The challenges for China's central government in promoting environmental protection have been extensively documented. Economic reform since 1978 has transformed the country into one of the leading economic powerhouses of the world, but rapid economic growth has been accompanied by heavy environmental costs. The environmental bureaucracy of China, as most researchers have noted, has been imperfect at best, experiencing a wide array of challenges. These include shortfalls in budget and manpower, bureaucratic competitions between environmental and economic/development-focused agencies, and frequent resistance to environmental regulation at the local level (all sub-national governments) that render the performance of environmental agencies often ineffective.Footnote 1
The diverging environmental priorities between the central and local governments have been widely noted by scholars.Footnote 2 Of course, the priority on economic development can be found from municipalities to national ministries. However, the central government, behaving like a “regulatory state” from the top, strives to produce a balance between economic development and the need for mitigation of the environmental impacts of economic growth.Footnote 3 Local governments, on the other hand, have been viewed as development-oriented actors, responding to economic stimuli and pursuing economic development even though they may be aware of the gravity of environmental degradation.Footnote 4
This binary conception, while offering analysts and observers a coherent perspective about the landscape of environmental governance in China, is far from adequate in understanding emerging policy innovation and environmental activism in China. Focusing on the four county-level cities of Suzhou municipality (Suzhou shi 苏州市), this article examines their policy processes in achieving the status (chuangmo 創模) of the National Model City of Environmental Protection (NMCEP) (Guojia huanjing baohu mofan chengshi 国家环境保护模范城市). It analyses the rationales and driving forces underlying these cities' proactive approach to environmental protection, and maps out the interactions at the sub-provincial level that eventually led to the emergence of the Suzhou model city group (mofan chengshi qun 模范城市群), a designation for an area in which all cities at both the prefectural and county levels have attained the environmental model city status.Footnote 5
This article also highlights the role of local leaders in shaping environmental policy making. These leaders pursue a balance between promoting economic growth and limiting its environmental costs. Some of their environment-conserving initiatives are extraordinary, responding to but sometimes even preceding and influencing national environmentalist initiatives. We also describe the sometimes preponderant influence of the provincial government on county-level policy and decision making, an area under-examined in previous studies of environmental politics and policy in China.
The Environmental State and China
Underlying our analysis of four cases and the model city group is the concept of “environmental state.” With an intellectual origin in environmental sociology, it refers to the state's increasing involvement in managing and institutionalizing environmental tasks through state policies.Footnote 6
While the concept of “environmental state” has mostly been applied in the context of industrialized states, in developing countries the state's involvement in environmental regulation and management has been uneven. Political elites are frequently unreceptive to the environmentalist agenda, devoting their efforts to economic development. It has been argued, however, that the attention of developing states to environmental agendas would show a gradual increase as economic development proceeds, a scenario modelled in the environmental Kuznets curve.Footnote 7
While controversies remain about the empirical validity of the Kuznets curve, sociologists have offered a more nuanced model about the mechanisms and trajectories of “ecological modernization,” a concept with close affinity to environmental state. Ecological modernization refers to the processes and outcomes by which the state, economic actors and civic organizations, responding to environmental degradation and resulting public advocacy, move towards better environmental governance and greater acceptance of the need for environmental good practice by corporations and political elites. It includes institutional changes which lead to internalization of environmental values and norms in social and policy processes.Footnote 8
China's environmental governance, observed Arthur Mol and Neil Carter, has witnessed some successes in ecological modernization. The country has established a relatively strong environmental bureaucracy and various regulatory frameworks at the central level, and has institutionalized environmental standards as laws which contribute to some level of compliance by private and local actors. Contributing less has been the still immature civil society, with insufficient citizen participation in environment-related decision making, and persistent resistance by local governments.Footnote 9
For analysts of China's environmental governance, the role of local governments presents significant challenges. Sub-provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) remain institutionally weak and find it difficult to act independently of the pervasive influence of development-minded cadres and officials. Vested and interlocking interests between local officials and business groups have also complicated the central government's efforts to promote the pro-environment agenda. Implementation and enforcement of state policies are found to be sometimes ineffective, frequently uneven, and always subject to a host of contingent factors including elite perception and the economic development level of municipalities.Footnote 10 In that sense, China remains a nascent environmental state, according to the original conception of “environmental state” as applied in developed countries.
The conceptions of the state in discussion of ecological modernization have concentrated mostly on the role of the central government. What is understudied in the literature is the role of local governments. For instance, a recent analysis of the environmental state in China suggested that the country's approach to ecological modernization focused mostly on the technological-economic aspect, with minimal attention to “political modernization, subpolitics and the re-invention of environmental governance.”Footnote 11 Yet omission of local governance in the official discourse should not be considered as evidence of the absence of local activism in dealing with environmental tasks.
We have found in our research that a local government's policies and institutional innovations in regard to environmental management can influence nearby cities, and can also have some impact on higher-level authorities' policy making, a phenomenon which has been described by researchers in other policy domains, and which has been attested as an important stage of policy experimentalism in China.Footnote 12 However, this has not previously been demonstrated in regard to the development of environmental policies. Empirically, therefore, this article addresses an important gap in the study of environmental governance in China.
Sources and Method
Since the inception of the National Model City of Environmental Protection programme in 1997, nationwide there have been 67 cities and five city districts, located in at least 12 provinces, which attained the “model city” status.Footnote 13 The majority are located in economically developed regions, prominently in Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces, and are concentrated in geographical clusters. The three localities which included the most model cities have been designated by the SEPA as “model city groups.” They are the Suzhou and Changzhou 常州 model city groups in Jiangsu province, and the Weihai 威海 model city group in Shandong province.
While the economic and political implications of achieving NMCEP status have been reported in official almanacs and media reports, in-depth research that examines the policy rationales driving the efforts of city governments to obtain the national award is rare. Systematic attempts to examine this kind of local environmental policy innovation would require extensive fieldwork, interviews with related officials and decision-makers, and access to local publications and media reports. To launch this research, we decided to select the Suzhou model city group, which includes six cities: Zhangjiagang, Kunshan, Suzhou municipality, Changshu, Taicang and Wujiang.
Our choice of this cluster was deliberate. The Suzhou model city group is unique because it allows for comparative study of the different processes through which cities became model cities. As discussed below, the Suzhou model cities include early adopters (Zhangjiagang, Kunshan) and late joiners (Taicang, Wujiang). We selected those four cities for more detailed analysis.Footnote 14 Though the model city programme is a national initiative, its origin was actually in Zhangjiagang 张家港, whose local experiment in environmental management had attracted the attention of the central government, was “generalized” subsequently as a national policy, and had considerable influence on other nearby cities. In studying this model-city group, we are therefore also studying the origin of the NMCEP programme.
Our case study of the Suzhou model-city group was preceded by preliminary analysis profiling the model city and non-model city groups in Jiangsu province, comparing these cities on a variety of socio-economic measures. For the time span of our analysis (1994–2008), the model cities have outperformed the non-model cities in economic growth. This is consistent with the official rhetoric that improvements in environment quality can bring subsequent economic and reputational gains to the cities and their leaders, although the interactions between economic growth and environmental governance are complex.
Much less is known about the political processes underlying cities' efforts to become NMCEPs, in particular the contrasting trajectories of the model city forerunners and late joiners. To unravel these dynamics of emerging local environmental activism in China, in July and August 2008, the first and second authors visited three county-level cities under Suzhou's administrative supervision – Zhangjiagang, Kunshan 昆山 and Taicang 太仓 – and Suzhou municipality itself,Footnote 15 conducting 20 interviews with local officials of various ranks, including an EPB director (juzhang 局长), three deputy directors (fu juzhang 副局长), six division heads (chuzhang 处长), four deputy division heads (fu chuzhang 副处长) and a deputy director (fu zhuren 副主任) of the Development and Reform Commission.
The authors' previous contacts with officials in Kunshan and Nanjing led to the interviews in Kunshan, and also produced many useful suggestions for interviews in Zhangjiagang, Taicang and Suzhou municipality. We selected interviewees on the basis of their previous engagement with or knowledge of the model city programmes in their own cities. We do not discount the possibility of bias in their recollections of these events, but they were typically very willing to recount the details of these achievements, and we were able to cross-check their accounts with other local sources. We also visited Nanjing and Shanghai in an effort to understand the oft-mentioned but under-examined influence of the provincial government and of Shanghai on nearby county-level cities. To prepare for the field research and to cross-check information from interviews, we also studied almanacs, official publications and media reports related to the cities' efforts in achieving the NMCEP status.
The National Model City of Environmental Protection Programme
Before presenting the results for these cases in Suzhou municipality, this section outlines the origin and development of the NMCEP programme. Administered by the Department of Pollution Control (Wuran kongzhi si 污染控制司) of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP, formerly the State Administration of Environmental Protection, SEPA) and founded in 1997, the NMCEP programme is one of the MEP's leading incentive programmes to motivate local governments to improve their environmental performance and bring it in line with national and international benchmarks.Footnote 16
The NMCEP programme was founded to serve as a more advanced qualification than the earlier Quantitative Examination System on Comprehensive Control of Urban Environment (QESCCUE), a compulsory environmental evaluation system for all cities in China. The new NMCEP programme, which was voluntary, was designed to motivate cities at the higher end of the QESCCUE rankings, that is, those maintaining higher-than-average national and provincial standings in the QESCCUE assessment and aspiring to outperform their peers. According to the official account, the NMCEP programme was first conceived in China's Ninth Five-Year Plan of Environmental Protection (1996–2001) and the Vision 2010, which called for building up model cities that are well-developed, clean and have sound recycling practices.Footnote 17 SEPA began to promote this programme in 1997. The scheme offered the best-performing cities the prospect of gaining the prestigious title of “National Model City of Environmental Protection.” The award is intended to recognize and publicize cities' attainment of a balance between social and economic development, ecological sustainability and public infrastructure development, and is awarded to cities (or in some cases to a district of a city) fulfilling SEPA's rigorous assessment criteria.Footnote 18
To be a model city, aspiring cities must work out their own “model-building” (chuangmo) plans in accordance with the MEP's requirements, including programmes of urban environmental management jointly developed with provincial or municipal EPBs and with business and social groups. Cities conduct self-assessments, implement their measures and plans, and then submit reports to the provincial EPBs which are forwarded to the MEP. The Ministry reviews the city's portfolios and dispatches on-site assessment teams to verify the implementation of their plans. If everything goes smoothly, the MEP makes its assessment reports available to the public. Residents of the city are then encouraged to give feedback (or lodge complaints) to the MEP regarding the real situation of the model-cities-to-be. In most cases, the public consultation period provides another opportunity for cities to launch extensive publicity campaigns showcasing their achievements in environmental protection and urban planning. Once the consultation period expires, the title of National Model City would be granted, and plaques and trophies would be bestowed on mayors, Party secretaries and chiefs of environmental bureaus. For most model cities, the entire process of chuangmo, from drafting and implementing a local plan, review of the city's performance by the MEP, and obtaining the certification award, takes three to four years.Footnote 19 As of March 2009, 67 cities and five city districts within municipalities had been designated NMCEP, and around 20 more were undergoing technical assessments or evaluation to assess their suitability for the award.
To ensure conformity to national standards after the title is designated, the MEP re-assesses the model cities every three years. In the 2004 round, the “sanctioning” and review procedures of NMCEP were streamlined; since then, re-examinations have been conducted through a combination of self-reporting, evaluation and unannounced site visits by the MEP and provincial team. Results of the review exercises are made public, and cities are granted exemptions from the next round if they are considered to have performed according to the NMCEP benchmarks throughout the review period. Should they fail to do so, they are warned and/or given deadlines for improvements. In the gravest cases of underperformance, cities are deprived of the model city title.Footnote 20 In the 2004 review, seven cities were granted exemption from further review. Shantou 汕头, Guangdong province, however, was warned for unsatisfactory performance subsequent to its nomination as a NMCEP in 1999. It was given a deadline of the end of 2006 to meet the national benchmarks or face disqualification if it failed to comply with SEPA's notice.Footnote 21 Wujiang 吴江, one of the cases covered in this article, also faced the prospect of sanctions in the recent review by MEP.
The criteria needed to ascend to the rank of NMCEP have become more stringent over the years. Initially, SEPA established the benchmarking system on the basis of the criteria for the QESCCUE and National Sanitation City programmes covering aspects such as social and economic development, environmental quality, environmental infrastructure and environmental management.Footnote 22 In September 2006, however, the standard was updated in accordance with the various Eleventh Five-Year Plans related to environmental management and pollution control. For a city to initiate a chuangmo campaign, it must have been at the top rank in annual provincial QESCCUE for three consecutive years, have no major environmental incidents, and must have spent a proportion of its GDP on investment projects related to environmental protection. It should also meet the benchmarks of MEP's auxiliary schemes, like those of ISO14000 National Demonstration Region, and Eco-Sound Provinces, Cities and Counties, all of which are related to the benchmarks of NMCEP.Footnote 23 Thus in order to be eligible for nomination for the award of NMCEP, cities must have already obtained a number of environmental certifications. These requirements place the programme in a privileged position in the myriad of similar initiatives of the MEP and other ministries under the State Council.
Interestingly, the model city programme is no longer prioritized by MEP as it was between 1997 and 2006. No new model city has been designated since 2007 although a few are currently under final examination; the MEP's emphasis seems to have shifted to a related but different campaign, the National Ecological City programme (Guojia shengtai chengshi 国家生态城市). Similar to the model city initiative, this is an incentive programme targeting city governments' environmental performance, but with much more stringent benchmarks, a broader emphasis beyond pollution control (the main focus of NMCEP), and coverage of both the urban and rural areas under the city's jurisdiction. It is widely perceived to be a more prestigious award than the NMCEP. Indeed, after the award of NMCEP to the cities in the Suzhou model city group, four of the five county-level cities have subsequently attained the higher title.
Suzhou Municipality and Model City Group
This section focuses on the empirical cases illustrating divergent trajectories of chuangmo at the county level. The cases of Zhangjiagang, Kunshan, Taicang and Wujiang, awarded the NMCEP title in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2003 respectively, reveal the different experiences of local state-driven environmentalism, and how local leadership, and in some cases provincial intervention, led the policy process.
The four cases are discussed as two groups. Zhangjiagang and Kunshan are conceived as early policy innovators, triggering emulative behaviour of the late joiners, Taicang and Wujiang. As China's first NMCEP, Zhangjiagang has been touted as the role model in many national and provincial model-building campaigns, environmental or otherwise. Wujiang, by contrast, was the last city which achieved NMCEP status in Suzhou municipality. Its experience suggests an entirely different trajectory of local environmental activism, one conditioned by successful cases of predecessors and influenced by the provincial authority.
In all four cases, however, local leadership (mayor and/or Party secretary) played indispensable roles. The case of Zhangjiagang also illustrates how local achievements were recognized by the central government, which subsequently crafted the NMCEP programme and benchmarks with reference to that city's experience.
Zhangjiagang and Kunshan: the early adopters
As the first NMCEP in China, Zhangjiagang's pro-environmental policies and attitude cannot be explained without reference to the leadership of Qin Zhenhua 秦振华, the city's Party Secretary from 1992 to 1998. As in many of the county-level cities in the coastal areas, the opening-up of China in the 1980s brought sizeable economic opportunities and challenges to Zhangjiagang, but it was during Qin's tenure as Party Secretary that the city took off rapidly in economic terms and became increasingly connected with the world.
The changes were sweeping and comprehensive, ushering the city from a lesser-known county to a nationally acclaimed model “small-city” and an exemplar of small-city urbanization and industrialization. All these could arguably be attributed to the strong leadership of Qin, particularly for his efforts to develop the city with his “Zhangjiagang spirit” (Zhangjiagang jingshen 张家港精神) which emphasized solidarity, diligence, quest for excellence and competitiveness (tuanjie pinbo, fuchong fenjin, zijia yali, ganyu zhengxian 团结拼搏, 负重奋进, 自加压力, 敢於争先),Footnote 24 and grafting external lessons, notably from Singapore, into the local context. Such spirit is essentially a blend of “communist morality based on ideology” and what has been called “neo-authoritarian developmentalism,” a perspective Qin developed after studying the Singapore model.Footnote 25
Drawing from his experience as a township leader since the late 1970s, and his work in helping to upgrade the local chemical industry, he promoted his environmental vision to the city: to achieve a balance between “the gold and silver mountain” (jinshan yinshan 金山银山) (economic gains) and “green water and mountain” (lüshui qingshan 绿水青山) (the environment).Footnote 26 In 1993–94, evidently in an effort to learn about ways to develop the local economy, Qin organized a delegation to visit Singapore. The city-state impressed him, and he was particularly struck by Singapore's “Garden City” goals and achievements, and by its authoritarian but effective approach to problems such as littering, using both propaganda and fines.Footnote 27 This further strengthened Qin's determination to make Zhangjiagang the cleanest city in China, primarily as an effort to attract foreign capital but also to establish its reputation as extraordinarily progressive, modern and clean.Footnote 28 He organized a mass publicity and public education campaign involving more than 100,000 residents and laid out rules regulating many aspects of civil behaviour in daily life.Footnote 29
In December 1995, a national meeting on environmental protection was convened in Zhangjiagang attended by Xie Zhenhua 解振華, director of SEPA from 1993 to 2007, several State Councillors, and representatives of provinces and cities throughout the country. In the meeting, Xie lauded the city for achieving an exemplary balance between economic gains and environmental protection. In July 1996, in the fourth national meeting on environmental protection, the city was named the first NMCEP. SEPA's citation specifically highlighted Zhangjiagang's tough approach to polluting firms and the government's policy allotting equal weight to environmental concerns and economic opportunity in making decisions related to foreign direct investment.Footnote 30 In SEPA's official newsletter, provincial and city EPBs were instructed to learn from Zhangjiagang, making the city a national role model in the environmental domain.Footnote 31 Since the mid-1990s, the city has continued its effort to maintain a high level of environmental performance. In 2001, it was named the first National Ecological City, again the first in the country.
What makes Zhangjiagang unique, however, is that it has never been assessed according to the benchmarks of the NMCEP programme. Administered by SEPA's Division of Pollution Control, the model city initiative was in fact inspired by the remarkable environmental performance of Zhangjiagang which was noted by Xie during his field research (diaoyan 调研) in 1995. He was convinced that the city's environmental quality and performance was already high enough that it could serve as a national role model. NMCEP was founded on the basis of the city's experience, complemented by SEPA's subsequent standard-setting work that formalized the various benchmarks and made the programme available for the city's participation. This illustrates how central government leaders can be influenced by as well as influence local policy and local achievements. Zhangjiagang's local experiment with environmental protection effectively led to the inception of a national policy. The role which local experiments can play in China's national policy-making, as a policy instrument of “experimentation under hierarchy,” is well-known,Footnote 32 but it had never been demonstrated in the context of environmental protection. The model of proactive national environmentalism versus resistant local developmentalism needs to be complemented by further studies of this type of more dynamic and complex interaction between national and local leaders in the development of environmental good-governance.
Public awareness of environmental protection has also been on the upsurge since the 1990s, according to our interviewees, with locals who had travelled abroad returning to demand that the city keep up with international environmental standards. For the EPB, the rise in local expectations has raised the political influence of the bureau within the city government and led to further institutional innovation. Zhangjiagang's EPB, for example, was the first in China vested with a “one-vote veto power” (yipiao foujuequan 一票否决权) over development/investment projects that might bring substantial environmental costs. In severe cases, the EPB could issue orders to industry requiring them to remedy their environmental problems within a certain period of time or, failing that, to shut down their operations. The EPB were very cautious about using this authority, but EPB officials told us that the sanction gave them more influence over local firms than they would have without it.
As Qin envisaged, the city appears to have benefited substantially from its improved environment, with an almost threefold increase in gross domestic product since becoming the first NMCEP. The extent to which the increase could be attributed to obtaining the model city status remains uncertain, but the interviewees affirmed that the improved environment achieved through national environmental certification programmes such as the model city award have put the city in a better position to attract foreign direct investment.
Following a similar trajectory to Zhangjiagang, Kunshan, the second NMCEP named in Jiangsu in 1998, was motivated to pursue environmental model city status partly by economic concerns, in order to attract capital investment. Detailed studies by Andrew M. Marton reveal how local contextual factors (primarily the leadership and township and village enterprises) reacted to external economic opportunities in the race towards rapid urbanization and industrialization from the late 1980s.Footnote 33 In the early 1990s when the government was uncertain about its environmental outlook, academics and researchers visited Kunshan for extensive fieldwork studies and concluded that its economic development would benefit substantially from achieving a higher level of environmental standards. Local government documents suggest that environmental protection had been on the leaders' agenda since the late 1980s.Footnote 34
The former mayor Ji Jianye 季建业 said “environmental protection is a kind of productivity … and is a requisite for attracting foreign investment.”Footnote 35 Like Zhangjiagang, Kushan was financially capable of meeting the standards of the model city programme, and helped to achieve them by subsidizing industries to upgrade heavily polluting plants to less-polluting technologies, while penalizing industries that failed to meet environmental standards by denying them eligibility for bank loans. The city also received strong support from prefectural and provincial governments. For example, a division head of the pollution control unit of the provincial EPB spent a week in Kunshan when the city was preparing for the model city assessment, offering detailed instructions to his local counterparts on how to meet the assessment criteria.
Was Kunshan influenced by Zhangjiagang's environmentalist activities and achievements? Some Kunshan EPB officials contended that even though Zhangjiagang was the first city to be awarded the NMCEP status, Kunshan's progress in environmental protection was no slower than that of Zhangjiagang. They hesitated to recognize Zhangjiagang's influence on their own policy choices, though one Kunshan official conceded that it was imperative to act when a nearby city at a similar level of socio-economic development had already achieved national recognition for high environmental standards.
Taicang and Wujiang: the late joiners
Compared to Zhangjiagang and Kunshan, Taicang and Wujiang joined the ranks of the model cities in the NMCEP programme at a later stage, in 2001 and 2003. The two cities are discussed together since they exhibit some similar features and both experienced challenges which the early adopters did not face. They appear to share similar trajectories of local environmental activism and policy concerns. Senior EPB officials in both cities admitted that their less developed economic condition was the major reason preventing them from earlier participation in the NMCEP programme. This, however, ceased to be an obstacle as their economies grew in the late 1990s. EPB officials acknowledged the benefits of achieving NMCEP status, as illustrated by the increased political attention and economic gains of the neighbouring cities, which encouraged them to initiate their own pursuit of such status.
Interaction of these factors is notable in Taicang. First, we were told that the Taicang government officials were embarrassed, when they attended political meetings with other mayors in the county, that they had not yet secured the model city title. In the late 1990s when three of the county-level cities in Suzhou municipality had already achieved environmental status as NMCEP, Taicang's Party Secretary saw the imperative of promoting the same environmental campaign. This demonstrates how concern about “losing face” (diulian 丢脸) and peer pressure between cities could drive a local government's environmental policy making. Indeed, our interviewees repeatedly suggested that it was local officials' political and reputational concerns that catalysed Taicang's efforts in pursuing the NMCEP title.
Second, as a later joiner of the NMCEP programme, Taicang experienced more external influence than Zhangjiagang and Kunshan. Advice and encouragement from higher-level government leaders from both the provincial and prefectural level EPB shaped Taicang's policy deliberation and choices. A year after attaining NMCEP status, the city was invited to consider pursuing National Ecological City status, even though the city officials believed that it would be a premature move given the lack of sufficient financial capability and sufficient development of environmental institutions necessary to achieve the more stringent benchmarks of the Ecological City programme. These local concerns, however, did not seem to forestall pressure from the provincial government. Provincial Party Secretary Li Yuanchao 李源潮 visited the city in 2005 and suggested that the city should pursue that higher environmental status, persuading city officials to take on the instruction even though, within the EPB and other agencies, some officials expressed reservations about its feasibility. However, Li's visit to Taicang was soon followed by a province-wide conference in Taicang attended by most of the cities' EPB officials on the “construction” of the National Ecological City in Jiangsu. In the event, provincial leaders met with their counterparts in the Taicang government, seeking to persuade the city to follow their advice. This inevitably provided a strong impetus to the local government to speed up the project, and is indicative of the extent and impact of political intervention by the provincial government in shaping environmental policy-making at the local level.
As for lateral influence from cities which had already achieved the National Ecological City award, apart from reputational concerns experienced by individual local leaders, interviewees in Taicang were unwilling to acknowledge learning from the successful experiences of Zhangjiagang and Kunshan. But we noted that Taicang officials shared similar policy concerns with their neighbouring cities, including the quest for political attention from the provincial and prefectural governments, and the potential economic benefits of improving the local environment. In fact, as in the policy calculus of Zhangjiagang and Kushan, Taicang's model city campaign was closely related to economic rationales. For the two early adopters of the national policy initiative, the national prestige from achieving the award had given them a distinctive political status, attracting capital investment and facilitating transition of the local economies from polluting to high value-added and high-technology companies and industries. Similarly in Taicang, officials identified the potential economic gains from meeting the benchmarks of the national environmental policy programme. Indeed, in our interviews they noted that in the years after NMCEP status was attained, the city attracted a significant number of investors from Germany, known to city officials as the leading forerunner of environmental best practice in business and industry, making Taicang, as they expressed it, the “hometown of German enterprises in China” (Zhongguo De qi zhi xiang 中国德企之乡). This shaped public and government appreciation of the work of the local EPB, and reinforced its legitimacy.
As the last of the cities under Suzhou's administrative supervision to become a model city, “completing” the model city cluster in Suzhou municipality, Wujiang shared the experience of Taicang: strong influence from the provincial government, and from the earlier model cities; “peer pressure” experienced by the local leaders; and relatively accessible shared knowledge and expertise of model city building efforts provided by earlier achievers. These motives and resources, however, did not ease Wujiang's challenge in attaining model city status. The textile-dominated industrial base has always been a problem in improving the city's environmental standard. Unlike the situation in Taicang where German firms might have been regarded as complementary and supportive to the city's EPB, Wujiang's textile sector found it hard to comply with the environmental standards of the NMCEP programme, and the city also realized the economic losses from phasing out the polluting firms. Zhangjiagang and Kunshan were not so closely tied to such polluting industries.
In addition, late joiners like Wujiang and Taicang inevitably experienced a certain degree of unfairness. The assessment criteria of NMCEP, as suggested above, were actually developed with reference to Zhangjiagang's conditions after the visit of the then SEPA director in 1996. Over the years, the benchmarks were revised, and made higher and more restrictive. Increasingly, aspiring or late-joining cities perceive that they are discriminated against as a result of the application of more stringent standards, while the earlier model cities are sometimes exempted from reassessment.
For Wujiang, this posed challenges in 2008 as the city faced re-examination from the MEP team. The reassessment exercise seemed particularly troubling to Wujiang as it was the first city in Suzhou municipality to experience SEPA's new benchmarking scheme promulgated in September 2006. This was complicated by the fact that Wujiang was still dealing with the environmental implications of incidents of serious textile-industry-induced water pollution in early 2008, which themselves followed the blue-green algae bloom in Lake Tai in 2007.Footnote 36 These pollution episodes could have disqualified the city from maintaining its model city status since one of the three basic requirements of the NMCEP programme is non-occurrence of any major environmental accident for three consecutive years. The revised benchmarks for the National Ecological City programme in 2007 presented financial and manpower challenges even to the resourceful Zhangjiagang EPB.Footnote 37
However, as Wujiang's leaders would be shamed if the city was deprived of model city status, interviewees suggested to us that Wujiang's EPB and the local government were making every effort to ensure that the reassessment exercise from the MEP would be smooth, with negotiation between Wujiang, the provincial EPB and MEP about the possibilities of a lenient handling of Wujiang's case.
Roles of the Provincial Government and Shanghai
The Jiangsu provincial government decided in a 2002 working committee on environmental protection that two model city groups in Wuxi and Zhenjiang and an additional 27 model cities had to be established by 2004 and 2005 respectively.Footnote 38 But the provincial chuangmo instruction does not seem to have been implemented successfully. The two model city groups did not become visible or known to the public until 2005 when Changzhou and its two county levels cities became NMCEPs. By 2008, Jiangsu still contained only 18 model cities and a number of others at various stages of chuangmo. A recent meeting of the mayors of NMCEPs in Nanjing has not given rise to any action-plans about the future of the NMCEP programme in Jiangsu and the country.Footnote 39 The programme was temporarily halted as a result of a province-wide suspension of chuangmo activities in 2007.
The decision was made for several reasons. A provincial EPB official suggested to us that the Lake Tai incident in 2007 had aroused scepticism within the provincial government that the model city campaign necessarily provided safeguards for good environmental performance, and officials decided that its policy relevance ought to be reviewed. Moreover, the updating of the NMCEP standards was ongoing, in response to the newly defined emphasis on environmental protection in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan and at the 17th Party Congress in 2007. Emphasis on the NMCEP programme, it was argued, was becoming outdated, and the focus should shift away from the narrowly conceived pollution-control benchmarking to the much broader conception of “ecological construction” (shengtai jianshe 生态建设), as exemplified by the recent National Ecological City initiative.
But the continuing significance of NMCEP as the most full-fledged and well-established environmental programme in China cannot be underestimated. In fact, many cities at various stages of chuangmo have indicated their strong support for retaining the programme. They argue that model city building, as demonstrated by the successful experiences of the many model cities, is a successful “handle” (zhuashou 抓手) to enhance both governmental and public awareness of environmental protection, therefore conferring on the local EPBs a heightened level of official and public support and legitimacy in performing their work. After a heated debate in regard to the relevance of this local environmental initiative, chuangmo regained its momentum in 2008; various cities have also resumed their NMCEP campaigns.
Suzhou is close to Shanghai, and we have tried to assess the possible influence of Shanghai on environmental policy in the cities of nearby Jiangsu. But our interviews with Suzhou officials did not reveal any notable influence, and Shanghai's contribution to the pro-environmental efforts in nearby districts appears to be largely indirect. The Jiangsu provincial EPB and Shanghai EPB hold regular meetings every year and maintain frequent technical and information exchanges. However, Shanghai has not been enthusiastic in promoting model city efforts and does not seem to conceive of model city status as a means to attract the desired types of industries and firms, even though the city has expended considerable effort on industrial upgrading and restructuring towards the tertiary service economy. Shanghai maintained active collaboration with the provincial environmental authority in Nanjing, but co-operation across different levels of governance, such as between Shanghai and a nearby county-level city, is limited. County-level cities like Zhangjiagang, Kunshan and Wujiang do not have the economic preponderance which Shanghai enjoys, and have to distinguish themselves from other cities in order to compete for investment and capital. One strategy they chose was to focus on environmental protection as an aspect of governance which Shanghai has not prioritized. This emphasis stimulated local leaders' commitment to the environmental agenda, pursuing policies that showcase how local governments could contribute to both economic growth and environmental protection and thus help to fulfil the programmes and goals of the central government.
The Future of the Environmental State in Local China
The pro-environmental strategy pursued by local governments, as described in this study, resonates with the larger literature concerning the role of local state interventionism in China. Jean Oi noted that local state corporatism constitutes an effective economic driver, through selective targeting of enterprises or sectors favourable to and consistent with local political and economic needs.Footnote 40 Similarly, Zheng Yongnian contended that “economic localism” is accompanied by competition between localities, which can be as important as the central government's co-ordination efforts.Footnote 41 The case presented in this study supports these analyses and extends their relevance to the environmental “statecraft” now available to local states.
As our study reveals, interaction between cities is competitive, though this is seldom acknowledged publicly, and involves both economic development and local leaders' intangible reputational stakes. Competition is particularly evident in the late-joining model cities in the Suzhou group (Wujiang and Taicang) in their attempts to distinguish themselves from the earlier model cities in the group (Zhangjiagang and Kunshan) in order to attract investment and promote economic sector upgrading. Though the material gains may not be easily attributable to a particular policy such as NMCEP, the perception of local leaders and provincial officials about the policy's implications seems to be changing. Officials whom we interviewed refer to model-city status as both a significant attainment of local governments in environmental protection and as a contributing factor to local socio-economic development. In fact, it is recognized by a number of these EPB officials that the attainment of NMCEP status has not only helped promote the public profile of the city (and indirectly attract capital investment), but the chuangmo campaign has also been an important catalyst promoting co-operation between the local EPB and other bureaucratic agencies, mobilizing public support for the work of the EPB and enhancing its legitimacy and authority.
The successful experience of the early adopters of the NMCEP programme has also encouraged less developed regions in the province to accelerate their environmental work. Officials in Huai'an 淮安 in north Jiangsu, for example, admitted to us that the lessons of the earlier model cities have contributed to their understanding about how environmental protection could actually be used to enhance economic development, leading them to the once radical and now salutary conclusion that economic development and environmental protection are not after all incompatible. Environmental innovation at the local level, in that sense, expands the repertoire of policy instruments available to local developmental states in their quest for further economic development. In the county-level cities we studied, the green initiatives of the local governments were orchestrated as part of a larger effort of leveraging high value-added growth and phasing out unproductive enterprises.
While the case of Suzhou municipality might only be illustrative, it does offer some clues about the future of environmental governance in China, especially at the local level. Pessimistic diagnosis of local environmental governance may be valid in many local contexts. Yet the cases of Suzhou municipality have suggested that competition for economic gain does not necessarily lead to a vicious cycle of environmental degradation. On the contrary, at least for the cases we have examined, the incentive to achieve growth also facilitates industrial restructuring and upgrading and the accompanying improvement in environmental quality, and hence flight to the regulatory bottom is not the unavoidable outcome.
These case studies also challenge an enduring conception about governance in China: that local environmental policy is driven by governments of the higher echelons, with local governments, whose frequent non-conformity with central government environmental regulation and edicts is well-known, resistant and unco-operative. As our study has suggested, this perspective belies the diversity of local environmental performance, and fails to account for the local origin of environmental innovation which in some cases has been taken up by the central government. The exemplary effects of Zhangjiagang and Kunshan, and the recognition bestowed on them by the central and provincial governments, have laid the basis of the NMCEP and other incentive programmes, and served eventually as catalysts bringing emulative responses that may sow the seeds for broader environmental activism in local China.
Finally, as the study of Suzhou municipality suggested, local initiatives such as NMCEP or the National Ecological City will find popularity when local leaders are able to exploit the potential of these schemes to benefit their economies. In other words, the corporatist nature of local China has persisted, and finds new expression in the environmental arena.
