ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the entire Chinese government, from the central to local levels, is mobilized for environmental protection via environmental goals. After briefly reviewing the history of goals in China’s Five-Year Plans, the sulfur dioxide (SO2) mitigation goal in the 11th Five-Year Plan is focused on to understand the processes in detail. Setting up the national goal is highly centralized to directly reflect the weak or strong environmental political will that the top leadership of the party has formed. It is then distributed to provincial governments and further to municipality and county governments, in which provinces tend to follow their individualized rules to illustrate the process’s decentralization. The decentralized attainment of those localized goals is evaluated, and incentives are put into place for local governments’ cooperation. The evolution of environmental goals is analyzed, from those targeting emissions of pollutants such as SO2 to pollutant concentrations such as fine particulate material and then to the Air Quality Index that comprises multiple pollutants.
