China and the Environment

Articles

Posted by Bishopbunmite on 12/5/2013

Global environmental website Chinadialogue launched their anthology of essays, "China and the Environment: The Green Revolution" at Free Word in April. We spoke to Sam Geall, the executive director of Chinadialogue, about the particular environmental issues facing China, and how a bilingual dialogue is helping develop some solutions.

What is chinadialogue?

chinadialogue is the world’s only fully bilingual website focused on the environment. The idea is to get Chinese environmentalists, policy makers, civil society activists and academics published in both languages, for a global dialogue.

The major part of our publishing is high quality journalism, so long form, on-the-ground reports or analysis or op-ed pieces. But we also do blog posts and we publish longer form policy-briefing type reports.

When we started, there was a fear that talking about climate change with China was a way of hectoring them. But we wanted to create a constructive discussion and learn about some of the stories that were happening in China.

The book that we’ve just released, China and the Environment: The Green Revolution is an attempt to collect together some of the most dramatic and interesting of those stories.

What do you mean when you say chinadialogue is ‘truly bilingual’? 

We publish absolutely everything in Chinese and English - and that includes user comments on the website. We have a team of volunteer translators who translate from English to Chinese and vice versa, so we can get a conversation going across the language barrier. If you’re a policy maker in Germany interested in what China’s doing with coal, you can write a comment and a Chinese person can respond to you. 

One odd thing about that process is that we’ve developed a translated vocabulary for some of those environmental terms, because a lot of the terms we start translating are new ones. I remember when terms like ‘fracking’ first started being used, we were one of the first groups deciding what the consistent accepted term for something like that was going to be. So we build up a specialized vocabulary. 

What cultural differences are there between how English-speakers and Chinese-speakers talk about environmental issues? 

A major assumption in the West is that environmental concerns are what sociologists call ‘post-material concerns’: that you only become concerned about conserving the natural world once you’ve got to a certain level of income and comfort. But the world is more complex than that – actually, rural people suffering from terrible air and water pollution problems, at low income levels, are still very concerned about these issues. Of 20 of the world’s most polluted cities, 16 of them are in China. You’ve got a major water pollution incident happening every 2 to 3 days. You’ve got a huge death toll from air-pollution related diseases; from soil-pollution-related cancers, and these kinds of diseases are still on the rise. 

In the UK or the US, we’re not actually facing these direct environmental effects so often. We focus more on uncertain and longer-term environmental effects like climate change.

What work is being done in China to address these environmental problems? 

China’s environmental laws over the last ten or twenty years have actually got very strong. But the issue is that they’re not being implemented at a local level: there’s a collusion between local officials and business. 

During the reform era, there was a decentralization of power, partly to encourage the economic juggernaut that took off at the local level.

So a lot of provincial governments had much greater freedom to encourage investment, but at the expense of losing some local control. That’s led to a situation where laws are often disregarded. Local officials are only really judged by their GDP growth, so they’re chasing GDP growth the whole time. One of the struggles has been to help redefine how growth is measured in China: if local officials were, for example, being evaluated by GDP growth, minus natural resource depletion, minus the costs of a pollution incident, their political evaluation would look quite different, and they might have different incentives.

There are people in central government who are quite keen to see this happen. It’s clearly a threat to China’s growth, if it keeps disregarding environmental laws. There are government-linked social scientists saying that the environment is now the number one cause of social discontent in China, pointing to a great number of rural protests every day, and pointing to the need for a civil response to these top-level directives, in order to get a public buy-in so that these laws are actually enforced.

How much does your site report on global issues – things which aren’t specific to China?

We try to publish 50% Chinese, 50% non-Chinese authors. Our Chinese writers are mainly focused on Chinese issues, and the non-Chinese authors typically write about global issues. So it’s 50:50 in terms of China and the rest of the world. But the discussions we’re interested in are where there are interesting lessons to be learned back and forth.

One of the big conflicts over the last ten twenty years has been over dam building, particularly in the south west of China where there’s been a push for large hydropower projects which are often very unpopular with the local population. One thing we’ve tried to do on Chinadialogue has been to write about these large hydropower projects in other parts of the world. Why are the US, for example, removing their dams now rather than building new ones? There’s been an organised destruction of dams across the Midwest, because they didn’t lead to very sustainable outcomes.

Air pollution in Beijing is also a big problem, so we published a history of how clean air regulation was brought in in London in the 1950s, after the smog. We looked at how the campaign played out, and how there was quite a pluralistic debate at the time: people saying regulation wouldn’t work, that there should be a free market solution, or that greater pollution is a sign of greater economic development. But although it was a struggle to bring in the Clean Air Act, it actually ended up forming a model for clean air regulation in other parts of the world.

We tell stories like these to see if there are lessons to be learned, and we tend to make it a platform for an open discussion. So when we talk about about nuclear power, for example, we’re not advocates of any particular science – we’ll have pro and anti nuclear voices from the UK – our aim is to reflect how that debate is playing out.

There are so many comparisons to be drawn with the environment around the world, but I wonder if there are any problems that are unique to China that are being faced for the first time? 

The pace at which it’s urbanizing is unprecedented. The migration to the cities in the last 20 years has been the largest migration in human history. The challenge is to create a new model of city design. Beijing is now looking like LA, in terms of its layout and design, and how it’s a car-centric city. We now see that it’s at bursting point in terms of congestion. How you can urbanise rapidly, and model yourself more on Copenhagen, say, rather than LA, is a real challenge, and a very new one: one of many.

China has actually had success in some of these areas. It’s the largest producer and consumer of solar hot water heaters – and that’s an example of real grass roots innovation. A local company innovated this kind of technology and it’s been rolled out across China. E-bikes are another good example. In Beijing, there’s been a massive take-up in electric bikes. When the electricity is coming from coal, it’s not ultimately having a net benefit but it is preventing some urban air pollution. There are some really interesting bits of innovation that can point towards the way they’re dealing with an unprecedented scale of the problem.

But the argument that comes through from the writers in this book is that the basis of transforming the model is in the grass roots: for creating a viable green lobby and moving to a more sustainable form of green development. You need that public buy in, that pressure. And that’s coming, but the challenge is to allow it to be part of the development process to allow those voices to be heard.

Speaking of voices being heard, the one thing we hear all the time about China is censorship, and how it’s very prevalent, especially online. How often have you run up against that?

We’re in an interesting position. Discussions around the environment and sustainability in China are a permitted space for very serious discussion about governance and the rule of law. They can be a vehicle for talking about wider issues which would be very sensitive if you approached them head-on. In the Chinese media, environmental journalism has been at the forefront of having a more wide-ranging and pluralistic discussion about politics, about rule of law, about local governance, transparency, accountability, and local corruption – these kinds of issues are often discussed through the prism of green issues and sustainability.

So you can’t say “we have a problem with local government”, but you can say “we have a problem with green issues that we can’t seem to address through our local government”.

There’s been an opening at a local level for more investigative reporting. Until the 1990s all media publications in China were state controlled or affiliated to mass organisations. But then papers starting being able to compete for audiences, so they started competing to cover issues of public concern: so people would actually want to read them. What you got was a flourishing of locally-focused investigative reporting: people getting into issues like pollution and local corruption.

Would you say there are quite a few optimistic outlooks to the essays in the book?

There are some quite serious warnings in the text, but there are a number of optimistic stories towards the end. In my chapter I quote a very enterprising journalist who says “this is the golden age of China’s environmental journalism – but that’s not something I’m happy about”. There are a lot of horrendous problems in China, which means there’s a lot to write about. It’s incumbent on us to report this, but it’s hardly a great state of affairs. So while there are hopeful stories in there, there is still a strong sense that the kind of changes in governance that allow for the creation of a more institutionalized green lobby that can take on vested interests in China is still a long way off.

Sam Geall is an anthropologist, writer and editor with a focus on China and the environment. He's Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography of China at Oxford University and the Executive Editor ofchinadialogue.net, a bilingual online journal on environmental issues, with a special focus on China. His research interests include environmental journalism, the politics of climate change, citizen science and civil society.