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As China's GDP rises to third place in the world, the Chinese people have lost a safe haven to live and work. As a year fraught with environmental disasters, 2009 reflected this.
The primary cause behind these disasters is the regime's priority: that economic development take precedence over environmental protection. The second cause is the failure of laws and regulations to safeguard the environment.
Rapidly Rising Social Conflicts over Environmental Protection
Most officials in China consider economic development to be a higher priority than environmental protection. As a direct consequence of such thinking, environmental pollution has continued to worsen.
Numerous studies have confirmed that environmental pollution is severely compromising the public’s health. Chinese people no longer have safe food, or clean living and working environments, which has triggered many social crises.
Data from Chinese environmental protection agencies show that since 1997, complaints over environmental pollution have risen rapidly.
In 2002, there were over 500,000 complaints filed with government agencies. Since 2006, water pollution issues occur on an average of every two days.
In 2007, Chen Xiwen, director of the Chinese Central Rural Work Leadership Group, said that besides appeals from farmers who have worked the land for ages, other top reasons for appeals and complaints are corruption and environmental pollution, accounting for 30 percent and 20 percent of the complaints respectively.
In 2007, there were more than 600,000 appeals and complaints due to environmental pollution, with 80,000 resulting in physical confrontation. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2010 Blue Paper on Society confirms that social conflicts caused by environmental pollution rose rapidly in 2009.
Failing System Lead to Environmental Crises
In terms of environmental pollution, developed countries typically have three lines of defense: environmental laws, environmental studies that precede project approval, and an ongoing practice of emissions monitoring.
In China, we can find a comprehensive system encompassing all three lines of defense. It is therefore ironic, given the completeness of the system, that the pollution situation has become so abominable.
First of all, from the legal standpoint, China has a complete set of laws and law enforcement system. Since September 1979, when China adopted the first comprehensive set of environmental regulations, nearly every year since then new laws and regulations have been written and adopted.
As of July 2007, there were more than 2,000 provisions of environmental law. However, as Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China Pan Yue once said: although there were many environmental laws, there were few that were useful.
Secondly, besides laws and regulations, each level of government has an environmental protection agency. At the central government level, there is the Ministry of Environmental Protection. At the provincial, county, and municipal levels there are environmental protection agencies as well. Their job is to evaluate and approve local enterprises, monitor changes in the environment, and enforce environmental laws.
Yet many officials in charge are intentionally loose about environmental laws. In fact, many polluting enterprises are “flagship projects” of local officials. Between 2002 and 2008, there were 70 investigations of violations of environmental laws, involving 72 government officials.
Thirdly, environmental protection agencies are responsible for monitoring pollution discharged by businesses, and for enforcing standards. The reality is, these agencies often fail at this. Last summer, in Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province, over 600 children were found to have elevated lead levels in their blood. This was caused entirely by illegal discharge from local factories. Yet the polluting factories received passing grades from the local environmental protection agency, and had never even received a single notice of violation before the incident.
The three lines of defense that usually work in modern countries with the rule of law have failed in China.
Even the authorities have admitted that the resultant findings of environmental studies have been subject to corruption. On June 5, 2009, World Environment Day, Deputy Minister Zhang Liyun of the Ministry of Environmental Protection disputed an Associated Press story, defending China by denying that it had loosened environmental standards to stimulate economic development.
Zhang’s defense, instead of rousing a sense of patriotism as intended, triggered nearly 10,000 online posts, most of which expressed skepticism and dissatisfaction with China’s current environmental protection efforts.
Appealing for the Rights to a Clean Environment Will Predominate
In the legal community globally, the concept of human rights generally encompass three generations of human rights: 1) civil rights and political rights, 2) economic, social, and cultural rights, and 3) self-determination, development, security, and environmental rights. Based on the experiences of developed countries, these three levels of rights are built on one another. Civil and political rights are the foundation of the latter two.
