China Environmental Law

The Panyu waste incineration plant protest in Guangzhou last week was important for a number of reasons, but one of the most thoughtful takes on the event comes from an unlikely source, the Communist Party of China’s Guangdong Party School.
In an article entitled, “Confronting pollution: ‘expel it’ or ‘manage it’”? (I’d welcome a better translation, [...]

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I am not going to write anything today because you must read this article from Caijing Magazine: Heavy Metal Warfare.  It covers the smelting industry along the Xiang river in Hunan province 1 the , and in the process provides a telling picture of the challenges faced by Chinese environmental regulators across the vast rural [...]

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I know its hard to keep the incidents of environmental poisonings straight in China. Today’s post involves the more than 300 children living in the shadow of a lead and zinc smelting facility in Fengxiang county, Shaanxi province who have been reported with levels of lead in their blood so high they were exhibiting symptoms [...]

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We’ve about reached our pontification limit for the week here at CELB, so will avoid in depth analysis today and give you a quick tour of a few other China environmental stories making the headlines.
Environmental Protests
More than 1,000 residents in Zhentou, Hunan Province, “demonstrated outside local government headquarters and a police station, demanding greater compensation [...]

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I love it when Chinese officials become dismissively indignant even when they are just flat out, demonstrably wrong. Here’s a classic.
Chinese Minister of Environmental Protection has refuted doubts over the accuracy of the air quality test results in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics and blamed media’s exaggeration of the capital’s pollution.
Zhou Shengxian said during [...]

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The Good
During the first six months of 2009, Beijing experienced its best air in a decade.  Although just how good Beijing’s air is in an absolute sense remains in dispute (for all things Beijing Air, your indispensable source is livefrombeijing), there seems little reason to doubt that air quality has improved on a relative basis [...]

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The Ministry of Environmental Protection released the English summary of its “State of the Environment” report earlier this month.  We have read it so you won’t have to.
Let’s first look at the ten achievements identified for 2008.  Where interesting facts and figures were given, we have noted them.

First, the CPC Central Committee and the State [...]

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I applaud China’s willingness to publish the results of environmental and energy audits when the results do not paint a pretty picture.  The National Audit Office (NAO) yesterday released a report containing the results of its audit of the compliance efforts of 41 major state-owned enterprises (SOE) in 2007.  It found that a number of [...]

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Premier Wen apparently announced the 2008 numbers for Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) discharges and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) emissions reductions in his address to the National People’s Congress.  If these numbers had been released previously, I missed them.  You may recall that the 11th Five Year Plan calls for a 10% reduction in COD and SO2 [...]

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The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has articulated the concerns of many that the need for economic stimulating activities may result in backsliding on the environmental front in China.  Zhou Shengxian, the Minister of MEP, in remarks before a national conference on environmental protection on Monday, said that “factories with backward facilities ‘would revive’, using [...]

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