China looks to new environment ministry to clean up fouled waterways
April 11, 2008
China has hailed its newly created environment ministry as a symbol of its determination to get tough with pollution and clean up its ailing water system.
But in the past the best intentions of the central government have been thwarted at the local level in favour of economic growth at any cost - and for now there are few signs that much has changed.
If change is in store it should be evident in places such as Jiangsu province along the lower stretches of the Yangtze river. Nowhere is the price of economic growth more evident than along the Yangtze, where clusters of chemical plants and industrial parks as well as an aggressive approach to agriculture have enriched large sections of the population but left rivers and lakes bubbling with poisons and choked by algae.
China is slowly developing the tools required to reverse the impact that rapid rates of industrialization and urbanization have had on its environment. But sorting out the various jurisdictional problems in China's heavily polluted water system might turn out to be one of the biggest challenges facing the country's new ministry, formed out of the old State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) during the last session of the country's parliament.
One industry representative was particularly pessimistic about the change.
Wen Yibo, the founder and chairman of the Beijing Sound Environmental Group, one of China's first private environmental enterprises and parent of the Singapore-listed Epure International, said that SEPA's latest upgrade would "make no difference" when it came to enforcing China's environmental laws.
"The heads of local environmental bureaus are still appointed and paid by local governments, and they still have to listen to their bosses at the local level, rather than the ministry in Beijing. That will continue to be the case with the new ministry," he said.
Officials with the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) concede that the changes so far have been superficial as they struggle to disentangle the roles of the multitude of ministries and local government bureaus now engaged in the effort to improve China's air and water quality.
While the MEP is theoretically on a par with the likes of the Ministry of Science and Technology when it comes to top-level policy making, it has so far been given no additional staff or responsibilities. And if disputes arise in overlapping areas like climate change or overall industrial policy, it is unlikely to win out over the mighty state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission.
The installation of crucial water treatment equipment, as well as the elimination of heavy-polluting enterprises from China's riverbanks, were not even part of the official remit of the old agency, but "it had no choice" to go beyond its power and try to deal with the issues as best it could, an official with the environment ministry told the Shanghai-based China Business News.
He said that the situation was bound to improve now that the MEP has been established, but others remain concerned that the changes have been merely cosmetic. Some officials with the new ministry fear they still don't have the staff to perform vital monitoring roles, China Business News said.
Wen of the Beijing Sound Group concurred. His company has been involved in the installation of water treatment facilities since 1993, and the biggest problem now is not investment levels or government policy, but implementation.
"Everywhere in China, companies must now install water treatment facilities while they are constructing their projects," he said. "The government inspects them and sees that the facilities have been installed, but once the projects go into operation, many of the companies simply don't turn on the equipment in order to cut costs."
Eastern China's Jiangsu province is a test-case in attempts to switch to a gentler and cleaner form of economic growth. But local officials said that they have been hamstrung by bureaucratic problems and the difficulties of enforcing green legislation not just in the province itself, but further upsteam along the Yangtze.
The challenges are particularly evident at the 2,300-sq km Lake Tai, which provides water to around 40 mln people but has been administered with little caution or coordination among Jiangsu, the provinces of Anhui and Zhejiang, and the city of Shanghai.
Jiangsu has only just begun to reverse the impact of heavy industrial expansion, rapid urbanization as well as the indiscriminate overuse of fertilizers and pesticides in the Lake Tai region.
Raw sewage, fertilizer and chemical waste were discharged directly into the lake for years, and individual city and provincial governments have been reluctant to take responsibility because the costs of treatment were prohibitive and the sources of pollution too diverse for a single local authority to control by itself.
Grass-roots environmental officials were unsure about the impact that the new ministry would have on the effort to clean up the massive and heavily contaminated lake, but expressed hope that it could at least have the power to override the jurisdictional confusion that has made their jobs so difficult.
"It will take a few months to find out what is going on," said Hao Jiaqing, the director of the environmental bureau of Nanjing. "I haven't even had my business cards changed yet."
In Jiangsu, cleaning up after economic growth has become a matter of urgency. Much of Lake Li, a smaller spillover from Lake Tai, was a catastrophic mess up to just a few years ago. White foam created by putrefying algae had covered large parts of the lake's surface and turned it into a "stinking toilet", according a local tour guide.
Dozens of factories and fish farms on the banks have since been submerged or replaced with parkland, and the authorities have also implemented a new water diversion scheme aimed at protecting just a small section of the Li from the toxic run-offs from the Yangtze and elsewhere. Officials said that they were still not sure how effective their "experimental" plans would be in the long term because they had no jurisdiction over other sources of pollution.
They said that they have been closely monitoring a similar clean-up campaign at Lake Biwa in Japan, and said that it would take at least "30-odd years" to solve the problems.
Last summer, Lake Tai itself was smothered -- not for the first time -- by blooms of algae and cyanobacteria. That forced authorities to order the closure of more than 1,000 enterprises on the banks and cap the spiraling prices of bottled water in the area, some of which had risen to about five times the normal level as local residents -- almost entirely reliant on the lake for water supplies -- began to panic.
The Qinhuai River -- a tributary of the Yangtze created two millennia ago to fulfill the grandiose designs of emperor Qin Shihuang, builder of the Great Wall, and used since to regulate Yangtze water levels during flood seasons -- was dubbed by Nanjing residents as the "garbage river". It served as the dumping ground for toxic waste, fertilizer run-offs and the tons of residential trash left on its banks.
Local authorities have already spent 2.5 billion yuan cleaning up a 110-km section of the river, and have demolished farms, tenements and factories as part of an expensive makeover of the area. The plans also involve the reconstruction of Ming and Qing dynasty architecture destroyed by the Taiping rebels during the nineteenth century, officials said.
Sun Qiuyun from the Nanjing office of the state environmental protection bureau said that they had already moved 87 enterprises from the banks of the Qinhuai over the last few years. "We have moved some of them to industrial parks, while non-compliant chemical and pharmaceutical companies have been shut down completely," he said.
He noted that many of the enterprises discharging pollution directly into the river were small paper and leather producers that would already have been targeted for closure by state regulations.
According to the most recent government figures, Jiangsu province has closed down more than 2,700 small-scale chemical plants in the last year in order to improve its water supplies.
But officials are well aware that the problems go way beyond the reach of cities like Wuxi and Nanjing, or indeed the province of Jiangsu. One noted that while the provincial authorities of Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang have, in conjunction with the government of Shanghai, set up a committee to deal jointly with the problems of pollution on Lake Tai, "it is currently just a talking shop."
The lead is being taken by Jiangsu alone.
"Actually, it doesn't matter if there are four, six or how many different governments," said Wen of Beijing Sound. "If they are strictly implementing state requirements there is no problem, but they are not."
He said that economic growth remained the priority for most local authorities, and they are "engaging in regional protectionism" in order to mitigate the impact of environmental legislation and evade their responsibilities.
Ma Jun, environmental campaigner and head of the independent Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, said that while many of the industrial small fry have been shut down around Lake Tai, bigger and better known companies have avoided tough penalties.
Local environmental protection bureaus have only been able to impose small fines on such companies, and have not been able to force them to change the way they do business, he said.
Speaking on the sidelines of the country's last parliamentary session in March, Wang Rusong, an environmentalist with the China Academy of Sciences and delegate from south China's Guangdong province, said that local governments and enterprises simply did not have an incentive to do their best when it came to restricting water pollution.
They were naturally reluctant to spend money on expensive treatment plants because upstream polluters were still discharging waste almost with impunity.
Even if well-off regions like southern Jiangsu have developed different priorities, poorer regions like neighboring Jiangxi or Anhui still tend to emphasize the "growth at all costs" model of economic development. Wang said that most regions do not consider the downstream impact of industrial projects because the system itself does not give them an incentive to do so.
Wang said that although Jiangsu has promised to clean up the algae, bacteria and industrial contaminants that have ruined local water supplies around Lake Tai, it has done so only after Beijing declared the area to be a "natural disaster zone" and promised support for the region.
He said that environmental protection could not be left to local governments, and had to be handled on a national level.
Last year, when the problems became particularly acute after droughts slowed down the inflow of water from the Yangtze, Jiangsu tried out a number of temporary measures including inducing rain through "cloud seeding" and pumping active carbon and potassium permanganate into the water to digest the blue and green algae.
Yangtze water normally enters the lake at a rate of around 150 cubic meters per second, experts estimate, and officials reasoned that the contaminants flowing in from China's longest river would be preferable to the pollution in the lake itself, and proceeded to try to increase the inflow. This, they admitted, was only a stop-gap solution.
Officials in the region agreed that above all else, a more coordinated approach needed to be taken to deal with pollution at the source. Hao of the Nanjing environmental protection bureau said that on the Qinhuai River, all they could do was control the sources of pollution that fell under their own jurisdiction and hope that other local governments would do the same.
"We have built a 940,000-ton per year waste water treatment facility," he said. "We have ensured that we have not just cut off the polluted water and thereby simply moved the problem elsewhere, but have actually treated it in our waste water facilities."
Other experts are waiting to see how the new ministry fits in with China's attempts to pursue a cleaner and greener economic strategy.
"Cynically, I might say the change of status is more cosmetic than real," said Christopher Tung, partner with the legal firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques and environmental specialist.
"However, I am optimistic that a range of new initiatives together with real cabinet support will mean more power and tougher enforcement," he added.
Wen of the Beijing Sound Group was more cautious.
"The status of SEPA has been raised, but its functions have not actually been changed, and its powers in relation to local governments are also unaltered," he said.
"The ministry has the power, and it has the laws, but it doesn't yet have the system."
