Latest Articles by Christina Larson

The Middle Kingdom's dilemma (part one)

Christina Larson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:38:00 +0000

Can China clean up its environment without cleaning up its politics? The government wants civil society’s help and has created an opening for green groups. Still, reports Christina Larson, activists and scientists are on unpredictable ground.

[Reproduced with permission from the Washington Monthly]

In January 2007, a geologist named Yong Yang set out from his home in China’s western Sichuan province with five researchers, two sport utility vehicles (SUVs), one set of clothes, several trunks of equipment for measuring rainfall and water volume, a camping stove, a rice cooker, canned meat, more than 60 bottles of Sichuan hot sauce, a digital camera, a deck of cards, several compact discs of Tibetan music, and as many canisters of fuel as his team could strap to the roofs of their SUVs.

No roads cross the part of China to which Yong was traveling, so he also brought topographical charts and satellite photos of the region. His final destination, deep in China's wild western frontier, was the unmarked place on the Tibetan plateau from which the Yangtze River springs.

For several weeks, the two vehicles followed the Yangtze west, as the river turned from running water to ice. The thermometer became useless when the temperature dipped below the lowest reading on its scale. Occasionally they spotted an antelope, and once wolves devoured their fresh yak meat. As they climbed in elevation, tracing the course the Yangtze had cut through the Dangla Mountains many millennia ago, the air grew thinner and the wind fiercer. When the ground rose too steeply into the surrounding peaks for the SUVs to maneuver along the riverbanks, they drove on the frozen river itself, though this approach was not without its perils.

Yong Yang and researchers drive on the frozen river

About a month into their trip, on the auspicious first day of the Lunar New Year, Yong heard a great crunching sound as his front and then back tires slid through the ice, trapping his vehicle midstream. Fortunately, the vehicle wasn't too far submerged, and the backseat passengers managed to clamber out and signal to the second SUV. With a rope tied to the rear bumper, they dragged the vehicle from the frozen river, with Yong still in the driver's seat, transmission in reverse.

Yong, who is 48, and his companions made it safely out of the river. But since then he's continued to travel, in many senses, on thin ice. A vital question had propelled his journey up the Yangtze: the Chinese government is embarking on the most colossal water-diversion project ever attempted, and Yong had taken it upon himself to discover whether it would work.

Water is an unevenly distributed resource in China. Traditionally, the south has been lush while the north has been a land of dry tundra and frozen desert. In 1952, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong conjured a solution to this inequity: "Southern water is plentiful, northern water scarce," he said. "Borrowing some water would be good." Ever since, China's leaders have dreamed of diverting water from one of the country's great rivers to the other—from the southern Yangtze River into the northern Yellow River. (To fathom the scale of this undertaking, imagine watering the southwestern United States by diverting the Mississippi River into the Colorado River.)

In recent years, the scheme has become increasingly appealing to Chinese authorities, as water shortages in northern cities have become more and more dire. In 2002, China's highest executive body, the State Council, converted Mao's grandiose notion into a plan known as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project.

Construction on two sections of the project has already begun, but the most ambitious stage is scheduled to begin by 2010. This phase will divert water from the Yangtze in southwestern China to the north, across mountains that rise to about 4,575 metres above sea level. The entire project will cost at least an estimated US$60.4 billion, and has aroused intense opposition because it is expected to displace hundreds of thousands of people and devastate fragile ecosystems.

Between January and March of last year, Yong's team traveled more than 25,750 kilometres in the Yangtze River basin, threading every bend in the western reaches of the river. The previous summer they had driven roughly the same route, so they could compare water levels in different seasons. On both trips they collected data on rainfall, geology, receding glaciers and other trends that affect the volume of water in the river. Yong had learned from firsthand experience that for about four months each year the upper Yangtze is a ribbon of ice; only an engineering miracle could transport the frozen water north.

After he spent the summer and autumn compiling data and circulating it among several dozen peer-researchers for feedback, he found more reasons to be sceptical of the ability of the project to live up to the government's vision. The bounteous stream of Beijing's imagination became, in Yong's careful calculations, a trickle.

The fact that Yong is free to conduct such inquiries at all says much about the recent political evolution of China. Fifteen years ago, the government wouldn't have tolerated public questioning of large-scale infrastructure projects. But in recent years, criticism from independent scientists and environmental organisations has prompted the government to postpone two planned western dam projects. In September 2007, officials even acknowledged that unsound planning for the controversial Three Gorges Dam project had created a potential environmental “catastrophe”.

China's leaders know that a rapidly deteriorating environment could stall the country's economic miracle and ignite political unrest, and so they're experimenting with limited openness to help avert these hazards. It remains an open question, however, just how much impact Yong will be permitted to have. His midwinter expedition was only the first stage of his odyssey into uncharted terrain.

On my first visit to Beijing, in spring 2007, I wheezed all the way from the airport to my hotel. The thick smog hid any hint of direct sunlight, and for a week I didn't see my shadow. When I returned in mid-October, the city appeared to be a changed place. I was surprised to see clear blue skies. Skyscrapers were visible from a distance, not shrouded in haze. There were other changes, too—swept sidewalks, a sudden absence of bootleg DVD hawkers, more policemen on the streets.

A week later, the city looked, sounded and smelled like its familiar self again. The street vendors were back, along with the kerbside cobblers and the men waving Bourne Identity 3 DVDs. The skies were gray, the sun obscured, and cigarette butts and orange peels once again speckled the sidewalks.

The temporary makeover had coincided—not accidentally—with the Seventeenth National Congress of China’s Communist Party, the meeting of party leaders that happens once every five years and attracts numerous domestic and international visitors. During the congress, the central government -- eager to punctuate its new talk of environmental protection with some proof of its commitment -- had directed its might toward cleaning up a targeted area for a discrete period of time, reportedly putting regional factories and Beijing's public vehicles on a compulsory holiday.

The results were eerily impressive. (Expect an encore for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.) But the greater significance of this fleeting transformation was that it exposed the limits of the party's power. The central government can clamp down abruptly and indomitably, but it can't do so everywhere, all the time.

As I wrote in the Washington Monthly last summer (see "The Great Leap Forward"), China's political leaders have embraced the environmental cause in recent years, not out of sentiment or idealism, but as a matter of survival. China's environment is becoming so degraded that it risks choking off the country's booming economy: western nations baulk at buying mercury-contaminated grain, while water shortages threaten Chinese paper mills and petrochemical plants.

Also at risk is the country's political stability: “mass incidents” triggered by land seizures and polluted rivers are becoming increasingly common (see "Pollution Revolution"). But while the central government has issued stern directives aimed at reducing air and water pollution, it lacks the means to enforce them. That's because, in order to promote economic growth over the last three decades, Beijing has gradually relinquished certain types of authority to provincial governments.

The result has been dramatic gains in the country's gross domestic product (GDP), with new factories multiplying across the countryside. However, provincial autonomy also has enabled local officials to ignore cumbersome central directives, including regulations on matters ranging from food safety to environmental standards.

Understanding their diminished ability to enforce green statutes locally, China's leaders have turned cautiously to civil society for assistance. Since 1994, Beijing has empowered nongovernmental groups to expose polluting factories. Today there are more than 3,000 citizen green groups in China. In 2003 and 2004, the government enacted laws requiring environmental impact assessments and citizen input on major public works projects. (These measures took effect shortly after construction commenced on the first two phases of the water transfer project.)

In 2005, China's first national public hearing—over the fate of the Old Summer Palace—was broadcast on national television. Progressive environmental officials are introducing the concepts of "public participation," "hearings" and "rights" to the public. Environmental lawyers are litigating China's first successful class-action lawsuits. Compared to a decade ago, the situation is remarkable.

Still, there are limits to the government's spirit of reform, and perhaps some in the party feel they've been moving too fast. The government does want citizen groups to help combat pollution, and it has created an opening for them to do so. But political power in China is still wielded behind closed doors, and that opening can constrict without warning when an activist crosses the agenda of an influential official. It is within this unpredictable sphere that Yong Yang is attempting to operate.

Next: Epic consequences ahead

Christina Larson is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

Reproduced with permission from the Washington Monthly.

The Middle Kingdom’s dilemma (part two)

Christina Larson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:37:00 +0000

In China today, environmental advocacy is perceived differently by the government and the public – and it fluctuates with the political tides. Christina Larson reports.

[Reproduced with permission from the Washington Monthly]

Last October, I spoke with geologist Yong Yang, in Beijing. We first met last spring in western Sichuan province. He had thick black hair and hadn't shaved for a day or two. He was dressed in a black jacket, a gray sweater, and black jeans. Despite his rugged appearance and the adventurous nature of his research, his eyes seemed more sad than rebellious. "I am not against the government," he explained, snuffing out what was likely his sixth or seventh cigarette of the evening. "What I want is to get the facts."

In Yong's hotel room, we hunched over his laptop computer to look at slides from his trip in early 2007. [For several weeks, he and five researchers had followed the Yangtze River west – as it turned from running water to ice -- to the unmarked place on the Tibetan plateau from which the river springs.] There were photos of his SUV crashing through the ice; of someone pouring hot water from a tea kettle to defrost the engine's water tank; of Tibetan herders who offered Yong and his colleagues meat and milk along the way.

Then Yong opened up a spreadsheet. On one side was a series of estimates, based on Yong's research, of the volume of water in the Yangtze. On the other side were the official estimates prepared by the Chinese government's Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC). The government data was supposed to be secret, but Yong had obtained it from a network of friends and former colleagues inside the government.

Yong found that the official figures were often "way off". In one section of the river, the government's plans call for diverting between eight billion and nine billion cubic metres of water north each year. However, Yong's research—supported by 30 years' worth of reports from hydrology monitoring stations—indicates that the average annual water flow for that section includes a low estimate of seven billion cubic metres.

This means that when the river flow is low, the government would be hoping to divert an amount of water greater than the total volume in the river. Moreover, no sound engineering plan should call for redirecting all of the water in a river, since downstream communities, including Shanghai, will still depend upon the Yangtze for agriculture, industry and hydropower.

Yong is not alone in doubting the feasibility of the final section of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. More than 50 scientists in Sichuan contributed to a 2006 book, South-to-North Water Transfer Project Western Route Memorandums. The collection of scientific articles and reports raises serious concerns about construction at high altitudes, seismic stability, pollution in the Yangtze, climate change (the river's volume is expected to diminish as the Tibetan glaciers melt) and the potential for reduced river flow to shut down hundreds of downstream hydropower stations, perhaps inflicting power blackouts on millions of people. According to one former government researcher, there are even critics within the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR).

Why are the official projections so fantastically optimistic? Yong, who once worked as a government scientist in the Ministry of Coal Industry, thinks he has some idea of how the numbers were produced. "The government, they will make a goal," he explained. "Then their researchers think their job is just to say it works. Everybody will just say the good word, and try to find data to support it," he said, shrugging. "It's not a very scientific way of doing research."

Yong says he has asked the Yellow River Conservancy Commission how they arrived at their figures, but staff members have refused to respond. "They just emphasise that there won't be much problem," he said. No matter whose figures are correct, what worries Yong most is that there is no independent system in place to determine whether such a colossal and disruptive undertaking will work.

Yet informed sources say many entrenched interests have a reason to hope that construction proceeds. This bureaucracy has been replicated in affected provinces, creating hundreds of titles and salaries dedicated to moving the project forward. Five state banks have major investments in the plan, and expect loans to be repaid when water user fees are assessed. The two companies with multibillion-dollar contracts to build the early phases of the project are hungry for more. Yet the environmental impact assessment required by the 2003 law has still not been released, and the real deliberative battle over the project remains invisible.

The perennial unreliability of information pervades all aspects of China's environmental protection system, from water management to pollution control. Dr Zhao Jianping, sector coordinator for energy in the World Bank's China Office, for example, told me he was dubious of the government's ability to achieve its goal of having 15% of China's energy come from renewable sources by 2020. Having looked at the official plans, he told me that Beijing's characterisation of the potential of wind energy was somewhat realistic, but the discussion of biomass potential was, in his judgment, wishful thinking.

"In most other countries, you do the analysis first, then set goals," he said. "In China, you set the goal first, then you do the research and set the policy to try to achieve it."

Similarly, Yang Fuqiang, vice president of the Energy Foundation, a research center and partnership of major international donors, told me about Beijing's efforts to stem rising coal consumption. To monitor progress, the central government relies on local cadres to report the number of new mines, but these officials often give faulty estimates—either for lack of accurate information or out of a desire to please Beijing.

"Collecting reliable data is a major challenge," Yang said. There are no independent watchdogs to verify official statistics, which, unsurprisingly, often turn out to be wrong. In 2003, Beijing went back to review prior estimates of annual coal consumption, and discovered that its estimates for 2000 had failed to account for 50 million tonnes of coal burned—"a rather large oversight," Yang remarked.

Optimists say that what China needs most is more technical training for its officials: to ensure that regional administrators are better equipped to count coal mines, and local lawyers and judges understand the nuances of new environmental laws. China does need those things. But others are beginning to think that further changes are needed, too.

One person who has helped fund Yong Yang's research is Dr Yu Xiaogang, founder of the nonprofit organisation Green Watershed. Yu is also the architect of the greatest success story of Chinese environmentalism to date. In 2004, he coordinated opposition to a proposed series of dam projects on China's last wild river, the Nu. (Activists and scientists presented convincing evidence that the dam would have had a ruinous effect on local communities and ecosystems.) After a sustained campaign, premier Wen Jiabao personally suspended the project, pending a new environmental impact assessment.

When I visited Green Watershed's offices in western Yunnan province, Yu surprised me when he said that his success was only temporary. "There will always be another dam proposal, another financier," he explained. He said he wants a reliable process for gathering public and expert input while plans are being drafted, not when the bulldozers are ready to roll.

"What we have got to do," Yu said, "is change the system." The veteran environmentalist Wen Bo also told me: "For China's environment to improve, I think the political system needs to change."

In the United States, the popular and political momentum for creating our modern environmental apparatus was inspired by the work of a scientist, Rachel Carson, who challenged conventional wisdom and official policies governing the use of pesticides. After the US Congress passed a series of landmark environmental laws in the 1970s, independent environmental lawyers ensured that those statutes were upheld by suing the government when it failed to enforce legislation such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

When Washington has dragged its feet, independent scientists and reporters have uncovered White House obfuscations and pushed for government action. Every industrialised country – apart from Singapore – that has cleaned up its environment has done so with the help of civil society and a free press.

In countries where the government hasn't been able to control pollution, environmental crises have sometimes helped spur momentum for broader political change. Two decades ago, many in eastern Europe had grown resigned to life under a repressive government. That changed on April 26, 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine (in the former Soviet Union), sending vastly more radiation into the air than an atomic bomb.

Downwind, in Poland and Slovenia, uproar over nuclear reactors and official secrecy (the state presses initially refused to report on the disaster) provoked the first mass anti-government demonstrations.

China's leaders are aware of these historical parallels. David Lampton, the director of the China studies program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), explained Beijing's conundrum: "The Chinese are caught between the logic of what they know they need to effectively implement environmental policy, and the fear of whether these groups could become the opening wedge to political liberalisation."

During my time in China, I often found myself wondering whether Beijing's experiment could succeed. Can a limited form of public participation help avert environmental ruin?

Perhaps China will, once again, elide the apparent contradictions of its environmental politics in the same way that it has somehow melded capitalism and communism. Or perhaps smoggy cities, dwindling water supplies and peasant protests over pollution will force the party to accept greater political openness. Or perhaps the environmental activists themselves will call for it. Whatever happens, the consequences will be epic. If China continues on its current course, within twenty-five years it will emit twice the carbon dioxide of all the OECD countries combined. The Middle Kingdom's dilemma is ours, too.

Christina Larson is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

Reproduced with permission from the Washington Monthly.

China’s new environmental advocates

Christina Larson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:50:00 +0000

At Beijing’s Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, Xu Kezhu and her colleagues are helping people affected by ecological degradation to stand up for their rights. Christina Larson reports.

[This article is reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360.]

Down a dark corridor of a university campus in Beijing, a gold plaque on a wall of peeling paint marks the home of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, a small office that is arguably the epicentre of public-interest law in China.

Inside the cramped suite, shelves buckle under the weight of binders stuffed with thousands of hand-written accounts of polluted rivers and contaminated fields across China. Embroidered gold and maroon tapestries adorn the walls, gifts from the villages whose legal cases the centre has helped win.

Xu Kezhu is the centre’s deputy director and an environmental law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, where its offices are housed. Unlike most of her academic colleagues, she is interested in the law not only as theory, but in practice. "China has many good environmental laws," she told me. "The problem is enforcement."

Xu Kezhu founded the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims after a trip abroad opened her eyes to China's pollution problems.

When I visited, the surprisingly jovial law professor was wearing a loose maroon suit jacket, pink blouse, and black slacks. In her mid-40s, she has long black hair falling well past her shoulders and a bright broad smile. Her window looks out on a dingy Beijing sky. Her screensaver is a photo of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, a white dome against a clear blue horizon.

During the last three decades, China has put increasingly ambitious environmental regulations on the books, but implementation lags far behind principle. In recent years, even as the central government has become more concerned about controlling pollution, China’s environmental woes have intensified. Although Beijing vowed in 2002 to reduce sulfur emissions by 10% in three years, those emissions rose nearly 30%. (In 2006, the chair of China’s environmental committee complained that some provincial governments upheld less than a third of Beijing’s green laws.) Today thousands of unlicensed mines across China leach mercury into the soil.

The challenge of coordinating environmental enforcement across multiple levels of government — with central authorities often looking at the long-term picture, while regional officials remain more concerned about quick economic gains and local protectionism — is not unique to China.

But in the United States, for instance, two key mechanisms absent in China help enforce federal laws. First, the US Environmental Protection Agency has direct oversight over local environmental bureaus and can intervene when regional officials ignore rulings. In China, the opposite is true: Local environmental officials report to the provincial governments, who have an economic interest in shielding local industry. Also in the United States, independent environmental lawyers can sue the executive branch when laws, such as the Clean Water Act or Clean Air Act, aren’t upheld. In China, there is no long-standing tradition of taking the government to court.

Today, however, Xu Kezhu is one of a growing number of legal mavericks working to change the system. Xu told me that her goals are twofold: to "promote enforcement of environmental law," and to "tell the public how to respond when your rights are violated." The notion of rights is itself new in China — in the realm of environmental protection, or otherwise.

A dozen years ago, Xu Kezhu was purely a professor of environmental law at her university. "Back then my work was very academic," she says, "not as practical." In 1996, she moved with her husband, a diplomat, to Spain. During her first extended stay outside China, she was taken by Madrid’s blue skies and by the concept of local civic organizations — people outside of government championing the public interest.

When she returned home two years later, she saw things differently. "I realized we had a very serious pollution problem in Beijing." From the window of her apartment, on the 16th floor of a Beijing skyscraper, she noticed that thick smog often hid the surrounding buildings, and she could smell the air pollution even inside. "Just to teach environmental law was not interesting to me anymore," she said. "I thought, ‘I must use my knowledge.’"

Law students and professors volunteer to answer the centre's hotline, giving free legal advice to pollution victims.

In 1998, Xu and a fellow law professor at the university, Wang Canfa, whom Time magazine named as one of its 2007 "Environmental Heroes," co-founded the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. The next year, they opened a free legal advice hotline, the first of its kind in China.

Initially, Xu spent three or four days a week manning the hotline. Today the phones are answered by a growing group of volunteers — law professors and young law students drawn to the centre’s mission — who field legal inquiries and record each complaint for their files. Of those calls, the centre’s staff has taken up more than 80 cases: they've won a third, lost a third, and a third are still pending.

One case Xu is currently working on in Hunan province is emblematic. In 2001, a chemical processing plant opened in Hunan’s Shutangshan village. Although the factory provided the local government with a faulty environmental impact statement, local cadres, eager to preserve the jobs and tax revenue the plant had brought, overlooked this violation.

But after the factory opened, families living nearby began to notice new and troubling ailments: from vomiting and migraine headaches, to diminished rice yields and dead cattle. They came to believe the factory’s sooty emissions and wastewater dumped into the local water supply, the Xiang River, were the source of these problems.

The centre's volunteers record citizens' stories on sheets like this, collecting information to see if legal action is an option.

The villagers first appealed to the factory owner to install more stringent pollution-control equipment. Then they brought their concerns to the local environmental authorities. But by the summer of 2004, little had changed. So the villagers turned to force to shut the factory down — twice storming the grounds to rip its power-supply unit off the wall. Each time, plant operations halted temporarily, while repairs were made, but the factory was back online within a week.

In January 2006, a representative from the village, a farmer named Chen Li Feng, made the long journey to Beijing, where she camped for two weeks in a train station’s waiting room as she struggled to get an audience with the national environmental ministry. However, when that meeting occurred, officials simply gave her a letter directing local authorities to re-examine her case, and little changed. On her next trip to Beijing that November, Chen instead visited the offices of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. That’s how Xu learned about her case.

Three months later, Xu paid a visit to the factory in Hunan. She photographed factory conditions and interviewed village residents, local officials, and plant workers. She also showed the villagers how to collect samples of wastewater emitted from factory pipes and organized survey teams to record health problems and crop damage in affected areas. In May, she returned to further question the factory owner.

Today Xu is preparing a lawsuit against the local environmental protection bureau, which green-lighted the factory’s faulty environmental impact statement. If successful, the lawsuit will force the factory to shut down until it meets environmental standards.

The waste pipe of a factory in Hunan Province drains into the local water supply, prompting villagers to seek Xu Kezhu's help.

Recognising that her team can only handle a small number of the tens of thousands of pollution cases like this one across China, Xu’s office has also held an annual training workshop on environmental law for the past six years. So far they have trained about 300 lawyers and 200 judges from across the country.

When I visited the village of Shutangshan, the local organizer Chen told me that she hopes that Xu can finally "make the law work." We were sitting in her modest home, with the factory’s smokestacks and shrivelled orange trees in the backyard visible through the window. She told me that what little she had — her land, her health, her livelihood — was fast slipping away.

The room was dominated by a poster of Mao on one wall, and a loudly ticking clock. This region of southern China has twice nurtured movements of beleaguered peasants who have risen against the central government: first the anti-imperial forces of Sun Yat-Sen, then the peasant armies of Mao Zedong, who was born in a village nearby.

Today Hunan province is a hotbed of environmental unrest. In this, it is not alone. In 2005, China was shaken by 60,000 pollution-triggered "public disturbances" — demonstrations or riots of a hundred or more people protesting the contamination of rivers and farms. The Ministry of Public Security has ranked pollution among the top five threats to China's peace and stability. The longer the law fails, with China’s business elite prospering while millions of farmers stand to lose everything, the closer the countryside comes to erupting into revolt.

Christina Larson is a journalist focussing on international environmental issues, based in Beijing and Washington, DC

This article is reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360.

Homepage photo by xiaming