The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
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The daughter of a former vice mayor accused a wealthy local businessman and Party member of rape. After pursuing the case unsuccessfully for two years, the father, Tian Wanchang, resorted to petitioning in Beijing. Consequently, the man once responsible for “maintaining social stability” in his city has been labelled an “unstable factor” by local authorities. Ding launches a ferocious attack on the social ills the episode reflects:

A case like this cuts to the core of Chinese society, and the picture it paints is not flattering. It is a picture of jungle warfare, of a primitive world where power, force, is the only law. It is only because, in this case, the two sides happen to be more evenly matched – officialdom versus wealth – that anyone even knows that this case exists. Imagine a similar case involving the wealthy on one side and an ordinary citizen on the other – is there even any doubt that the case would never see the light of day? The injustice would certainly remain buried forever, regardless of the truth or the severity of the crime.

In this case, we have in Mr. Tian an official once in charge of maintaining social stability who, over the course of his career, doubtlessly clamped down on many who had been labeled disturbers of the peace. And now, following a bitter turn of events, he himself has been labeled one of those “unstable factors” threatening the very society he worked for years to maintain order in. More ironic still, despite his years of service to the state he is now unable to seek legal recourse for his own daughter. How is a father, how is anyone, expected to stomach a travesty of this magnitude?

Local business tycoons are in cahoots with the local authorities to a stupefying degree. The moneyed class is in fact so ingratiated with local government that the wealthy have become the de factor political rulers. What has emerged is a despotism where citizens are sacrificed on the altar of the powerful, where legal rulings are constantly harming the people they are meant to help. Citizens looking to protect their rights will simply never win versus officials or versus the rich. Their only choice is to perish together, pitiable and powerless.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guizhou, law enforcement, local officials, petitioners, police, rape, wealth gap
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For more than a year now, I’ve wanted to write an open letter to discuss with everyone my views on the “anti-crime drive” (打黑) in Chongqing. But considering that I wrote quite a number of commentaries on my own blog and for various media, I feared I might make carping remarks or get all twisted up, so I wrote off the idea. However, a number of trends in Chongqing of late are nagging causes for anxiety. In my view, the various things that have happened in that city already pose a danger to the most basic notions of a society ruled by law. And as a legal scholar, one in particular who has participated in the process of judicial reform, I believe I now have an urgent duty to openly express my uneasiness and voice my criticisms.

Another factor behind my writing of this open letter is the fact that Chongqing is the locale of my alma mater, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, and a city of which I have the fondest memories. It was there in 1978, after a “long a arduous journey,” that I began my sojourn into legal studies in that campus at the foot of Gele Hill.

In the course of our studies that year, our teachers too had only just returned to campus life after the “terrible decade” during which they were suppressed, and they spoke of the lawless days of the Cultural Revolution, chapter upon chapter of misery and suffering. A number of teachers could not hold back the tears. Actually, all of us students had also experienced the Cultural Revolution first-hand, and all of us one way or another treasured this course of study in law. We longed for the future of building rule of law in our homeland, and we all hungered for the opportunity to get involved in this great project, doing our part to preserve civil rights and freedom. We made up our minds that we would not allow the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution to be replayed on this soil.

CMP has since noted the letter’s publication by the Shanghai-based Finance Week:

While He Weifang’s letter still seems to be readily available on various blogs in China, the choice to print it could be risky for mainstream media and major internet news portals. It is also accompanied by a rather strong lead editorial under the title, “A Market Economy Cannot Be Without Mavericks” (市场经济不能没有特立独行者).

Writing on Twitter today, journalist Peng Xiaoyun (彭晓芸), who was dismissed as opinion editor from Guangzhou’s Time Weekly earlier this year, praised Finance Week for its courage. “I salute this publication and the editors who put out this series of essays!” she wrote.

The anti-crime drive and other developments in Chongqing have recently been covered by John Garnaut at the Sydney Morning Herald, and by a recently featured Economist article citing them as examples of growing princeling influence.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, crime, He Weifang, law enforcement, rule of law
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There are numerous reasons why effective enforcement both by the EPBs [Environmental Protection Bureaus] and civil suits is greatly hampered. Local EPBs are only “nominally responsible” to the ministry-level Environmental Protection Administration in Beijing, as Elizabeth Economy notes in her 2004 book “The River Runs Black,” and rely on local governments for “virtually all their support.” Local government officials also benefit from higher levels of output in their region, as Gregory Chow has observed, noting that “they receive credits for economic development and sometimes bribes from polluting producers.” Local governments, the courts and the EPBs give protection to key local enterprises.

A recent study in the academic journal “China Quarterly” on the efforts of local EBPs in Hubei Province to sue polluters who had failed to pay fines provides an example of these dynamics:
In Hubei, the study reports, any discharger of wastewater must register and report on their discharges, and the reports provide the basis on which the EPBs determine any pollution levies that must be paid. If the polluters fail to comply, they may be sued both for the unpaid amount and an administrative penalty.

In 1990, the National People’s Congress adopted the Administrative Litigation Law (“ALL”), which authorized not only civil suits against government agencies for alleged illegalities, but also suits by government agencies for judicial assistance when regulated parties fail to comply with agency decisions. In the early 1990s, when the ALL was still novel, citizens were reluctant to file cases against government agencies–a problem for the administrative law divisions of some courts that faced elimination because of small caseloads. In three areas in Hubei the courts approached local EPBs and cooperated with them in enforcing levies and administrative fines.

The arrangement has been a win-win, but only in one sense. The agencies file more cases, helping the courts increase their caseloads and generate litigation fees. The enforcement cases also generate revenues for the EPBs, which use the funds to supplement their underfunded budgets. As a result, the EPBs seek fines rather than ordering polluters to take measures to reduce pollution.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: environmental protection, environmental regulation, law enforcement
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Courts across the country will step up efforts to help local governments cope with an increasing number of mass incidents involving disputes over wages and management amid the economic downturn, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) said in a guideline released Monday.

“The courts will focus on dealing with a sharp increase in mass incidents especially in the mediation of demonstrations. If there is any trend seen in ‘mass petitions’, the courts should also work closely with local administrative departments,” the document said.

Judicial departments should “establish an early warning mechanism” and direct their resources in line with law enforcement, the SPC said.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: courts, law enforcement, social unrest
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Starting Jan. 1, workers nationwide will gain new rights, especially when it comes to long-term job security.

Employees with 10 straight years at a company will be entitled to a contract without a fixed end date, essentially giving them lifetime employment. Severance payments will be mandatory for anyone whose contract expires or who leaves after giving 30 days’ notice or is laid off, except in special cases of large-scale layoffs or dismissals due to criminal liabilities or serious violations of company rules.

Here in this southeastern industrial city near Hong Kong, people such as Huang have been reaching out to migrant workers and educating them about their protections under the new law. Although lacking proof, Huang and other labor advocates believe some employers are trying to shut them up. [Full text]

Read also this past CDT entry for links to another article on the labor law by The Guardian, and to comments from China Law Blog.

[Image source: Los Angeles Times]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: labor law, labor rights, law enforcement, migrant workers
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