Introduction

This chapter first briefly reviews the crises and health damages of China’s air and water pollution to distinguish the special importance of ambient particulate matter pollution. Several key factors are further examined, mainly democracy and the rule of law, that are linked to environmental problems. Democracy has been argued, in the 1970s, to act against environmental protection but, since 1990s, mainly for it, while China is not a democracy. Rule of law is a backbone to the solutions to environmental degradation in developed countries, but China performs poorly in this perspective and courts play almost negligible roles in implementing environmental policies. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a precursor air pollutant that causes ambient particulate matter pollution. The book understands China’s environmental governance and strategy through the window of SO₂ emissions, which rose rapidly together with economic growth and coal consumption. However, multiple sources of evidence show that the emissions have dropped substantially in the past decade to a level that has not been seen in the past four decades. Based on the analysis, this chapter raises the central research question of this book: How is environmental governance organized and implemented at the strategic level in China, which has neither democracy nor the rule of law?