China Environmental Law

There are few commentators on China’s environmental legal regime who would not single out reticence at the local level as a major factor in the lax enforcement of China’s environmental laws.  I’ve used the fairly neutral word “reticence” because the reasons for local inaction are varied and range from outright corruption to a sincere desire to protect local employment. Perhaps this phenomenon has been most colorfully characterized by Zhou Shengxian, Minister of MEP, who has previously been quoted as “lambasting the country’s ‘bumpkin policies’ that encouraged local officials to turn a blind eye to environmental hazards.”

A few of the bumpkins have been prosecuted lately.  It was reported today that from 2004 to 2007, 3,822 government officials have been charged with “dereliction of duty causing damage to the natural environment and wasting energy resource.”

Wang [Zhenchuan, deputy procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate] did not offer details as to the specific amount of economic losses, nor how severely the officials were dealt with, but admitted that crooked government officials were the reason why environment related crimes continued to occur.

“A few government officials misused their powers to grant unauthorized changes in land planning and expropriate farmland, forests, or grassland for other uses, causing severe loss of land resources,” Wang said.

“In the meantime, some other officials neglected their duties, and turned their backs on serious pollution of the natural environment, even protecting those guilty of damaging the environment and energy resources,” he said.

A “strike hard” campaign is slated to begin in May of this year and run to November 2009 “to crack down on environmental damage and energy resource waste caused by official dereliction of duty.”

“We hope the campaign will serve to protect the environment and warn all government officials to abide by the law while bringing the corrupt to justice,” Wang said.

I’m sure bad press doesn’t do anyone’s career any good, but it would still be nice to see the facts regarding the amount of penalties or jail time imposed as a result of these prosecutions.  I would also like to know what happened to the polluting facilties that were protected by the local inaction.

This report follows on the heels of yesterday’s story about an MEP Report that found “three of the four provinces along the Huaihe River” have “failed to meet their industrial waster water reduction and treatment target.”  The report said due to improper monitoring and weak law enforcement, the river is still plagued with ammonia and nitrogen.” The Haui River “is as the dirtiest river in the country.”

Currently, there are 191 urban wastewater treatment plants along the river, able to purify about 7.5 million tons daily, and about 2.7 billion tons annually, the MEP report said.

A previous report by the Xinhua News Agency said an average of 4.4 billion tons of waste is discharged into the river every year.

That means that only about 60 percent of the daily wastewater from industries and households can be treated.

Did you catch that? The reporter actually bothered to consult a previous story and cross-check the information with the MEP Report to provide some perspective. This is especially important because information relating to the Huai River pollution is notoriously suspect. Kudos to our unnamed scribe!

The thumbnail at the beginning of this post accompanied the China Daily article about the Huai River. Its shows a man fishing on a branch of the Huai with cormorants. The cormorants usually have something tied around their necks to prevent them from swallowing the fish they retrieve, which in this case may be for their own good.