China Environmental Law

The morning sessions today were by far the best of the conference, but they had little to do with environmental sustainability. The first addressed the “sustainability of the World Trading system” and the second dealt with the “Future of Culture in the Age of Commerce.”  Both topics could have supported separate conferences, and are probably more suited to the conference format since they are each ripe for academic debate.  “Environmental sustainability” on the other hand is not a concept around which there is much disagreement. Everyone agrees it’s a good thing and there is general consensus on what the available options are; its simply a question of which “products” you choose and how do you pay for them. Important questions, but not ones which make for lively panel discussions.

In any event, I was hoping to gain an insight or two from the Chinese officials scheduled to appear at the day’s sessions. Alas, missing from every panel on Friday were the high-ranking Chinese government officials who were originally scheduled to participate, including Guo Lijun, Standing Committee Member of the Tianjin CPC; Bie Tao, Deputy Director-General, Department of Policy & Law, Ministry of Environmental Protection; and Zhao Xiaoping, Vice Minister, National Energy Bureau. Now it could be that all three gentlemen experienced emergency situations, but I doubt it. If I had to guess, here’s what I think happened. This event was Vice President Xi Jinping’s (he moved up the time of his speech to insure it would be featured on the evening news-taking a page from the American politician’s playbook), and Mayor Huang Xingguo’s in terms of publicity. No other politician could risk making news that could possibly upstage these gentlemen. If they had simply been scheduled to deliver a speech, vacuousness could have been guaranteed. However, they were slotted to appear in panel discussions. The risk of news making in such an unscripted format was too great, and thereby had to be avoided. So we had ”no shows” which are understandable from the Chinese perspective perhaps, but were perceived as rude by many of the Western attendees. 

So it was with a slight feeling of having been shortchanged that I started my journey home.  Air travel in China is always a bewildering experience, and yesterday’s flight was no exception. Sometimes it’s a translation issue; like the airline whose motto in English is “we never stop to improve ourselves,” or the time a flight was delayed because of “aerial confusion”-by all means get that cleared up!

Usually it has to do with flight scheduling. Our flight was to depart Tianjin at 7:05 PM. At around 6:15 PM the computer monitors changed this to 7:35 PM.  Fifteen minutes later a recorded announcement was made that “the flight from Tianjin to Shanghai Hongqiao is delayed because of . . .”  Here the recording paused to allow the relevant reason to be inserted, but none had been.  I’d like to think that no one could bring themselves to utter a shameless lie, but I suspect it was just inertia.  The recording continued: “and is now scheduled to depart at 8:55 PM.” As my travel companions and I planned our assault on the VIP lounge (an earlier sally had been rebuffed), an announcement was made at about 6:45 PM that “the flight from Tianjin to Shanghai Hongqiao is now boarding at Gate 11.” And so off we went at our originally scheduled departure time.  In my book, all’s well that end’s well in the travel department.