“That ain’t no mountain,” said Jennifer L. Turner, the Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, in response to a picture of a pile of phosphogypsum waste just outside a farming village. She moderated a recent event on the development of environmental law and enforcement in China cohosted by the Environmental Law Institute and The Wilson Center. Since 2013, when the picture was taken, the mountain has grown, she said. She put the image up because many people hear about soil pollution, or illegal dumping, and picture something small. “You don’t picture a mountain towering over a village,” Turner said.

The Chinese government has been trying to improve China’s environmental law and enforcement. The president of China, Xi Jinping, reportedly said, “Green mountains and clear water are equal to mountains of silver and gold.” China is now finally recognizing what its growth has cost it, said Matthew Leopold, a General Counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency. “They’ve had year after year of incredible economic growth. They are now looking at the consequences of that growth,” he said. “You can’t grow by 10 percent a year without having pollution problems.”

Activism in Action

Activist organizations and NGOs have become a necessary tool in China’s clean-up process. “The corporate governance and laws associated with land use and property ownership are a lot different as might be expected in a communist style regime,” said Leopold. There’s no private property as we think of it in the United States, and ultimately the government itself is the holder of title to the lands, he said. But the government does not want all the responsibility of cleaning up and enforcing laws on the environment, he said. The Chinese water pollution law was the first time the government added an amendment to allow public comments and introduced a public interest lawsuit, said Turner. The Environmental Protection Law gave registered NGOs the right to bring up public interest lawsuits against polluters.

“Water matters to people,” Turner said, adding that the first pollution law in China was a water law. Activists with Green Hunan are taking control as part of an early warning system on the rivers in Hunan. With a network of 600 volunteers, they take water samples and pictures of different areas. “The citizen-gathered data may be all they have in order to identify polluters and try to trace it back to bring a case,” said Leopold. 

To address the water pollution issue in China, the NGO, Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, began creating maps using government water quality data, Turner said. The tool has helped NGO activists, international companies, and even the government understand the cleanliness of water in different areas.

The Soil Pollution Control Law     

Two situations led to the development of a soil pollution control law in China, said Leopold. The first, he said, was when the American embassy decided to do their own air monitoring in Beijing and posted the results online. This prompted Chinese people to ask the government why there was such a large difference in air quality measurements between the Chinese government data and the American embassy data, he said. It turned out to be an extremely effective way to start to get more progressive and transparent data for China. “There’s now continuous air quality monitoring in all cities or those cities lose their funding from the central government,” Turner said.

The other example Leopold cited was a nationwide survey of polluted lands. The numbers came from data generated by the environmental ministry, and a number of NGOs pushed for years for the data to be released, he said. The ministry finally released the data from the survey in 2014 by the environmental ministry. More government openness ultimately led to a release of the information, he said, noting that the openness led to the concept of a citizen’s right to know if they have pollution on their lands. Leopold spoke about advice he gave in China on adapting China’s environmental law and enforcement. “When I was there I really focused on rule of law across the board, but one of the key elements of rule of law is transparency,” Leopold said.

While much attention has been paid to air pollution over the years, said Leopold, not much has focused on soil pollution. Yet 20 percent of Chinese farmland has been contaminated by heavy metals, said Turner. Rice is so heavily polluted with cadmium in some regions, that the rice has become toxic. The government recommended that citizens diversify their rice intake to avoid the toxicity, said Leopold.

Enforcement Challenge

China is looking at the polluter pays principle as their primary goal in implementing regulations under its new soil pollution control law, said Leopold. However, it may be difficult to enforce, as it often is difficult to find which company polluted, how much, and where. “The polluter pays principle only gets you so far if you don’t know who all the responsible parties are,” Leopold said. NGOs and activists would have a hard time tracking the responsible parties for the pollution, said Turner. All they could do was make a map of 4,500 companies and 800 industrial parks, identifying them as companies that produce chemicals that could be polluting the soil, said Turner.

Leopold met with officials of the Minister of Ecology and Environment to discuss China’s new soil pollution law in April. Troubling questions arose from the Chinese officials and lawyers: “How do you get farms that have been contaminated back into production,” and, “How would you use the new law to clean up the soil to a level that would be safe to go back into production?” Leopold said. If agricultural lands in the United States are contaminated, we don’t typically try to turn them back into productive agriculture lands, Leopold said. “But there’s so little arable land,” said Turner. They need every acre, said Leopold, so they have a huge challenge ahead.

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