Mind the Gap: The Role of Foreign-Invested Firms in Narrowing the Implementation Gap in China’s Environmental Governance

Abstract

In March, 2013, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s fifth generation of leadership officially assumed power. Among the many challenges facing the new administration, few are more significant than pollution control. Although Beijing has rolled out an assortment of well-intentioned environmental protection laws over the last two decades, environmental indicators are nonetheless grim. Whether one looks at figures related to water, air, or soil pollution, the numbers are bleak. As much as 70 percent of China’s rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are affected by pollution (Greenpeace 2011:6). About 90 percent of the river sections around urban areas is considered seriously polluted (World Bank 2007:6), and more than half the groundwater monitored in 182 Chinese cities is deemed undrinkable, largely due to the influence of untreated sewage, industrial pollution, and pesticides (Bloomberg 2011). Soil pollution is also extensive—so much so that soil data were recently treated as a “state secret” by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) (Zhang 2013). One survey estimates that 10 percent of farmland has levels of heavy metal such as lead and zinc that exceed government limits (Buckley 2011); others place the figure closer to 40 percent (Watts 2012).