At 2:15pm protesters rolled out another long banner, this time white with black letters. The police, who earlier voiced that the red banner [reading "Anning oil refinery, don’t put our home into environmental hell!"] was too provocative, sent a small troop to inspect the white banner which read “Give me back beautiful Kunming! We want to survive! We want to be healthy! PX project, get out of Kunming!” Protesters rushed to engage with the police, asking whether or not the banner passed muster. With a supportive and encouraging nod from a police captain, the crowd burst into applause and paraded the banner around the square. […]

[…] Some media outlets reported cell phone service disruption at the protest zone. I personally did not experience this. No organization or local NGO announced themselves as the protest organizer and no names of organizations have been named by media outlets. At the same time, media reports have given very little credit to the protesters for maintaining civility (not a guarantee for Chinese demonstrations) and to the police force for patiently allowing (and thus softly promoting the demonstration). After all, Kunming’s security forces have to breathe the city’s air just the same as anyone.

Protesters are awaiting public announcement from the city or provincial government on the status of the PX plant. They are calling for greater transparency in the approval process and disclosure of the project’s environmental assessment. Until these results are delivered, this issue is likely to gain momentum among Kunming’s citizens making the 5/4 protest the first of many. […]

In contrast with the Kunming demonstration, planned protests in Chengdu on the same day were met with a obstructive tactics such as a “weekend-long earthquake drill” and—as NPR’s Louisa Lim reported—a rescheduled weekend:

The tentacles of the stability-maintenance machine go deep, and all of them swung into action in Chengdu. A woman who’d forwarded a message about the protest on social media was forced to apologize on television earlier in the week. At least 10 dissidents were put under house arrest or forced to “go on holiday,” according to a local human rights website. Meanwhile, employees at state-run work units were warned that they’d be sacked if they protested.

Then there was an enormous leafleting campaign. Households received letters from the government calling for “everyone to stand firm and not believe rumors, and not participate [in protests] in order to prevent people with other motives from seizing this opportunity to create turmoil.” The letters had the unintended effect of bringing the Pengzhou plant to the attention of those who hadn’t already heard about it, creating an even greater groundswell of suppressed discontent.

[…] Since any attempt to protest would clearly have been unwise, some citizens protested in silence by wearing facemasks. Given the levels of pollution, however, this was ineffective. Others commented wryly that the police show of force represented a new “Chengdu model” of dissent, where the actual marching had been outsourced to the security forces.

An editorial in the state-owned Global Times argued that heavy industry projects are economically necessary, but that trying to brush public concerns aside is the wrong approach:

China’s economic development is inseparable from the development of heavy chemical projects. However, the reality is that residents do not want to pay for China’s overall situation at the price of their living environment.

Questions over the development of heavy chemical projects are mainly discussed by local governments and enterprises. Governments have good intentions, with the goals of developing the economy and creating employment, while the public focuses on environmental situation. It has become a stalemate.

To break through this deadlock, local governments should make ordinary people’s environmental anxieties their first concern. They should represent ordinary people’s ecological and comprehensive interests and strive for these interests. Problems will be solved in a much more orderly and rational manner if governments are trusted by public in this regard.

[…] Hanging on to outdated social governance approaches will only make things worse. There is always a way out for heavy chemical projects. Current problems come from the methods of dealing with them.

Also at Global Times, a report on the protests by Chang Meng and Duan Wuning stressed the importance of timely transparency surrounding industrial projects:

“PX is a basic petrochemical raw material and is safe if proper protocols are followed. People are scared because there is a lack of access to information or participation in the projects,” Jin Yong, a leading petrochemical expert at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times.

[…] Information disclosure for both projects was opaque and came out late under public pressure.

“We met with the project committee in April, which was the first public communication event after the construction for two years,” a staffer of Green Kunming, a local environmental NGO, told the Global Times.

“Public rights to information access, participation in environmental policies and judicial remedies are key to solving these situations and preventing the EIA from being manipulated by developers and officials,” Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times.

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Post tags: Chengdu, Chengdu PX, economic development, environmental protests, Kunming, Kunming PX, Ma Jun, protests, PX, Sichuan, stability maintenance, transparency, Yunnan
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It found that China currently has 22,909 rivers that each covers an area of more than 100 square kilometers, some 28,000 fewer than were counted during the 1990s.

[…] “Overexploitation of water resources and pollution are the two major problems. With demand from the industry and urban consumption increasing, the water supply is already being severely challenged, especially in North China,” Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times.

The national strategy should shift from increasing water supply to conservation and more efficient use of water, Ma added.

Marking the completion of the first phase of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project, Scott Moore expanded on Ma’s advice in an op-ed at The New York Times:

In realizing Mao’s dream of moving huge quantities of water from areas of plenty to those of want, Beijing is building a modern marvel, this century’s equivalent of the Panama Canal. But whereas the canal inaugurated a century of faith in the ability of human ingenuity to reshape the natural world, the South-North Water Transfer Project is a testament to the limits of engineering solutions to problems of basic environmental scarcity.

[…] Ultimately, China needs significant political reform to meet the challenge of water scarcity. In order to make difficult decisions about who gets how much water, the country needs robust, transparent and participatory decision-making mechanisms. Moreover, in order to make policy ideas like water-rights reform work, the legal system and the rule of law must be strengthened. Finally, Beijing needs to stop relying on technology to avoid making hard choices about scarce resources. The United States and the rest of the world need to push the Chinese government to make its development more sustainable through political reform, lest China’s economy and social stability be endangered.

A 2011 Q&A with Kenneth Pomeranz at The China Beat (RIP) similarly challenged Beijing’s reliance on epic engineering over “fixing a million leaky faucets” (via CDT).

According to a separate study by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, meanwhile, 44% of shallow groundwater in the North China Plains is polluted, and little more than a fifth can be drunk without treatment. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz counseled optimism:

Try to see it as a glass 1/5th full. @raykwong Marvelous. 1/5 of shallow groundwater in N China Plains drinkable. bit.ly/ZtUmWi

— Rob Schmitz (@rob_schmitz) March 27, 2013

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China has given the go-ahead for the construction of three new hydropower dams on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra river, ending a two-year halt in approving new projects on the river amid concerns from India and environmental groups.

[…] China has, so far, only begun construction on one major hydropower dam on the main stream of the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra or Yarlung Zangbo as it is known in China – a 510 MW project in Zangmu in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which began to be built in 2010.

One of the three approved new dams is bigger than the Zangmu project.

[…] While they are run-of-the-river projects, they will be required to store large volumes of water for generating power. Their construction is likely to trigger fresh concerns in India on how the flows of the Brahmaputra downstream will be impacted.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei attempted to ease such concerns on Wednesday. From Xinhua:

Hong said, “The Chinese side always takes a responsible attitude towards the exploitation of cross-border rivers and every new project will be planned and reasoned in a scientific way (before being started).”

He added that the interests of the countries on the upper and lower reaches are all taken into consideration.

But The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman outlined a number of other fears surrounding renewed development on the Nu and other rivers:

Ma Jun, head of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said that because local governments and state-owned enterprises profit enormously from building large-scale infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric stations, they often cut corners on legally required environmental impact assessments.

“We had a chance to review some of the summaries of the large dam projects on the Jinsha river – there are major gaps identified in those reports, and some of them are very basic ones,” he said.

[…] The state council notice also mentions the Xiaonanhai hydropower station on the Yangtze river, a $4.75bn, seven-and-a-half-year project designed to have a capacity of 1.76 gigawatts to provide electricity to the sprawling south-western metropolis Chongqing.

Critics say that the project will displace about 40,000 people, submerge about 20 miles of arable land and destroy endangered fish species including the Dabry’s sturgeon, a 140m-year-old “living fossil” which has appeared on a Chinese postage stamp.

A slideshow at The Guardian showed some of the areas, communities and habitats under threat from new dams.

As Kaiman noted, reservoir-induced seismicity is another worry in parts of the country already prone to landslides and earthquakes. In December, a Probe International study suggested that the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake which killed some 80,000 people was likely caused by the weight of water behind the nearby Zipingpu dam.

For more information, see International Rivers’ China resources.

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Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, dams, Hydropower, India, Jinsha River, Ma Jun, Mekong river, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nu River, rivers, Tibet, Yangtze River
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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.”

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Post tags: 2008 Beijing 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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Chen shocked the world in April when he made a daring, next-to-impossible escape, climbing over the wall surrounding his house (breaking his foot in the process) and catching a ride some 350 miles to Beijing, where he took refuge in the U.S. Embassy. After a tense, days-long diplomatic standoff closely involving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (No. 3), a deal was struck under which Chen would be allowed to travel to the United States to study. Now at New York University, Chen has embraced his new role as an evangelist for human rights, making the case that incremental change — one village or even one person at a time — can eventually transform a superpower. Against all odds, he remains optimistic, believing that China, taking a cue from Japan and South Korea, must “learn Eastern democracy.” He even thinks it’s inevitable: “Nobody can stop the progress of history,” he says.

An interview with Chen Guangcheng by Isaac Stone Fish accompanies the list. In it, Chen discusses how the central government allows abuses by local authorities—see Guizhou journalist Li Yuanlong’s detention last week for a recent example—and the chances of change or even revolution in China’s near future.

The central government definitely knew I was illegally detained at home. As for how the local authorities invented lies to frame me to put me in prison, as for how they persecuted my entire family, [the central government] didn’t necessarily know about the details. Yet now, six months later, I still haven’t seen the central government follow the country’s laws and keep its promise and investigate and deal with those officials who recklessly and illegally committed crimes.

Throughout Chinese history, has any emperor said they want to hand over power? Every emperor wants his power to last generation after generation. But can they? The Communist Party cannot monopolize all of the power in the country forever. This is a reality they must accept.

The possibility of China facing a revolution in 2013 is pretty big. This is something that the powers that be in China understand more than anyone else. It’s a pity that international society still does not understand this and has still not prepared. America should immediately start moving from dealing with China’s powers that be to dealing with the Chinese people. It definitely won’t be like 1989.

Chen does not appear to view the possibility of revolution with any great relish: when asked what the worst idea of the year is, he answered “violence”.

Controversial artist Ai Weiwei, still unable to leave China over a year after his 81-day detention in 2011, is ranked 26th:

[…] Ai has found ways to occupy his time. When one of his Twitter followers asked in May whether he was working on any new artwork, Ai tweeted back, “I am the artwork.” In April, he set up cameras throughout his house, providing a live feed on his website and to his 170,000 followers. (“Twitter is my city, my favorite city,” he told FP this year.) The authorities soon pressured him into removing the cameras, evidently preferring that they be the only ones to watch the rotund 55-year-old work on his computer and play with his cats.

But make no mistake — this performance art is deeply political. Throughout his career Ai has insisted that artists have a duty to humanity that outweighs the obligations of nationalism. Even declaring one’s opposition to “trafficking children, selling HIV-infected blood, [and] operating slave labor coal pits” is enough to get branded as “anti-China” in today’s political climate, Ai once noted on his blog, asking, “If we aren’t anti-China, are we still human?”

Foreign Policy also published a slideshow from Ai’s first North American retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., noting that “the artist was not in attendance.”

British singer Elton John added a concert dedication to Ai’s list of recent accolades on Sunday. While dismissing this “disrespectful” gesture, Global Times took the opportunity to critique Chen and Ai’s inclusion in the Foreign Policy list:

Western society is seriously biased against China. When US magazine Foreign Policy compiled a list of 100 global thinkers from around the world, the first Chinese on that list was blind activist Chen Guangcheng, and the second was Ai Weiwei. Even to Chinese people who have sympathy for these two people, this list may seem ridiculous.

In a diverse era, we don’t hold that the existence of people like Chen and Ai is unexpected in China. Also, we don’t believe that the impact they have brought should be denied completely.

The selection of Chen and Ai makes people wonder whether the word “thinker” in Chinese and English have different meanings. We can just say that some Westerners are increasingly unable to contain themselves over China’s rise. They cannot control China through normal means and they are more likely to rush their fences.

A more nuanced piece of Aiconoclasm came last week from Paul Gladston at Randian:

There are […] significant dangers in the upholding of Ai as our sole representative/mediator of artistic resistance to authority within China. While Ai’s bluntly confrontational and often bombastic stance can be readily digested within Western liberal-democratic contexts where romantic notions of heroic dissent in the face of overwhelming power still persist, it is by no means representative of the critical positioning of most other Chinese artists. Ai may have situated himself admirably behind enlightened westernized ideals of freedom and openness, but the sheer bluntness and reductive simplicity of his critical approach to authority have effectively foreclosed a more searching discussion of contemporary art within China as well as the complex, web of localized cultural, social, political and economic forces that surround its production and reception.

[…] Ai Weiwei is right in drawing our repeated attention to the debilitating injustices of totalitarian power within China. He is also right to upbraid western viewers for their inability to see past what are for them the pleasurable ambiguities of contemporary Chinese art. Less convincing, however, is Ai’s wholly reductive view of the critical possibilities of contemporary art in China. By insisting on his own stridently oppositional approach towards power as the only legitimate game in town, and because we are already highly familiar with that approach, [he] has misrepresented the contemporary Chinese artworld. One might add that Ai is also romanticizing the conditions of criticality in the West.

At 54 in the Foreign Policy list is Yu Jianrong, for his concise but detailed roadmap for reform.

In April, he released a succinct, two-phase plan he called a “10-Year Outline of China’s Social and Political Development.” Despite its bland title, Yu’s blueprint offers a timetable for Chinese reform that for once is as credible as it is ambitious. The plan puts dates and specifics to the task, advocating, for example, a stronger law on private property, the revealing of “information pertaining to government affairs” and “officials’ property,” and the abolition of “speech crimes,” after which China should “open up” the media and political parties. Yu’s short manifesto immediately caused a splash when he released it to his nearly 1.5 million followers on the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo (though the government has maintained a deafening silence). “We’ve already decided to change,” Yu explained in an interview. “The question is: In which direction do we change, and from where do we start?” Sweeping reform in this authoritarian land of 1.3 billion won’t be easy, but Yu’s plan is as good a place to begin as any. The era, he said, of crossing the river “by feeling the stones” is over.

China Media Project’s David Bandurski translated Yu’s plan in March. Soon afterwards, Didi Kirsten Tatlow described it at The International Herald Tribune, together with some criticism from Tsinghua University political scientist Liu Yu:

Master plans like Mr. Kang [Youwei]’s, or Mr. Yu’s are “unrealistic,” she said.

“All Chinese intellectuals, especially the men, they tend to blur the line with being an official and then they’re thinking, ‘How should I design a system for the country?’ and ‘How to make progress?’

“In the West there are intellectuals who make proposals on specific things, but in general they don’t make plans for the whole country,” she said.

What is needed instead, she believes, is a broad debate, among ordinary people.

“A good plan should involve the whole society,” she said. “There should be a big debate on where the country should be going.”

Yu’s nomination for best idea of 2012 is Mo Yan’s controversial selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mo’s chief rival for the award, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, took 49th place on the Foreign Policy list as a consolation prize.

At 69 is environmentalist Ma Jun:

[…] A journalist turned environmentalist who founded the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, Ma applies scientific rigor to exposing such corporate violations (more than 90,000 to date), flagging everything from a small coal-tar factory improperly storing its dangerous waste to Apple suppliers poisoning workers with a toxic chemical used on touch screens — as well as local governments that flout environmental regulations across China. Dozens of major multinationals now consult Ma’s pollution readings when working with suppliers in China. And by documenting environmental violations that had long been obvious but were never compiled in a way the public could easily understand, Ma has given statistical ammunition to Chinese citizens trying to nudge the Communist Party into cleaning up its act.

Wang Jisi, “China’s most respected expert on the United States”, came in at 73:

[…] What does Wang want us to know? That the feel-good stories U.S. officials tell themselves about China’s global ascent are an elaborate form of denial. In an influential monograph co-authored by Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Lieberthal, Wang this year described China’s actions on the world stage as rooted in the conclusion that “America will seek to constrain or even upset China’s rise.” Beijing’s view, he says, is that the United States is “heading for decline” and that China’s development model provides an “alternative to Western democracy and market economies.” The result? “[T]hese views make many Chinese political elites suspect that it is the United States,” Wang says, “that is ‘on the wrong side of history.’”

And at 83 is the Taiwanese-American former head of Google China, venture capitalist Kai-fu Lee:

In an article he published on his LinkedIn page in October, Lee named China’s narrowly focused school curriculum and the risk-averse nature of Chinese students, as well as the country’s chaotic Internet environment, among the reasons China hasn’t yet produced its own Mark Zuckerberg. That may be why he has also started a popular education website encouraging Chinese students to think more creatively. Although none of his companies has exploded yet, Lee’s ultimate contribution may be more fundamental: laying both the intellectual and financial groundwork for a revolution in the world’s largest online community.

Perhaps more significant to China for now than any of the above are Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein, who top the list having begun to pilot the formerly reliable Chinese satellite of Myanmar (also known as Burma) into a more open and international orbit:

Aung San Suu Kyi, the soft-spoken, iconic political activist whom devotees call simply “the Lady,” may not seem like an obvious partner for Thein Sein, but she has become one by doing what few legends of her stature can: embracing the messy pragmatism of politics. Although Burma’s struggles are far from over — she has warned that international investment has been too rapid, and ethnic violence is escalating — the willingness of both the Lady and the general to embrace short-term compromise and foster long-term reconciliation in what was only recently one of the world’s most isolated countries is something to celebrate.

Fittingly, Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in June. She used the occasion to remind the world of those like her, who struggle in the most forlorn places: “To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.” It is a sentiment still felt from Aleppo to Havana, Pyongyang to Tehran, but also, as Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein have shown, one that doesn’t need to be permanent.

See more on Chen Guangcheng, Ai Weiwei, Yu Jianrong, Ma Jun, Wang Jisi, Kai-fu Lee and Myanmar/Burma at CDT.

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[…] [C]ivil society groups and scientists were scathing about the outcome. Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo called the summit a failure of epic proportions. “We didn’t get the Future We Want in Rio, because we do not have the leaders we need. The leaders of the most powerful countries supported business as usual, shamefully putting private profit before people and the planet.”

Rio+20 was intended as a follow up on the 1992 Earth Summit, which put in place landmark conventions on climate change and biodiversity, as well as commitments on poverty eradication and social justice. Since then, however, global emissions have risen by 48%, 300m hectares of forest have been cleared and the population has increased by 1.6bn people. Despite a reduction in poverty, one in six people are malnourished.

The Guardian noted the more prominent roles that BRICS nations played in this year’s conference, highlighting Brazil’s. In an interview with chinadialogue’s Xu Nan, Ma Jun of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs suggested grounds for optimism in this new, less Western-centric process:

Xu Nan: How do you rate the declaration text the Rio+20 conference has produced?

Ma Jun: Generally, the NGOs here aren’t happy with it. And if you just look at the text, there doesn’t seem to be much progress – much of it is confirming or admitting what’s already happened, rather than moving forward.

But I have a different take.

The outcome of the Rio conference 20 years ago was led by the western developed nations – it reflected their concern for the environment. But 20 years later, things are different. The developing nations are very deeply involved, and some are very big players in sustainable development. So this text is more of a global consensus.

A discussion involving both northern and southern hemispheres is bound to be more difficult, and the text is bound to be the result of compromise – but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad outcome. After all, it includes many good principles for dealing with the problems.

Taking China as an example, 20 years ago it accepted the declaration under western guidance. Now, it only accepts what it can genuinely agree with. And that is a huge step forward.

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Post tags: Brazil, BRICS, environmental policy, greenpeace, international relations, IPE, jonathan watts, Ma Jun
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The film features interview segments with Ma Jun of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs on China’s water “time bomb”. Groundwater extraction lowered the water table in Hebei by 130 feet between 1996 and 2006, and with inadequate supplies, there is not enough clean water to reclaim the polluted. The real extent of the problem is unknown, Ma says: while 90% of the shallow groundwater flowing through the cities is thought to be polluted, no complete data exists.

Local officials did eventually come up with a solution of sorts for the farmers’ plight: they confiscated the land on which the orchard had stood.

The film ends on an optimistic note regarding the South-to-North Water Diversion project. In addition to long-standing doubts about its practicality, however, severe droughts in southern China have raised questions about the core assumption underlying the scheme.

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An environmental researcher by trade, Ma spent years chronicling China’s ecological catastrophes. Some of what he witnessed was inexorable and slow, like the graying of the Beijing sky; last December, the World Health Organization ranked Beijing 1,035th, out of 1,100 international cities, in air quality. Other results of his country’s unfettered growth were horrific, like the massive flooding of the Yangtze in 1998, after years of deforestation and soil erosion. Eventually, he decided that merely telling the story was not enough. “As a media person, you look to expose the problem,” he says, “but you can’t stop there-—people are looking for answers.”

Ma founded the not-for-profit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) in 2006. Since then, more than anyone else in China, Ma has channeled the power of the Internet and the optimism of China’s younger generation into a force for environmental change. Working with a devoted national network of young volunteers, Ma and his nine full-time staffers have compiled an open-source online database of water, air, and hazardous-waste pollution records—-in the country that generates the world’s highest emissions. Those records are damning: Over five years, IPE volunteers have helped hunt down some 97,000 records of factories operating in violation of China’s green laws. And those efforts lead to change.

“When I look at China’s environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money,” he says. “It’s lack of motivation. The motivation should come from regulatory enforcement, but enforcement is weak and environmental litigation is near to impossible. So there’s an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of motivation.” Ma has become expert at using his database to create that motivation, especially when it comes to helping global companies police their suppliers.

Read more about Ma Jun and about environmental activism in China, via CDT. See also our special section on the Environment.

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To date, Ma Jun and his team at IPE have exposed over 90,000 air and water violations by local and multinational companies operating in China. Chinese citizens, for the first time in history, have at their fingertips information that reveals which companies are violating environmental regulations across China’s 31 provinces—and with it, the power to demand justice.

Through its Green Choice supply chain program, which has 41 local NGO participants, IPE has encouraged consumers to use their buying power to influence corporate sourcing and manufacturing behavior. Although IPE has no regulatory authority within the government, under Ma Jun’s leadership the organization has succeeded in getting more than 500 companies to disclose to the public their plan and efforts to clean up their facilities. Ma Jun is now working collaboratively with major brands such as Wal-Mart, Nike, GE, Coca Cola, Siemens, Vodafone, H&M, Adidas, Sony, Unilever, Levi’s and Lenovo, all who now regularly reference the maps and self-regulate.

Also working with the IPE—belatedly—is Apple, which has scheduled a joint environmental audit of one Chinese supplier following sustained pressure from Ma’s organisation.

The inspection is scheduled to take place in the coming weeks and the results will later be made public, according to Wang Ding, vice director for the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which has been critical of Apple’s environmental practices. Ms. Wang said the component supplier makes printed-circuit boards, but she declined to provide further details ….

“We think they [Apple] have changed a lot, especially that they are opening up and allowing an audit like this,” she said, adding, “it’s a good start and a good change, but we will watch closely to see what happens and if they maintain this more open attitude.”

Ethiopia’s Chinese-backed Gibe III dam threatens the delicate ecology of Lake Turkana and the livelihoods of those whose farming depends on the lake. Water resources in the area are already fiercely contested, with some desperate herders mounting raids across the Kenya-Uganda border to water their cattle. The Goldman Prize’s website explain’s Ikal Angelei’s leadership of opposition to the dam:

Angelei brought together Lake Turkana’s divided and marginalized indigenous communities to fight against the mounting environmental and social implications of the Gibe 3 Dam. She informed elders, chiefs and opinion leaders—all of whom had not heard about the dam—about the project and its implications. In February 2009, local tribes issued a “Lake Turkana People’s Declaration” stating that they had given FoLT the mandate to communicate their grievances regarding the dam.

Angelei took their voices to local members of parliament and the Ministries of Environment, Energy, Water and Irrigation and Fisheries, urging them to reconsider Kenya’s power-purchasing deal with Ethiopia. In response to Angelei’s advocacy, in August 2011, the Kenyan Parliament passed a unanimous resolution for the Kenyan government to demand an independent environmental assessment from Ethiopia. UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee also responded to her appeals by passing a resolution to halt dam construction until further investigation.

Angelei’s work has deterred a number of potential backers for the Gibe III project, with the result that, according to International Rivers’ Peter Bosshard:

So far only ICBC, a large commercial bank from China, has approved a $500 million loan for the dam’s equipment in July 2010. Ikal has held the bank to account for its destructive project in the international media, and will continue to do so. Even in China, ICBC’s decision is now being considered a case of lacking corporate social responsibility. A few weeks ago, the Chinese government directed its banks to align overseas projects with “international best practices” on social and environmental risks.

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A crowd of blue markers covering the map show the location of each firm, and the markers can be clicked on to access pollution reports. The map is partly about “naming in shaming” polluters, who can have their names removed from the database if they pass an independent environmental audit ….

The pollution map isn’t totally comprehensive. Most of the data is gathered from government documents, which are “far from complete,” according to a recent IPE report. The NGO’s work has mostly focused on electronics multinationals with suppliers in China, but pollution from Chinese manufacturers who supply Western clothing brands are next on the NGOs target list, Collins said.

Google Earth, meanwhile, helped British explorer William Lindesay rediscover a far-flung fragment of Great Wall in the Gobi Desert. From Malcolm Moore at The Telegraph:

“I have been looking at this area since 1997, when a friend gave me a copy of an atlas showing the red lines of Genghis Khan’s attacks and counter-attacks, and underneath those are the strands of wall,” he said.

However, when he began making enquiries about sections of wall in Mongolia, he was repeatedly told that no structures had survived.

Eventually a Dutch historian mentioned a retired Mongolian geographer, Professor Baasan Tudevin, who had travelled extensively through the Gobi desert.

“The problem was that we could not find him. Eventually, as a last resort, we put a notice in the newspaper. And a couple of hours later, he turned up, wearing all the medals he had been awarded for his work. He told us there were various structures in the desert, and we could look for them using Google Earth,” he said.

See also Lindesay’s own Wild Wall site, and more on Lindesay and the Wall from National Geographic Adventure and Smithsonian.org.

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The Wall Street Journal spoke about the report with new CEO Tim Cook, who as SVP for Worldwide Operations and then as COO oversaw the closure of Apple’s own factories and the assembly of its current supply chain over the past 14 years.

In one of his first interviews as Apple Chief Executive, Tim Cook said the Cupertino, Calif., company has long aimed to be more transparent and believes the steps it is taking—including nearly doubling the number of supplier audits it does—are “raising the bar” for the industry.

“I have spent a lot of time in factories over my lifetime and we are clearly leading in this area,” said Mr. Cook, previously Apple’s chief operating officer who oversaw its supply chain. “It is like innovating in products. You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem.”

Apple’s audits covered all of its final assembly manufacturers and included 14 specialised environmental audits in China. From Apple’s own list of highlights:

• In 2011, we conducted 229 audits throughout our supply chain — an 80 percent increase over 2010 — including more than 100 first-time audits. We continue to expand our program to reach deeper into our supply base, and this year we added more detailed and specialized audits that focus on safety and the environment ….

• Our audits have always checked for compliance with environmental standards. In 2011, in addition to our standard audits, we launched a specialized auditing program to address environmental concerns about certain suppliers in China. Third-party environmental engineering experts worked with our team to conduct detailed audits at 14 facilities. We uncovered some violations and worked with our suppliers to correct the issues. We will expand our environmental auditing program in the coming year.

• We have a zero-tolerance policy for underage labor, and we believe our system is the toughest in the electronics industry. In 2011, we broadened our age verification program and saw dramatic improvements in hiring practices by our suppliers. Cases of underage labor were down significantly, and our audits found no underage workers at our final assembly suppliers.

Alongside the report, Apple announced its membership of the Fair Labour Association, a factory monitoring organisation established in 1999 by the Clinton White House and a group of apparel manufacturers bearing fresh bruises from a string of highly-publicised sweatshop scandals. From Bloomberg:

“Most big corporations have their ‘Nike moment’ at some stage — when they realize the difficulties of maintaining their standards, particularly in an increasingly global environment,” said FLA President Auret van Heerden. “The problem with the supply chain is that it’s a moving target ….”

“If you’re a 16-year-old girl in a developing country, your best chance of enjoying proper rights is if you get to work at a multinational,” he said. “The power of their contract is more powerful than the power of law ….”

Independent monitoring isn’t the panacea to problems in China’s factories, said Geoffrey Crothall, communications director of workers-rights group China Labour Bulletin .

“The problem isn’t whether or not they do audits, but whether workers are treated in a reasonable manner,” he said. “What the workers need is an effective voice in the workplace.”

The use of child labour among Apple’s suppliers has attracted particular attention in the past, particularly after the number of reported cases increased from 11 in 2009 to 91 in 2010. Last year, the total subsided to 19, in spite of the greatly expanded inspections.

We discovered a total of 6 active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at 5 facilities. In each case, the facility had insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation. We found no instances of intentional hiring of underage labor.

We required the suppliers to support the young workers’ return to school and to improve their management systems— such as labor recruitment practices and age verification procedures—to prevent recurrences. (p 9)

In an email to company employees published at MacRumors, Cook said that “we will not rest until the number is zero everywhere”.

Apple’s report emerged amid a burst of well-deserved attention to Mike Daisey’s show, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’, which was featured this month on This American Life. [UPDATE, 03/16/2012: This American Life has now retracted the episode because of "numerous … substantial fabrications" by Daisey.] When Daisey visited the Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant in 2010, he spoke to several workers in their early teens:

And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I’m 13. And I say, 13? That’s young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you’re– and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don’t really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections, but workers told me Foxconn always knows when there’s going to be an inspection. So what they do then, they don’t even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line ….

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?

Apple has repeatedly disclosed cases of child labour in its supply chain, though not at which suppliers these cases were discovered. The 2012 report states that no such cases were found at final assembly manufacturers such as Foxconn in 2011, suggesting either an ineffective audit or a miraculous reversal of the situation Daisey found the previous year. But others interviewed by This American Life lent some credence to Apple’s claim:

This is Ian Spaulding, who estimates that he has been in or worked with about 1,000 factories throughout China. The company that he founded and runs, INFACT Global Partners, goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards that are set by Western companies so those companies are ready when outside auditors come and check on working conditions ….

… [H]is only real objection to anything that Mike Daisey found had to do with child labor. Ian Spaulding said yes, there definitely is child labor in China, but not at the top tier electronics manufacturers. Other people who we talked to agreed with this. Even people who are critical of Foxconn for all kinds of things agreed with this. He said maybe a stray worker here and there might get in on a borrowed ID, but it is not a widespread problem.

The report also describes measures taken in response to explosions last year at factories in Chengdu and Shanghai, in which a total of 77 were injured and four killed. Both accidents were found to have been caused by the ignition of airborne aluminium particles.

Working closely with external experts, Apple audited all suppliers handling aluminum dust and put stronger precautionary measures in place before restarting production. We have established new requirements for handling combustible dust throughout our supply chain, including:

• Specific ventilation requirements with regular testing of air flow velocity

• Comprehensive inspections of ductwork to identify aluminum dust deposits

• Banning the use of high-pressure compressed air for cleaning to lower the possibility of dust clouds forming

• Requiring that all vacuums be rated explosive proof to prevent ignition

• Ensuring that type-D fire extinguishers are available to handle metal fires

At the time of this report, all suppliers except one have implemented the counter- measures identified by the team of external experts. The one supplier that has not will remain shut down until modifications are in place. (p 15)

The publication of Apple’s supplier list follows sharp criticism of the company’s practices over the past year from Chinese environmental groups, including Friends of Nature and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Among the coalition’s complaints was Apple’s uncooperative and frequently obstructive attitude. In January last year, they ranked Apple last out of 29 tech companies in terms of supply chain transparency, and the firm’s exceptional secrecy was a major reason for the special attention it received in a follow-up report in August. Apple’s cloak-and-dagger approach was described in a chinadialogue interview with the IPE’s Ma Jun last year:

Liu Jianqiang: … In February Apple released a document admitting that workers in its supply chain had suffered industrial injuries. Has Apple improved its behaviour since then?

Ma Jun: Apple’s behaviour hasn’t improved at all. It has admitted there are issues in its supply chain, but it hasn’t made any adjustments to its policy, maintaining that “it is our long-term policy not to disclose supplier information” and ignoring questions from environmental groups …. We’ve read that Apple progress report carefully. It says that 36 suppliers had “major violations”, but some of those are taking high agency fees or telling workers what to do during audits. The pollution issues we found are a serious threat to local communities – yet not one of those was included.

Personally I feel that the “black box” audits aren’t doing any good ….

LJ: Have you been in touch with Apple during your investigation?

MJ: We wrote to Apple last week, asking it to confirm: whether or not the companies we mention in the report are suppliers; whether or not Apple is aware of their breaches; and whether or not Apple knows about the repeated complaints. But there was no response. After the poisoning incident last year, we sent a list of questions to Apple in August. Apple didn’t reply until November – and then not to Chinese NGOs, but to an American NGO – saying it could not confirm if the company was a supplier, and that Apple needed the environmental groups to provide more evidence. The NGO responded that a lot of publicly available information showed it was an Apple supplier, and Apple replied that “it is our long-term policy not to disclose supplier information”. And so the door was closed.

Apple later engaged in talks with the organisations involved, but the newly released supplier list marks a still more radical departure from its past policy. Although not completely exhaustive, it includes suppliers accounting for 97% of Apple’s procurement spending.

But many have criticised the absence of information beyond a bare list of names which fails to reveal which suppliers have committed violations, where their plants are located, or with which subsidiaries of the larger companies Apple is involved. (Kaedar Electronics, for example, is not listed separately from its parent company, Pegatron.) From The New York Times:

Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group for workers’ rights, was disappointed Apple did not reveal the location of the suppliers on its list, complicating outside efforts to monitor the progress at the factories. Some plants on the list are relatively unknown, with Web sites that do not list where facilities are situated.

“It’s a bit of a half-step really to say, ‘Here are the names of the factories, go look through a haystack,’ ” Ms. Gearhart said. “But it’s a start ….”

… [T]he list excludes many of the secondary suppliers — companies that provide parts to firms that directly contract with Apple. For instance, though the American glassmaker Corning has manufactured the strengthened glass in iPhones, it does not appear on the list because it technically does not contract with Apple, but with an intermediary that finishes the glass before it is delivered to an assembly factory.

Further frustration came from the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, which pointed out that 62% of Apple’s global suppliers failed to meet the company’s 60-hour-per-week limit, let alone the 49-hour average workweek which is the Chinese legal maximum:

Apple’s Code of Conduct stresses of course that: “Under no circumstances shall work weeks exceed the maximum permitted under applicable laws and regulations.” But very few factory workers in China work less than 50 hours a week, and so we should not be surprised if employees at Apple supplier factories are working in excess of the Chinese legal limit, especially given the results of Apple’s progress report. We can’t say this is for sure however because even in the new post-Steve Jobs era of openness, Apple still does not reveal which factories commit what violations.

Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Progress Report would be a lot more helpful and meaningful if it went one or two steps further and broke the report down into individual countries and showed to what extent the individual suppliers in those countries complied with the law as well as Apple’s own standards.

This would not be such an issue if Apple’s standards and China’s labour laws were more in sync but an eleven hour gap between the maximum working hours permitted each week is something Apple needs to think about.

The list also failed to win over Mike Daisey, who responded via This American Life’s blog:

Apple has released a list of its suppliers, but it still hides the companies it audited with anonymity. This makes it impossible to learn anything new about what is going on in Apple’s supply chain, to verify anything, or hold anyone responsible. The FLA will audit a tiny percentage of Apple’s factories, and also won’t make public which factories they audit.

If Apple would spend less energy finessing its public image, and instead apply its efforts to real transparency and accountability, it could be a true leader for the electronics industry. Apple today is still saying what it said yesterday: trust us, we know best, there’s nothing to worry about. They have not earned the trust they are asking for.

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Post tags: Apple, child labor, corporate responsibility, Foxconn, Ma Jun, pollution, Shenzhen, transparency, working conditions
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When I ask two men about the pollution, they say, “What pollution?’ There’s no pollution here.” Another man said he and others who spoke to journalists have been threatened — he angrily accused me of working for Apple.

I ask one woman if she’s been threatened. “I don’t know,” she says nervously.

Schmitz notes recent talks between Apple and the Chinese environmental groups who released a damning report on the company’s supply chain pollution earlier this year. 21st Century Business Herald (via chinadialogue) revealed more details of the meeting:

The talks lasted three hours, during which the two sides crossed swords several times, according to participant accounts. Li Li from Envirofriends said that, at one point, discussions almost broke down ….

… Certain suppliers previously contacted by this newspaper argued that the main driver of pollution was Apple’s constant efforts to lower prices. They said Apple usually asks suppliers to cut prices every quarter and falling profits are forcing suppliers to reduce costs, which in turn leads to a reduction in spending on environmental protection ….

But you can’t blame Apple for everything, said Li Bo of Friends of Nature, China’s oldest environmental NGO, who was also present at the meeting last week: after all, the factories are in China. China needs to think about how to deal with these pollution issues under its own legal and supervisory regime, he said.

See also Can China Fight Pollution?

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According to Chinese media reports, Apple pledged to improve its environmental standards for suppliers during the meeting, and acknowledged that some of its supply firms have excessive emissions and have failed to keep track of their wastewater pollution. Apple officials also said they would take environmental contamination more into consideration in the future when selecting new suppliers ….

Five Chinese environmental NGOs attended the meeting, including the EnviroFriends Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Friends of Nature and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Some, like IPEA director Ma Jun, interpreted the meeting as a positive development, while others said there was much more progress to be made.

“In the term of information transparency, Apple still has not done enough,” said Friends of Nature Secretary-General Li Bo to Caixin, following the meeting.

From The Wall Street Journal:

“This a major step forward,” Mr. Ma said. “They asked these companies to take corrective plans and give a timeline, and Apple will verify whether all these issues have been resolved ….”

Mr. Ma still urged greater transparency from Apple, saying the company didn’t name the suppliers it is scrutinizing. He also called for the polluting suppliers to disclose what measures they plan to address the advocacy groups’ concerns.

“Apple is trailing far behind in terms of transparency and pushing for the polluters to be held publicly accountable for their problems,” he said ….

Ma said Tuesday’s meeting was one of several he has had with Apple since the Chinese groups issued their report, including one meeting at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., with a senior executive and other Apple officials whom he declined to name.

Scrutiny of the firm’s environmental record has also reached China’s state media, with CCTV airing a 40-minute report on two major Apple suppliers last month. One of them, Taiwanese notebook casing manufacturer Catcher, faced partial closure of a Suzhou factory after local residents complained of a strange odour.

Update: On Twitter, Rob Schmitz of American Public Media’s Marketplace has questioned the accuracy of the Caixin report, which now appears to have been removed.

Yesterday’s Caixin article on Apple (http://bit.ly/sy1NNz) is, according to at least one person who attended the mtg, full of errors. →

Envirofriends’ 李力 [Li Li] told me Apple did -not- admit to violating any pollution laws. The only thing it admitted was having 15 suppliers in China →

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Catcher Technology Co., a maker of high-end metal casings for laptops and smartphones, said on Monday that a plant in eastern China that was partially shut after residents complained to the local government about a “strange odor” primarily produces casings for Apple Inc.’s MacBook Air and some smartphones, meaning shipments will be affected.

[Catcher President Allen Horng] said he doesn’t know when the plant will resume full operations, which will require an inspection by the local government. Catcher’s total shipments will fall 20% in October and possibly by 40% in November if the outage continues, Mr. Horng added.

The Financial Times noted that any harmful pollution from Catcher had evaded both Apple’s own audits (PDF) and the Chinese environmental groups behind a recent report on the company’s supply chain, ‘The Other Side of Apple II‘ (PDF). Update: But the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, one of the organisations involved in the report, is now investigating. From PC World:

Since 2008, residents in the community began noticing the odor, with the smells reaching their worst starting around June of this year. One resident, who would only give her surname as Xia, said people in the community have reported breathing problems and pain in their throats. Her 5-year-old child is among those affected, she said.

“It’s been so strong that even when you close the window, the fumes will still come through,” she said. “When I smell it, my body just feels heavy and worse. When I don’t smell it, the symptoms just go away ….”

“The Chinese government is paying more and more attention to pollution control, especially when it affects the health of people,” Ma [Jun, of the IPE] said. He also noted that Apple suppliers have begun to contact environmental groups about improvements being made at their factories. Foxconn, the maker of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, recently informed IPE it would install new pollution control equipment in one of its factories in the Chinese city of Taiyuan following complaints from local residents.

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Consequently, the group chose to focus exclusively on Apple in its follow-up report (PDF), published today. The report attempts to penetrate the secrecy surrounding Apple’s suppliers, identifying them and monitoring their environmental impact. From chinadialogue:

Meiko Electronics of Wuhan, central China, is a printed circuit board manufacturing subsidiary of Japanese firm Meiko Electronics. Its major customers include Apple, Motorola and Siemens. In April 2011, staff from IPE and Friends of Nature’s Wuhan branch went to investigate pollution at the plant. They found a 150-metre ditch running from the east side of the facility to Nantaizi Lake, filled with a milky-white liquid. For dozens of metres the water of Nantaizi was a grey-white colour, covered with white foam and dark floating objects. This polluted water flows directly into the Yangtze River.

In June, lawyer Zeng Xiangbin from Friends of Nature’s Wuhan branch and the Pony Testing Company tested a sample of the liquid from the ditch. Chemical oxygen demand (also known as CODcr load) was 192 milligrams per litre: 4.8 times the Category V Environmental Surface Water Quality Standard of 40 milligrams per litre – the worst category of water quality – indicating the water was unsafe for use for any purpose. Responding to the investigation, Nantaizi Lake fish farmer Wan Zhengyou said: “My generation is drinking polluted water; the next will have only poisoned water to drink.”

Kaedar Electronics Limited and Kunshan Unimicron Electronics are located in the Jiangsu city of Kunshan, in eastern China. According to media reports, the former is an Apple supplier and the latter is a suspected supplier. In April 2011, staff from IPE and Li Chunhua from Nanjing Green Stone visited the area. Locals told them that the foul-smelling gases from the plant sometimes left them unable to open their windows and woke them up at night. Eight-year-old Tong Haiyi said to the investigators: “Sometimes when I come back and study I get a really sore chest, and when [my mother comes] to pick me up I feel really dizzy. And sometimes there’s a really strange smell in class.” His mother told the team that he often suffered from headaches, dizziness and nosebleeds.

Polluting suppliers are far from unique to Apple, and the company has often been targeted at least partly for strategic purposes. As Ma Jun of IPE said in January, “Apple should be a leader. If it can move on this, it can change the whole industry.” This echoed comments from Greenpeace during its 2007 campaign for A Greener Apple: “Apple should be an environmental leader. We want Apple to be at the forefront of green technology, and to clearly show other companies how to do it the right way.”

But Apple is singled out for other reasons as well: its uncooperative and even obstructive dealings with environmental groups, and its failure to act visibly and verifiably on known problems. Another post at chinadialogue, on the other hand, reviews actions taken by other companies in response to earlier reports’ findings:

Since contacting 29 global IT companies ahead of its first published report in April 2010, IPE has had dialogue with most of them. Some responded right away; others required more nudging. Initially slow to respond, Siemens has since used IPE’s database to track its more than 10,000 suppliers in China.

“[Siemens] developed software to automatically compare their list of suppliers with our list of polluters and violators,” said Ma. When Siemens identified problems, it required violators to take corrective action and to make public disclosure about what went wrong and how they tried to fix problems. Vodafone, BT, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Lenovo have also been fairly proactive, Ma said. Non-IT brands including GE, Nike, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Unilever have also been using the database, said Ma.

US retail chain Wal-mart – another company that, like Nike, seems to have achieved a significant turnaround in its reputation – has been an assiduous user of the database, said Ma. “Every month, Wal-Mart is comparing their list and our list,” he said. When it identifies problem suppliers, it gives them a certain time frame to deal with the problem. If they fail to do so, Wal-mart pushes them to go through a third-party audit under the supervision of NGOs. That process identifies problems and requires corrective actions.

In an interview with chinadialogue, Ma Jun laments Apple’s lack of responsiveness:

Liu Jianqiang: You published your first report on Apple in January. In February Apple released a document admitting that workers in its supply chain had suffered industrial injuries. Has Apple improved its behaviour since then?

Ma Jun: Apple’s behaviour hasn’t improved at all. It has admitted there are issues in its supply chain, but it hasn’t made any adjustments to its policy, maintaining that “it is our long-term policy not to disclose supplier information” and ignoring questions from environmental groups. Injured workers wrote to Apple three times, but got no response at all. We’ve read that Apple progress report carefully. It says that 36 suppliers had “major violations”, but some of those are taking high agency fees or telling workers what to do during audits. The pollution issues we found are a serious threat to local communities – yet not one of those was included.

Personally I feel that the “black box” audits aren’t doing any good ….

LJ: Have you been in touch with Apple during your investigation?

MJ: We wrote to Apple last week, asking it to confirm: whether or not the companies we mention in the report are suppliers; whether or not Apple is aware of their breaches; and whether or not Apple knows about the repeated complaints. But there was no response. After the poisoning incident last year, we sent a list of questions to Apple in August. Apple didn’t reply until November – and then not to Chinese NGOs, but to an American NGO – saying it could not confirm if the company was a supplier, and that Apple needed the environmental groups to provide more evidence. The NGO responded that a lot of publicly available information showed it was an Apple supplier, and Apple replied that “it is our long-term policy not to disclose supplier information”. And so the door was closed.

There has been some small sign of change in Apple’s attitude, however, according to the Financial Times:

In a highly unusual move for Apple, the company changed that stance just hours ahead of the report’s publication, inviting Mr Ma to start a dialogue on his allegations. Mr Ma said Apple told him some of the factories on his list were not the US company’s suppliers, but did not specify which ones.

Apple has promised greater engagement with NGOs before, pledging in the Supplier Responsibility Progress Report (PDF, p.22) to “collaborate with industry groups and NGOs in China to address key issues” (though the issues it mentions specifically relate to working conditions rather than the environment). But this new hint at a different direction may be linked to the recent change in Apple’s leadership, following founder Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO last week. His successor Tim Cook has been more engaged than Jobs with matters in China; according to the Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, for example, he personally visited Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant following the infamous string of suicides there (PDF, p. 18). In one widely retold anecdote, Cook tells a colleague that “someone should really be in China driving” the company’s response to a problem and, only thirty minutes later, asks him why he isn’t already on his way there.

GlobalPost reports hopes that the change of leadership at Apple will indeed mark a turning point in its approach to corporate responsibility:

In phone interviews this week, former workers who got sick at the Wintek factory in Suzhou while making touchscreens said they hope Apple’s new chief, Tim Cook, will step up and investigate their situation. They also hope Apple will conduct better audits of its supplier factories and catch problems earlier.

Jia Jingchuan, a factory worker who made the personal appeal to Jobs earlier this year, said he’s not too optimistic. Jia said he continues to have health problems. Because he finally left the factory, he no longer has medical insurance but continues to spent out-of-pocket for supplements to help his nagging health problems ….

“Steve Jobs was indifferent to our poisoning and evaded his responsibility,” Jia said in a separate statement released by the Hong Kong labor group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavoir (SACOM), which called on the new Apple CEO to address the situation ….

“The massive poisoning at Wintek is a serious breach of the labor law and Apple’s code of conduct,” the group said in a statement.

“Corporate social responsibility is no more than rhetoric if there is no remedy to the workers for the code infringement. SACOM demands Apple under the leadership of Tim Cook has dialogue with the workers as soon as possible.”

But Ma Jun doubts that Apple’s corporate culture will change suddenly, and Cook’s history in building and running the company’s current supply chain may suggest that he is unlikely to start thinking different now.

Sources:

The Other Side of Apple II: Pollution Spreads through Apple’s Supply Chain (PDF) – Friends of Nature, Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, Green Beagle, Envirofriends, Green Stone Environmental Action Network
Apple Supplier Responsibility: 2011 Progress Report (PDF) – Apple
Apple: back under the spotlight – chinadialogue
Can IT clean up its act? – chinadialogue
“Apple has made no progress at all” – chinadialogue
Apple attacked over pollution in China – FT.com
China: Apple workers react to Steve Jobs’ resignation – GlobalPost

© samuel wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, corporate responsibility, Foxconn, Ma Jun, pollution, steve jobs, wintek, wuhan
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