CHINA: Help From The People

The turnaround was, by Chinese standards, amazingly swift. On Jan. 18 China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) ordered 30 major construction projects--most of them massive power plants scattered around the country--to shut down because they hadn't conducted required impact studies. Twenty-two quickly complied, paying fines of $24,000 each. But the rest--including three plants being built by the state-run China Three Gorges Corp., the influential developer behind the $27 billion Yangtze River Dam--ignored the directive. A bureaucratic turf battle raged until last week, when the company suspended work and vowed to comply. "It's astounding, because in the past regulatory bodies used to 'swat at flies but not at tigers'," says Fang Ning, deputy director of the Political Science Institute at China's Academy of Social Sciences, quoting a Chinese proverb.

China is getting tough on overdevelopment, for reasons big and small. Until now, as the country's growth rocket-ed along, developers ran roughshod over environmental regulators, despite new laws giving the latter increased authority. Power plants, in particular, have been untouchable. Demand for electricity has outstripped supply, forcing some of the country's factories to cut operations to just a few days a week. But China's increasingly toxic environment may pose an even greater threat to its citizens. Since President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao took over the reins of government in 2003, they've sought to bolster their popular support by appearing to tackle such quality-of-life problems. Doing so also dovetails with another of their priorities, throttling back the racing economy.

That confluence of interests has given a boost to China's fast-growing environmental movement. Green NGOs have been not only tolerated but supported by usually suspicious officials because "the government can't say, 'We don't want a good en-vironment'," says Nick Young, a Beijing-based publisher of newsletters on China's NGO community. The number of green activists has thus been mushrooming. "In the mid-1990s, there were very few groups promoting environmental protection," says Wang Yongchen, an environmental journalist who helped found Green Earth Volunteers--with 50,000 members, one of China's largest eco-NGOs. Now, according to government statistics, China has more than 2,000 nongovernmental environmental groups.

Those numbers have, in turn, added to the clout of formerly ineffective agencies like SEPA. Pan Yue, SEPA's deputy director, is a well-connected Communist Party rising star who "clearly has Wen Jiabao's ear," says Elizabeth Economy, a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. And Wen, a former geologist, chairs a high-level advisory body that includes both Chinese and foreign environmental experts. But the spread of activist groups lends muscle to their pro-environment policies. As political decentralization has dispersed power to the provincial and even city level, these groups act as helpful sources of local information--and, in effect, extend the reach of watchdog agencies. "The government really doesn't have the local leverage or as many sticks as they used to," says Jennifer Turner, an expert on Chinese environmental issues at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

These whistle-blowers have any number of targets. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of factories illegally dump hazardous effluents into the country's water and air, often while complicit local officials look the other way. Most of the rivers in northern and eastern China are so heavily polluted that even with expensive treatment they cannot be made safe for drinking. A recent report by the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning states that in each of China's 11 biggest cities, 400,000 people annually are infected with chronic bronchitis because of high levels of soot and other suspended particles. China's pollution problems also have global implications. Even with only 20 million vehicles, a tiny number relative to its 1.3 billion citizens, China is already the world's second biggest producer of greenhouse gases.

SEPA's latest decree drew from earlier, smaller dam campaigns by homegrown NGOs. Their biggest victory so far was winning a government order last year to stop --construction of 13 large dams on a pristine stretch of the Nu River in Yunnan province. After the central government announced plans to build the dams, Green Earth and dozens of other NGOs organized a massive protest campaign. They noted that the Nu, which begins as a glacial stream high on the Tibetan Plateau, is one of the last undeveloped rivers in Asia and winds through one of the world's biological hot spots--a habitat for 7,000 species of plants and rare animals, including elusive snow leopards.