Congratulations to China, to Ma Jun and to the Chinese people on this historic opportunity. I wish you success in this important fight for a less polluted world and for a more transparent and responsible corporate environment. -- Matthew

Thanks for your attention.

Enforcement is often more challenging than legislation in China. To ensure that this new legislation be put into use, the NGOs and citizens who care about the issues could do the following two things.

The first thing is to test the new rules in practice. Some local NGOs have plans to send out letters to alert listed polluters that they are legally bound to disclose discharge data within a limited timeframe. Some others plan to follow the rules by posting requests to local agencies over the next couple of months, to ask for such information as the list of polluters in their regions.

If media could follow up by exposing those listed polluters who fail or even refuse to disclose, it will help generate public pressure on the companies to meet the legal requirements.

Secondly, the data disclosed by agencies and corporations shall be collected, categorized and presented in a user-friendly way so that people will appreciate the value of environmental data disclosure. We need to keep in mind that the data itself may be of little use to ordinary users unless it is interpreted properly. We have modified our database to make sure that the corporate discharge data we input is searchable and cross-comparable on our Web site.

Ma Jun

It is a great achievement that the Chinese government will start the trial of this legislation. The next question is how to make sure that it would work. This involves a lot of supervision and management.

So my question to the author is: what would be a possible working model for the public sector and non-profit sector working together to ensure legislation can be effective to the companies that are considered as the main source of water pollution?

VZ

Bob,
I agree that information is crucial to effective participation. As I just mentioned in a comment on the Xiamen PX article, it seems what is also needed is clearly defined frameworks for carrying out public consultatations, rather than simply commitments to participation without substance and specification. Chinese public consultations have been known to last no longer than a day (when a European equivalent might last a year, at least) - SL

Within the first few months I was in China, I attended an event called "Sino-International Environmental Protection Event" (Sept 16 2006) in Xiangshan Park. There was a speech on protecting the environment, and then there was a big pile of plastic bottles and everyone clapped for it (yay!), and then people tried to sell products made out of recycled materials. That was the extent of it. In terms of Chinese NGOs, I have seen few creative or meaningful ideas in terms of protecting the environment. Global Village of Beijing for instance, seems to get a lot of awards, but for what? Businesses are certainly taking advantage of this boom. Go to Baoding, or Dezhou, these are the "solar valleys" of China, where the streetlights are powered by solar panels, oohh aahh!

So how do we get more public participation? Yes, the cost of guanxi and lawyers is high. But maybe we can start with getting real, accurate information on the gravity of environmental problems.