Tightening the grip: environmental governance under Xi Jinping

ABSTRACT

In the space of a few years, China’s global image with regard to environmental matters has significantly improved. Particularly since Xi Jinping’s coming-to-power in 2012 China’s reputation in the global climate change regime has improved markedly and it has gained accolades for a new determination to reverse environmental degradation at home. China’s incipient green transformation is partly due to a new actor constellation in environmental governance, a striking feature of which is the prominence of ad hoc campaigns that offer quick results but that may undermine the creation of law-based enforcement mechanisms in the long term. Another development – China’s increasing use of emerging technologies and big data analytics – has given rise to new forms of government-business alliances. These new players and innovative approaches have injected momentum into China’s environmental governance system and suggest that, contrary to conventional wisdom, authoritarian regimes can be responsive to citizen demands under certain circumstances. Yet it remains to be seen whether long-term environmental goals can be met, due to a pervasive lack of accountability, the weakening of civil society and heavy constraints on public participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental governance
• transition
• environmental policy
• environmental state
• China

In a 2006 Special Issue of Environmental Politics examining China’s environmental governance system (Mol and Carter 2006), leading environmental politics scholars analyzed the complexities and dilemmas of China’s incipient environmental state and weighed both the domestic and global implications thereof. In all, the analyses in that Special Issue suggested that ‘new relations between state, market and civil society, and an opening up toward the outside world characterize new modes of environmental governance that try to turn China’s development path in more sustainable directions’ (Mol and Carter 2006: 149). By focusing on shifts in the institutional framework of environmental governance as well as relevant social and economic developments, the 2006 Special Issue laid the foundation for the large volume of literature on China’s environmental politics that has since emerged. This Symposium takes a fresh look at these issues and re-evaluates some of these predictions in light of the significant economic, political and social changes that have occurred since 2006. Developments since the ascension of Xi Jinping as China’s paramount leader in 2012 have been especially striking; therefore, we focus particularly on this time period. What has changed and where is the ship of China’s environmental state now heading? What lessons and implications can we draw from comparing China’s environmental governance then and now?

A first striking change since 2006 is the transformation of China’s ostensible intent, which has given rise to a different global image with regard to environmental questions. A decade ago, China was widely criticized by countries in the global North for its perceived recalcitrance in climate change negotiations and framed as a reckless growth-at-all-costs polluter within its own borders; since then, a new openness to multilateral approaches to reducing GHG emissions combined with the rapid build-out of renewable energy capacity has generated widespread praise and admiration for China’s ‘green entrepreneurial state’ (Mazzucato 2015). China is now seen as a global leader in renewable energies after having become the largest wind energy provider worldwide in 2010 and the leading installer of solar photovoltaics since 2013. In 2017, Chinese automakers also manufactured more than 680,000 electric vehicles, buses and trucks, more than the rest of the world combined (Babones 2018). China’s new green image provides a sharp contrast with America’s retreat from the global climate change regime and the neglect of renewable energy development under President Trump. Indeed, following America’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement in June 2017, many observers looked to China to take up the mantle of global climate change leader (Ye 2017), something quite unimaginable before the Copenhagen summit in 2009. Likewise, the international news media and environmental NGOs now routinely offer praise for China’s domestic ‘war on pollution’ that is credited with recent dramatic improvements in air quality in some regions of China (New York Times (NYT) 2018).

The contributors to this Symposium offer insight into some of the internal shifts that have given rise to both China’s green reputation on the global stage and a new tenacity in combating environmental degradation domestically. Here, we introduce the contributions to the Symposium by focusing on three dimensions of this transformation that are particularly salient: the emergence of new actors in China’s environmental state; increasing reliance on ad hoc campaign-style enforcement mechanisms; and emerging ambitions to use big data and technologies in environmental management. Taken together, these analyses draw attention to rapid advances in China’s environmental governance processes as well as some degree of success in reversing the environmental toll of decades of growth-at-all-costs. Yet, they also raise questions about the utility and viability of environmental authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics in the longer run.

A changing landscape of actors

Since Xi Jinping assumed office in 2012, a host of new players have joined the environmental governance field while others have retreated. These new players include judges, prosecutors, environmental NGOs and Chinese citizens (Van Rooij et al. 2016). Most recently, local tax bureaus and local police have begun to play a more significant role in environmental enforcement activities. The recent introduction of an environmental tax under a new Environmental Protection Tax Law is intended to significantly raise the costs of pollution. In force since January 2018, this reform has brought an end to a pollution discharge penalty fee system administered by local Environmental Protection Bureaus’ (EPBs). Instead, local tax bureaus will be responsible for collecting a new environmental tax that replaces the fee system. It is widely hoped that this move will force local governments to stop exploiting loopholes and protecting polluting enterprises that contribute the most to local tax revenue and employment (Xinhua Net 2018). The revenues generated from the new environmental tax will become part of local fiscal incomes, creating an incentive for perennially cash-strapped local governments to embrace the new environmental tax. A potential downside of this change is that it may weaken the position of the local EPBs even further, since the loss of pollution fee revenues could make them even more dependent on budget allocations from local governments.

Another important recent change is the establishment of environmental police (EP) forces in different regions. China’s first EP force was created in 2008 in Kunming city and more than a dozen municipal and provincial governments (including Guangdong, Beijing, Hebei, Sichuan, Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu, Yunnan, Shanxi, and Hubei) have since followed suit. By pursuing environmental pollution cases as criminal offenses, officials expect that industry will be more inclined to comply with China’s environmental laws and regulations. As one government official in Beijing put it, ‘the police’s compulsory measures, including detention, will deter polluters’ (China Daily 2017). While the creation of EPs could conceivably increase compliance rates, at the time of writing there remain thorny issues to resolve regarding the legal status of EP as a special force of the PRC (Wunderlich 2017).

In addition to the entrance of new actors, there is also change among the players with a long-standing role in China’s environmental governance. Eaton and Kostka (2018) in this Symposium focus on recent efforts to improve interjurisdictional environmental management in China and discuss the state’s increasing use of the considerable power of the Communist Party hierarchy. In water governance, for example, higher-ranked Party cadres in large administrative units covering interjurisdictional river basins now receive targets for water quality (Chien and Hong 2017). Under the ‘one river, one leader’ system, formalized in a 2009 MEP document, higher-ranked cadres at the provincial or municipal level are designated as ‘river chiefs’ and tasked with managing lower-level cadres who oversee tributaries that flow into the river basin overseen by the ‘river chiefs’. By shifting accountability from governments to Party organizations, Party leaders increasingly play important roles in environmental management.

Other actors have been weakened in recent years. Mol and Carter (2006: 160) saw environmental NGOs developing rapidly and found that while their ‘political room’ was limited it seemed to be expanding. Looking back, in the first decade of the twenty-first century environmental civil society enjoyed more space for manoeuver because China had just joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and was creating a relatively open society (Halverson 2004). But under Xi Jinping the space for environmental NGOs (ENGOs) has become increasingly confined, particularly since the new Chinese Foreign NGO Law came into effect in 2017. NGO registration processes have become much more difficult for domestic and foreign ENGOs and they are under increasing pressure to enter alliances with government-run NGOs (so called GONGOs) such that experts suggest that we see a hollowing out of the non-governmental nature of ENGOs in China (Huang 2017). The limited participation of NGOs and citizens in governance processes creates doubts about the effectiveness of China’s emerging environmental state in the long term.

At the same time, we also see determined efforts to improve state capacity in environmental policy. In particular, administrative reforms newly-launched in 2018 aim at a considerable streamlining of the environmental bureaucracy to reduce inefficiencies and conflicts associated with considerable fragmentation of policymaking and enforcement authority. Under the state’s ambitious restructuring of central ministries in 2018, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) was dismantled and replaced by a much larger and potentially much more powerful Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE). In addition to its responsibility for pollution control, the new MEE has been given increased authority over policies touching on climate change, previously the purview of the National Development and Reform Commission. By consolidating power under the roof of the MEE, this reshuffling of bureaucratic responsibilities at the national level may help to address China’s long-standing coordination problem of fragmented authoritarianism (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1988) and persistent problems stemming from the fuzzy allocation of responsibilities to ministries, such as frequent overlaps and conflicts in policymaking and implementation processes (Ran 2013).

Another important change concerns the recent switch from a horizontal (kuai)-based to a vertical (tiao)-based management system in the environmental bureaucracy. Under this new reform, environmental management is more centralized from sub-provincial to the provincial level. Previously, a municipal EPB received its guidelines from the provincial-level EPB but final decisions were, in fact, made by the municipal government on the horizontal (kuai) plane. As municipal leaders often prioritized economic over environmental priorities, this frequently gave rise to problems of ‘local protectionism’ (Lorentzen et al. 2014). In 2016, China announced the transition toward this vertical-management system, first piloting it in 12 provinces with plans to roll it out nationally by 2020 (People’s Daily 2016). Under this new reform, provincial EPBs (rather than local government officials) have authority to nominate the director and vice-director positions for municipal EPBs. In addition, environmental monitoring and inspections, previously the responsibility of municipal and county EPBs, have been brought up to the provincial level (Ma 2017).

Yet, one should not be overly optimistic about the prospects of these centralizing reforms. Similar vertical management reforms have been tested in the fields of quality and technology supervision and land management in China. A decade after implementation, reforms have stalled or even reverted to a horizontal-based management system because they did not bring significant improvements in enforcement (Ma 2017). Indeed, early pilots in the 12 provinces show that while the new reform might well increase the EPBs’ independence from local governments, they have also come with pronounced disadvantages for local environment officials. Under the new system, some EPBs have become more isolated in their locality as local government officials tend no longer to view EPB leaders as ‘their’ agents. Importantly, this isolation shrinks the promotion opportunities for local EPB staff and makes it difficult to attract competent personnel. Whereas prior to the reform, EPB staff could be promoted horizontally or vertically, the career mobility prospects for EPB officials have now, in effect, been constricted by the move to a predominantly vertical line of personnel movement (Ma 2017). As such, while this new reform gives more authority to the provinces, it has not solved long-standing dilemmas faced by the EPB in the complex politics of the local state. Overall, despite the challenges encountered when the rubber meets the proverbial road, the new restructurings do indicate a strengthened commitment from Beijing to improve environmental governance and to employ tighter oversight of local governments.

Orders from Beijing: tougher laws, stronger campaigns

Alongside bureaucratic reforms, we also see improvements in the framework of environmental law as well as the rise of ad hoc environmental campaigns. Over the last decade, China has introduced numerous environmental laws and enforcement mechanisms to strengthen environmental oversight. In 2007, the State Council promulgated the Regulations on Open Government Information, which requires that EPBs disclose information to the public about environmental regulations and data pertaining to environmental management and supervision (Wang 2018). Seligsohn et al. (2018) in this Symposium examine the impact of the EPBs’ increased information transparency on key environmental outcomes. Using several performance measurements of air and water quality along with the widely used Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), they find that public transparency alone has had no impact on environmental outcomes beyond the provision of information itself. One important implication of this research is that information disclosure only results in improved environmental outcomes when ‘coupled with the design of mechanisms for its use, both in effective interpretation of the data and in a role for the citizenry to influence government’ (Seligsohn et al. 2018: 31). Their research joins other recent work in the finding that information transparency is not a panacea because significant problems of poor information quality, selective disclosure and data manipulation remain (Wang 2018).

Another noticeable change in recent years has been the increased use of ‘sticks’ and coercive supervisory mechanisms. Under the revised 2014 Environmental Protection Law (EPL), polluting companies face a stricter fine system through uncapped penalties, higher minimum fines, and daily fines. Importantly, under the revised law, local government officials could be held criminally liable if they failed to punish polluters (EPL 2014). While it was once common for upper-level authorities to turn a blind eye to local officials’ nonfulfillment of environmental targets and the manipulation of environmental data, such infractions now often result in severe punishments. Upper-level governments have increased the frequency of onsite inspections (both announced and unannounced), and recent research suggests that such practices have discouraged violations (Zhang 2017). In 2016 and 2017 alone national inspection teams punished more than 10,000 people for breaches of environmental protection regulations (South China Morning Post 2017). For instance, in Hebei province, 487 people (among whom were hundreds of governmental officials) received punishments for misconduct in environmental data management in 2016; some of the accused even received prison sentences (China News 2016).

Although China has experimented with some new approaches and instruments over the last decade (Kostka and Mol 2013), environmental policy implementation continues to rely heavily on a command-and-control approach. The inclusion of strict environmental targets in local and national Five-Year Plans has been a particularly important policy instrument. This target-based approach to implementation incentivizes local officials to prioritize environmental mandates, yet there are also numerous shortcomings in the system. In particular, target rigidity, cyclical behavior of governments, poor data quality, and the absence of an independent monitoring agency have generated adverse effects and contribute to a yawning gap between regulatory goals and outcomes (Wang 2013, Kostka 2016). Shin’s study in this Symposium on low-carbon cities shows that China’s heavy reliance on quantifiable targets for policy implementation might be ultimately ill-suited to the realization of ambitious, multi-faceted environmental policies. Studying low carbon planning in the city of Baoding, Shin (2018: 20) notes that ‘when faced with difficulties in inducing lower-level officials to work in the interests of the central authorities, China routinely responds by … instituting ever more detailed, draconian, and increasing numbers of targets and evaluation metrics’. Yet, his analysis shows that for low carbon planning, a policy that is fundamentally complex, specific quantifiable targets were not effective instruments as they failed to incentivize long-term planning and investments. Shin’s findings raise important questions about China’s tendency to rely excessively on compensation-for-performance structures to promote environmental policies.

We also see the Communist Party drawing on its long experience with top-down campaign-style enforcement mechanisms to combat pollution. Recent examples include the 2010 campaigns to ‘eliminate backward production capacity’ and ‘small plant closure’ as well as the 2013 Action Plan for Air Pollution Prevention and Control (APAP), an ambitious effort to remedy severe air pollution in the Beijing-Hebei-Tianjin area. Many of these campaigns used quite drastic implementation measures, such as the summary closure of polluting plants as well as cutting off factories’ access to electricity and water (Kostka and Hobbs 2012). While such ‘blunt force regulation’ (Van Der Kamp 2017) may offer quick results in the short term – as shown in the rapid decline in PM2.5 pollution resulting from APAP measures – such ad hoc campaign style enforcement hinders the creation of long-term compliance and routine enforcement mechanisms and may also undermine the rule of law (Ma 2017, Van Der Kamp 2017, Van Rooij et al. 2017). Moreover, many of these campaigns are focused narrowly on particular regions, especially larger urban areas, and on particular pollutants (Kostka and Nahm 2017, Van Rooij et al. 2017). Van Der Kamp (2017) points to the considerable costs of such blunt force regulations since closing companies negatively affects local development and employment. In addition, with the sheer number of campaigns being launched every year, the local bureaucracy is also facing an ‘overmobilization problem’, and cadres may be unable to implement future environmental campaigns with the same enthusiasm as before.

Finally, ad hoc campaigns are often pushed down through the strong vertical lines in China’s environmental state. However, as Eaton and Kostka (2018) show, tackling China’s grave environmental problems increasingly turns on questions of sub-national interjurisdictional relations. They argue that too little is known about the underlying drivers of interjurisdictional relations in China and sketch an analytical framework for analysis that conceives of interjurisdictional relations as a function of four variable categories: political institutions; local leadership traits; characteristics of local business and civil society; structural factors (geographic density and group size). Their research points to the limits of top-down, command-and-control mechanisms in resolving problems of transboundary pollution and other forms of interjurisdictional environmental conflict.

Taking advantage of emerging technologies and big data analytics

Another significant change over the past decade is the emergence of digital technology to identify, analyze, report on, and respond to polluting activities in China. Advanced technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS), the global positioning system (GPS), and remote sensing (RS) technologies have ‘opened the door to new modes of monitoring and managing the environment’ (Hsu et al. 2017: 2). GPS and GIS data, for instance, has been used to monitor China’s air quality, forest coverage rates, and landscape changes at the local level (Cui et al. 2005).

Most recently, ‘big data’ approaches in environmental management have emerged in China. In 2016, the MEP (now the MEE) announced the construction of a national ecological big data platform by 2021 (MEP 2016). This platform aims at centralizing data management, merging and unifying different data sources, and developing the necessary infrastructure for hosting such complex interconnected platforms. More specifically, the MEE’s big data platform will consist of a big data application platform, a big data management platform, and a big data environmental cloud.

At the present moment, progress on incorporating big data approaches into environmental governance is decidedly variable across environmental issues. In the field of air quality management, for instance, the MEE has already established data-based analysis and predictive models for air quality management. Data here is collected from multiple sources, including satellite data to analyze and predict general air quality, drone technologies to monitor pollution discharges and data from citizen reports to tackle particular pollution episodes. MEE’s air pollution data platform serves as an early-warning system for severe smog incidents, yet at the moment is struggling with familiar data quality and consistency problems, such as incomplete and inaccurate data, as well as insufficient coordination across multiple data sources (Zhang 2018). However, on other issues, such as water quality and soil pollution, data provision and investments are lower (Hsu et al. 2017: 7). Existing problems of data availability, data quality, and inconsistencies between different sources of environmental statistics will continue to pose challenges for China’s national ecological big data platform.

Innovative efforts to introduce new digital environmental management mechanisms are also underway at subnational levels. In Guizhou, a province that is quickly advancing toward its goal of becoming a big data technology hub, the provincial government introduced ‘cloud chiefs’ that manage big data monitoring systems. For instance, by integrating and uploading hydrological, environmental, meteorological and biological data into the Caohai Big Data Monitoring and Management System under real-time surveillance, the province aims to improve the protection of the Caohai Grassland Reserve in the province’s southwest (Xinhua News 2017). In Shanghai, city officials began to employ big data to manage different issues of urban governance as early as 2011, including the creation of a data platform for air quality monitoring and air pollution source management (Hsu et al. 2017, Wang 2018). The city of Shenzhen has also embraced big data technology for environmental governance. A ‘digital environmental protection integrated platform’ in the city features an intelligent environmental warning system, a digital environmental law enforcement system, and an urban environmental emergency management system (Yang and Xu 2014).

One interesting aspect of the embrace of big data is the relationships that have sprung up between a range of new actors and the state. Among these new linkages is a government-business partnership joining IBM and MEE in the U-Air project that is forecasting air quality for 70 Chinese cities (Zhang et al. 2017) and a partnership between China Mobile, Guangruida Information Technology Company and MEE for China’s Online Air Pollution Monitoring Platform (GSMA 2018). At the city level, there are also many new relationships forming to create smart cities, such as the alliance between telecommunications manufacturer Huawei and Weifang municipality as well as a partnership between Tencent and Guangzhou municipality (Yicaiglobal 2018). These new actor constellations deserve further in-depth study since they raise important new issues surrounding data sharing and data privacy practices, diverging interests between firms and governments.

Conclusion

What lessons and implications can we draw from comparing China’s environmental governance in 2006 with its current incarnation? First, the findings of the contributions gathered here comport with the claim made in the earlier Special Issue that, for the Chinese state, ‘the times of denying or trivializing environmental challenges have passed’ (Mol and Carter 2006: 165). From Xi Jinping down to local EPB officials, the need to prioritize environmental protection has become a consensus within the Chinese state. But the particular means through which China addresses its environmental challenges is divergent from its western counterparts and will remain so. Indeed, developments in the past decade show that China is certainly not heading in the direction of an environmental state with strong democratic underpinnings. Instead, the current trends in environmental governance show a tendency toward a centralization characterized by the reinforcement and refurbishment of top-down management tools alongside ever tighter controls on civil society and public participation.

But this is not to say that China’s environmental state completely disregards society. On the contrary, China’s nascent green transformation shows that authoritarian states can, under certain circumstances, be responsive to public demands for improved environmental governance. The Chinese Communist Party now regards pollution control as one of the ‘three tough battles’ to be fought and won by 2020 (along with financial risk management and targeted poverty alleviation). The high prioritization of environmental protection reflects the leadership’s view that this is fundamentally a matter of regime legitimacy. Against this background, China has made rapid improvements in environmental management and governance over the past decade, progress that is increasingly apparent at both domestic and international levels. We find considerable improvements in many domains such as air pollution control, renewable energies and electric vehicles. At the same time, the contributions in this Symposium along with much recent writing about China’s environmental state, serve as a reminder that many constraints and challenges remain firmly embedded in governance processes. Among these are a pervasive lack of accountability, poor data quality and management, and heavy constraints on civil society and public participation. Accordingly, the findings gathered here suggest that the understandable enthusiasm for China’s green transformation ought to be tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism about the road ahead. The coming decades are shaping up to be an exciting time for researchers working on China’s governance of environmental protection and climate change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.