China’s environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, are as well known as its spectacular economic growth in the past decades. Alongside increasing concern about environmental degradation, a rich academic literature on Chinese environmental governance has emerged since the 1980s. The environmental issues have become an important window to approach some topics in conventional political science research, including bureaucratic politics, contentious politics, state–society relations, and authoritarian resilience. Yanzhong Huang’s new book, Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State, represents one of the most comprehensive recent pieces of research on China’s environmental governance.
This book differs from existing studies in two important ways. First, it adopts an environmental health perspective to examine the magnitude, outcome, and impact of environmental degradation in China. Environmental health problems are defined as “health effects caused by toxic substances in people’s immediate or proximate surroundings” (p. 2). Toxic Politics posits that these problems, such as air pollution, water pollution, and soil contamination, pose a serious and sustained threat to the health and well-being of Chinese people. Despite that, the Chinese state has largely failed to recognize and handle environmental problems from an environmental health perspective. This book, by explicitly connecting environmental degradation to public health issues, effectively demonstrates the political imperative and motivation of government response to the environmental crisis in China. In doing so, it makes clear the growing public dissatisfaction and unrest related to environmental issues in China. Using an environmental health perspective, the book also naturally connects the discussion of China’s environmental crisis to the theoretical debate on authoritarian resilience and solves the puzzle of why a persistent and powerful authoritarian regime like China would care about and act relentlessly to address environmental pollution.
The second distinctive feature of Toxic Politics is that it emphasizes the international dimension of the Chinese environmental crisis and governance. Unlike government policy, environmental pollution does not stop at national boundaries. It is not new for environmental studies to draw on international comparisons and to emphasize international cooperation and coordination. But this book is quite insightful in linking the centralized policy making and enhanced enforcement of environmental protection under Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader since 2012, to China’s increasing desire to position itself as a global standard-bearer and pacesetter on international issues including renewable energy, climate change, and sustainable development. The trends of domestic centralized power and international ascendance in Xi’s China have been documented separately in studies of Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy, but Huang establishes a convincing linkage between them in the discussion of China’s environmental governance. Such a linkage not only sheds lights on the increased credibility of the Chinese central government’s commitment to environmental protection since 2013 but also illuminates the challenge China faces from its problematic domestic policy implementation in fulfilling international promises and pursuing global leadership. The nexus between domestic politics and foreign policy is thus highlighted, generating important implications for the viability of the China model.
Toxic Politics focuses on the government response to environmental health problems in China. In terms of policy making, the book shows that a legal and institutional framework for environmental protection, beginning in 1979, has developed through the rapid promulgation of laws, policies, and regulations on environmental issues. Coupled with the proliferation of laws and regulations is growth in the size, capacity, and status of China’s environmental bureaucracy since 1998, when the State Environmental Protection Agency was set up as a ministry-level bureau. Notably, Huang describes a new policy framework built under Xi Jinping governing environmental health issues, indicating Xi’s willingness to defuse public demands for better environmental health. By demonstrating an “environment-in-all” approach in official governance ideology, one that “seeks to integrate environmental considerations into the economy, politics, culture, and society” (p. 108), Huang argues that Xi has brought about an important change in the Chinese Community Party’s ideological foundations that has had profound and positive implications for environmental health in China. Nonetheless, he also points out that “air, water and soil pollution in China still is framed primarily as an environmental rather than a health problem” (p. 113). One of the reasons for this is the strong development-first mentality in the Chinese policy community. GDP growth remains the centerpiece of China’s policy agenda, and government officials continue to pursue rapid economic development. Because efforts to combat pollution, at least in the short run, undercut efforts to sustain GDP growth, China will continue to confront the profound quandary between economic growth and environmental protection.
Xi Jinping’s commitment to pollution control is also undercut by the gaps and deficiencies in policy making and by the perverse bureaucratic incentives created in the implementation stage. According to Huang, the implementation of environmental protection policy in China before Xi Jinping suffered from two intrinsic problems: insufficient authority and a lack of coordination. Both are attributed to the “fragmented authoritarianism” in post-Mao China (Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, 1998, Policy Making in China): Chinese policy making is strongly influenced by bargaining among competing bureaucratic agencies, such as central ministries and local governments charged with enforcing policy. Under this “fragmented authoritarianism,” little change was possible without strong personal intervention by central government leaders. Given Xi’s centralized power and stronger commitment to environmental protection, ambitious political leaders jumped onto Xi’s policy bandwagon, expressing their support for environmental protection while declaring their loyalty to him. At the same time, policy paralysis in enforcing pollution control became particularly common at the grassroots level because of the inaction of local government officials. The grassroots-level governments have neither enforcement powers nor sufficient human and financial resources to fulfill their increasing responsibilities designated by upper-level government authorities, who have strong incentives to pass the buck to the lower levels. This results in the phenomenon of cengceng jiama: imposing additional targets and requirements at every lower administrative level in China’s pollution control. To mitigate policy implementation problems, a set of new policy instruments and mechanisms were introduced under Xi’s leadership, such as central environmental protection inspection, campaign-style enforcement, and regional environmental supervision bureaus.
Yet, many of the inherent policy implementation problems, such as upward accountability and lack of public participation, have been left untouched in China’s environmental governance. Huang assesses policy effectiveness in China’s pollution control using a procedural approach that “focuses on investigating whether a policy is pursued in ways consistent with the procedures called for” (p. 157). An analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data shows that the stricter and more centralized policy enforcement measures introduced by Xi Jinping have not produced truly significant and substantial reductions in pollution. The mixed performance record suggests that the environmental crisis is likely to require profound political changes beyond routine policy making and implementation. The book thus concludes that, without anchoring its rule in solid public approval that places less emphasis on performance and more on the rule of law, and without enlarged institutionalized public participation in the policy process, the environmental crisis will continue to be one of the biggest obstacles to China’s future economic growth and political stability.
Notwithstanding the incredibly rich discussion of China’s environmental health crisis and government response, Toxic Politics leaves open questions of subnational variation in China’s environmental governance. Most existing studies of policy implementation and local governance in China posit or identify substantial and systematic subnational variation in almost all policy domains. Given the considerable economic disparities and vastly different resource endowments among Chinse localities, the trade-off between GDP growth and environmental protection is likely to play out differently in the incentives of local leaders, which may determine their degree of local compliance and performance in environmental protection. Moreover, given the uneven socioeconomic development among Chinse regions, the public demands and expectation for government response to the environmental health crisis are also likely to vary in meaningful and systematic ways, which might loop back to the political calculation and behavior of local leaders in environmental protection. Thus, local variation in China’s environmental governance deserves more discussion and theorization in the book.
Toxic Politics makes a strong case for why Chinese leaders would make efforts to address environment pollution and what the government response to the environmental health crisis tells us about the resilience of the Chinese authoritarian regime. However, the book does not flesh out how the game of authoritarian politics—largely, the relations or interactions (e.g., concession, cooptation, control) between the leaders and the elites—is reflected in and reshapes the institution and policy frameworks of environmental governance in China. Some powerful stakeholders in the Chinese environment policy-making process, such as a handful of large state-owned enterprises in the energy sector that hold strong political linkages with certain factions within the ruling class, may have substantial influence in both China’s domestic environmental reforms and the Belt and Road Initiative, which has profound environmental implications for other countries. A deeper dive into the network and coalition between political leaders and industry or business elites with an eye to understanding their influence on agenda setting and policy making in the Chinese authoritarian setting might provide a more nuanced view of how the dynamics of authoritarian politics shapes environmental regulations and institutions.
