Left Flank

Beijing's striving for wealth and prosperity is not good for the world's environment.

The main obstacle is not Beijing's refusal to take green issues seriously. It's that the central government has essentially lost the ability to control its provinces and regulate its markets. Since the 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping declared that «To get rich is glorious,» China has granted its provinces a large measure of autonomy to pursue that goal. State-owned enterprises have been sold off, markets deregulated, and local officials given wide leeway to stimulate their regional economies. Today, provincial officials rely on tax revenue (or even bribes) from local companies, and they sometimes own or have a personal stake in the businesses they oversee. But the same decentralized set-up that helped produce China's extraordinary economic growth has now made it difficult for Beijing to enforce rules issued from on high.

In the United States, state and federal agencies work together to enforce environmental laws. In China, however, provincial officials tend to focus on protecting their industries, and local regulatory agencies are on the payroll of the provinces, rather than the national government. Local officials determine matters like how emissions credits are doled out, often without clear rules from above. Many of the regulatory agencies, meanwhile, are bare-bones operations, especially inland. «You might have only three regulators for an area the size of Idaho,» says Charles McElwee, an environmental lawyer based in Shanghai. «There could be factories going up that they're not even aware of.» (All told, China's national environmental ministry has a few hundred employees, compared with more than 18,000 for the U.S. EPA.) As a result, green laws are rarely followed. One recent survey of 509 cities, for instance, found that 77 percent of sewage went untreated, as polluters simply ignored China's clean-water laws.

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Even so, the international community would be wise to follow the lead of these nonprofits. Right now, governments spend a lot of time imploring Beijing to take steps to curb its pollution. They might get further, however, by helping the central government implement the laws it's already passed. Finamore points out, for instance, that if China enforced all the building codes it has on the books, it could cut its energy use dramatically. NRDC is training Chinese building inspectors, who often don't understand the codes, and helping set up independent certifiers to act as watchdogs. But too many international green groups, Wen notes, avoid this hands-on approach, instead staying in Beijing, writing papers and trying to influence national policy. Nor have governments really stepped in on a local level, either. In 2005, Beijing invited officials from California to persuade Jiangsu's provincial government that it could save money by conserving energy rather than by building new coal-fired plants. Since then, other provinces have expressed interest in similar partnerships, yet Congress has given such efforts only sporadic attention.

Offering technical advice on, say, energy efficiency may sound perversely trivial in the face of the runaway destruction of the Chinese landscape. But, for now, steps like these may be the best remedy China could receive for its ailing environment--at least until the Chinese public begins demanding greener growth and even more robust protection.

That government should get out of the way so laypeople can be rich and free is almost a plea, a sentiment South Koreans also have. Yet, when buildings crumble and crime goes unpunished laypeople often blame the government first. Yet with vested interests paying their way into the pockets of the regulators, asking for a fair umpire is a sisyphean task.