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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The world cannot address its pressing environmental problems without China. But can China be relied upon as a steadfast steward of nature, as its leaders have claimed in recent years?
Prominent environmental campaigner and reporter Ma Tianjie gets to the heart of China’s remarkable ecological transformation to answer this question. He takes us on a journey through the country’s thirty-year struggle to clean up its rivers, clear its air and stabilize carbon emissions, drawing out the complex political impulses that have helped and hindered progress. Anchoring his storytelling in some of China’s major environmental challenges - from Beijing’s ‘airpocalypse’ to the cancer villages of the Huai River basin, he shows how the ideas and actions of few extraordinary individuals were critical in changing China from a heavily polluted country to a place where environmental issues are high on the agenda. The complex ecological tapestry Ma paints illuminates the key ideas, experiences and influences that have shaped China’s environmental consciousness and will continue to frame the search for green China well into the twenty-first century.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Note on Chinese Names
Map
Introduction
Notes
1 The River
Rural miracle
Eyes on the Huai
Creative destruction
The long haul
Notes
2 The Dam
You say “heritage,” I say “asset”
Consensus – contested
The override
The developmental voice
Taming the machine
Notes
3 The Hurricane
Big thinker, game changer
Green hurricane
EIA for the drawing board
Turning point
The wind stops blowing
Notes
4 The Incinerator
Après moi, le déluge
Not in Guangzhou’s backyard
The hard sell
Transcending NIMBYism
Hollowed out
Notes
5 The Smog
Olympic Blue
“Crazy Bad”
It’s the economy, stupid
New sheriff in town
This time it’s different
The race to 60
Notes
6 The Peak
The radical
Copenhagen hangover
“Around 2030”
Conflicting imperatives
Reclaiming leadership
Neutrality, with Chinese characteristics
Notes
Epilogue
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Note on Chinese Names
Map
Introduction
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
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In Search of Green China
MA TIANJIE
polity
Copyright © Ma Tianjie 2025
The right of Ma Tianjie to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5723-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024942301
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
To my mother Li Jieping, my father Ma Chenqi and my wife Huang Zheng.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have come into existence without the encouragement of Professor Judith Shapiro, my advisor at American University from 2007 to 2009, and a mentor to me ever since. It was her introduction that brought me into the capable hands of my editor Louise Knight, who provided invaluable guidance at every step of the editorial process.
The luxury of writing the book full-time was only made possible by my wife, Huang Zheng, who was the sole breadwinner for the family for the entire duration of my writing. It was her unwavering support that propelled me across the finish line.
I extend my sincere gratitude to the more than 30 interviewees, friends, and colleagues who shared their stories, insights, and written materials with me. I will refrain from naming each individual here, as some provided information under the condition of anonymity. Should any of them read this passage, I want them to know that I am eternally grateful for their generous assistance.
I would also like to acknowledge the environmental pioneers whose work I have referenced. Special thanks should go to the Chinese journalistic community, whose collective efforts to document Chinese environmental affairs over the past 30 years have created a remarkable archive that I have been able to draw upon. As an editor myself, I am aware that this public archive should not be taken for granted, given the pressure the community is currently facing in continuing to add to it.
And, finally, my thanks to Inès Boxman, Olivia Jackson, Maddie Tyler, Leigh Mueller, and other colleagues at Polity Press who helped with the process through their professionalism and patience. The two anonymous reviewers who helped me improve the manuscript also have my heartfelt gratitude.
As someone who writes in English as a second language, I wrote the book at a time when Artificial General Intelligence was experiencing significant breakthroughs. I consulted ChatGPT and Google Bard for grammatical advice, for which I am (should be?) thankful. However, AI did not write this book: the ideas, sentences, and mistakes are all my own.
Note on Chinese Names
In Chinese, the family name precedes the given name. In English-language literature, it has been customary to refer to important Chinese figures in this surname – first name order, such as Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping, or even Yao Ming. However, this is not the case for other Chinese people, which creates confusion. In the main text of this book, I have consistently placed Chinese surnames at the front, including my own. For the references in the endnotes, I have chosen to follow the first name / surname convention, given the amount of existing academic literature that already adopts this order. I hope readers will bear with this minor inconvenience. In addition, unless otherwise specified, all the Chinese-to-English translations in this book are done by me.
Map
Introduction
Most people know that, back in 1969 in the United States, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, sparking a national awakening that transformed environmental governance. Few know, however, that China also experienced a burning river. In the early 1990s, a minor tributary of the Huai River, Fumagou, caught fire when the flammable gasses generated by the stew of pollution discharged by food processing plants and paper mills ignited. The fire spread to the land, damaging not only the sluice gates that regulated the river’s water flow, but also a small temple on the riverbank. Poignantly, the fire left statues of Bodhisattva in disarray, as if mocking their inability to control their own fate.
Like the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that went almost unnoticed locally (such was the frequency of occurrences like this), the Fumagou incident was non-news when it happened. Local witnesses and the press could not pinpoint the exact date of the fire. But the steady stream of pollution horror stories such as Fumagou finally stirred the national consciousness about the horrendous state of China’s environment, forcing people to act.
More than 30 years on, China has come a long way from a state of burning rivers. After a prolonged period of intense air, water, and soil pollution, the country’s waters and sky are noticeably cleaner than before. And in recent years, Chinese leaders have embraced the idea of achieving carbon neutrality and declared building an “Ecological Civilization” as a priority pursuit for the party state. However, there is always a part of the story that feels too green to be true. The global media is full of accounts of environmental protection being sacrificed in China for economic growth. And skepticism runs deep in some countries, particularly in the United States, about the country’s credibility as a climate partner, given China’s continued building of coal-fired power plants and other aberrations contradictory to its claim of environmental leadership.
The source of this mistrust might lie in the fact that China’s green aspirations are not matched by a standard set of environmental institutions and norms that are the hallmarks of environmentally “successful” countries, particularly in the West. The country’s environmental agency has been weak when faced with more powerful industrial ministries; its civil society remains marginalized, increasingly so in recent years; and its judicial system offers few means of redress for pollution-afflicted victims. How could China claim that it is constructing an eco-civilization when all the usual pillars of environmental governance seem so flimsy? One possible explanation may be that the country has taken a somewhat different path toward environmental stewardship.
While those pillars are definitely important for a robust environmental governance system, the Chinese experience suggests that they might not be the necessary conditions. If anything, China appears to have achieved much environmental progress despite all the weaknesses in its system. What happened?
The short answer is that China has somehow arrived at an unorthodox solution to the environmental challenge. Depending on their own intellectual or political orientations, different people may find elements in this “environmentalism with Chinese characteristics” that fit into numerous theoretical frameworks of their choice. Political scientists with a focus on the state–society relationship see “fragmented authoritarianism”1 or “embedded environmental activism”;2 researchers more suspicious of the party state’s motives call it “environmental authoritarianism.”3 While developmental economists find an example of “developmental environmentalism”4 that applies the full force of an East Asian developmental state on a green industrial agenda, others see traces of eco-Marxism or even constructive postmodernism.5 They may all be correct in important ways, as the current version of the Chinese approach to environmental conservation has borrowed from many schools of thought, just like the post-Mao system imported and adapted key ideas from the outside world. Whether one views it as a makeshift patchwork or a beautiful tapestry is a value judgment.
Leaving aside these differing perspectives, there is fundamental common ground – namely, that the country has come a long way from “environmental denialism” at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when pollution was seen as unique to corrupt capitalist states.6 In the roughly 30 years since Fumagou caught fire, a series of environmental crises and debates have led to a domestic environmental awakening. From pollution-affected communities to senior Communist Party leaders, from environmental activists to the broader intelligentsia, people have begun to search for solutions to the country’s befouled water, air, and soil. In the process, they have cast their searchlight outward to learn from “advanced international experience.” They have also looked inward, deep into the nation’s mixed experience with nature from antiquity to the present. The lessons drawn from such inquiries formed some of the key ideas that have converged and clashed to shape China’s unique brand of contemporary environmentalism.
The longer answer is set out across the pages of this book. It offers a historical narrative that I hope captures the nuances that have been woven into the patchwork, or tapestry – whichever way you want to see it. The three-decade-long journey from Fumagou to Ecological Civilization has not been a linear progression toward a predetermined destination. Any generalization risks presenting a static snapshot of the current state of China’s environmental affairs without considering the historical context that has shaped it. An account of how China came to adopt its environmentalism is important because it not only describes what China embraces today but also what it has discarded or marginalized along the way. The prevailing environmental ideas that influence government policy and popular perceptions today cannot be fully understood without tracing their historical ascendance and acknowledging what has been left out.
A central theme of this journey is the reimagination of nature. In the early 1990s, China was forced to confront its egregious abuse of nature by the tragedies of the Huai River basin. The human cost of pollution prompted the first large-scale environmental clean-up effort more as a form of desperate self-preservation. Afterward, under the influence of Western environmentalists and thinkers such as Rachel Carson and Patrick McCully, China’s first-generation environmental activists introduced a new conception of nature as something worth conserving for its own sake. Their emotional defense of China’s endangered species and their remaining pristine habitats against developmental projects drew many into the environmental cause, while alienating others who saw them as irrational provocateurs.
Their ideas were picked up by visionaries inside the Chinese government, who tried to transcend the human–nature dichotomy by developing an ambitious policy framework that incorporated nature as a crucial asset under the strategic control of the state. The initiative was sidelined by the emergency of the Global Financial Crisis but was ultimately rediscovered by the new leadership of Xi Jinping, who framed nature as a bountiful source of national wealth when well managed. That fundamental idea guided the drawing-up of regulatory guardrails between economic activities and their natural environment, including ceilings to China’s emissions. In its latest iteration, the “natural capital” concept has spawned a whole school of thought on increasing the productivity of nature as a new source of national competitiveness, validating the state support of industries such as renewable energy, which is becoming the poster child of the new era of “carbon neutrality.”
The biggest challenge for the realization of such ideas in Chinese environmental governance is institutional buy-in, particularly from the country’s “developmental bloc.” Readers will find various references in this book to this formidable coalition, comprising primarily the central government development planner, provincial and sub-provincial (local) governments, and business interests either at their disposal or closely aligned with their agenda. This alliance is also a historical product of the post-Mao era political economy, well documented in studies on dynamics such as the “promotion tournament” or “structural imbalances.” Reforms in fiscal arrangements, taxation schemes, and incentives for cadres reshaped center–local relationships and the state’s position vis-à-vis the economy, creating a powerful institutional bloc heavily invested in an economic growth model that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge nature’s biophysical limits.
While this bloc is often viewed as monolithic, that is not entirely accurate. Instead, it has experienced internal frictions that can sometimes be as intense as its tensions with external entities seeking to influence its behavior. Over the years, shifting mandates and priorities within the bloc have created opportunities for external actors to exploit divisions, neutralizing the bloc’s resistance to incorporating ecological factors into its developmental decisions.
The stories of this book are narrated through those individuals who demonstrated impressive agency in challenging the ideology and actions of the developmental bloc. Some of them are enlightened leaders of China’s central environmental agency, currently known as the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), which remains the most important counterbalance within the central government to the developmental apparatus. Others hail from China’s environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), whose effectiveness and resilience continue to shine even under severe political and financial pressures. Furthermore, scientists, researchers, and think tank members have used their indispensable insider tracks to remold the formidable growth machine from within. Most importantly, the many ordinary Chinese people whose health and livelihood are inextricably linked with the natural environment rose up more than once to make their voices heard by those in power at the critical moments of the 30-year journey.
The book’s chapters are organized chronologically and thematically to capture the evolution of ideas, institutions, and extraordinary individuals whose actions drove the change. The first chapter, “The River,” begins with Huo Daishan’s brave intervention into the disastrous water pollution of the Huai River and explores how his photography challenged the local power structure that protected pollution. His actions inspired concerned citizens throughout the country. In return, he was encouraged by China’s first-generation environmental leaders such as Liang Congjie. The second chapter, “The Dam,” documents the direct confrontation between this new generation of environmental advocates and the developmental bloc over the building of the Nu River dams. Environmentalist Wang Yongchen, along with allies Mu Guangfeng and Yu Xiaogang, appealed to the nation to recognize and preserve a piece of undisturbed nature with an emotive voice and a powerful vision of “green citizens” who uphold a civic duty to defend the environment.
Chapter 3 (“The Hurricane”) traces the roller-coaster career of a young environmental vice minister whose nationalistic ideas about conservation and state capabilities significantly influenced China’s green policy directions. His ambitious regulatory agenda would fundamentally alter the power dynamics of developmental planning, enabling the environmental agency and its civil society allies to challenge the developmental coalition’s monopoly. However, his eventual sidelining would quell aspirations for multi-stakeholder governance, which could have presented an alternative universe for contemporary Chinese environmental politics. Chapter 4 (“The Incinerator”) chronicles the turbulent years of environmental street protests when residents near extensive industrial and waste disposal facilities directly challenged the developmental agenda, using the regulatory tools left behind by Pan Yue and employing shrewd confrontational tactics. Young activists Luo Jianming and Chen Liwen exemplify a new type of “green citizens” who embrace their environmental civic duties with the savviness of the internet age.
Chapter 5 (“The Smog”) begins with Beijing’s “Airpocalypse” moment in 2013, and follows the career of scientist He Kebin. He played a significant role in facilitating a technocratic reconciliation of environmental and developmental goals. The arrival of Xi Jinping as China’s new leader changed the fundamentals of the country’s environmental politics, affirming nature’s place under the new governing philosophy of Ecological Civilization. These dynamics continued into the era of “dual carbon targets” – carbon peaking and carbon neutrality – which is the focus of chapter 6 (“The Peak”). After many years of hard-nosed advocacy, climate modeler Jiang Kejun and his fellow policy advisors found a receptive audience in the Chinese developmental apparatus under the pragmatic leadership of Xie Zhenhua. Collectively, they retooled China’s growth engine to arrive at a formula incorporating nature as a source of productivity and national competitiveness. Nevertheless, the center-driven approach to decarbonization still faces significant uncertainties, as the developmental bloc at the local level is stripped of agency and faces little pressure from a marginalized civil society.
For the past 20 years, I have been fortunate enough to work alongside some of the individuals featured in this book during my tenure at Greenpeace and China Dialogue in Beijing. I have also witnessed the developmental bloc in action while working on greening the food, textile, and chemical industries in China. These experiences have shaped my perspective on the relative significance of events and informed my selection of materials. This book is by no means an objective academic analysis of Chinese environmental politics. Instead, I intend it to be a blend of journalistic non-fiction, a historical account, and a personal reflection on the journey we have collectively undertaken. I have chosen to engage with only a small portion of academic literature that has helped me make sense of events and trends in my career as a practitioner. While some academically minded readers may find it unsatisfying, I do hope they get something useful out of this subjective and opinionated tapestry that is otherwise firmly grounded in research, interviews, and first-hand observations.
A reflection I draw from this inquiry into China’s recent environmental history is that there is really nothing fancy about what is being proposed and practiced. The idea that some kind of “constructive postmodernism” or “organic process philosophy” has any bearing on environmental and developmental policy in China today, just because the term “Ecological Civilization” overlaps with certain process philosophy concepts, is misguided at best. While the current leadership clearly has the intention to reconcile the human–nature relationship, it is still galaxies away from the kind of organic holism that sees all existence as one.7
In the same vein, people should not automatically assume the relevance of eco-Marxism in Chinese environmental practices solely due to the country’s socialist political roots. While leaders like Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao, and Pan Yue eloquently quoted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their speeches and writings on the environment, these citations are limited to a few well-known passages. Nevertheless, compared to the Mao-era hubris that viewed mastery over nature as an end in itself, modern party ideology has made significant progress in embracing Marxism’s environmental message, especially the materialistic stance that the human economy is embedded in its biophysical environment.
However, despite the extensive literature developed by the party’s theorization organs, including party schools and Marxism research centers in universities, which attempt to align party policy with orthodox Marxism, there is little evidence to suggest that the Chinese state is pursuing a comprehensive eco-Marxist agenda. As this book will show, the main critique of China’s dominant developmental model from the left is its seemingly inextricable embeddedness in the globalized liberal economic order, as the “World’s Factory.” The urban waste management case study presented in this book also exemplifies how far mainstream practices in China today deviate from Marx’s key environmental insight for addressing the “metabolic rift” of capitalist society.
On the other hand, dismissing China’s environmental strategy as a mere statistical manipulation or an insidious program disguised as a green campaign in order to consolidate authoritarianism risks missing the genuinely valuable lessons from China’s experience, which could help other countries facing similar challenges. China’s environmental approach has yielded significant environmental and human health benefits, warranting its consideration as a serious model of green governance. The improvements in air and water quality achieved in recent years have saved tens of thousands of lives from premature death.8 China’s leveling off of carbon emissions, while not yet at a peak, also makes a significant contribution to global efforts to control temperature rise.
If the “state-led environmentalism” practiced in China today bears any resemblance to a recognizable model, it is a mixture of developmental environmentalism and environmental nationalism with a touch of steady-state economics.
The convergence of green policies with a profound concern for national strength, manifested in technological advancement, economic robustness, and resource sufficiency, represents a pivotal juncture in the evolution of Chinese environmental consciousness. It underpins some of the most significant environmental and industrial policy measures that China has promulgated in recent years, notably the carbon neutrality target. For proponents, the emergence of world-class industries in China, such as solar power and electric vehicles, serves as a testament to the validity of this approach. The inherent “greenness” embedded in an industrial and economic structure that is intrinsically less pollution-intensive and resource-demanding is also less susceptible to reversal by a weakening of regulations. This intrinsic drive constitutes China’s “green engine” that propels its green transition forward.
Crucially, this seemingly pro-growth environmental strategy with industrial policy as its main instrument appears to be moderated by the enforcement of a biophysical boundary in the human economy, as advocated by ecological economists such as Herman Daly. At the top level of environmental policy, the diminished importance accorded to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or “economic throughput,” as a fundamental indicator of progress, and the focus on building up valuable “stocks,” including natural capital, for the nation’s long-term well-being, closely align with the essential understanding of steady-state economics. Nevertheless, it is unrealistic to contend that China is actively pursuing an economy with no growth.
This is not to say that an environmental strategy inspired by ecological economics and centered around shoring up national competitiveness is the answer to China’s environmental crisis. Far from it. This book documents some of the serious limitations of this approach. While the state appears to have internalized the society’s desire for better environmental quality, it has rejected other societal aspirations for participation and consultation. The result is a highly centralized, target-oriented system that constantly picks winners and losers using environmental performance as a surrogate for efficiency and technology superiority. This assumes a benign, informed developmental apparatus with superb environmental consciousness and know-how. But the reality, as documented by cases in this book, is less encouraging.
The global implications of China’s chosen path to a green rejuvenation are less than clear. While the international community can be reassured of the country’s commitment to environmental protection, the very nature of that commitment begs a few questions. Does a competitiveness-oriented environmental strategy create unnecessary zero-sum dynamics at a point when international cooperation is most needed in addressing pressing global challenges such as climate change? Will China project this brand of technology-driven green development to other developing countries through overseas programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative? How does a lack of bottom-up domestic support for China’s environmental drive affect the long-term trajectory of its green transition, which is so crucial to the future of this planet?
These are not questions that can be fully addressed in this relatively short book. My aspiration is that readers curious about the global impact of China’s environmental policies might appreciate some insights into the evolution of the national psyche. Thoughtful readers might also discern that important chapters of China’s modern environmental history, such as the battle to conserve endangered species, are absent from this book. (Yes, the giant panda is not mentioned.) Due to space limitations, I intentionally confined my case studies to pollution, emissions, and industry, as the entire history of biodiversity conservation in China warrants separate treatment. Still, I hope the overall narrative remains intact.
On a humid, windless July morning in 2023, Fumagou lay peacefully before me. The once notoriously polluted river had undergone a remarkable transformation, becoming a waterfront park where retirees strolled with their grandchildren and pets along the cobblestone paths and woodclad sightseeing platforms that extended into the middle of the river. The water was visibly clean, displaying a deep jade hue, although the overgrown water weeds in the middle of the river indicated a level of eutrophication. A billboard erected beside a road bridge crossing the river announced a government-led project undertaken in 2012 that had given the river a major facelift, with a budget of 250 million yuan.
As I asked an old man in a wheelchair who was enjoying an occasional breeze beneath a tree if he remembered a temple that had burned 30 years before, he shook his head with a smile. The fate of the little river serves as a perfect footnote to the story of this book: people enjoy nature’s gifts, yet they tend to forget how difficult it is to preserve the very nature that keeps giving.
Notes
1.
Andrew Mertha. 2008.
China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change
. Cornell University Press.
2.
Peter Ho. 2007. “Embedded Activism and Political Change in a Semiauthoritarian Context.”
China Information
21(2): 187–209.
3.
Judith Shapiro and Yifei Li. 2020.
China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet
. Polity.
4.
Elizabeth Thurbon, Sung-Young Kim, Hao Tan, and John A. Mathews. 2023.
Developmental Environmentalism
. Oxford University Press.
5.
Arran Gare. 2016.
The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future
. Routledge.
6.
The sentiment is well documented in Geping Qu (曲格平) and Jinxin Peng (彭近新). 2010.
Environmental Awakening: China’s First National Environmental Protection Conference
(环境觉醒: 人类环境会议和中国第一次环境保护会议). China Environmental Science Press (中国环境科学出版社).
7.
Zhihe Wang (王治河). 2023. “Anthropocene, Ecological Civilization and Organic Process Thinking (人类世、生态文 明与有机过程思维).”
Journal of Poyang Lake
(鄱阳湖学报) 2023(1): 26.
8.
Huanbi Yue, Chunyang He, Qingxu Huang, Dan Yin, and Brett A. Bryan. 2020. “Stronger Policy Required to Substantially Reduce Deaths from PM2.5 Pollution in China.”
Nature Communications
11(1462):
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15319-4
.
1The River
The Huai River is not a large river. In fact, its network of over 200 tributaries is so extensive and intricate that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the mainstream from the rest on a map. Although it is much less well known than the Yellow River to its north and the Yangtze River to its south, there is a strong argument from historians that the defining prehistoric event that created Chinese civilization actually occurred close to the Huai River basin. On the banks of the river, Yu the Great united the ancient tribes in an epic effort to tame the mythical great flood, thereby building up the embryonic Chinese state.
Whether that argument is historically sound, one thing is indisputable: the river floods a lot. In the nine centuries between the Song Dynasty and the end of the Qing Dynasty, written Chinese history recorded over 400 devastating floods that won the river the name “Hazard River” or haihe 害河. The 1931 flood that inundated much of the Huai and Yangtze River basins killed over 3 million people. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came into power in 1949, one of its first nation-building efforts was to address Huai floods once and for all.
“We must fix the Huai River,” Chairman Mao Zedong instructed his subordinates in 1950 when they were worried about floods that summer.1 Those eight Chinese characters (一定要把淮河修好) remain prominently displayed, cast in concrete, on the side of the imposing Huaidian sluice gates that regulate the flow of water in the Shaying River in central Henan province, one of the largest tributaries that feeds into the Huai downstream.
On a sweltering hot afternoon in July 2023, I visited Huaidian and observed water flowing through the partially open gates, forming bubbly currents that transformed this spot into a recreational area for riverside residents. In the middle of the river, a middle-aged man practiced swimming against the man-made waves. Not far from this scene, on the bank, a group of elders playfully cast fishing nets into the water, hoping to catch fish disoriented by their journey through the gates.
First constructed in 1959, the mechanical sluice gates were part of the People’s Republic’s massive infrastructure upgrade campaign to bring the Hazard River under control. Thousands of such projects were completed in those years, subjecting the river’s hydraulic rhythms to the will of river managers. The wild river was tamed, a testament to Mao’s vision of conquering nature.
Three decades later, however, the river was to be known for a different kind of hazard. On May 23, 1994, a group of ministers, governors, and high-level Communist officials arrived at the bridge above the Huaidian sluice gates to inspect the condition of water coming from upstream. It was the dry season. Most of the gates were shut to store more water at Huaidian. The officials were shocked by what they saw and smelt: a deadpool of nauseating “soy sauce” covered with ominous mounds of foam lay before their eyes. The toxic pollution from all the factories upstream of the Huaidian was collected and condensed at the gates, under the quiet gaze of Mao’s words: “We must fix the Huai River.”
The officials were deeply disturbed by what they saw. Among them was Xie Zhenhua, then the relatively young chief of the State Environmental Protection Bureau, in his mid-40s. They were there on an urgent mission to find a solution for the polluted Huai River, which had created a stir among the public a few months earlier when China Central Television (CCTV) broadcast scenes of its scandalous pollution to hundreds of millions of viewers. On the bridge, an elderly sluice gate keeper rolled up his pants to show the officials his legs covered with red spots. “Fish and shrimps used to be so abundant in the river that they would tear through the fishing nets,” he reportedly told the delegation; “now I get this for stepping into the water.”2
As the dismayed cadres walked along the riverbank to check further the sorry state of the river, they were followed by a group of news photographers taking pictures of them. One cameraman named Huo Daishan, who got the assignment from the local newspaper, was upset that he only got the backs of the officials’ heads in his shot. To capture their faces along with the sluice gates on the river, he jumped onto the trunk of a dying, slanting tree leaning all the way into the river. Before the tree submerged in the toxic water under his weight, he pressed the shutter. “I was the only one who got that shot,” Huo told me at his home not too far from the sluice gates. Even 30 years on, I could still sense his excitement: “there was just that tree trunk and after my shot it disappeared!”
What he did not know at the moment of the photoshoot was that his fate would soon be entangled with that of Xie Zhenhua and the efforts to clean up the Huai River. On the next day of the officials’ visit to Huaidian, a historic conference was held in a downstream city where China’s first systematic pollution-fighting policy package for an entire river basin was approved. It was a playbook that tried to enforce a biophysical limit on unbridled industrial development, and effectively transformed the environmental challenge into a developmental strategy, a swap that was essential for a country that must confront its pollution problem while still early in the industrialization process. It was a playbook that China would keep updating throughout its struggle to balance two objectives seemingly at odds, with all its promises and flaws.
Rural miracle
The Huai River’s severe pollution was the product of the particular political economy that propelled China’s spectacular economic take-off in the late 1970s. The end of the Cultural Revolution and beginning of Reform and Opening-up shifted the CCP’s priority toward economic affairs. Consequential reforms aimed at loosening the grip of the planning system on the economy, especially those rewriting the relationship between central and local governments, fundamentally changed incentives on the ground, with far-reaching impacts on the environment.
“Contracting,” or chengbao 承包, became the buzzword in the 1980s. The household contract responsibility system allowed farmers to trade their surplus crops after meeting state quotas. State-owned factories in cities contracted out their workshops to entrepreneurs who could trade the extra products after fulfilling orders from state planners. Fiscal contracting permitted local governments to retain their surplus revenues after handing over a fixed quota to the central government.3 The reforms fired the starter pistol for provinces, municipalities, and townships to “get rich quick,” as the pursuit of private interest became a possibility in the People’s Republic.
Along with these economic liberalization measures were micro-level incentive schemes that considerably altered the behavioral patterns of political actors, particularly powerful cadres with substantial influence over policies in their jurisdictions. The measurement of GDP became systematized after 1985, replacing Soviet-style material balances used before. The adoption of GDP as a core indicator of political achievement was swift and thorough. Measurement is published at four levels of the government hierarchy, from the central level down to counties, which is uncommon worldwide. By the mid1990s, political scientists had already observed a correlation between a region’s GDP growth and the career prospects of local officials.4
Across the country, Communist cadres became hyperactive business developers who desperately tried to expand the tax base in their own jurisdictions. Millions of so-called Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) were set up, many no more than garage businesses hiring a bunch of farmers. They contributed to the early economic success story of post-Mao China.
Henan, one of the four provinces situated along the Huai River, was also undergoing a transition from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. With its fertile plains, the “grain basket province” contributed nearly one-fifth of China’s wheat in 1994. The elaborate irrigation infrastructure supported by ditches, canals, and sluice gates on the Huai River’s tributaries played a crucial role in its agricultural productivity. The abundance of organic materials from agriculture lent itself well to industries that could absorb them as feedstocks. Food processing and paper making became natural extensions of the province’s agrarian economy.
One thing that the plains of the Huai River basin had absolutely no short supply of was inexpensive wheat straw. And this became the material foundation for the first industrialization attempt in many impoverished villages along the river. Straw-based paper making boomed, providing townships their entry point for GDP growth, and farmers with an extra income for what was otherwise agricultural waste.
A common scene in the region at that time was local farmers lining up at the gates of paper mills with carts fully stacked with wheat straw. Compared to paper making with wood fibers, the technology for straw-based pulping was also much more accessible for the Chinese TVEs, allowing production to ramp up rapidly in the backyards of rural communities to meet surging demand from households and industrial needs. The economic equation appeared so promising that, in 1985, Premier Li Peng boasted that the development of TVEs allowed millions of Chinese farmers to turn into industrial workers right on their own doorstep, “leaving the soil but not the village,” or litu bu lixiang 离土不离乡,5 thus avoiding the fate of other developing countries that were blighted by the rise of ghettos in their big cities. By 1992, almost 40 percent of China’s industrial output was produced by TVEs.6 A whole literature emerged celebrating TVEs as China’s “systematic innovation” and an alternative path to prosperity.
It proved to be premature optimism. The environmental consequences of the policy to let millions of TVEs blossom, many using retired equipment from older facilities in the cities, were so dire that it nearly doomed the Huai River. Small paper mills bleached the wheat straw with vast amounts of alkali and chlorine. The resultant effluents were aptly termed “black liquor,” which was extremely costly to treat. Many simply dumped the toxic spent chemicals directly into nearby rivers. In the late 1980s, prominent Chinese sustainability scholars were already warning that haphazard industrialization through TVEs merely dispersed pollution across the country, making it difficult to control later.7
Ying Xiangting, a 90-year-old former paper mill manager who still resides adjacent to his old riverside factory compound, vividly remembers the exact locations where newly added production lines were situated in the paper mill during the paper industry’s rapid expansion. When I talked to him, he also recalled the locations of the eight wells that the paper mill dug to secure fresh groundwater. The river water had already become unfit as an input for the production processes. The factory owners were aware of this, so they chose to utilize groundwater while discharging the wastewater farther downstream.
The reform-era political economy was so skewed toward economic growth that it ushered in a mutual dependence between local governments and enterprises, as the former relied on the latter to deliver economic results and tax revenue, while the latter counted on the former for protection and “eyes wide shut.” The co-dependence was exemplified by a monosodium glutamate (MSG) company called “Lotus,” located 20 kilometers upstream of the Huaidian sluice gates. Henan’s abundant rice and corn served as ideal raw materials in a bacterial fermentation process for manufacturing the flavor-enhancing ingredient that gives food a savory “umami” taste. Under the company’s capable management, Lotus MSG became China’s largest MSG producer in 1994, boasting an annual production of 100,000 tons.
The company formed a special bond with the local government in Xiangcheng City, where it operates. At one point, 70 percent of Xiangcheng’s tax revenue came from Lotus MSG.8 The payrolls of teachers and public servants were tied to the company’s economic fortunes. An urban legend of the time said that whenever it was payday at Lotus MSG, retailers and restaurants would experience a boom in their business.
There was just one problem with this prospering company: effluents. While a minuscule amount of its odorless crystal product can make an entire pot of broth flavorful, the waste stream discharged from Lotus MSG’s numerous discharge pipes, with high levels of organic wastes and ammonia nitrogen, ruined the receiving water bodies. Much of the “soy sauce” seen by leaders at the sluice gates in 1994 was contributed by the company’s black and sticky effluents. For many years, Lotus MSG was the single largest polluter on the Huai River.
Witnessing the staggering pollution caused by reform-era enterprises was a disillusioning moment for many, regarding the rural industrial revolution. In 1992, Wang Hui, a prominent scholar and torchbearer for “New Left” intellectuals (a nickname given by their neoliberal critics, which they embraced), was deeply disturbed by what he observed in a star township of TVE development. He questioned the so-called innovation in those supposedly collectively owned rural enterprises, claiming that their rampant pollution and labor violations were typical outcomes of an efficiency-maximization model introduced through radical privatization arrangements in the form of “contracting.”9
Around 1990, a petition drawn up by a group of retired cadres in Huaidian landed on Huo Daishan’s desk. At that time, he worked as a communications clerk for the township government. The petition bore a striking headline: “Stop the pollution, save millions of our people.” Huo recalled, “They were all elderly gentlemen in their 80s who had served the CCP since the dawn of the People’s Republic, and they were deeply concerned about the future of our country.” It was at that moment that he grasped the gravity of the river’s plight.
Eyes on the Huai
Huo Daishan, a son of the Huai River, is now in his 70s. This former army man of small stature has lived within walking distance of the Huaidian sluice gates for much of his life. He has intimate memories of the Huai from his childhood: people served tea with water directly scooped from the river, and wedding banquets were held on the banks with the beautiful waterscape as a backdrop. It pains him to have watched the clear water gradually turn black and foamy.
When I talked to him, two distinct topics inevitably crept into our conversation: photography and cancer. Ever since he was assigned the task of taking photos for his army unit during the 1970s, he has been passionate about the possibilities of photography. He takes pride in his technique. In the pre-digital age, he would keep tweaking the recipes of his developing solutions until he got the sharp images that were the envy of his peers. The local police station’s crime scene photographers came to him for tips. He recounted such exchanges with a grin on his face.
If not for the pollution of the river, he would probably have remained a successful photographer inside the local communications establishment. In 1998, one of his best friends from childhood died of esophageal cancer, an increasingly common cause of death in the region. A few years earlier, Huo’s mother also died of cancer. On his deathbed, the friend pleaded with Huo to do something, because he had access to the press. It was a turning point in Huo’s life. That year, he quit his stable job and went on a 1,000-kilometer journey along the river to document the extent of its pollution with his own camera.
His career change coincided with a critical juncture in the government’s campaign to clean up the river. In 1994, after the officials inspected the Huaidian sluice gates, they were intercepted by a group of distressed people who presented them with a plea bearing signatures from tens of thousands of locals requesting intervention from the Center. The following day, a conference was held in a city farther downstream, where officials from the central government and four provinces along the Huai River developed a package of measures that pledged to reduce pollution by the end of 1997, and to restore the river to a clear state by 2000.10
