A March 1999 report from U.S. Embassy Beijing
Summary: Environmental degradation and the waste of scarce water resources reflect structural problems in China’s political and economic system. New policies are not needed since China has had good economic policies for over two decades. Better policies are lost in a black hole created by local governments and ministries that put their own selfish interests above the good of society. Corruption and blocking of environmental enforcement by local government, not inadequate policies, caused environmental degradation of the Huai River and of Lake Taihu, devastation of the virgin forests of Yunnan Province and the now annual drying up of the Yellow River. In part four of a summary translation of “Grave Concerns? two Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Environmental and Development Institute researchers conclude that only by overcoming the barriers between local governments and between and within government ministries and enforcing rules based on a proper understanding of the national interest can China’s environment and natural resources be saved.
“Grave Concerns -- Problems of Sustainable Development for China? [Shendu Youhuan -- Dangdai Zhongguo de Kechixu Fazahan Wenti] is a volume in the influential China’s Problems Series. “Grave Concerns?was published by Today’s China Publishing House in October 1998. Authors Zheng Yisheng [STC: 6774 2496 3932] and Qian Yihong [STC: 6929 5650 4767] are the Vice Director and the Secretary-General of the Environment and Development Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“Grave Concerns?is the fifteenth volume in the China’s Problems Series published by Today’s China Publishing House under the sponsorship of former Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Vice President Liu Ji. Another book from Today’s China Publishing (not part of the China’s Problems series), “Political China?attracted much criticism from party ideologues for its tough criticism of China’s political system yet the book is still widely available in Beijing today. Outside Beijing the conservative breezes are often weaker. Several books discussing the problems of the Chinese system have been great commercial successes and inspired many imitators including publishing houses in Inner Mongolia and Qinghai.
Books (especially the good stuff buried deep inside) are often much better sources of information and analysis than are Chinese periodicals which are monitored more closely by the authorities. While some of these books are hard-hitting, the China Problems series books are not produced by dissidents but rather by scholars who work in Communist Party and government think tanks such as Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Like the nationally circulated Guangdong Communist Party paper “Southern Weekend?[Nanfang Zhoumou], the official connection makes these books more rather than less interesting. The October 1996 book ?I>Speaking Heart to Heart with the General Secretary?written by a group of CASS scholars seems to have foreshadowed some of the initiatives of the Fifteenth Party Congress. Similarly, the fifteen books published thus far in the China Problems series may hint at changes to come.
[Note: Embassy Beijing has sent summary translations of two books in the China Problems Series: ?I>China Doesn’t Want to Be Mr. No?(http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/chimrno.htm) and “Competition in the Pacific?http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/paccpca.htm) End note]
Page numbers refer to the first edition of “Grave Concerns?published as a volume of the China’s Problems series by the Today’s China Publishing House [Jinri Zhongguo Chubanshe] in October, 1998.
Additional background information on Chinese environmental issues can be found among the ninety unclassified Embassy Beijing reports posted on the U.S. Embassy web page at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/index.html Some informal translations from the Chinese press bearing on the Chinese environment are available at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/sandsrc.htm Several reports on new pathbreaking books available in Beijing is available at http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/english/sandt/bjbkwrm.html
SUMMARY TRANSLATION BEGINS
Problems built into the system itself cannot be ignored. Let’s look at the story of water pollution on the Huai River -- a microcosm of China -- to understand the conflict between the environmental protection and the economic development departments. Here we see the consequences of putting the interests of individual bureaucracies ahead of the public interest. During 1994 and 1995 repeated serious water pollution incidents on the Huai River resulted in tens of thousands of cases of contagious intestinal and skin diseases. This disaster resulted in the forced closing of many of the polluting plants. Looking more closely at the history of development and environmental enforcement along the Huai River pollution, we can see clearly that the problem wasn’t lack of good policy but that the policy was ineffective. [pp. 250 - 253]
Important Huai River clean up policies preceding the 1997 pollution control committee approved by the State Council include a 1978 Huai River pollution control plan; a four province Huai River control commission set up in 1980; a four province Huai River water resources protection leading group established in 1988, a February 1989 order on preventing Huai River pollution issued by the State Council and four provinces; 64 pollution control projects worth 160 million RMB begun in 1990; and Huai River environmental protection surveys conducted in 1994. According to statistics from China’s Agenda 21 environmental white paper, by 1994 there were already four environmental laws, eight resource management laws, 20 environment and resource management regulations and 260 environmental standards. These already constituted a good framework for the protection of natural resources and the environment.
[Note: See for example the article examining the ineffectiveness of policy enforcement in the internal distribution edition of the Chinese Communist Party journal Fortnightly [Banyuetan] at Party Journal: More and More People Defy Central Government Notices End note.]
We should know about all this so that no reader will think there wasn’t any policy or orders before the water pollution disasters of 1994. With all this in mind, it is hard to escape the feeling that all the public discussion and the comments of experts on this topic are superfluous because a clear, reasonable policy for pollution control has already been in place for some time.
Administrative interference by local government often prevented environmental regulations from being enforced. Local government did not allow rules requiring that environmental protection be taken into account in the design, construction and operation of plants and did not allow local environmental protection bureaus to interfere.
[Translator’s note: Local government selects the personnel, funds, and provides “administrative guidance?to local environmental protection bureaus. Although the local EPB in theory takes environmental policy advice from the central government environmental protection authorities, in practice the will of the local government very often prevails over central government policy directives. End note].
The heart of the discussion in this chapter is problems such as administrative intervention and problems arising from the system itself. We believe that the question of whether a sustainable development policy is possible for China rests on the solution of these problems. Why are policies ineffective? Why are environmental affairs not handled according to existing legislation? If we avoid addressing this question by a new set of policies, laws and regulations and a new method of directing environmental enforcement, this won’t have much effect on the “difficulty of implementing sustainable development?
This is because even a better thought-out, far seeing policy will lose its effectiveness in the “black hole?of the Chinese system just as they as we have seen in the ineffectiveness of China’s policies for the Huai River. To be very blunt, when I hear news reports of the leaders and cadres of the Huai River basin angrily cursing the polluters, calling them no better than drug pushers and murdering bandits, I get very complex feelings in my heart. Was it not those very same leaders who were praising as heroes of the “economic miracle?those very same people they curse today as “drug pushers and murdering bandits?
Behind the tremendous economic growth of the Huai River over the past 15 years is the rapid growth of the “fifteen small industries?such as small paper mills and small dying and tanning plants. For years the cancer rates of people along the Huai River were higher than elsewhere. Finally came the disaster of July 1994 that gave contagious intestinal and skin diseases to over 30,000 people.
We should not forget, as we look over the lessons of the history of the Huai River, that we can’t say that “we didn’t know?what the consequences of heedless development would be. Nor can we just assign the blame to a few guilty individuals. What we need to do is figure out how to design a system that protects people’s knowledge and ideas that are in the long-term best interests of all of society rather than being excluded and suppressed. How can we harmonize the short-term interests of a locality with the long-term interests of society? [pp. 256 - 257]
Lake Taihu is one of China’s five great freshwater lakes. At the heart of China’s fastest growing region, Taihu has the worst water pollution in China. Economic losses owing to water pollution are estimated at USD 600 million annually. Despite intervention by the central government in 1996, water pollution has continued to worsen. The relatively developed cities of Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou spend less than one percent of their GDP on the environment. Zhejiang local governments spend far less. Clean-up efforts are local and not coordinated. One sign of this poor coordination is the water quality at provincial borders which falls in the very worst category over 90 percent of the time.
The neighboring cities of Wuxi and Changzhou can’t agreed on clean-up plans. Changzhou says blocking the flow of some waters into the lake will stall the develop of its industry. The two cities argue even about basic monitoring data. Although Jiangsu Province has a plan for Lake Taihu through the year 2010, no decision has been made about this project that should be taken care of now. The State Council established a coordinating committee composed of the ministers of environment and hydrology together with leaders of the provinces and cities involved. Yet this committee has never held a meeting! Can the goal announced by the government to “Ensure that all the discharges in the Taihu River region meet environmental standards by 1998 so that the lake will be clean by the year 2000?be met? [pp. 258 - 259]
Xi Zhinong [Note: A 1999 USIA International Visitor. End note], a worker in the Yunnan Forestry Bureau, told Chinese environmentalists and the press that the habitat of the Golden Monkeys is threatened by the clear cutting of virgin forest. This finally got the central government’s attention. The Ministry of Forestry sent an inspection team and the leaders of Yunnan Province ordered a stop to the timber cutting and logging road construction in Deqin Prefecture. The cutting stopped for a time, but it didn’t solve the problem. A Green Camp composed of forty environmental volunteers went to study the “path to sustainable development in Deqin Prefecture?
[See group leader Tang Xiyang’s open letter and report about the Green Camp ?6 trip to Deqin, Yunnan Province as well as the November 1996 U.S. Embassy Beijing report Saving the Snub Nosed Monkey: Student Environmental Action in China ]
Deqin Prefecture, with a per capita income of 480 RMB [USD 60 per year], is one of China’s poorest prefectures. Most of the inhabitants are minority people. Ninety percent of the income of the county government comes from logging so local officials estimate that the logging ban cost the county treasury 8 million RMB [8.3 RMB equals 1 USD] and the people who lost their jobs another 7 million RMB, and the province says that the central government should compensate the county for banning logging in this national level wildlife conservation area.
Yet the State Planning Commission doesn’t have an item in its budget for such a payment. When the “people from Beijing?come, the local officials say, “Certainly, you are correct. But what would you do in our place? We have to make a living!? The Golden Monkey habitat is still in danger. After the order came down to stop cutting in one place, cutting was intensified in other areas around the county. Neighboring areas seemed to draw this lesson: cut your trees as fast as you can. This seems to be true in adjacent areas of Tibet as well.
The Ministry of Forestry cannot control the actions of local government. [Note: After the March 1998 central government reforms, the Ministry of Forestry became the Forestry Bureau directly subordinate to the State Council rather than to a ministry. End note] Again we come to the contradiction between the central government and local government. During the early 1980s, the forest lands were divided into state forests and collectively-owned forests. Every level of government (regional and county) has its own forestry company which does logging in virgin forest on behalf of the state. There are many different kinds of excuses and deceptions used to do this: that the virgin forests in the nature preserves were once collectively-owned forest; by deceiving the weak local environmental protection offices, or by just claiming that the local government is in charge of the collective forests, logging goes on in protected areas. The market economy has raised the price of wood and local logging companies want to cut down the trees before someone else does.
According to a May 1998 report from Friends of Nature member Tian Dasheng and Wu Dengming of Chongqing, cutting in many virgin forests in an area where the provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou meet Chonqing Municipality is not apparent from the road but if one climbs into the hills, large expanses of clear-cut forest land can be seen. One Chinese official said in mid 1998 that now is the third peak in timber cutting counting from [Note: the first peak during the Great Leap Forward that began in] 1958. The Central Television program Focus on August 2 revealed that Deqin Prefecture, Yunnan local government had resumed logging all the while receiving 11 million RMB annual subsidies from the central and provincial governments not to log.
The State Council issued an order banning illegal timber cutting on August 5, 1998. [pp. 259 - 262]
[Embassy Comment: Embassy officers traveling in Yunnan Province met academics who felt that the central government actions in Deqin made the situation worse. Other prefectures noted the subsidies paid to Deqin to stop logging and decided to start logging in their own protected areas in hopes of getting subsidies and buy-outs from the center to stop. Local reports indicate logging may have decreased immediately after the ban, but it is not clear it has stopped or what the long term results will be. End comment.]
The Yellow River began drying up once a year in 1972. At first the river would dry up for only ten or twenty days, but this period gradually lengthened until it reached 136 days in 1996. The length of the dried out portion of the Yellow River also lengthened from 310 kilometers to 683 kilometers in 1995. At first the river would dry out in April; in 1990 it dried out in February. A new record was set in 1997. The river dried up on February 7 and water didn’t flow until August 6. But just 56 hours later, the river dried up and started again a total of eight times until September 3 when the regular flow resumed. Water shortages along the Yellow River already cause economic losses of 3.6 billion RMB (about USD 400 million) each year. [pp. 264 - 265]
During 1990 - 1995, rainfall along the middle and upper reaches of the river was down 11 percent and along the lower reaches down 6 percent compared with the average of the 1950s. Some experts attributed this to El Nino and to the greenhouse effect. Over half of the Yellow River waters are used in irrigation -- a much higher proportion than during the 1950s. In 1995 for example, 122 projects for diverting Yellow River waters had a combined design capacity of 4000 cubic meters of water per second. This is far higher than the amount of water the river can provide. Experts says that the amount of water the Yellow River can provide is 37 billion cubic meter but current water diversion projects already take up 40 billion cubic meters. Another reason for the water shortage is that the middle and lower portions of the rivers are short of water storage capacity. Yet the most important reason is the destruction of forests and vegetation along the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River and with it the loss of much soil into the river. [pp. 265 - 266]
Chinese experts have long proposed policies to address these problems such as regional management of water use, raising water prices to encourage conservation, increasing storage capacity and strengthening measures to prevent soil loss along the upper and middle reaches of the river. Over the long term there is the south-to-north transfer of waters project [Nanshui Beidiao]. These policies have been discussed for years yet the situation gets steadily worse.
In 1987 the State Council approved a government plan to coordinate water use along the Yellow River. During the decade since however, every province has fought to grab more water with no thought to conservation. The conservation plan for ten years has been just a scrap of paper. This is what is called a “tragedy of the commons?or in Chinese colloquial terms “if I don’t steal it first, someone else will.?[Bu qiang bai bu qiang] Taking water from the river is always praised as “a great economic achievement? But how were these 122 projects for diverting the Yellow River waters approved? How did the Ministry of Hydrology implement the central government’s plan for sharing the river waters? What kind of coordination was there among the departments implementing these plans? How can an organization that has the authority to plan and manage the sharing of the river waters be created?
It wasn’t just every feudal lord [note: refers to local governments. End note] acting on his own account that created this problem. The lack of coordination among central government ministries made things much worse. If we are to break down the walls that separate local governments, we will also have to break down the walls that separate government departments. For example, hydroelectric power generation by the electric power authorities will come into seasonal conflict with agricultural water use needs. This is a problem that cuts across ministerial lines. Despite the worsening of the drying up of the Yellow River, several provinces have announced plans to divert still more water! Yet diverting still more water is part of the central government’s plan to help some of the most impoverished people in China and to narrow the great regional gaps in living standards, and to help China’s minority people. Conflicts between the policies of central government ministries creates these problems. [pp. 264 - 267]
For example, only ten percent of the people in the Yellow River region live upstream but they use half of the irrigation water. Moreover, people in this region pay just one fifth to one tenth the national average water price and use water only one-third as efficiently as the average Chinese farmer. Water allocation in China today is what people call “management on the surface but in fact just the thievery allocation method? If the price of Yellow River irrigation water were to be raised just to the average price of Chinese irrigation water, waste could be cut by one-third. [p. 268]
[Note: Water prices have already begun from a very low level. The average north China water price in early 1999 was 1 RMB (USD 0.12) per ton (or cubic meter), about double the late 1997 price. See the articles translated from the Chinese press Beijing Water Prices Raised Again to 1 RMB Per Ton End note].
Raising water prices is difficult but without it no water conservation policy can be successful. Chinese leaders such as Premier Li Peng at the November 1996 Central Economic Working Conference called the gradual establishment of a “user pays?water system essential. Yet no one dares put this into practice for fear of colliding with a constellation of special interests and political and economic questions. Who wants to raise the price of water and be accused of “adding to the farmers burden?or causing inflation? [pp. 268 - 269]
As one expert said at the Working Conference, “Making effective use of limited resources is essential to the welfare of the entire society and is the true meaning of “virtuous government? Yet insisting on providing subsidized water [fuli shui] only benefits a minority and sacrifices the interests of the majority and of society as a whole.?Yet as people get more and more worried about the Chinese water shortage, they put their hopes on the South-to-North water transfer project [Nan Shui Beidiao]. Very few people think of how the water will be paid for. Experts predict that a cubic meter of water delivered to Beijing will cost 8 RMB. Can that be done in today’s China which is unwilling to adjust water prices? When will the water price problem of China’s cities be solved. [pp. 268 - 269]
China’s water problems arise from being good at diverting water and weak at conserving water. From being strong at building big projects but weak at creating an effective system of administration. From being good at organizing a campaign but weak at harmonizing competing interests. All this characterizes an imbalance in the capacity of government. The drying up of the Yellow River is the result of these problems in the capacity of Chinese government. [p. 270]
END OF PART IV OF SUMMARY TRANSLATION
As a centrally planned economy, China has always favored big projects. Bit projects also provide opportunities to spread wealth and grant concessions to friends. At the same time, the weakening of the central government’s ability to impose fines and control the daily life at the individual level in the countryside makes it very difficult for the central government to raise water prices or to enforce a decentralized water conservation program.