“China is rich now, people finally have something to spend,” he says. “The other thing is China’s dining culture. If there’s something left in the plates, they have their face. They have a sense of security. If you have more than you actually need, it’s something to be proud of.”

But the new campaign uses the slogan “I’m proud of my clear plate.”

[...] “This campaign started by targeting ordinary people,” says Zhang Ye. “But at the same time, Chinese authorities, they begin to counter corruption and correct the behavior of using government money for having meals. This campaign – I would summarize it by saying it started from bottom to top, and then was promoted from top to bottom.”

[...] In the months since the campaign was launched, many restaurants in Beijing and beyond have started offering smaller portions, encouraging guests to take doggy bags, and giving out certificates to those who clean their plates. [Source]

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Post tags: food waste, public opinion, waste
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On January 29, Xi’s comment went public on China Central Television’s widely-watched evening news broadcast, xinwen lianbo. Next day, People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the CCCPC, devoted half its front page and six articles responding to Xi’s call. The headlines ranged from “Opposing Waste Is a Political Mission” and “‘Tongue Tip’ Regulation Requires All Stakeholders’ Cooperation” to “Restaurants Should Offer Half-Entrees” and  ”The High Season For High-End Liquor Is Over.”

[...] The rest of China’s mainstream media quickly fell into line. In an article titled “Opposing Waste Is a Profound and Far-Reaching Social Reform,” Global Times opined, “Chinese people’s wastefulness isn’t only shown in banquets, [but also] the desire for big houses and good cars that’s learned from Americans — these are all signals of a culture of waste.”

[...] But in a highly-charged political atmosphere such as China, even discussion of universal values can lead to unexpected places. Unlike Global Times, which tends to follow the Communist Party line, other news outlets followed instructions to report on the “Clear the Plate” but did so with a twist: they lauded the campaign, but also took the opportunity to critique and investigate the corruption underlying it.

For example, Sina.com pointed out that abuse of public funds is a main cause of food waste. China Youth Daily recommended rewarding those who blow the whistle on abuse of public funds. Journalists from Beijing News reviewed annual meeting banquets among different provinces’ resident offices in Beijing, finding that a “standard dinner table cost RMB8,000 [about US$1,285]“. The known outspoken miroblog account of People’s Daily Online commented, “Power won’t limit itself; only reliable regulations and oversight can put power into a cage.”

See also Fines for Food Waste and the “Clean Plate Campaign”, via CDT

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Post tags: food waste, Global Times, online public opinion, public opinion, state media
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[… E]ven a reader with no Chinese language skills will notice a troubling difference: [on Sina Weibo], commenters lit virtual candles of mourning; [on Tencent Weibo], reactions consisted of laughter and celebration.

The Chinese people have long had mixed feelings toward Japan. After the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake — the largest ever recorded in Japanese history — hit the island nation, some Chinese Web users expressed condolences, while others rejoiced in Japan’s tragedy. But why is there such a sharp divide between users of two different Weibo platforms? Are Chinese Web users on Sino Weibo more sympathetic toward the Japanese? Does anti-Japan sentiment really run stronger on Tencent Weibo?

Some Chinese Web users certainly think so. “Sina Weibo users are obviously relatively mature,” posted one user, @卟懂_作业先森他不爱我, on Sina Weibo. “This is why I don’t use Tencent Weibo,” commented another user, @姬旦. Defenders of Tencent Weibo, however, attribute the difference in online reaction to the different degrees of censorship. “This is because some posts on Sina Weibo were ‘killed,’” argued @千树枯, “If you look at it from this perspective, Sina Weibo is truly tragic!”

In both cases, however, initial responses may be misleading, and Funakoshi concludes that “Netizen opinion is fickle, time-dependent, and unreliable — especially when viewed as a proxy for Chinese opinion.” For more on the potential pitfalls of Weibo-watching, see ‘Weibo’s Limits and the Ballad of China’s Middle Class‘ at CDT.

Sina Weibo’s candle icon previously appeared on CDT after it was temporarily removed last June so it could not be “lit” in memory of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

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Post tags: Algeria, anti-Japan, Japanese, netizens, public opinion, sina weibo, Tencent Weibo, weibo
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On January 1, 2013, it became illegal to drive through both red and yellow lights in the Asian country. Those cited more than once will likely lose their driving privileges. The aggressive rule follows a crackdown by Chinese authorities aimed at reducing the estimated 250,000 road traffic fatalities the country experiences each year – a figure that makes road accidents the leading cause of death among residents between the ages of 15 and 44, says the World Health Organization.

A Caixin news brief reports the specific penalties of the new regulation, and the online uproar that the law caused:

[...]The law, put into effect by the Ministry of Public Security’s Traffic Management Bureau on January 1, requires drivers to come to a full stop at a yellow light. If they fail to do so, drivers will have six points deducted from their license. (Drivers who lose 12 points from their licenses in a year lose them.) People have taken to their Weibo accounts to complain that more accidents will be caused by people driving slower in anticipation of a green light turning yellow.[...]

CNN translates a few Weibo comments, giving us a glimpse into the online chatter surrounding the new rule:

“I’m among the first victims of the new rule,” wrote netizen @SunYiXuan on Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo, “I hit the car before me this morning when the driver slammed on the brake when the light turned yellow. Slow down when you’re 1 km away from the traffic lights. Good luck my friends.”

 [...]“If yellow light equals red light, we don’t even need green lights any more. On and off of one light can do the work,” @YuJianShouQing posted.A poll on Weibo shows 13,000 users, or 84%, of netizens who responded considered the new rule as “unacceptable”.

A poll on Weibo shows 13,000 users, or 84%, of netizens who responded considered the new rule as “unacceptable”.

China Daily went to the street to see what a Beijing taxi driver thinks about the rule:

Jiang Mingsheng, a taxi driver in Beijing who has 33 years’ driving experience, said the regulations have put him under pressure when he drives past road crossings, as many traffic lights in Beijing do not have countdown timers.

“I ran a yellow light the other day. I was meters away from the stop line and the lights suddenly turned yellow. I was almost in the middle of the road after I put my brakes on and stopped the vehicle,” he said.

“I don’t think anyone would be able to stop the vehicle in that case,” he said.

A more recent Caixin news brief reports that, after negative public reaction to the law was widely expressed, the Ministry of Public Security has softened penalties on drivers who fail to stop at yellow lights:

The Ministry of Public Security says drivers breaking a new rule on running yellow lights will be warned, but not lose points from their licenses. The ministry made the announcement on January 6, and said the change was in response to objections from the public.

The Economist has more on the ministry’s decision to heed public opinion, and offers a comment on what this says about the relationship between public opinion and official conduct:

The official response to the uproar was prompt and surprisingly conciliatory. On January 6th the public-security ministry shifted into reverse, announcing that in the light of public opinion, it was suspending enforcement of the yellow-light rule while it re-examined the idea. For now, violators will be “educated” rather than punished. The announcement even thanked the “broad masses” for speaking up.

On non-political issues, the urban populace is ever less shy about challenging officialdom. But it is still rare for Chinese officials, especially the police, to yield to public opinion. Whether the episode heralds more significant shifts in the relationship between China’s rulers and ruled, it may be too soon to say.

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Post tags: Ministry of Public Security, online public opinion, public opinion, traffic accidents, traffic rules, yellow light rule
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Around a third of the capital’s 20 million population are migrants, but many of their families become split by rules requiring their children to go to their “home” provinces — even if they have never lived there — sometimes for years, to study for and take the test, which varies by location.

[...] ”Either you let the country share in your education resources or you accept the reality that outsiders are stuck in your education gutter,” said Du Guowang, a 12-year Beijing resident from Inner Mongolia.

[...] But bigger cities are less willing to share residency or benefits, fearing doing so would burden their already strained resources and spur a new influx.

[...] Despite years of lobbying national and city education officials, the migrant parents in Beijing have received noncommittal answers — along with occasional warnings. Their website, where they posted their demands, stopped working recently.

Meanwhile, Chongqing has allowed migrant children to take gaokao in the city. Xinhua News Agency reports:

Chongqing is the latest metropolis to ease the household restriction on migrants attending gaokao, following Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces.

Outside the pilot regions, the exam restriction is still in place, although children of migrant workers can take the nine-year compulsory education (from elementary to high schools) without household restrictions.

[...] Wang Boqing, president of MyCOS, a Beijing-based higher education consulting and outcome evaluation company, said that the move would definitely boost equity of schooling but was more than that.

“It’s really about the rights of people. Migrant workers pay taxes and contribute to government revenues. So universities in cities where they work should be open to them, because these schools all receive funding from governments,” he said.

See also China to “Speed Up” Hukou System Reform, via CDT.

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Post tags: college entrance exam, education, hukou, migrant workers, public opinion, social inequality, urban rural divide
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According to Southern Weekly [zh], there are around 16,000 registered urban planners in China, theoretically responsible for everything from the layout of the city to the planning of a small road. However, according to a recent interview in Southern Weekly, most city planners admit that their work in China is often compromised. One urban planner stated:

“Government leaders usually have a strong opinion about the projects, although sometimes their ideas are not scientific. For example, leaders like wide roads and large squares.”

[...] Since 2011, more and more city planners have found a new platform to communicate with the public by using Weibo, which helped urban planning become more transparent and involving.

According to Southern Weekly, 80 percent of city planners use Weibo. They are the most critical group towards urban planning in China. For Ma Xiangming, chief engineer of Urban and Rural Planning Institute in Guangdong Province, his tweet changed the fate of the old buildings in Guangdong. In 2011, Ma tweeted about the demolition of old buildings on a street in Guangdong. Little did he realize that his post was soon retweeted thousands of times before it elevated into a public debate. Media[zh] also reported on it. Within 7 days, the city planning bureau decided to keep the old building due to pressure from the public.

See more on urban planning via CDT.

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Post tags: cities, online public opinion, public opinion, social media, urban planning, weibo
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“The result represents people’s perception of society. They acknowledge what China has achieved over the past 10 years, recognize the 18th CPC National Congress as the linchpin of China’s development, and are aware of the changes China is facing at home and abroad,” said Zhang Shuhua, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

As to what China should do in terms of political reform, more than 70 percent of the respondents said they believed that the government should further accept public supervision from the public and the media. Strengthening anti-corruption efforts and increasing transparency in government information came as the second and the third, with 69.3 percent and 66.5 percent respectively supporting the measures.

“The results of this poll echo previous investigations, which represent what people have been paying attention to, and what they anticipate in terms of political reform,” said Zhang.

Some 85 percent of respondents believed that China is likely to face more challenges in the future.

On the topic of political reform, more than 70 percent of those surveyed thought that the government should allow increased oversight from the public and the media, while anti-corruption policies and government transparency also topped the list of desired changes. Elsewhere in the survey, 27 percent pinned the biggest problem in China’s economy on industry monopolies, while 23 percent pointed to the wealth disparity between the coastal and western provinces.

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Post tags: economic reform, Global Times, monopoly, political reform, public opinion, transparency
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Many of the implications of a rising China for the United States were barely addressed by President Obama and Mitt Romney in their debate Monday night, as both candidates swung foreign policy questions back to domestic issues like jobs and education.

[…] Heated tensions between China and three American allies in the Pacific — Japan, South Korea and the Philippines — went unmentioned during the debate. The worrisome standoffs and violent protests over various disputed islands did not come up.

[…] Two weeks from now, the Chinese Communist Party will install a new group of leaders — the Standing Committee of the Politburo, with just nine members, or perhaps now seven — who will be making the major policy decisions for China over the next decade. The party congress and the leadership transition were not mentioned in the debate.

Despite Romney’s repeated threat to immediately label China a currency manipulator, examined by The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Puzzanghera, one of the few eye-catching moments was the Republican’s conciliatory tone when he stated that “we don’t have to be an adversary [with China] in any way, shape or form”. This challenged Obama’s unusually hardline reference to China as only a “potential” partner. Brian Fung at The Atlantic analyzed the rhetorical reversal between the two candidates:

The exchange between Obama and Romney was merely one of several painting the former as the hawk and the latter as the dove — an odd turn when the president is actually the one who has had to work with the Chinese on world governance while Romney, as the challenger, has had the luxury of making campaign commitments the media will forget or overlook later.

As for the way the Chinese themselves might view this exchange, the leadership in Beijing likely recognizes that in an election-year context, candidates will say things to appease domestic audiences they aren’t necessarily committed to. But one thing’s certain: The fact that the People’s Republic will be going through its own power transition just days after Americans head to the ballot box has China’s elite watching Boca Raton about as closely as the rest of us.

Zhu Feng, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Peking University, shared his views on the dynamics of China issues in the campaign with The Wall Street Journal:

In the past, the sitting president would typically have to defend his administration’s China policy against attacks from the challenger. But it seems the two of them have some sort of tacit agreement on China policy.

The only point that made Romney stand out was this so-called “labeling China a currency manipulator.” But I really doubt if that’s anything more than just election rhetoric.

The interest seems to extend well beyond officials and academics. Surveys suggest that more ordinary Chinese are watching the 2012 U.S. election than followed the 2008 race. Josh Chin at The Wall Street Journal looked into Chinese online reactions to the Monday’s debate:

“It’s a shame we can’t see the U.S. presidential debates broadcast live,” said another user. “Actually, I don’t care so much about who would be the president. I just want to learn more about the election itself. Over here, it was decided who would be next a long time ago, so there’s nothing to watch.”

[…] ”What I don’t quite understand why they spend so long debating international issues in a country where 70% of people probably wouldn’t be able to locate China on the map,” said another user. “Is it because they’re not capable of solving their domestic problems and are looking for easier overseas target instead?”

[…] Chinese interest in this year’s U.S. elections appears much stronger than it was in 2008—a shift some analysts attribute to an increased interest among Chinese people in democracy. More than a third of Chinese people said they were paying close attention to this election, up from 17% during the 2008 contest, according to a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year. The only other countries that showed rising interest in the U.S. election were Turkey and Pakistan, which both edged up 1%.

A particularly controversial aspect of the debate was the absence of human rights topics. From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

[T]he most surprising fact about the debate’s discussion of China—and the one that tells us the most about the new relationship taking shape the world’s two greatest powers—was that neither candidate in uttered the words, “human rights” in relation to the People’s Republic. That used to be a standard feature. On October 11, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton dinged George H. W. Bush for having “coddled” the Communist government in the years after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. “I would be firm,” Clinton declared. “If we can stand up for our economics, we ought to be able to preserve the democratic interests of the people of China.” The next day, his campaign put out a statement denouncing the “butchers of Beijing” and faulting Bush for deciding “that we should give Most Favored Nation status to Chinese Communists, who deny their people’s basic rights.” (But, once in office, Clinton pushed through legislation making China’s Most Favored Nation status permanent, a decision he called a “principled, pragmatic approach.”)

The absence of a discussion of human rights will not go over well in the American human-rights community or with Tibetan groups. For the moment, however, in Beijing it is being greeted with pleasure. China takes careful note of vocabulary—the Foreign Ministry keeps track of the mentions of specific words—and the erosion of human rights from the candidates’ priorities will be taken as a sign, as foreign-affairs specialist Zhu Feng put it, that economic issues are “something they really care more about now than human rights or security.”

For detailed fact-checking of the final presidential debate, see ‘Romney Swaps Apology Charge With Obama Jab: Reality Check’, at Bloomberg.

See more on Sino-U.S. relations via CDT.

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Post tags: Barack Obama, china bashing, democracy, Mitt Romney, online opinion, presidential election, public opinion, U.S. election 2012, U.S. relations, United States
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But the latest Pew survey of 3,177 Chinese residents finds that many Chinese have grown more anxious over the past four years–only 59% said they like the pace of modern life, down from 72% in 2008. The economy has grown at an average of around 9% per year over these four years–in fact, 70% of the respondents said they are better off financially than they were 5 years ago–but it turns out growth isn’t all that matters.

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Post tags: education, food safety, healthcare, inflation, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, public opinion
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In a Pew Global Attitudes survey conducted in March and April of this year, 70% of Chinese said they were better off financially than five years ago. And 92% said they enjoy a higher standard of living than their parents did at a similar age.

Still, the same poll, which had a disproportionately urban sample in China, highlights the extent to which many Chinese are struggling to cope with the side effects of economic growth. Six in 10 describe inflation as a very serious problem. About a third say this about air and water pollution. And the cultural impact of rapid change worries many – roughly 70% believe their way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence.

But three issues in particular emerge as growing concerns. First, the poll, which was conducted as the initial details of the Bo Xilai scandal were coming to light, finds growing concerns about political corruption. Half say corrupt officials are a very serious problem in China, up from 39% in 2008.

Second, there is a consensus that some people are being left behind by China’s rapid growth – 81% of those polled agree that today the “rich just get richer while the poor get poorer”. Nearly half (48%) describe the gap between rich and poor as a very big problem, up from 41% four years ago.

[...]

Third, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the number of high profile product safety scandals in recent years, the Chinese public is increasingly worried about consumer protection. Roughly four-in-ten (41%) now consider food safety a very big problem, up from just 12% in 2008.

Only 39% view the current relationship with the U.S. as one of cooperation, compared to 68% in 2010. However, 52% of respondents “like” American ideas about democracy. Despite the satisfaction with an improving standard of living, respondents also expressed concern about the loss of traditional ways of life, with 57% saying they are getting lost and 71% saying their way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence.

Read the full results via Pew Research Center.

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Post tags: corruption, lifestyle, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, public opinion, quality of life, wealth gap
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Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

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Post tags: anti-japan protests 2012, hexie farm, patriotism, protests, public opinion
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Ms. Tang’s daughter was kidnapped in October 2006 in Yongzhou city in Hunan, raped, beaten and forced to work as a prostitute in a spa until her rescue in December of the same year.

Unhappy with the first round of convictions meted out in 2008, Ms. Tang has been fighting for harsher penalties for the defendants in her daughter’s case.

In June, the Hunan Provincial Higher People’s Court handed down tougher sentences, including death sentences for two of the men, life in prison for four others and a 15-year jail sentence for one. But Ms. Tang continued to fight for death penalties for all the men.

Last week, the distressed mother was sentenced, without trial, to 18-months in a labor camp for “disturbing social order and exerting a negative impact on society”. This led to public outrage, expressed in a variety of public venues: from the blogosphere – where an overwhelming majority of surveyed netizens demanded the abolishment of re-education through labor, to official media – in reference to the local authorities that sentenced Tang, the Global Times demanded that officials “bear in mind that they are public servants, and not above the people”.

Yesterday, Tang was released from the labor camp in Hunan province. From The Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report:

Tang Hui is free.

The mother sentenced to a labor camp for pushing hard for tougher punishment of the men who allegedly raped her daughter was released on Friday, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. News of Ms. Tang’s release followed shortly after an outpouring of support for her on Chinese microblogging sites, offering yet another illustration of the growing power of social media in China.

[...]“Tang Hui, this is China – a China with hope,” Deng Fei, a journalist with Phoenix Weekly magazine who’s been following Ms. Tang’s case, wrote on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service.

“This really would have been unimaginable without the Internet,” wrote Sun Yueli, a lawyer. “I just hope the next step in defending her rights goes as smoothly.”

An AP report further notes that the intensity of public pressure likely led to this quick release:

Chinese authorities on Friday released a woman sent to a labor camp for campaigning for harsher sentences for the seven men convicted of abducting, raping and prostituting her 11-year-old daughter, with officials apparently bowing to public pressure in the highly emotional case.

Without drawing attention to public reaction, a Xinhua report claims that the reason for her release had to do with her young daughter’s need for care:

Tang filed an appeal on Aug. 7. After considering her appeal, the center decided to allow her to leave, since her daughter, now 17 years old, is still a minor and requires her mother’s care, provincial publicity officials said.

The public’s vocal outrage, and ultimately Tang’s release, could be viewed as another example of what Elizabeth C. Economy has called “China’s New Political Class: the People”. Also see prior CDT coverage of re-education through labor in China, and the case of Tang Hui.

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Post tags: kidnapping, netizens, online public opinion, public opinion, rape, re-education through labor, Tang Hui
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Chinese people power has arrived. As China’s top officials meet in Beidaihe to finalize their selections for the country’s new leadership, they are being overshadowed by a different, and increasingly potent, political class—the Chinese people. From Beijing to Jiangsu to Guangdong, Chinese citizens are making their voices heard on the Internet and their actions felt on the streets.

[...]

One of the events that Economy uses to underscore this trend is the flood that continues to wreak havoc on Beijing after last weekend’s torrential rains. While the government’s manipulation of death tolls and censorship of media and micro-blog coverage of the event led to serious public anger at the offical response to the disaster, the incident allowed citizens an opportunity to effectively stand up for themselves in the relief effort. China Media Project provides an in-depth media survey to show how the government has been trying to mitigate the fallout of negative public opinion by highlighting “positive” stories:

As we approach the critical one-week anniversary of the floods in Beijing last Saturday that claimed at least 77 lives, according to the latest official numbers — and as Chinese continue to heap criticism on the government via social media — China’s propaganda leaders are moving aggressively to contain negative coverage.

[...]

While Weibo has proven a potent means for civic interaction, it has also become a valuable government tool to survey public opinion. An op-ed run in China Daily and the Global Times calls attention to the need to reconcile a discrepancy in digital literacy between officials and the public:

A recent local public servants’ selection test highlighted Chinese officials’ poor knowledge of Weibo.

[...]The situation of Chinese officials and governmental agencies not being able to keep up with the public’s demands needs to be changed. It’s worrying that they don’t know how to properly use this platform. Learning Weibo and other Internet applications should be a required course for civil servants and governments in the future.
More importantly, a “real life” interaction model between the government and the public also needs to be established. The government should learn to listen to the people rather than merely issue administrative documents. It needs a thorough reform. Perhaps a Weibo post of 140 words is a starting point.

The past year has been rife with incidents in which citizens have taken to the streets and to the Net to voice their concerns. For a few examples, see prior CDT coverage of the Wukan uprisings on the ground and in the blogosphere, or the Shifang protests and social media’s role within.

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Post tags: civil society, Elizabeth Economy, protest, public opinion, public opinion guidance, sina weibo, weibo
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The Committee of 100’s opinion survey project began in 1994 and produced opinion surveys in 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2012. The objective of this study is to determine American attitudes toward China, and, as a “mirror,” measure Chinese attitudes toward America on key issues in US-China relations and salient domestic issues in both countries. The target respondent groups in both countries include general public, opinion leaders and business leaders with a stand-alone sample of the US policy community.

The survey findings provide unique, comprehensive and comparative information that can be used to enhance US-China relations and formulate recommendations on how to forge mutually beneficial partnerships, including leader-to-leader, people-to-people, organization-to-organization, and many others to foster greater understanding and build trust between the United States and China.

An article in the New York Times summarizes the reports findings, and contrasts them with the Gallup-China Daily USA poll from earlier this year:

Two-thirds of Americans now see China as a serious or potential military threat to the United States. Nearly six in 10 Chinese believe their country is destined to become the world’s leading superpower, and increasing numbers of everyday Chinese believe the United States is trying to prevent them from achieving that status.

Most Americans don’t believe that U.S. media outlets report truthfully about China, and about half of Chinese feel the same way about their media. Six in 10 Americans think the U.S. government has done a poor job handling relations with China — although things have improved since 2007 — while two-thirds of Chinese think Beijing is mishandling relations with Washington.

For the general Chinese public, corruption is the No. 1 concern, followed by jobs and the economy, a growing wealth gap and the rise in housing prices. But Chinese opinion leaders worry most about a decline in morality, followed by concerns over Taiwan, while business leaders cite HIV/AIDS as their top issue.

Almost half of all global executives polled believe that the technology innovation center of the world will move from Silicon Valley to another country in the next four years according to a survey published Wednesday.

KPMG’s global Tech Innovation Survey 2012 found 43 percent of respondents said Silicon Valley’s crown would be passed elsewhere by 2016. China was named as the country most likely to be the next innovation centre (45%), followed by India (21%) and Japan (9%) and Korea (9%).

Israel came in fifth while Europe barely featured.

The survey also found that China and the U.S. are the two countries most likely to come up with “disruptive technology breakthroughs” that will have a global impact in the next two to four years.

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Post tags: China's rise, polls, public opinion, surveys, views of China
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Two theories on the deadly smog soon emerged. The most popular, and the least serious, was that Wuhan’s high school students were burning their books in the wake of graduation and the much-hated college entrance examination. The more serious was that a large-scale industrial accident had taken place. Boiled Universe, the handle of a Wuhan-based Sina Weibo user of no great importance, was one of hundreds of microbloggers who offered a variation: “It’s said that a boiler explosion at Wuhan Iron & Steel caused large volumes of toxic dust and smoke to spread, enveloping the whole of Wuhan, and the death of two people.” Others not only promoted the rumor, they did so by re-tweeting what they claimed was a photo of a chlorine gas leak at Wuhan Iron & Steel. (Another microblogger later offered definitive proof that the photo was six months old).

Someone from Wuhan Iron & Steel Co. Ltd, clearly incensed by the rumor-mongering, logged into the company’s Sina Weibo account (the company has 900 followers, billions in revenue) to deny responsibility for the haze . But that was destined to go nowhere: Few in China are going to take the word of a giant state-owned steel company, especially when it comes to rumors about large industrial accidents. By mid-afternoon, fears of a chlorine gas leak had become so prevalent (online, at least), that the Wuhan Fire Department felt compelled to tweet on Sina Weibo to inform its 95,000 followers that over the course of Monday, it had removed two hornet’s nests, caught a snake and put out five small fires, but it had not, under any circumstance, responded to a major alarm, much less a “so-called chemical leak and explosion.”

Local authorities then went further. From Bloomberg, the following day:

Police in the Chinese city of Wuhan detained two people for spreading rumors that heavy pollution in the capital of Hubei province was caused by an industrial accident, a newspaper controlled by the local Communist Party reported.

The Changjiang Daily, supervised by Wuhan’s party committee, said government departments denied rumors the smog that covered the city June 11 was related to an industrial accident or the leaking of toxic gases. The newspaper didn’t give more information about the people detained or the rumors.

After some investigation, Wuhan’s Environmental Protection Bureau blamed burning of straw by farmers for the pollution, in a statement translated and circulated by the US embassy in Beijing:

An analysis of the air indicates the pollution is caused from burning of plant material northeast of Wuhan.

[…] According to our investigation, the abnormal air quality in our city is mainly caused by the burning of the crops northeast of Wuhan towards Hubei province. Similar air quality is occurring in Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui provinces, as well as in Xiaogan, Jingzhou, Jingmen and Xiantao, cities nearby Wuhan.

The straw burning explanation was, as Minter described, greeted with some incredulity. Farmers had long burned straw as fuel, but Monday’s pollution was exceptional, and its intensity seemed to point to an industrial source. But according to Cornell University air quality expert Dane Westerdahl, America’s only source of “beyond index” pollution scores is not industrial activity, but forest fire. Using straw as fuel spread the burning out over many months. With coal and natural gas replacing it in this role, and other traditional uses also disappearing, straw is now incinerated in vast quantities simply for disposal, producing greater, more concentrated amounts of smoke than in the past. Jiang Gaoming described this shift in a 2007 article at chinadialogue, pointing out that with some organisation and investment, the straw could instead be used to produce beef, fertilising manure or carbon-neutral energy.

In northern China it is now the middle of the autumn planting season, and once again the farmers are burning off the crop stubble left after the harvest. The highways that run through the fields are covered in smoke, which seeps in through closed windows and can reduce visibility to half a kilometre. It gets worse at night; crop fires are illegal, so the farmers wait till it gets dark to avoid getting caught. However, you were unlikely to see this a decade ago ….

So why are the farmers so determined to burn off their leftover straw? Because there is nothing else to do with it. In the past the straw was used as fuel, but now farmers are more affluent and burn coal or natural gas. At one time it could also have been used to feed draught animals, but now they have been replaced with tractors. The government has promoted the use of straw in methane production, but to date only 0.5% of China’s total 600 to 700 [million?] tonnes of straw produced annually is used to make the gas. Ideally it could feed livestock, but the cost of storing straw and the livestock itself makes this unfeasible. Even if you fed the entire nation’s herds with straw, there would still be a lot left over. One could increase the number of ruminants, but China’s straw is scattered around the country and the cost of collecting and transporting it is high. If farmers cannot make a decent profit from it (and they no longer care about earning a few yuan here and there) it will be burnt off to prevent it getting in the way of other work.

The immediate grab for explanations involving hushed-up accidents, and the widespread rejection of the one offered by the local government, show the depths to which trust on public safety issues has sunk. New rules requiring publication of PM2.5 data for cities around China, overdue or not, were a sign of progress on this front. More recent developments such as the arrests of the alleged rumour-mongers in Wuhan and demands for the US embassy to stop tweeting its own air quality measurements seem to indicate a backward step. At chinadialogue, Greenpeace’s Zhou Rong argued that, while the American @BeijingAir monitor does indeed accentuate negative readings, silencing it is not a solution. Instead, the government’s best means of overcoming public scepticism is greater transparency.

First, the government should face up to the severity of the air-pollution problem. China has long looked to traditional pollutant indicators like PM10 (coarse particulates) to evaluate air quality, but not PM2.5 levels. The result is a picture of air pollution that is, at times, too rosy – and out of step with public perceptions.

[…] Second, although most Chinese cities have now started to publish PM2.5 figures – a major step forward – they remain evasive about the health implications of that data. The public don’t understand what a daily average PM2.5 figure of 35ug/m3 or 75ug/m3 means for their health. They just want to know if their elderly parents can go out for a stroll or their kids can go out to play, but the raw statistics they are given don’t tell them that. In the absence of more “human” data, it is hardly surprising that so many citizens, concerned about their families, turned to the US embassy’s feed and its depressing litany of warnings – exaggerations that have worsened the fear and mistrust of the government.

It isn’t complicated stuff. But escalating it to a political – even a diplomatic – issue may just make it so. To regain public trust, all that the Chinese government needs to do is push its existing systems of data disclosure further, and provide accurate information in a format the public can digest and use. Breathing air under the same piece of sky every day, ordinary Chinese people make their own judgements about the state of their environment. And when it comes to statistics, urban residents will judge their veracity by their own experience.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, air pollution, air quality, chemical leak, farming, greenpeace, industrial accident, PM2.5, public opinion, public safety, rumors, United States, wuhan
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