Inducements have been offered — in a “delicate” way, Ma said — by those convinced the Web site is an elaborate shakedown.
“It is the traditional Chinese way of doing things,” said Ma, who says he has never taken a bribe.
Ma was born in Qingdao. He grew up in Beijing, where his father, an aerospace engineer, encouraged him to learn English from one of the first foreign-language radio programs.
He studied English and journalism at university before becoming an assistant in the South China Morning Post’s Beijing bureau.
Traveling with the paper’s correspondents, he witnessed the toll China’s economic boom was taking, prompting the research that developed into his 1999 book.
The discord between the idealized versions of the country’s natural richness that fill Chinese literature and the brutal scarring of the landscape Ma saw inspired the groundbreaking study.
“It was an astonishing book. China’s equivalent of Silent Spring,” said Mark O’Neill, a colleague during the 1990s, refering to the 1962 book by Rachel Carson credited with helping launch the environmental movement in the US.
O’Neill said Ma’s calm approach was crucial to the NGO’s success.
“He has made the maximum use of the space, but without getting himself arrested or getting locked up. This takes great intelligence and savvy,” O’Neill said.
Most of the companies the Web site pinpoints are Chinese, but multinationals with operations in China have also been named.
Ma hopes the Web site will challenge the argument, repeated by big firms, that the complexity of modern supply chains prevents proper monitoring.
“From now on you cannot say ‘I do not know’,” said Ma, who runs IPE out of a small Beijing apartment.
US giant General Electric has used the site to check suppliers, and said it could help find new customers.
“I think it could be an opportunity where we may be able to use some of our technology to help turn around a factory,” said Albert Xie, head of GE’s Ecomagination project in China, which develops environmentally friendly opportunities.
Last summer, Ma’s NGO launched the Green Choice Alliance Program where corporations commit not to take goods from suppliers who flout environmental regulations.
The aim is to give a competitive advantage when selling goods and stop firms having to obsess about low costs.
“If they only care about quality and pricing and nothing else, you push [suppliers] to cut corners,” he said.
Multinationals are crucial to any genuine progress, Ma said.
Former Wal-Mart chief executive officer Lee Scott said in Beijing last year the firm would require suppliers to ensure the factories they buy from receive the highest ratings in audits of environmental and social practices by 2012.
“That is the game-changer,” Ma said.
“If you are below legal discharge standards you are out of the game,” Ma said.
Ma is realistic about the challenge of cleaning up pollution — “We still haven’t seen the turning point,” he said — but he believes there is a genuine desire for improvement.
“At the time I wrote my book, it was not just officials, many ordinary people believed we needed to get rich before we deal with our environmental problems,” he said.
“Recently, things have changed,” he said, adding a database like his would have been “unimaginable” only eight years ago.
“[Foreigners] are observers, they want to see things changing faster. But to us, we are part of it. We need to make sure this thing does not sink into chaos,” he said.
RSS