BOOK REVIEW
Inertia Sets In in China
Mark Elvin
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's
Future. Elizabeth C. Economy. xvi + 337 pp. Cornell University
Press. 2004. $29.95
China's environmental problems are in the news. As I drafted this
review, the disastrous situation with pollution and health care in
the People's Republic was being reported on the front page of the
Sunday New York Times (with the headline "Rivers Run
Black") and in The Economist. A critical appraisal of
the problems and of the efforts being made to remedy them is needed.
In principle, therefore, Elizabeth Economy's new book is a welcome
addition to the works on a slightly earlier period by scholars such
as Vaclav Smil, Richard L. Edmonds, Judith Shapiro and many others.
How useful is it? The River Runs Black is in effect several
studies woven into one: (1) an overview of the impact of recent
economic growth on the environment; (2) a history of the creation of
an official environmental bureaucracy and its operations since the
end of the 1970s; (3) a sketch of the new environmental activists
since the 1990s and of the role of China's special brand of
government-organized nongovernmental organizations; (4) an analysis
of the impact on environmental policy and technology of China's
diplomatic and business relations with the world outside (with the
World Trade Organization, for example); (5) comparisons with
somewhat similar situations elsewhere in the world; and (6) some
guesses at possible futures.
These components differ greatly in quality, relative to what
could have been done with the topics. In summary, the first
is sadly inadequate; the second is enlivened by some excellent
passing comments but is too often inconclusive and is marred by
occasional major gaps; the third (which consists mostly of
biographies of activists) is journalistic but is readably and
engagingly done; the fourth, although commendable for not trying to
force clear-cut judgments on the reader, is—perhaps
necessarily, given the subject—a confusing tangle of
specifics; the fifth is best described as "worthy"; and
the sixth begins with some sharp and, in my view, accurate judgments
(for example, "the economic costs of China's environmental
degradation are rising sharply") but degenerates into three
inadequately conceptualized scenarios. This is not really a book for
the general reader, but professionals actively engaged in the field
will need to be familiar with it.
Let me try to justify these conclusions in terms of the sources on
which the book is, and is not, based. The main foundations are press
and press-type materials in English and secondary works in English;
only here and there have Chinese materials been consulted. But the
Chinese-language materials on the effect of recent economic growth
on the environment (item 1 above) are now voluminous. For example,
on the shelves near me is a 42-volume series, published by the
Environmental Sciences Press in 1995, on the environmental situation
in each province, with extensive statistics, and with additional
volumes on such topics as forestry, mining, soils and water
resources. There is also an extensive scientific periodical
literature in Chinese, which is mixed in quality (at least in the
one subfield with which I have a modest familiarity, historical
hydrology and hydraulics) but crucial. None of this material
features anywhere. An illustration of how it matters is that Economy
overlooks the key long-term danger to the Three Gorges Dam. In the
middle section of the gorge, the rock formation has historically
been liable to massive slippages when heavily permeated with
water from exceptional precipitation, and the water level at this
point is scheduled to be raised about 90 meters above its present
height. An analysis of this danger is, so far as I know, accessible
only in the Chinese scientific literature.
Economy also fails to use valuable materials in Chinese pertaining
to the earlier part of the history of the environmental
bureaucracy—for instance, the five-volume Collection of
Reference Materials on the [Draft] Law on the Environment
published in Beijing in 1982. One of the reasons this matters is
that the key bureaucratic player in the early part of the process,
Li Chaobo, is very prominent in those materials but has since been
airbrushed out of the historical record. There is also a small but
useful Chinese-language periodical literature on politics that
features both some serious contributions on how to reconcile swift
economic growth with environmental safeguards and some striking
pro-environment cartoons—one I recall shows fish swimming
underwater with raised umbrellas to ward off the rain of filthy
garbage descending on their heads.
Economy does not mention, let alone use, remote sensing analysis,
which is vital for estimates of the acreage of farmed land or the
extent of "forest cover" (an elusive term that needs, but
does not receive, precise definition). Nor is her appraisal of her
sources stabilized by fieldwork, although she has conducted
interviews with some of the main players in environmental
protection. The usefulness of personal familiarity with at least
sample areas can be illustrated from my own experience. Before
doing fieldwork in the upper part of the Lake Chao catchment two
years ago, I had the impression from my reading that the summits of
the mountains were stripped bare of forests. (Chinese colleagues
later confirmed that deforestation of the summits had indeed
occurred.) I was thus astonished on arrival to see the extent of
successful reforestation. Of course, precious habitat had gone, and
endless stands of same-species and same-age trees and bamboos were a
poor substitute for what had been there before. But there was little
doubt that the situation had been turned around—in good
measure, it seems, by the "campaign" approach that Economy
describes as being mostly of little effect. Even reasonable
generalizations like this last one thus need refining to bring out
nuances. The campaign was covered in some detail in the Anhui
provincial press, in Chinese, and here again is a major neglected
source, newspapers. The task, though, of wading through
environmental articles that have appeared in Chinese papers is now
so great that—to be fair—to do the job properly the
author really would have needed a substantial team to back her up.
This said, Economy has a nice eye for paradox. Thus the collection
of fees for breaches of environmental rules has created a financial
incentive for Environmental Protection Bureaus to allow problems to
persist. The flood of timber imports into China has not
helped protect domestic forests but has, by forcing down the price,
driven Chinese loggers to increase their output. At such
moments the book is usefully mind-opening.
Overall, though, what we have in front of us for the first two
components is not a systematic synthesis of available
research and a substantial investigation of major Chinese sources.
Rather, with only marginal exceptions, it is the report of an
anglophone policy analyst. The reliance on the stringing together of
snippets from what are mostly ephemera or semi-ephemera is
unavoidable in the sphere of current politics and international
relations (the later part of the second component and all of the
fourth). But there is no systematic examination of the ideological
or partisan biases that typically tend to affect these
items—which is disturbing. The reader's main frustration,
though, is a by-product of the author's careful laying out of this
unsatisfactory data: Too often, one has no idea of the take-away
message. Thus on page 106 we learn that in the late 1990s the State
Environmental Protection Agency's "enforcement capacity during
the late 1990s began to be enhanced," but on page 107 we are
told that at the same time "maneuverings . . . diminished
SEPA's ability to coordinate high-level environmental policy and
stretched its capacity very thin," and its staff was cut in
half. On pages 112-113 we learn that sometimes the courts can be
used to enforce environmental law but that often they cannot. The
presentation of the scrappy evidence is properly done, but as this
creation of a patchwork album goes on and on, it is often all but
impossible to draw any clear inferences as to how the trends are
moving and why.
The three future scenarios offered at the end are "China Goes
Green," "Inertia Sets In" and "Environmental
Meltdown." The first is a sadly unconvincing vision of
continuing growth creating "more challenges for the
environment"; those challenges would be contained simply by
investing more in protection (which would lead to "tens of
thousands of model environmental cities") and by achieving
greater democracy. The second scenario is mistitled: The fine print
describes a regime concentrating on dynamic system maintenance in a
situation that is far from stable, responding only to internal and
external pressures for change to the extent it thinks necessary for
preserving its power. In the third scenario, economic growth
slackens and the destructive focus on short-term considerations
intensifies, with adverse social and political effects. The second
scenario is in my view by far the most likely, essentially because
it requires the lowest level of conflict with powerful vested interests
Scenario creation can be helpful in forcing us to distill the
essence of our understanding of a situation. When we engage in it,
we need to distinguish between robust processes and critical
ones—in other words, between those with a strong capacity to
self-stabilize even when pushed far from equilibrium and those (much
rarer and harder to foresee) in which small inputs can trigger
disproportionately huge effects. Making such tough distinctions well
could have helped produce a much more challenging
conclusion.—Mark Elvin, Chinese History, Australian
National University, Canberra