In China, where dissent is often brutally suppressed, publicly shaming powerful corporations for destroying the environment is fraught with risk. Ma Jun (馬軍) treads carefully.
The author of China’s Water Crisis, a savage catalogue of the country’s environmental collapse, Ma now takes the fight to polluters, shaming factories on a Web site run by his non-governmental organization the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE).
And working out how far a small campaign group can push businesses — and the officials who back them — has become his specialty.
“There is a space there, but there is a line as well. The key is to understand both,” the soft-spoken 40-year-old said.
“This is the Chinese condition. This is a country that has been ruled in a top-down way for thousands of years. Now you want to do things in a different way? We have to have some patience,” he said.
There is no doubting the severity of China’s environmental crisis.
Centuries of slashing forests, diverting rivers and expanding agriculture were compounded by the arrival of the world’s most polluting industries during the economic boom of the last 30 years.
More than 60 percent of China’s rivers and lakes are now dangerously contaminated, official figures show. The desert is spreading from the north and the World Bank says 20 of the world’s 30 filthiest cities are in China.
China’s Minister of Environmental Protection Zhou Shengxian (周生賢) has said there were more than 50,000 public disturbances linked to pollution in 2005, state media reported, the last year any figures were released.
Despite the groundswell of anger, Ma is adamant any environmental progress must be measured.
“We want to see change, but we also want to see that this does not sink China into total chaos,” he said.
The World Bank estimates the cost of air and water pollution is about 5.8 percent of the country’s GDP, prompting new central government policies.
Tougher rhetoric has been followed by stringent targets, major clean-ups and reforestation programs.
There is also increased tolerance of critical media coverage of environmental issues and a wary acceptance of small-scale international and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
But enforcement remains woefully lax, and Ma — who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 — hopes public scrutiny can pressure polluters to clean up, as it has in the US.
“Public participation is the key to dealing with our environmental problems,” said Ma, who studied at Yale University in 2004. “The pre-condition for any meaningful participation should be to allow those who are affected to have access to the information.”
Using government statistics the IPE has created a map highlighting 30,000 violators of air and water regulations. Firms can only be removed after a third-party audit.
While Ma uses only government-approved data, his approach has still provoked angry responses from businessmen and occasionally from local officials.
“There are some extreme cases when they created a certificate with a chop saying the company is ‘basically OK’ within hours [of being named on the site],” Ma said. “These are awkward moments.”
Ma’s gentle and legalistic approach is crucial.
“When they learn that all the data come from the government, I think many of them feel more at ease,” he said.
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