Problems of polluted water, land, and air are crucial to China’s leaders and environmental rights defenders alike. Both feel they have the nation’s best interests at heart in addressing them. President Hu Jintao’s theories of “scientific development” and “harmonious society” converge closely in discussions about nature, and his address at the party congress this past October was peppered with references to “sustainable development” and the environment. Meanwhile, Chinese who strive to protect the environment are observing with alarm their country’s ecological decline. And like activists elsewhere, they are motivated by universal values—that individuals have the right to drink clean water, breathe unpolluted air, and live and work on land that is being protected.
 

     The current Chinese leadership appears mindful of environmental issues and citizens’ views on them, at least compared to their predecessors. Besides Hu’s public utterances, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has won praise for his high-profile support of environmental protection. The head of the State Environmental Protection Agency, Pan Yue, who took over the post after toxic benzene contaminated the Songhua River in northeastern China in 2005, has said that public participation is needed to tackle environmental problems. So on the surface, Chinese leaders seem to encourage a more politically open dialogue on the topic.

     But nature and public health are still readily sacrificed in favor of blistering economic development. At the party congress, Hu also laid out ambitions to quadruple per capita GDP goals (set in 2000) by the year 2020, which will take a huge ecological toll even under the most protective conditions. While China’s economy booms, the numbers of citizens and protests emerging in defense of the environment swell right alongside it. The government’s own statistics show that water or air pollution factors into as many as half of the country’s “mass incidents,” a gauge of popular dissent. Weighing the costs of ecological damage and, no doubt, greater social unrest, the Ministry of Public Security ranks pollution among the top threats to China’s peace and stability.

What They Fight For

     China’s path of development makes environmental rights advocacy a life-and-death issue. Modern industrialization has been fueled by burning coal, the use and discharge of dangerous chemicals, and massive development projects that leave toxic fallout in their wake. The resultant pollution has taken the lives of countless numbers of Chinese who have succumbed to cancer and other fatal diseases. The major cause of death in China is heart disease linked directly to air pollution. This all means that environmental rights defenders are engaged in a dual battle for the environment and public health.
 

     Plans for dam construction and dam sites themselves have become magnets for rights activism. This comes with historical rationale; China has experienced several disastrous floods following dam and levy collapses, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced. Besides flooding, environmental damage from dams is felt sharply through the practice of dynamiting and the contamination of air and water supplies with hazardous materials that are discarded and discharged during construction. Today, more than half of the world’s large-scale dam projects are in China, reflecting the ambitious quest to power the country’s economy. Often led by some of the poorest and most vulnerable Chinese citizens, extended and occasionally violent protests have broken out over the erection of dams.

     Among China’s development projects, the massive Three Gorges Dam, which is slated for completion in 2009, has been the main target of citizen unrest. No matter how fierce their opposition, most people affected have submitted to relocation. Chinese officials are unwilling to talk much about rights in this case. To the contrary, the value of the Three Gorges Dam project to social stability can be seen by a number of detentions, arrests, and prison sentences given out to some who have protested it. Officials have been more pliant in dealing with citizen unrest over other dam projects. For example, plans for a series of dams along the Nu River in Yunnan Province were scrapped in 2004 after a vast contingent of local community members and environmental activists, including several Chinese and foreign NGOs, fought the project on environmental grounds. Wen Jiabao’s intervention to help suspend the project received a great deal of extensive publicity, but the government line seemed as concerned about stomping out the controversy as protecting the environment.
 

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