The politics of industrial pollution in rural China

Abstract

After more than three decades of extremely rapid industrial growth, China faces an environmental crisis. The rural industrial sector, which includes millions of loosely regulated factories and employs hundreds of millions of workers, is a major focal point of this crisis. This paper provides a critical review of scholarship on industrial pollution in rural China and advances a new framework for thinking about the topic as a political domain with three inter-related parts:

• The politics of knowledge: What do rural citizens know about environmental contamination, and how do they know they know it? What sources of information are available to the public regarding pollution incidents? How does uncertainty about pollution sources and severity, as well as the potential links to health risks, shape rural peoples' experience of pollution?

• The politics of action: What strategies do individuals, communities and civil society organizations use to combat pollution? What outcomes are associated with such strategies?

• The politics of regulation: How are national laws and policies regarding pollution control implemented in rural areas? How do agencies and enforcement officials balance the competing objectives of environmental protection and economic growth?The paper concludes by considering the implications of this framework for how scholars understand industrial pollution in rural China and briefly discussing a future research agenda for this field.

Keywords:

• industrial pollution
• rural industry
• knowledge politics
• environmental civil society
• regulation
• China

I would like to thank the organizers of this collection on politics in rural China, as well as the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to focus and refine my analysis. Many colleagues recommended important research to include in the paper or provided critical feedback on earlier drafts, including Chen Ajiang, Jennifer Holdaway, Rachel Stern, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Benjamin Van Rooij and Zhang Lei.

Notes

¹Xie has the dubious distinction of being the highest-ranking political official ever to lose his post over an environmental issue.

²Cancer is the leading cause of death in both urban and rural China. See MOH (2008) and Holdaway (2010).

³Article 35 of the Constitution of the PRC guarantees citizens ‘freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration’.

⁴The EIA law has the potential to dramatically change environmental decision-making in China. One example of the EIA law's potential was the halting of more than 30 major infrastructure projects by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2004. In taking this action, Wen invoked the EIA law and criticized various government organizations and publicly traded corporations for failing to conduct thorough environmental reviews. Like other laws and regulations, however, it is subject to the political considerations, financial constraints, and institutional limits of enforcement and oversight. See Hu et al. (2012).

⁵The New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System (NRCMCS), initiated in 2003, was designed to improve healthcare access among the rural poor. It is a tiered system that allows patients to access local village and township clinics and county hospitals, with heavy subsidies from the central and provincial governments (see Meessen and Bloom 2007).

Additional information

Bryan Tilt is an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University. His research focuses on sustainable development, agricultural systems, pollution control and water resources in China and the United States. He is the author of the book The struggle for sustainability in rural China: environmental values and civil society, published by Columbia University Press in 2010.