Can Environmental Activism Succeed in China?

The world admired the speed and success of China’s “economic miracle,” which occurred when the economy grew, opened up, urbanized, and industrialized at breakneck speed. Inside China, however, the mood was far less upbeat. Neither the Chinese people nor their government seemed at ease with the achievements and results of the rapid development. To be sure, there was enormous popular pride taken in China’s ascent to the ranks of global superpowers, and general satisfaction with the material benefits that both the poor and the rich gained from an expanding economy.

However, rampant grassroots protests revealed intense popular indignation at every thing from land grabs to environmental pollution, while top officials themselves complained about the corroding effects of materialism, cadre corruption, and income inequality. On the Chinese internet, people vented their concerns, frustrations, and anger regarding a wide range of issues and problems that affected their lives or, in their view, the state of society and future of the nation. In a society notable for mobility and greater media access, including online communication, citizens displayed a heightened awareness of income disparities, lavish conspicuous consumption, and corrupt official practices. Social disparities and tensions fueled popular anger and at times resistance.

There was great restlessness, anger about structural injustices and bad governance, and a search for new forms of spirituality and ethics to replace a collapsing moral order. All of this contributed to anxieties and uncertainties regarding the future that shaped the mood of the public in China during the second decade of the 21st century.

To a large extent, these feelings are related to one elementary question surrounding China’s political institutions. While the economic system was completely overhauled, and became arguably one of the most dynamic in the world, the political institutional order remained largely unchanged. It still was fundamentally a one-party system, in which a Leninist party exercised authoritarian rule. The mobile and innovative economy of China, based on inclusive institutions, was in tension with a political system based on exclusive institutions. The unmediated contradiction between an increasingly complex and open economy and society and a still intact Leninist party state was a persistent problem that China seemed not to be able to resolve.

There was widespread skepticism of the long-term compatibility between a flourishing market economy and an authoritarian communist polity, fueling a pervasive feeling of uncertainty. Few people in China were convinced that the political system was set up for the future or that the political institutions were stable or strong enough to weather a big social crisis. This was in contrast to more mature political systems where, problems and conflicts notwithstanding, citizens acted on the assumption that their institutions were enduring and resilient.

The restlessness manifested itself in a number of phenomena that churned the public sphere in China. There was frequent outrage and despair about China’s worsening environmental situation. The era of super high growth, above all, took a heavy toll on the environment. There was little question that economic growth came at the expense of the country’s air, land, and water resources, much of them already degraded by decades of Stalinist economic planning that emphasized the development of heavy industries in urban areas, and by centuries of deforestation before the modern period.

In 2012, less than 1 percent of China’s 500 largest cities met the World Health Organization’s air quality standards. The heavy air pollution in China was mostly caused by the use of fossil energy, especially coal, which China relied on for 70 percent of its energy needs. China had abundant supplies of coal and had been burning more of it per year than the United States, Europe, and Japan combined since 2007, although consumption declined after 2014. Energy consumption grew 130 percent from 2000 to 2010. As Chinese citizens became wealthier and moved into cities, they used more energy and contributed more to the environmental problems. Heavy traffic caused by increasing car ownership became the leading source of air pollution in Chinese cities.

Water was an equally acute challenge. China had only one-fifth as much water per capita as the United States. But while southern China was relatively wet, the north—home to about half of China’s population—was an extensive, dry region at risk to become the world’s biggest desert. Ten northern provinces fell below the World Bank’s water-poverty level, resulting in high rates of land degradation and desertification. Industry and agriculture used nearly all of the country’s water resources, but household consumption was also on the rise. China’s water was also highly polluted. In many parts of China, factories and farms discarded waste into surface water. China’s environmental monitors estimated that one-third of all river water, and many of China’s great lakes—the Tai, Chao, and Dianchi—had the most degraded quality, rendering their waters unfit for agricultural use and human consumption.

At the same time, soil pollution from factories had seriously contaminated some of China’s arable land. The Chinese government released a report in 2014 that said nearly one-fifth of its arable land was contaminated—an indication of the toxic results of China’s rapid development and its lack of regulations over commercial activities. The soil pollution had severe consequences for the national food chain. There was increasing concern among Chinese citizens and some officials over soil contamination in the main agricultural centers, because of the potential effects on food safety throughout the country. Skyrocketing water and air pollution brought about a number of severe public health challenges. Rising toxic emissions from coal and fuel oil caused growing rates of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and so did acid rain. All along China’s major rivers, Chinese citizens experienced rising rates of disease such as cancer, tumors, and other health problems related to pollution.

It seemed clear that China’s significant environmental problems could only worsen with continued global warming. A 2015 report by the Chinese government provided a dire scientific assessment of the impact of climate change on China. The report urged more spending on preparing to cope with the increasing likelihood of frequent natural calamities such as extreme droughts, floods, and heat waves. Rising sea levels were among the threats receiving most attention in the report. The concern was that, as polar ice melted and ocean temperatures rose, seas across the world would swell. Indeed, because the changes were uneven, the waters off China’s coast had already been rising faster than the global average.

According to the findings, the sea waters along the coast of eastern China will likely rise between 40 and 60 centimeters by the end of the 21st century, exposing Shanghai and other cities to tidal floods and severe damage from storms and typhoons. The report also predicted that inland China would experience major shifts in rain and snowfall, which would reshape agriculture. Rising temperatures would also mean the air absorbed more moisture, which would then likely be dumped in increasingly erratic precipitation patterns, especially in northern China. The net effect, according to the report, was that China’s water resources, already strained, could shrink 5 percent by midcentury. Irregular shifts in rainfall would not only result in major changes in farming, but could also put unanticipated heavy stress on infrastructure. In addition to environmental or economic risks to China, these changes implied national security issues. Alterations of current river flows and water volumes might then lead to struggles over cross-border water resources along China’s southern borders and surges of transnational migration, triggering international disputes and conflict.

As the 2015 report demonstrated, awareness of the severity of the problems grew among the population and the authorities. The government started to address the problem. It set strict standards and ambitious targets, such as mandating the reduction of coal use for electricity generation and the installations of cleaner coal-burning generators in an effort to improve the abysmal air quality in the big cities. In 2015, China claimed to have lowered its coal use by 8 percent compared to the year before. It upgraded vehicle emission standards and energy efficiency. Drones were used to detect factories that violated emissions laws. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Law was revised for the first time since 1989. The modified law strengthened environmental protection by fining polluters, and by even permitting NGOs to bring public-interest lawsuits against those who violated the law. It also held local officials accountable for the environmental standard in their regions.

However, many of the requirements and targets were regularly unmet, owing to insufficient implementation or oversight. Local Chinese authorities failed to strictly enforce regulations for protecting the environment, because they sometimes were invested in local companies and profited from unrestricted economic development in their areas. The decentralized nature of China’s political system, which so many times in the past had worked to China’s advantage in the economy, had a serious downside—namely, that Beijing often failed to get policy buy-ins from local officials.

Government inaction and inertia prompted the emergence of a vibrant environmental protest movement China. When citizens’ concerns were not addressed satisfactorily, they turned to protest to make their voices heard, either via the internet or on the street. In 2015, a former China Central Television journalist, Chai Jing, caused a video sensation with a self-made and self-financed documentary. Called Under the Dome (qiongding zhi xia), it was posted on the internet. The footage, consisting of commentary, interviews, and factory visits, documented the extent and dangers of air pollution in China. The film exposed the pollution caused by state-owned energy companies, steel producers, and coal factories. It also pointed to the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to penalize the big polluters. The video was viewed over 150 million times within three days of its release. Chinese citizens also staged public demonstrations against the building of coal-fired power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, waste incinerators, and the like. According to Chen Japing, a former leading member of the Communist Party’s political and legislative affairs committee, the environment surpassed illegal land expropriation as the leading source of social unrest in China.

In August 2011, an estimated 12,000 mainly middle-class protesters faced down riot police to demand the closing of a petrochemical plant in Dalian, in northeastern China. The local authorities were forced to back down in the face of environmental protests. The demonstrations in Dalian were largely peaceful. A year later, however, images posted on the internet from Shifang in southwestern China’s Sichuan province showed scenes of bloodied protesters and police officers firing tear gas. The demonstrators voiced their protest against the planned construction of a $1.6 billion copper smelting complex, which would have been one of the largest smelting complexes on earth. The furious protests prompted local officials not just to suspend but to permanently cancel the project.

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From Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping. Used with the permission of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Klaus Mühlhahn.