China Environmental Law

The Asia Society’s 18^th Asian Corporate Conference has returned for the third time to China (it has not been here since Shanghai in 2000), and it picked Tianjin as its locale and the Tianjin Municipal People’s Government as its co-sponsor. Yesterday was not the kind of day Tianjin must have hoped for to showcase its new TEDA development area (where the conference hotel is located). Northern China, including Tianjin, was enshrouded in a haze of fine dust and other particulate matter which left one feeling depressed and very gritty. Visibility was limited to a couple of blocks so if there are signs of rising prosperity in the TEDA zone, they were hard to see.

My trip by taxi in from the Tianjin airport was spent alternatively at a dead, idling stop and a Mad Max, white knuckled, dash down the freeway using every inch of paved and unpaved space available.  I assume most international visitors arrived in Beijing and drove to Tianjin. While it’s usually a two hour trip, yesterday it was reportedly taking at least five hours because of traffic and construction. 

The only conference event yesterday was the Opening Night Dinner headlined by China’s Vice President and heir apparent, Xi Jinping. He gave a fairly short speech about China’s “post-1978″ economic developments and the application of a “scientific outlook” to future development, that included as two of its pillars, “putting people first” and sustainability. The first pillar means that development should be for, by, and shared among all the people (which I assume refers to the “harmonious” themes of reducing income inequality and spreading development to all regions). Sustainability requires development that avoids pollution and builds a “resource conserving” society.  He also noted that recent trends in energy efficiency and pollution reduction were in the right direction, and he supported the creation of a “circular,” energy conserving, environmentally friendly economy. There wasn’t anything new in the speech (and no mention of carbon emissions  reduction), but it was not as unreservedly pro-development as Hu Jintao’s speech before the Boao “Green Asia” Forum in Sanya last month.  Vice President Xi’s speech gave much more than a nod to the sustainability theme of the Asia Society conference.

The speech ended, however, with a striking example of how much work may still may need to be done in China to change attitudes as to what, in fact, constitutes “green” development. In praising the efforts of Tianjin and their economic revitalization efforts, Xi noted that the traffic-clogged, dust covered, sea of concrete that we were sitting in the midst of had only a few years ago been an “uncultivated salt marsh.” I wouldn’t trade a heron for another five-star hotel, but then again I don’t need to keep hundreds of millions of people employed. Someday the calculus will change in China as well, let’s just hope there are some uncultivated salt marshes left when it does.