Postcards From Tomorrow Square (23 page)

The last PowerPoint slide in a presentation that one of the scientists showed me read, “We are confident that the air quality goals for Olympics 2008 will be met in Beijing.” When I asked, “Really?” all eyes turned toward the senior CAS official in the room, a British-trained scientist. “I personally am sure the goals will be met,” he said. Even if the winds are wrong? “Ninety-nine percent.”

I don’t know whether he is right, but what I took from the day was that sophisticated people are honestly trying to do the right thing, in ways official propaganda had not prepared me for. Like England, the United States, Japan, and others before it, China is passing through the environmental-disaster stage of industrialization and beginning to clean up. The difference is that those countries waited until they were rich before they started the process. China is still full of poor people, but for reasons of scale and impact, it cannot postpone cleaning up.

There are signs that Chinese officials at many levels are facing that fact. An episode that seems to underscore China’s stubbornness actually shows the reverse.

In 2004, the “Hu-Wen team” of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao had recently come into power with the slogan of building a “harmonious society.” This specifically included greater harmony with nature. A man named Pan Yue, the deputy director of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, had been giving speeches about the need to measure the environmental cost of economic growth. (Pan, a former soldier and journalist now in his late forties—relatively young for an influential bureaucrat—has become the best-known spokesman for environmentalist causes in the government.) The agency, which in 2008 became the Ministry of Environmental Protection, approached the World Bank for help in conducting the first comprehensive survey of the total cost to the country, economic and otherwise, of China’s air and water pollution.

“At first we were reluctant,” a bank official who declined to be named told me. “These measures are always controversial and difficult”—especially any attempt to measure a toll in human lives. But there were signs that progressive elements inside the Chinese government wanted the study for use “as inside argument for devoting more effort to the environmental issue.” The important background point is that even though the outside world tends to see China itself and “the Chinese regime” as a great homogenous bloc, there are ideological, regional, and personal rivalries at every level.

The economic calculations were sobering enough, to say nothing of the health consequences. When the World Bank issued its draft report, “Cost of Pollution in China,” in the summer of 2007, it said that China’s economic growth rate would be cut significantly—perhaps by half or more—if the government accounted realistically for what Pan Yue called the country’s “overdrafts” on resources. China’s announced growth rate has been 9 to 10 percent each year over the past two decades; the report said that environmental costs could represent between 2.9 and 5.8 percent, which would reduce China’s miraculous-seeming growth rate to sclerotic European levels. Estimating how many people were sick, dead, or deformed would of course be much more controversial.

According to widely reported leaks, the bank concluded that about 750,000 Chinese people die prematurely each year because of pollution. But the Chinese government requested that no total figure be included in an interim version of the report released in 2007, because it wanted to review the methodology behind the estimate. This move was blasted around the world as yet another sign of the government’s secrecy.

The odd part of the denunciation is that the report itself, which the Chinese government accepted, included every bit of shocking information except that final tally. There were calculations of childhood deaths from dysentery, lost “life-years” because of air pollution, increased hospitalization rates because of lung diseases and cancers, and other grim statistics, including the conclusion that air pollution in all its forms is probably 10 times more damaging to China’s health than all forms of water pollution. It is hard to imagine how anyone who opened the report could consider it a whitewash.

“The press reaction to the report really irritated us,” the bank official said. “It’s not just the Chinese—all governments we deal with are very careful with this kind of life-and-death data. All of us felt that the government was taking the exercise seriously and that it helped nobody to slap them down.” Several people I spoke with at other international organizations concurred. Sure enough, in March 2008, after the hubbub had died down, a report on environmental policy by Xinhua, the state-run news agency, mentioned offhandedly that “a World Bank report said about 750,000 Chinese die earlier due to air pollution every year.”

T
he Chinese Communist Party unquestionably rules China, but in a more haphazard and uneven fashion than Westerners often recognize. About some things it is as inflexible, intolerant, and oblivious to outside criticism as the worst stereotypes suggest. These hard-line areas include political challenges to the party’s legitimacy, criticism in the media, and any suggestion of regional separatism or “splittism”—notably, uprisings in Tibet fomented by what the state-run media always refer to, in English, as the “Dalai clique.” About many other matters, ranging from the daily practices of mayors or provincial governors to the deals struck by entrepreneurs, the central Communist government in Beijing is either unable to impose its will or uninterested in even trying. Economic development has been fastest in the parts of the country—mainly the south, far from Beijing—where the central government has been most hands-off.

The varied nature of the government’s approach explains a theme I heard in many interviews. Both Chinese and foreign environmentalists said the government is sending subtle but important bureaucratic signals that it now takes environmental protection more seriously. It is more tolerant of Chinese and foreign nongovernmental organizations working for green causes. It is allowing more of its citizens a chance to defend their environmental rights via lawsuits or organized protests. And it is changing the way it promotes and rewards its own officials, to move them toward an environmentalist outlook. There are still huge pressures in the opposite direction, like payoffs to mayors or governors from land developers. But the new signals are positive.

For example, until recently the curriculum at the Central Communist Party School, where future administrators are trained, included no environmental training whatsoever. In U.S. military terms, this was like the days when war colleges taught future generals nothing about counterinsurgency. That is now changing. I talked with two foreign representatives of nongovernmental organizations—Peggy Liu, of the Joint U.S.–China Cooperation on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), and Lila Buckley, of the Global Environmental Institute (GEI)—that have been working with the central and provincial party schools to develop new courses and emphases. Liu, a Chinese American veteran of the tech and venture-capital industries who now lives in Shanghai, started JUCCCE in 2007 as a way of pooling Chinese and international efforts on the environment (its name is pronounced “juice” in English and “
ju si
” in Chinese, meaning “coalition of thinkers”). The group is developing bilingual Web sites intended to connect Chinese scientists, officials, and bureaucrats with their counter parts overseas, and is trying to connect party officials and factory managers across the country with international advisers.

“This can be like the Human Genome Project,” Liu said, referring to the way researchers around the world used the Internet to share the computational work of decoding the genome, thus completing the project in a decade rather than a century. So far, she said, the Chinese government has welcomed rather than impeded her projects. “The government’s green policies are among the most progressive in the world—seriously,” she told me. “The challenge is to build an environmentally conscious workforce and have it pervade at every level. It’s as if Starbucks were building a whole coffee culture at once.”

GEI, one of China’s few homegrown, locally run environmental NGOs, also trains future government leaders. Chinese authorities keep such a careful eye on NGOs that the very concept of a “non”-governmental organization is peculiar in China—and all the more so since the tradition of civic action is so weak. Still, GEI has been free to conduct traditional conservation efforts such as supporting wildlife reserves; it has promoted wider adoption of energy-saving systems like the one used in the Sunnsy cement factory; and it has brought to the Tibetan hinterland simple, cheap “biogas converters” with which Tibetan villagers produce fuel for heating and cooking from yak or cattle dung. (What about the smell? Buckley, an American in her twenties who is GEI’s only non-Chinese staff member, told me that the villages smell better with the converters than they did before, when the villagers burned the dried dung, and heaps of dung patties polluted their drinking water.)

And GEI has made a major push for a presence in party schools. This has required some delicate maneuvering, since the schools have naturally been slower than regular Chinese universities to bring in foreign experts. In 2006, GEI took two 12-member delegations of party instructors to the United States for three weeks of sustainable-development training at Stanford and Yale and for visits to the World Bank, Resources for the Future, and similar organizations.

By all accounts, the most important change in China’s bureaucratic culture is revising the performance-rating system for officials so they are graded on environmental protection rather than mainly on economic growth. To explain the long-term significance this can have, it is useful to think of the professional U.S. military, which resembles China’s nationwide Communist administrative system in this way: Ambitious young officers are rotated through a variety of command posts on their way to the top. In both, the organizational culture is continually reinforced through midcareer training—war college for future U.S. generals, party schools for future ministers and provincial governors. And career success depends heavily on performance evaluations at the end of each assignment that determine who moves up and who is sidetracked. Shifts in the rating system have a pre dictable and profound effect on individual behavior.

China’s national laws about air and water pollution are also shifting in an environmentally responsible direction. In China even more than in the United States, law is one thing and reality is another—but in general, I was told, these pollution standards are being taken more seriously than they used to be. For instance, in spring 2008 a spokesman for the Shanghai Economic Committee announced the city’s 20 goals for the year. Energy conservation and pollution control were at the top of the list.

“My sense is that local political leaders and the heads of big state-owned businesses understand that they really will be held accountable,” Charles McElwee, an American environmental lawyer based in Shanghai, told me. The goals are quite explicit. For example, greater Shanghai is supposed to improve its “energy efficiency”—the amount of energy used per 10,000 RMB of economic output—by 4 percent each year. The nationwide goal is to increase energy efficiency by 20 percent and decrease emissions of major pollutants by 10 percent by 2010, compared with 2006 levels. That goal is theoret-ically still within reach, though 2007’s achieve ments fell short (for instance, energy efficiency improved by 3.3 rather than 4 percent). In 2007, the reported level of COD—chemical oxygen demand, a major indicator of water pollution—went down by more than 3 percent nationwide, and the level of sulfur dioxide, a major air pollutant, by more than 4.6 percent. “When I saw those figures, it changed my perception of how things were headed in China,” McElwee said.

In parallel with its own incentives on environmental issues, the government has warily tolerated forms of organized citizen action that it would usually restrict. Even as it has opened the country economically and socially, the government has tried hard to limit independent sources of information and any type of organization outside its control. Yet Green-peace maintains programs and offices in China, where it has launched an aggressive (by Chinese standards) campaign to persuade consumers not to buy furniture made of rain-forest wood, not to eat shark-fin soup, not to waste energy—and not to buy products from Chinese or foreign companies that undermine these goals. Greenpeace China is quoted frequently in the press—yes, the Chinese press. Environmental exposés are increasingly tolerated, as political exposés are not, and they draw widespread attention.

The rule of law is still shaky in China, but Chinese environmental lawyers have filed and sometimes won suits on behalf of citizens who are sick because of pollution or whose farms have been poisoned. A former journalist named Ma Jun has created the remarkable online China Water Pollution Map for his Beijing-based group, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Anyone using the Internet can zoom in on a city or village, click on a lake or river, and see the latest pollution readings—and also which factories or farms are creating the problem. Jane Goodall’s organization has started “Roots & Shoots” programs to teach Chinese children about environmental problems. In early 2008, thousands of people poured into the streets of Shanghai to protest the downtown extension of a Maglev train line, which they believed would give off dangerous radiation near their homes. There was a similar mass protest in 2007 about factory pollution in the coastal manufacturing town of Xiamen.

“China’s greatest environmental achievement over the past decade has been the growth of environmental activism among the Chinese people,” Elizabeth Economy, author of
The River Runs Black
, told me in an e-mail. “They have pushed the boundaries of environmental protection well beyond anything imaginable a decade ago.”