Elizabeth Economy, the director for
Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of an
environmental history of China, The River Runs Black, observes, “It's
clear there's been an uptick in both rhetoric and real concern.”

The dilemma is enforcement. The central government's decision to open up
the country's economy has simultaneously undermined its ability to
impose its will on far-flung provinces. Since 1980, China's economic
strategy has been one of decentralization. State-owned enterprises have
been partially privatized; provincial governments have been given more
authority; entire sectors of the economy have been deregulated.

In economic terms, this strategy has been wildly successful. But it has
also diminished the central government's reach. Gone are the days when
Beijing could easily disseminate party dicta―or orders such as not
dumping trash into the river―to every citizen through clearly delineated
work units. Perhaps more significant, the central government has a
dwindling ability to make regional and local government officials follow
its lead. Although laws are promulgated in the capital, provincial
authorities are responsible for implementing them. But provincial
governments depend on tax revenue from local industries, so shutting
down polluters often runs counter to their interests. Local officials
are no longer beholden to the party patronage machine as they once were.
They can make good money by selling land to developers, or taking bribes
to protect a private factory. A promotion from Beijing is no longer the
only route to upward mobility.

The central government no longer maintains a permanent presence in the
provincial capitals, so there is no energetic national oversight of what
happens in a place like Lanzhou. Local environmental bureaus are
supervised and financed not by Beijing but by provincial authorities
whose officials would be unable to afford their chauffeur-driven cars
without payoffs from potential polluters. As a result, China has
numerous national laws that sound wonderful on paper but can't be
enforced. David Lampton, head of the China studies department at Johns
Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies, has
popularized the term “implementation bias” to describe this phenomenon.
He defines it as “the situation in which every central initiative will
be distorted in favor of the organization or locality responsible for
implementation.”

This breakdown in governance is so pronounced that, in defiance of
Beijing's ambitious targets, the country's environment is getting worse,
not better. Official reports likely understate the problem, but those
numbers are troubling enough. Beijing vowed in 2002 to reduce sulfur
emissions by 10 percent in three years, yet they climbed by nearly 30
percent. More than 4,000 rogue mines leach mercury into the soil. An
estimated one in five power plants operate illegally―enough to fully
power the United Kingdom. Last year, Mao Rupai, chair of the
congressional environmental committee, estimated that in some far-flung
provinces as few as 30 percent of environmental regulations are upheld.

To deal with this predicament, Beijing has invited help from an
unexpected corner: civil society. Citizen groups can help spread
information, provide oversight, and put some pressure on local
authorities. The government granted legal status to NGOs in 1994, and
green groups were the first to flood into this new space. Initially,
they focused on innocuous campaigns like environmental education and
trash pickup. In 2003 and 2004, however, environmental activists gained
a major wedge in the door of the public policy process with the passage
of a series of laws and accompanying regulations. One law, for instance,
required environmental-impact assessments to be conducted before
construction projects could be approved, articulating for the first time
the principle that the public has a right to participate in the process.
Another gave members of the public the right to request a hearing when
an administrative ruling―for instance, one that granted a license for a
construction project―would impact them substantially and directly. Given
the Communist Party's long-standing preference for secrecy, these
measures represented a fairly dramatic departure from the past.

Already environmentalists are exploiting them. Last year, the Global
Environmental Institute, a Chinese nonprofit, was instrumental in
getting Beijing's city government to adopt energy-efficient
rapid-transit bus lanes. After NGOs objected to a series of planned dams
on the Nu River, Premier Wen Jiabao suspended the project, pending an
environmental-impact assessment.

If anyone is seizing the opportunity created by Beijing, it is Ma Jun,
arguably China's most prominent environmentalist. Ma, who was selected
as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2006, is the brains
behind the China Water Pollution Map, the Web site to which Zhao Zhong
contributes.

I met Ma at the Beijing headquarters of the Institute of Public &
Environmental Affairs, the nonprofit he founded two years ago. Slight
and energetic at thirty-nine, with a boyish face and a quick smile, Ma
was dressed in smart business-casual style (dark suit, no tie), and had
a Bluetooth headset affixed to one ear. A floor-to-ceiling office window
looks out over the murky city skyline, but his bookshelves are lined
with photographs he has taken of China's western provinces: steep gorges
and winding rivers, the landscape of numerous epic movies. His bookcase
holds Henry David Thoreau's Walden alongside an ecological history of
China, Retreat of the Elephants, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Sitting at his desktop computer, Ma called up his Web site. The site
enables readers to search for both detailed information about instances
of pollution and the regulations by which they can be evaluated. We went
to a map of Lanzhou, where I had met Zhao. “See,” Ma said, “this allows
people to see how close the factories are to the rivers, and how close
they are to the communities, so local people can keep an eye on them and
put pressure on them to change their behavior.” We zoomed in to street
level to eye a few factories. “You can see that this is right in the
middle of the city, and this is right along the river. You can see all
of these polluters, and then people can click and see which government
document and for which reason it's listed as a polluter, and which
conclusions are made by the documents and which river they discharge into.”

The key to Ma's endeavor is information. Although the recent laws have
made more environmental data available to the public than ever before,
it's not always easy for an average citizen to find it. So Ma relies on
a legion of volunteers like Zhao Zhong, who hunt down regulations and
pollution statistics from various official sources. These are then sent
to Ma's team of four staffers and ten volunteers, who feed the
information into the online database.

By gathering and publishing this material in one place for the first
time, Ma hopes to generate new forms of pressure on polluters. One way
is to mobilize citizens. Local people can use the data to monitor
factories and lobby them to change their behavior―lending clout to
environmental officials trying to enforce the law. Environmentalists
have already found that arming ordinary Chinese with access to
information can produce dramatic results. In May, the government of the
city of Xiamen in the southeastern province of Fujian suspended plans
for a lucrative plant that would manufacture a potentially carcinogenic
petrochemical. Xiamen residents mounted an effective campaign against
the plant, arguing that there was no evidence that city officials had
approved the required environmental-impact assessment. Angry residents
called the factory an “atom bomb,” and circulated nearly a million text
messages in protest.

Ma also hopes that international environmental activists will use the
Web site in their ongoing effort to prod multinational companies who
care about their brand names but use suppliers who are less fastidious.
In this, Ma has a special expertise: earlier this decade he wSubscribe
Online & Save 33%%orked as a consultant to international companies on
greening their supply-chain management, and served on Coca-Cola's global
Environmental Advisory Board. So far, Ma has reached out to numerous
domestic and international corporate executives. Some American
companies, such as Pepsi, DuPont, and General Motors, have been
unresponsive, but he reported a “very good meeting” with Wal-Mart. Ma
has persuaded six international companies whose factories are listed as
major polluters to commit to third-party auditing, and a battery
factory, operated by Panasonic, to begin construction on a new
wastewater facility.

Ma didn't start out as an environmentalist. In the 1990s, he worked as a
journalist for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, which placed him on
an environmental beat. This allowed Ma to travel across China and see
“rivers turning to sewers,” he told me. In 1999, he published China's
Water Crisis. The book is often compared to Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring for the jolt it delivered to public opinion. It also established
Ma as an environmental authority. Today, he is one of thehandful of NGO
leaders whose advice is occasionally sought by government officials. In
fact, just a few days before we met, Ma had given a workshop in one of
the provinces which was attended by a high-ranking official from the
State Environmental Protection Administration (China's version of the
EPA), who spoke about the draft of a new regulation on information
disclosure. “It's very interesting, because in that room it was twenty
NGOs from across the country sitting there. And he basically invited
everyone to make comments. You know, ‘What is your comment on the draft
version? Will this help you, or do you feel like this is not enough? You
can make suggestions.' ” I asked Ma for the official's name, but he
demurred. Such consultation is relatively new, and still somewhat fragile.

As with all Chinese environmentalists I met, Ma exhibited an urgency
devoid of discernible ideology. His goal, for the moment, is to clean up
China, and he's pragmatic and patient about how to accomplish that. For
instance, instead of pushing the government to legislate higher
environmental standards, he's trying to make sure that existing
standards are being met. “Right now the site shows all the businesses
reported by the government as polluters. So let's keep an eye on them
first.” He's as eager to work with major companies like Wal-Mart as he
is with local volunteers like Zhao Zhong and his mother. “You have to
keep in mind that the full kind of Western-style participation will not
happen overnight,” he said.

For both environmentalists and the government, this is a delicate dance.
Hard-liners within the Communist Party worry about ceding too much
leeway to groups such as green NGOs. They are quick to remind their
colleagues of the role that civil society―human rights groups, labor
unions, churches, and, indeed, environmentalists―played in the downfall
of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe.

But today's China is worlds away from the Soviet Union circa 1986. The
Communist Party in Beijing has maintained its rule precisely because it
has permitted some measure of openness. By relaxing its grip on the
economy, it engineered a boom that has lifted living standards
significantly. The government has also made modest concessions to
political participation, with experiments such as closely controlled
village elections. China's citizens, especially those in its middle
class, perceive a country in which opportunity is expanding, not
shrinking. Because of this, Beijing believes―probably rightly―that it
stands on firmer ground than its Soviet counterparts did two decades ago.

Still, no one knows how this peculiar experiment will play out. All that
can be said for certain is that much is riding on Beijing's gamble. Not
only will it influence whatever political path China may take in the
future, but it could determine whether China can find a way to avert
environmental ruin. Today, considerable international attention is
focused on the question of whether Beijing will commit to
specificenvironmental steps, such as putting numerical “caps” on its
greenhouse gas emissions. What most outside observers don't seem to
understand is that this question is, for now, largely beside the point.
It won't make much difference if Beijing adopts carbon caps unless the
government finds a way to convert its edicts into reality. To a great
extent, then, hope for a cleaner earth lies with the ability of China's
unlikely bedfellows, its mandarins and its environmentalists, to make
this experiment work.

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Christina Larson, is an editor of the Washington Monthly. She traveled
to China this spring on a fellowship from the International Reporting
Project at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies in Washington, D.C.

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