Book Reviews

Managing the Chinese Environment, by Richard Louis Edmunds, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, 326pp, ISBN 0 19 829635 5, pbk

Pollution abatement and environmental protection are amongst the most prevalent of the many issues being addressed in China by foreign scholars and technical experts. Though much of the actual and potential damage is domestic, concern about the regional and global environmental impact of China´s economic development continues to grow.

The key questions may be phrased simply thus: how seriously do the Chinese themselves take these problems, what are they doing about it and how effective are they likely to be? Any investigation of environmental policy in China (and indeed in many other countries) will unearth two fundamental contradictions: between the overwhelming desire for short-term economic growth and the less pressing concern for the state of the environment; and between the rhetoric and legislation governing environmental protection on the one hand and the implementation of these measures on the other.

This book (reprinted from an issue of the journal The China Quarterly) is drawn from contributions to a conference entitled "The Chinese Environment" held at the School of Oriental & African Studies in London, in January 1998. The focus is on policy, political, social, legal and administrative issues and, as such, this is a welcome change from the plethora of quantitative or semi-quantitative accounts which fail to delve below the surface of statistics and their technical causes.

The twelve chapters fall into two types: those which set the scene for environmental policy and regulation, and those which explore a particular sector or issue. The first four chapters after the Introduction together comprise an authoritative one-hundred page account of the background to China´s current state of environmental degradation and system of environmental management. This part of the book should be compulsory reading for all foreign specialists involved in China´s environment.

Mark Elvin´s chapter on Imperial China is a joy to read, for it tells us that nothing is new. War and urbanisation with the ensuing pursuit of short-term gain has caused irreversible degradation of China´s natural environment for at least two thousand years. The publicly-expressed concerns of officials, poets and citizens have been to little effect. War and urbanisation in Europe have had similar effects, but differences in population, urbanisation, geology, climate and topography have rendered the impact significantly more devastating in China.

The following three chapters address the unspoken question: "why should China be any more capable of acting now than it did in the past?". Abigail Jahiel and Michael Palmer provide up-to-date and detailed accounts of the current legal and administrative framework for environmental protection. The last twenty years have seen a series of bursts of activity to improve this framework. Laws and regulations have been written, the administration rationalised and the status of the main environmental protection agency elevated. But to little sustained effect. The main cause of the poor administration of the environment and, indeed, of most aspects of natural resources and enrgy, lies in the system of government in China. The problems of multi-tiered government, numerous vertical lines of reporting, a strictly hierarchical bureaucracy, no clear convergence of power and accountability, inadequate funding of key agencies, low respect for the judiciary, and a shortage of skilled manpower are possibly more visible in the country´s environmental protection programme than in most other activities of government. Administrative measures are preferred to economic incentives, and local people´s mediation committees to the courts.

Lester Ross charts China´s recent enthusiasm for participating in international accords and conferences concerning the environment, but again reaches the conclusion that implementation is but a shadow of the rhetoric.

After reading these four chapters a pessimist might reasonably conclude that little substantial and sustained progress will be made in the management of China´s environment until fundamental changes take place both to the system of government and in the economy. The first is needed so that the processes of policy making and policy implementation are both more effective and more closely integrated. The second step relates to the requirement that meaningful economic incentives for "good behaviour" can only be introduced once a market economy has become more fully developed.

The following six chapters may be crudely lumped into three groups: land, water and industry. Robert Ash and Richard Louis Edmunds review trends in the use and abuse of arable land, whilst James Harkness assesses progress in addressing the problems of deforestation. The news on both fronts is not good. As the amount of agricultural land declines, the use of fertiliser and pesticides grows, with consequent damage to land and water. The last ten years have been marked by campaigns to replant large areas of forest in the north of the country. But Harkness claims that the actual volume of standing wood may actually be falling.

Water is the current big environmental issue in the Chinese newspapers: either too much in the south or too little in the north. The water-table beneath Beijing is more than 30 metres below the level of 1949 and seems to be dropping at an accelerating rate. James Nickum addresses the question of whether there is too little water or if it is just badly managed. The question is relevant in the light of the longstanding but now increasingly publicised plan to bring water from the Yangtze River north to the Yellow River and on to the North China Plain, described in a separate chapter by Liu Changming. Nickum´s controversial conclusion is that North china´s problem can largely be solved by economic measures supported by institutional reform. In the long term he might be right, but since the market economy has not yet arrived and as substantial institutional reform in China takes time, I fear that the south-to-north transfer of water may be necessary, despite the likely detrimental environmental impact. It is easier to undertake a great engineering project than to reform government.

Vaclav Smil´s paper on energy and natural resources and Eduard Vermeer´s on industrial pollution address related topics. At first sight, the outlook for this segment might appear as bleak as for water and land resources. Yet in certain cases administrative and policy measures are proving effective, at least in the short term in certain locations. The closure of large numbers of small-scale mines, power stations, refineries and other types of plant is being undertaken with a high degree of firmness, and new plants in the energy sector will be predominantly large and clean. In many cities measures have been quickly enforced to reduce vehicle emissions and to close factories within city centres. Along the wealthier coastal belt, economic development will necessarily lead to the progressive substitution of "dirty" manufacturing by "cleaner" tertiary industries. That being said, energy and industrial pollution will remain a significant problem, not least because of the predominance of coal in the country´s primary energy supply, the likely persistence of manufacturing in inland provinces, and the government´s slowness to promote rail rather than road transport.

Judith Bannister´s chapter reminds us that one of the most important impacts of pollution is that on human health. Since 1949 great steps have been taken to improve the health of China´s population through the implementation of basic health care and hygiene programmes. Continued gains are now being partially offset by the effects of pollution. As the number of people of working age continues to grow during the next ten years, so will the pressure on the environment from the economy.

Finally, the good news. Wherever there is pollution, the opportunity exists for western companies to make money through pollution abatement management and technology. But as Bruce Tremayne and Penny de Waal show, it remains to be seen how such activities will be regulated.

This book does indeed provide, as it claims, an insight into the environmental challenges facing China in the first decade of the twenty-first century. But somebody who is not a China specialist may ask (as China-watchers rarely do) what makes China special with respect to the environment. Any large rapidly industrialising nation is bound to encounter many of the same problems as China, both in the nature of the environmental damage and in the perceived inadequacy of the reponse. The scale of the environmental challenge in China is magnified by two types of phenomena: natural and socio-economic. Natural features which exacerbate the damage caused by industrialisation include: the large reserves of coal, the low rainfall in the north of the country, the presence of large rivers which are attractive for the construction of large dams in the south, the relative shortage of cultivatable land and the geologically active nature of much of the topography. Socio-economic characteristics include the systerm of government, the large population, the important role of township and village enterprises during the last twenty years, the close relationship between these enterprises and local government, and the immaturity of the legal system. These phenomena combine to render China one of the most difficult countries for the development of a sustained programme of environmental management.

For these reasons China provides an ongoing case-history which should be of interest to scholars and experts in the field of environmental protection anywhere in the world. This publication provides a brief, authoritative and readable progress report which is essential reading for those involved in China´s natural resources sector. It also gives a useful overview for those who are not China specialists but who wish to gain an insight into the problems of environmental management in the world´s most populous nation.

by Philip Andrews-Speed, CEPMLP

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