Environmentalism with Chinese Characteristics

The good news out of China is that the People's Republic will be spending $200 billion on cleaning up the air and water pollution that has marred its rapid economic growth. The bad news is that sum is virtually unchanged from the last budget and is unlikely to make a difference.

The Chinese government sets goals in five year increments. We are currently in the 11th Five Year Plan and the plan reads as though nothing were more critical to the government than improving environmental conditions in China. Anyone living here knows better.

The announcement this week of the government's long-postponed plans for environmental protection for 2006-2010 was scrutinized by environmentalists for signs of whether the country can finally get its act together. Zou Shoumin, director of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning and one of the plan's authors, told the state-run Xinhua news service that the government will spend $85 billion on cleaning up water pollution, $80 billion on air pollution and $28 billion on solid waste. In total the cleanup costs will equal about 1.35% of China's GDP. That's slightly more than what China spent under the previous five-year plan.

The government talks about the millions that are being allocated toward this or that; however, the money generally doesn't make it far down the line. A large percentage is swept off the books as it makes its way down though the government departments. Each layer takes a little more of the money until all government officials have enough to send their mistresses to Louis Vutton in Hong Kong and their National Day vacations to Europe are fully paid for. Whatever is left is applied to the lake down south that hasn't seen a fish in 10 years or the missiles to seed the clouds over Beijing during the Olympics. The problem is that mistresses like their LV and they aren't going to stick around if their shopping is curtailed.

However, the amount may well be short of what it will need to turn things around, say Wang Canfa, who heads the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, a Beijing-based NGO. For China to begin serious cleanup it needs to spend 2-3% of GDP on environmental protection, he says. Even the money China now spends could be used more efficiently, argues Wen Bo, the China program manager for Pacific Environment, a San Francisco-based NGO. "In the past many such huge investments didn't result in real cleanups. They became a hotbed for corruption," he says.

I dispute the use of "in the past".

But, Wen adds, Beijing's efforts are hobbled by the government's sensitivity to reporting on the environment by journalists and the increasing number of "green" non-profits based in China. "Most environmental problems have their roots in government mismanagement and corruption by individual government officials," he says. "Local governments are so afraid of any individual or organization that's able to bring an issue to light."

Government officials must have thought they hit the jackpot when environmental remediation became a topic of national concern. You have to keep your revenue sources fresh and not put all your eggs in one basket. If the real estate market tightens, you need to know that you're not getting stuck in Hainan Island over Chinese New Year - the family was counting on Brussels.

Local officials' blind pursuit of economic development at the expense of the environment is considered one of the main sources of China's pollution woes. An official effort to begin calculating a "green GDP," which incorporates the cost of environmental damage in provincial economic growth statistics, was seen as one way to alleviate that problem. If local officials ignored the environment, it would show up in numbers that their bosses in Beijing could monitor. But this summer the drive for a "green GDP" collapsed because of the difficulty in placing a value on environmental preservation.

I can't fault China for choosing economic development over environmental concerns at this stage of development. There are a lot of mouths to feed in China. But paying lip service to the issues while skimming money off the top ("skimming" is a generous choice of words) is a bold alternative.