The plethora of publications on China’s environmental policymaking offer broad coverage of the subject but also raise the bar for new entrants to the field. A book clearly passing the threshold is Yun Liu’s Blue Skies over Wuhan: The Evolution of Environmental Protection Policy in Hubei, 1970s–80s. Its spatial focus on Hubei offers insights into a little-researched region and makes for a valuable case study that is a nuanced alternative to the still-proliferating, monolithic view on China’s environmental politics. Liu explores the province’s environmental politics employing a dynamic historiographic analysis that draws on local archival material such as gazetteers, official pollution records and academic field reports. In times of an ever more prominent, yet often problematic, use of artificial intelligence in academia, one ought to commend Liu’s diligence to plough through such vast material.

The author’s approach to these sources and the delivery of his argument constitutes another merit of the book. A key emphasis is put on the concept of environmental policy evolution, whereby Liu skilfully outlines a longitudinal trajectory shaped by local (horizontal) dynamics and central–local (vertical) interactions. He captures the interplay of several elements, e.g. policy and ideological changes at the top vis-à-vis local pollution disasters and subsequent social dissent, which local policymakers had to carefully balance when developing pollution control policies. A major takeaway for readers is the well-structured evidence on how environmental management has unfolded in Hubei: policy implementation is depicted as an incessantly evolving process subject to top-down pressures from national development imperatives and conflicting local interests, which feeds into and results from complex compromise-finding.

For researchers of China’s environmental policymaking, the conceptualization of these patterns is not new. Yet, for the book it is an essential framework to develop a central argument and deliver its key findings. Liu’s overarching assessment is that government policy could only achieve pollution control, albeit to a limited effect, through strong engagement with the local officials that harnessed their communities’ sentiment in support of stronger environmental regulations. The author attaches great significance to these local officials, whom he sees as witnesses, conflict-solution providers and active members of the communities (p. 102) that were likewise affected by pollution incidents.

Liu develops his argument along six chapters, starting with a review of premodern Hubei’s environmental disasters, early industrialization and the emergence of local environmental awareness (chapter one). This is followed by a documentation of major pollution incidents affecting three of Wuhan’s lakes and local environmental agencies’ engagement with industrial polluters (chapter two). Chapter three highlights rampant air and soil pollution, the civil protests shaping empathic environmental officers’ responses and how even widespread anger over pollution-induced agricultural losses could not curtail polluting, yet economically critical, industries. Chapter four moves from case-specific analysis to explore the institutionalization of environmental agencies, covering policy experimentation, environmental movements and interagency (horizontal) collaboration, which has produced some degree of environmental regulatory effectiveness. Chapter five depicts the emergence of the “right to pollute” concept, with its distorted economic cost-benefit calculations that fed into the ill-conceived “pollute first, clean up after” approach. Chapter six concludes by tracing key pollution events behind Hubei’s environmental policy evolution and to which extent the learned lessons helped regularize environmental protection.

As the book unfolds, Liu identifies an environmental governance mechanism based on local agencies’ responsiveness that grew in parallel to discourses, dissent and conflict within the Hubei community. He specifically shows how local environmental officers instrumentalized public opinion and societal pressure to acquire more financial and administrative capacities for implementing pollution management control. According to Liu, the pattern – covering pollution incident, subsequent societal dissent, responsive policy request for more financial support and incrementally strengthened implementation – became a fundamental routine for institutionalizing environmental governance (pp. 167f). Yet, he also concedes that local efforts to curtail polluting effluents from economically powerful industries were mostly ineffective. Improvements would only emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, when economic incentives and mass mobilization were integrated in environmental policy efforts, and the national policymaking agenda first included environmental issues. Another interesting aspect revealed by Liu is that Hubei’s environmental agencies implemented local policies in relative independence from outside or central stakeholders’ interference. Using archival evidence, Liu attributes the need to act independently and thereby precede the national environmental agenda to the nascent environmental awareness and social discontent across Hubei. Given community pressure and the ineffectiveness of regulatory political measures, e.g. teethless warnings and low financial sanctions, local administrators repeatedly submitted warnings to central authorities on environmental regulatory failures. While this pattern may not be unique to Hubei and likely occurred across China, Liu’s work sets forth a valuable proposition on how bottom-up feedback may have influenced national environmental policymaking.

Blue Skies over Wuhan is an interesting read that excels in its recorded details on type and dimension of effluents, remedial investments, agenda timelines and policy changes. However, on several occasions Liu deep dives into single events, which per se constitute an enriching experience but ultimately remain insufficiently connected to the book’s broader argument. In such instances, a structured framework demonstrating how certain incidents furthered, impeded or were irrelevant for the advancement of policies would have been meaningful. However, such analyses ask for a very different combination of research methods, e.g. supplementing archival work with focused interviews of local officials, which are outside of the publication’s intended scope. Nonetheless, Liu presents a novel research work, which as a case study fills gaps in the existing canon. It is highly suitable for environment-oriented scholars in Chinese studies as well as for those working on environmental governance, policy studies and human geography with an interest in the evolutionary dynamics behind regulatory frameworks. In that sense, the book also serves as suitable teaching material in those fields: the analytic-narrative style keeps a close eye on actual events and takes stock of failures and achievements. This approach perfectly fits the educational purpose of conveying realities on the ground to all students interested in environmental management.