Governing Environmental Conflicts in China

Abstract

a million premature deaths each year. China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and choking smog in cities reaches levels that make it hazardous to go outside. 3 According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China's figure for 2010, 4 the cost of pollution has reached about 1.5 trillion RMB, or roughly 3.5 percent of GDP. For the Chinese state, one unanticipated outcome caused by degrading environmental quality is the occurrence of a large number of environmental conflicts. Since 1997, environmental conflicts have increased annually by 25 percent (Hou and Zhang 2009). In recent years, there is increasing evidence that the upcoming middle class in urban regions has started to express their concerns and disagreements with government decisions, which adopt a rule-based approach; national laws, policies, or regulations are cited to remedy perceived governmental mismanagement (Johnson 2010). One consequence of this is that the Chinese state often has to reinforce public participation to accommodate this. In addition, in contrast to many violent protests that have occurred in rural China in response to environmental degradation, these citizens work within the existing political system as much as possible. They attempt to depoliticize their protest actions by establishing transparency and public consultation as their master frame (Johnson 2015), which is a generic type of collective action frame (Snow and Benford 1992). In contrast to other types of master frame, such as human rights, political reform, or political freedom, this master frame is relatively acceptable for the Chinese state, which creates an environment for negotiation between it and its citizens (Johnson 2015).In general, these new features of protests initiated by Chinese citizens in relation to environmental issues cause a dilemma for the state. China, like many other authoritarian counties, has established concession and repression as two crucially important strategies to cope with social conflicts (Cai 2010). However, both suppression and concession appear to be ineffective in coping with environmental conflicts in contemporary China. First, the occurrences of environmental conflicts with mobilized protests potentially endanger social order, the top priority of the Chinese state. Actions must be taken to end them as soon as possible. Second, the depoliticized nature of the protests initiated by citizens makes the use of suppression inappropriate as it will significantly damage state legitimacy. Third, making concessions to meet 3 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/china-pollution-protests-2014729105632310682.html (accessed August 25, 2015). 4 http://www.cfr.org/china/chinas-environmental-crisis/p12608 (accessed August 25, 2015).4citizens' demands by enhancing public participation does not match the authoritarian nature of the state. It can be thus concluded that the governance of environmental conflicts is a challenging issue for the Chinese state; concession or suppression cannot help it out of environmental co...

Environmental accidents and environmental legislation in China: Evidence from provincial panel data (1997–2014)

“…It is found that Chinese deputies have been active in environmental bill submissions in recent years (Kamo & Takeuchi, 2012) since climate change has become a major concern among citizens and government officials (Li, 2017;Li et al, 2017;Zheng & Kahn, 2017;Zhu & Wu, 2017). There are similar or greater concerns among citizens and government officials when an environmental accident occurs, which may motivate deputies to submit bills to address the concerns and convince the local leaders that they perform their official role assignment and are worthy of reappointment.…”

From Eco-Civilization to City Branding: A Neo-Marxist Perspective of Sustainable Urbanization in China

“…High-level officials at the district, municipal, provincial, and national tiers of government are not chosen by an electorate but evaluated through an official assessment system administered from above. In this a variety of indicators play a role, of which growth of Gross Domestic Product, avoiding riots and revolts, some environmental norms and, increasingly, demonstrated loyalty to the leadership play key roles [83,84]. This evaluation is partly objectified, but it has been shown to have a variety of weaknesses including responsibility borne for duties that cannot be practically fulfilled and political (ab)use [85].…”

“…Power accumulation has shifted to those societal groups that live in the wealthy and large cities by the East coast, where a history of party loyalty has conflated with success in government, business, or leading universities in the nation and where track records of being directly or indirectly in charge of constituencies with faster than average economic growth has been recorded over the years, where major social revolt is prevented and where the ecological discourse reflected in the use of green city labels is convincingly vented to the outside world and helps attract and keep satisfied investors, high tech corporations, talented residents, and substantial numbers of visitors [8,81,84]. As in the case of capital accumulation in sustainable urbanization, the mobilization of bias promoted through power accumulation is systematic and exceeds the thresholds of pluralistic input to decision-making or even the position of a limited number of policy actors having structurally more resources in and input to the policy process [80,94,96,99].…”

Governing the sharing economy smartly: A tale of two initiatives in China

“…This regulation was made without the participation of the other stakeholders, and most citizens complained that it was difficult to meet. Moreover, this governance style implies that different stakeholders involved in governance processes insist on their own goals and do not take others' interests seriously (Li, 2018). In the governance of home sharing, the platforms sometimes do not carefully implement the background check policy issued by local governments.…”