The Xi-Li administration is certainly talking the talk when it comes to environmental issue, but are they walking the walk? Observers offer their verdicts.
The Xi-Li Administration has never been stingy of communicating its ambition of running a greener, if not the greenest, government to the public. On Premier Li Keqiang’s debut press conference in March, he promised an upgrade of China’s economic development model “to enable people to enjoy clean air, safe drinking water and food.” In May, President Xi Jinping told his politburo colleagues that they should never sacrifice the environment for temporary economic growth. The president later reaffirmed his no-environment-sacrifice rhetoric in front a larger crowd on a state visit to Kazakhstan in September.

And the new administration’s effort to present themselves as a green government seemed not to end just by the increasing use of green language. At a cabinet meeting in July, Premier Li revealed that China sought to increase the annual output of its energy conservation and environmental protection sector to 4.5 trillion Yuan by 2015, making the sector a new pillar industry of the country. Later in September, the State Council launched a high-profile 1.7-trillion-Yuan-worth action plan to combat air pollution which highlighted the phasing out of overcapacity of steel, cement and glass.

Given that the brother of the president is the founding chairman of the International Energy Conservation Environmental Protection Association, the administration’s sudden zeal to excel in environmental governance and to increase green investment is not hard to comprehend.

However, despite the seemingly vigorous green efforts of the Xi-Li Administration, the first year of their tenure was marked by growing public discontent for China’s deteriorating environment. An opinion poll conducted by Canton Public Opinion Research Center found that nearly a quarter of respondents were not happy with their ecological environment, a 6% increase from the previous year.

Steve Tsang, the director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, told chinadialogue that China’s environmental governance in 2013 deserved “a failing grade” though “there is an element of bad luck for the Xi-Li Administration”.

According to Professor Tsang, although the new administration were doing something to improve the environment, the actions did not appear to be enough. “It (the Xi-Li administration) will need to take on the issue much more seriously than it has done so far,” he said, commenting on the worsening smog situation. Despite the new administration’s eagerness to tackle air pollution, heavy hazes haunted Beijing and other northern cities earlier last year came back and engulfed more than 100 cities in early December.

Professor Tsang’s verdict was echoed by Arthur Mol, an environmental policy professor at Wageningen University. “I haven’t been impressed by major powerful new measures being taken,” he told chinadialogue. The revision of Environmental Protection Law, though slowly making improvements in recent drafts, is “still hanging”, Professor Mol added.

China’s Environmental Protection Law, which is currently undergoing major revision, caused great concerns among environmentalists and observers last year. In late June, the second draft of amendments to the Environmental Protection Law reportedly threaten public accessibility to environmental public interest litigation by giving monopoly prosecution right to the government-backed All-China Environment Federation.

Though later drafts u-turned on the controversial decision which was widely seen as backward and unwise – Beijing editor of chinadialogue and veteran environmentalist Liu Jianqiang feared it could “creates a huge obstacle to public participation in environmental protection” – policy-makers’ reluctance and failure to include the public and grassroot environmental protection groups in environmental governance casted doubts over their train of thoughts over environmental governance.

Tang Hao, a professor teaching Politics at the South China Normal University and regular contributor to chinadialogue, said China’s environmental governance could not progress without public participation. Public exclusion would fuel discontent and hence giving rise to the increasingly common environmental protests, he said.

So far the actions taken by the Xi-Li Administration to tackle China’s environmental problems have been partial rather than systematic, according to Tang Hao. “Only if we redesign the environmental governance system and involve the public and grassroot NGOs, can we find the fundamental way of solving China’s environmental problems,” he said, adding that the current system limited the administration’s capability of acting effectively on environment.

But systematic redesign does not come easy. Citing the revision of Environmental Protection Law as an example, environmental governance expert Professor Mol said “even in a model of environmental authoritarianism, leaders that are willing to take radical environmental measure have to deal with bureaucracies that are partly unwilling to give so much priority to the environment.”

Local governments’ preference for economic growth over environment could drag the administration behind. In late December, a reported submitted to the national legislature by China’s cabinet said the country could fail its 12th Five Year Plan emission target if no drastic progress were made by the end of 2015. The stagnant progress of emission reduction was partly blamable to the worship of economic growth and lack of incentives to promote industrial restructuring by the local government, according to an official from the National Development and Reform Commission.

“China’s environmental pollution problem relates closely to the country’s rapid-progressing industrialisation. There won’t be any major improvement as long as China being the world factory,” Chen Gang, a research fellow at National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute, told chinadialogue

“Expecting the new administration to solve the structural problem is hardly practical,” he added.