ABSTRACT
Spend a hot summer day in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, or any of China’s sprawling urban metropolises, and you can easily sense how serious China’s pollution issues are. And the well-known urban centers are not even where the pollution is the worst; there are parts of rural China where industry is concentrated and regulation is lower that are exceptionally polluted. In Shanghai, in the late-1990s, if you ever took a stroll in the northern part of Shanghai and walked along the Suzhou Creek, the fetid smell of pollutants was overwhelming. This should not be a surprise to anyone, as China has received much scrutiny on this issue over the last decade. For example, the New York Times is just one of many periodicals that regularly report on the environmental degradation occurring in China, noting recently that the country’s “pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.” 1 Or, more recently: “China, the world’s most prodigious emitter of greenhouse gas, continues to suffer the downsides of unbridled economic growth despite a raft of new environmental initiatives … Other newly released figures show … an epidemic of pollution in waterways.” 2 Similar articles have appeared in nearly every major periodical. China scholars have taken on the issue as well. Probably the most prominent among them is Elizabeth Economy of the Council of Foreign Relations, who has built her reputation on lambasting China for its environmental record (Economy 2007, 2004).
