The Troubles with China’s Environmental Destruction Agency

All countries suffer internal tugs of war over how to balance the short-term costs of improving environmental protection with the long-term costs of failing to do so. But China faces an additional burden. Its environmental problems stem as much from China’s corrupt and undemocratic political system as from Beijing’s continued focus on economic growth. Local officials and business leaders routinely—and with impunity—ignore environmental laws and regulations, abscond with environmental protection funds, and silence those who challenge them.

—Elizabeth C. Economy

Why has China allowed itself to become the black lungs, yellow dust bowl, and biggest global warmer of the planet? This is an important question because, at least on paper, China has a set of environmental regulations almost as tough as those of the United States. In practice, however, the laws are a total sham.

As a root source of the problem, China’s Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is woefully understaffed. Whereas the U.S. EPA employs close to 20,000 regulators, China’s counterpart has only 300. In addition, China’s local environmental bureaus most empowered to enforce the federal government’s edicts are highly autonomous, far more concerned with gunning the local economy than protecting the environment, and often corrupt.

In a highly interrelated problem, many of China’s worst polluters are also government-run enterprises. This raises an obvious “fox guarding the henhouse” issue because it requires the government to police itself.

There is also the very large matter of the exceedingly small fines that Chinese regulators typically impose on polluters. These fines are seen not as an effective deterrent but rather as a small cost of doing business.

The coup de grâce for China’s environment is China’s sordid historical relationship with the Earth. For centuries, the country’s rulers have subjugated nature to their needs instead of attempting to live in harmony with it. As Chairman Mao once put it, man must “conquer nature and thus attain freedom from nature.”

In the communist system, there is also precious little respect for the more diffuse rights of others to everything from clean air and water to human rights. That’s why in this permissive atmosphere, it is routine for Chinese factory managers to either ignore environmental rules or, in some ways far worse, to engage in elaborate ruses to fool environmental inspectors.

One such ruse, which is practiced by as many as one-third of all large Chinese companies, is to switch on the company’s pollution-control technologies only during government inspections. This is easy to accomplish because corrupt regulators often tip off the companies in advance of inspections in exchange for bribes. That’s why Joseph Kahn of the New York Times has correctly noted the following:

The enormous human and environmental toll of China’s rapid development is not just an unintended side effect but also an explicit choice of business executives and officials who tolerate death and degradation as the inevitable price of progress.

Groups such as the Sierra Club are not likely to ride to the rescue either. Rather than being respected in China, environmentalists are subject to all manners of abuse—from fines and beatings to prison. A “poster child” for this problem is Wu Lihong. He went from being honored in the Great Hall of the People as one of China’s top environmentalists to being beaten and jailed a year later on trumped-up charges of blackmail.

As a final cause of China’s lack of environmental protection and enforcement, there is the meteoric rise of powerful foreign companies and their lobbyists in the political and economic fabric of China. As noted in Chapter 1, much of the foreign direct investment flooding into China comes from companies based in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States that are actively exporting some of their most polluting industries to China. Indeed, it is precisely China’s dysfunctional system of environmental protection that helps make China such a magnet for foreign investment.

There is both a danger and a paradox here that should not be lost on any student of Chinese history aware of the “foreign humiliation” that China was subjected to in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The danger is that these powerful foreign economic interests are overpowering the political will of the central government, thereby rendering it impossible for China to get a handle on its own pollution problems. The paradox is that as China’s Communist Party seeks to mold the country into a superpower, it is quickly losing control of its own destiny to powerful foreign economic interests.

Add all of this up and you get what you got: the most heavily polluted country on the planet with enormous environmental problems that are not just local and regional, but global in scope.