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From War on Nature to War on Pollution: Continuity and Change in the Chinese Communist Party’s Ecological Agenda

Coraline Goron and Genia Kostka¹

Introduction

A growing body of research has studied environmental management and governance in China, ranging from top-down vs bottom-up measures, to environmental laws and regulations, to the use of policy instruments, to different forms of citizen participation, to China’s model of authoritarian environmentalism. The consensus is that there has been incremental but significant progress to address many of China’s environmental issues. Over the years, China’s environmental bureaucracy has gradually been reformed and strengthened, and top-down signals have now clearly made the environment a high-priority issue. In this discussion, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While there are good reasons for considering the party-state as a single entity (Li and Shapiro 2020), we argue that there is distinct merit in looking at the CCP’s approach to environmental governance, including how it has decided to (not) use the institutions of the Party and the state to govern the environment.

This chapter addresses this gap by examining how the CCP and related structures have shaped environmental management in the Mao era (1949–78), the reform and opening-up era (1978–2013) and the Xi Jinping era (2013– ). How has the CCP exercised its political power over the environment, and how has this shaped the development of China’s environmental governance? Based on analysis of various documents and secondary sources, we examine the CCP’s approach to the environment through the lens of three core vectors of its power: the CCP’s key developmental and environmental concepts and doctrines and its diffusion in society through propaganda; the gradual upgrading of the environmental bureaucracy; and its choice of governance tools, techniques and technologies.

We find that, alongside major changes to the level of attention paid to the environment, the CCP’s approach to environmental governance has also changed. While in the reform and opening-up era, following the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the environment was regarded as a symbol of state modernisation with an emphasis on building regulatory capacity and embracing marketisation, in the Xi era, the CCP has resorted to governing the environmental field directly and has considerably politicised its governance by making it a marker of Xi’s doctrinal contribution to socialism with Chinese characteristics, and a political priority task for Party cadres and local leaders. Since 1949, the Party has relied on ideology and personalised leadership, using doctrine and control over local cadres’ performance and career development as key vectors of power for dealing with challenging environmental crises. However, the modus of implementation has changed over time: in the reform and opening-up era, the party-state experimented with various regulatory and market mechanisms, but in the Xi era, the CCP has taken greater control of environmental issues by increasingly using Party structures and the CCP’s propaganda machine to push through environmental protection measures. The CCP has also increasingly drawn on technology and (albeit to a limited extent) citizen feedback.

The chapter is structured as follows: the next section analyses the evolution of CCP doctrines and propaganda towards the environment from Mao to Xi. The third section looks at the progressive upgrading and politicisation of the environmental bureaucracy. The fourth section summarises a general shift from a defeat of the regulatory environmental state to the resilience of authoritarian environmentalism. The chapter concludes that CCP organs and methods have increasingly been employed in the field of the environment.

From Mao to Xi: Pollution to Ecological Civilisation as the Beacon of Modernisation in the CCP Doctrine

To understand environmental politics and what is shaping the political agenda in China, a focus on ideology and the CCP’s interpretation of key developmental and environmental concepts is important. Although it has retained some key fundamentals, the vision of the environment in the CCP ideology has changed a lot since the Mao era.

The Mao era did not have a very elaborate doctrine regarding the environment, but some key elements of the political discourse epitomised the leaders’, especially Mao’s, attitude towards the environment. As summarised by Liebman (2019), the language of ‘war against nature’ (zhan tian dou di 战天斗地) and seeing chimneys as ‘modernisation’² coexisted with the idea and practice that frugality and waste reutilisation were key socialist virtues; according to Mao, ‘wasting attitudes were as bad as corruption’ (langfei de xinwei he tanwu Yiyang zui’e 浪费的行为和贪污一样罪恶). For instance, Lei Feng, the archetypal ‘good citizen’ who was presented as a model for all to emulate across China, was praised during the Mao era and early reform era for his extreme frugality (Tian 2011). Lei Feng was used to support the ‘mass line ascetism that aimed to incentivize people living in a poor nation forged after decades of war to work hard collectively with minimal resources to create a modern, socialist China’ (Jeffreys and Xuezhong 2016). However, the official line was that industrial pollution and waste were scourges of capitalism and that socialist countries like China were, therefore, immune to them (Chen and Zhou 2015; Zhang 2020).

There was a big shift in the 1970s. The first expressions of a modern Chinese environmental discourse were made at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. At the conference, the Chinese delegation sent by Zhou Enlai promoted two core ideas: global injustice and the imperative of development. There were two sub-components: a claim to a ‘right to pollute’ and a new openness to international cooperation, considered necessary for modernisation. The ‘right to pollute’ was advanced in reaction to the Club of Rome’s influential Limits to Growth report issued in 1972, which exhorted governments to control industrialisation and population growth. China, India and many other developing countries opposed the characterisation of their economic development as a global environmental threat. They demanded and, with the adoption of the ‘sustainable development’ concept in 1992, succeeded in including development in the emerging global environmental agenda (Bernstein 2000). Openness to international cooperation became a key element of China’s environmental discourse, mirroring Deng Xiaoping’s general reform and opening-up doctrine.

Domestically, Zhou Enlai pushed for recognition that socialist China was facing industrial pollution issues (Zhang 2010). Henceforth, the official propaganda portrayed China’s efforts to address environmental problems as exemplary, while Western demands were often portrayed as hypocritical and imperialist (Zhang and Barr 2013). The official discourse boasted that China, unlike the West, would pursue economic development and simultaneously protect the environment. In the 1990s, the official discourse began to reflect the international concept of ‘sustainable development’.

Nonetheless, these earlier environmental discourses and policies were mere lip-service, and the imperative of development and modernisation prevailed until the late 2000s. Environmental protection itself was framed as a development issue. This frame was enshrined in the interim Environmental Protection Law (EPL) in 1979 and the first Central Environmental Policy Document adopted in 1981.³ Another official script unambiguously prioritised economic development over environmental protection. By the mid-1990s, Deng Xiaoping’s maxim of ‘development is the hard truth’ (fazhan cai shi ying daoli 发展才是硬道理) became hegemonic in the Party and in society (Jahiel 1998). Urban but especially rural industrialisation was the order of the day despite rapidly apparent environmental ravages.⁴ The role of markets and governments in environmental protection was absent from the official environmental discourse. The very few dissonant voices that did speak up were repressed. For instance, Bo Hechuan’s China on the Edge: The Crisis of Ecology and Development, which attributed environmental problems to misguided expansionary economic policies, was summarily banned in mainland China (Bo 1992).

The need to update the CCP ideology on economic development and modernisation only began to take hold in the 2000s amid an increase in serious pollution incidents and social protests. The number of petitions registered with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) grew tenfold between 1995 and 2005, and social movements related to environmental claims were rising by 29 per cent every year, to the point that SEPA’s director, Zhou Shengxian, publicly called it a serious threat to social stability.⁵ When Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took office in 2002, their political response to this looming threat to the CCP’s legitimacy (Wang 2013, 2018) was to propose a ‘scientific approach to development concept’ (kexue fazhan guan 科学发展观), which claimed to be people-centred, comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable. By 2004, ideas around ‘scientific development’ generated intense ‘political thought work’ within the Party and the government. Eventually, it was added to the official roots of socialism with Chinese characteristics (i.e. Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’) and was cited as a guiding principle for the fifth strategic document on environmental protection issued by the State Council in 2005. In October 2007, the Seventeenth Party Congress incorporated the concept into the CCP Constitution. At the same congress, Hu Jintao’s work report introduced the objective of building an ecological civilisation.

In the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, Chinese leaders’ official discourse began to focus on maintaining growth while investing more in ‘green growth’. Despite a push to achieve environmental targets in 2010–11, Hu and Wen’s second term ended amid rising environmental unrest and severe criticism that they had failed to transform China’s economic development model (Wang 2018). However, instead of being considered a sub-section of Hu Jintao’s thought, ecological civilisation was elevated to become one of the fundamental missions of the party-state through a revision of the CCP Constitution by the Eighteenth Party Congress in December 2012, which characterised its mission as the ‘Five-in-One’ (wu wei yi ti 五位一体) goal of ‘economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological civilisation construction’. When he took office in 2013, President Xi Jinping insisted even more on linking ecological civilisation to his ‘economic new normal’ advocacy (characterised by slower GDP growth and large-scale industrial transformation). Under his leadership, ecological civilisation became a pillar of the official doctrine of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. In 2018, the doctrine of ecological civilisation was further mainstreamed in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.

To push the ecological civilisation agenda, Xi Jinping became the main original producer of this political discourse, which was disseminated throughout the party-state apparatus and to every corner of Chinese society by CCP propaganda. Unlike his predecessors, who had viewed the environmental crisis as a social and political threat, Xi turned ecological civilisation into a positive narrative associated with the realisation of the ‘Chinese Dream’ (Zhongguo meng 中国梦) and the ‘New Era’ (xin shidai 新时代). Xi’s ecological civilisation claims that environmental problems are solvable and will be solved under the leadership of the CCP (Wang 2018). It also represents a promise that the attainment of the right balance between humans and nature will enable prosperity forever, as captured in Xi’s most-quoted ecological civilisation aphorism: ‘Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets’ (lüshui qingshan jiu shi jinshan yinshan 绿水青山就是金山银山). In line with the historical materialism that characterises the doctrine of socialism with Chinese characteristics (Foster 2017), ecological civilisation has been presented as the next step in the evolution of human civilisation (Ke 2013). This approach enshrines ecological civilisation in the CCP’s teleological modernisation discourse, which is ‘characterised by a normative, prescriptive, and also deterministic connotation of progress’ (Marinelli 2018, 368). The pathway to transformation that this discourse points to relies on ‘top-level design’ (dingceng sheji 顶层设计) and is strictly implemented by the CCP,⁶ whose main task is to correct the attitude and values of local officials and citizens. This vision is captured in the term daobi (倒逼), a synonym for structural coercion,⁷ which environmental leaders have used extensively to express the goal of toppling the dominant logic focused solely on economic growth.⁸

There are clear ideological shifts over time, from little environmental doctrine in the Mao era to ‘right to pollute’ narratives in the early reform and opening-up era to the ideological push for an ecological civilisation in the late reform and opening-up era and early Xi era. However, despite the dramatic ideological shifts in the development of the CCP’s doctrine, there are also several elements of continuity. First, the emphasis on modernisation and development was never undermined. The ecological civilisation discourse is still very much a modernisation discourse (Pan 2016). There is also this very strong continuity in the narrative of history as a continuum, where things are like they are because this is the trend of history that guides the CCP and is the only right path of development. Finally, the portrayal of China against the West has remained prominent, though more pronounced in the Mao and Xi eras. As noted above, the very premises of environmental policy in China in the 1970s were promoted as a way to avoid ‘following the road of Western capitalist countries’. It is interesting to see that this framing is still being used today after years of unchecked economic development and environmental devastation.

Upgrading and Politicisation of the Environmental Bureaucracy

Following the chaotic state-building efforts of the Mao era, the development of an environmental bureaucracy in the state apparatus resembling that of industrialised economies was a major endeavour of the reform era. However, since the 2000s, in parallel with the spread of a greener doctrine and the desire to change the growth-focused political culture of the party-state, the CCP has re-politicised the environmental bureaucracy by intensifying personalised leadership and oversight of local cadres to enable the CCP to exercise control over environmental management.

Bureaucratic Upgrading

It has been a protracted, incremental process to strengthen and upgrade China’s environmental bureaucracy. In the Mao era, there were no dedicated environmental institutions in the government until 1974, when Zhou Enlai set up an informal Environmental Protection Leading Small Group (guowuyuan huanjing baohu lingdao xiaozu 国务院环境保护领导小组) under the State Council. Earlier, the ministries in charge of related matters, such as the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Forestry, had been marginalised in personnel matters and lacked stability as they were frequently reshuffled and disbanded during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. As a result, there was no systematic approach to environmental management until the reform and opening-up era.

It was with the launch of the reform and opening-up era that the CCP started building a specialised regulatory system in the state to handle environmental protection. Step by step, China set up a vertical bureaucratic structure with Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) at provincial, municipal and county levels, independent from other industrial ministries such as the ministries of coal, power and metallurgical industries. Initially, the environmental bureaucracy’s primary task was to monitor industrial pollution, but it had to work within the planned economy system and slowly adapt to its chaotic and uneven dismantlement.

In 1982, the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environmental Protection (URCM 城乡建设环境保护部) was created with an EPB (环保局). However, the EPB occupied a very minor position inside the large URCM. In 1984, the central leadership decided that environmental protection was a ‘basic state policy’ (jiben guoce 基本国策), which led the leading small group to be upgraded into a National Environmental Protection Commission (Guowuyuan huanjing baohu weiyuanhui 国务院环境保护委员会) and the EPB into a State Environmental Protection Bureau (SEPB 国家环境保护局). Importantly, even though it remained formally under the URCM, this change in status allowed the SEPB to receive funds from the Ministry of Finance and begin to establish its own vertical bureaucracy with a provincial and sub-provincial system. By 1988, this project was well underway. Under the impetus of larger governmental reforms supported by General CCP Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the SEPB was upgraded to the better-staffed, higher-ranking (vice-ministerial grade) and independent SEPA under the State Council. Noticeably, SEPA was maintained through the dismantlement and sharp reduction of the state administration serving the planned economy in the 1990s. By 1996, 2,500 local EPBs and 2,223 environmental monitoring stations had been created throughout the country, mostly at the county level, with a total staff of around 88,000 (Jahiel 1998).

This rank and the new identity as a regulatory agency (Zeng et al. 2000) provided more political clout to China’s environmental bureaucrats. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, SEPA and local EPBs, which were often low-ranking, ‘non-indispensable administrations’, remained in a difficult position to supervise the two dominant types of industrial actors in China at the time: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the township and village enterprises (TVEs). On the one hand, SOEs mainly followed orders from their industrial branches, which had their own environmental offices and local leaders with their own developmental priorities (Chang and Wang 2010). On the other hand, local EPBs could not control the rapidly growing number of TVEs. In 1998, the industrial ministries were disbanded and the National Environmental Protection Commission, which had supported dialogue between them and SEPA, was also dismantled. SEPA became the sole authority in charge of environmental pollution and was upgraded to a ministerial rank. While this resolved some fragmentation problems, it also impacted the ability of local EPBs to monitor enterprises. This difficulty was compounded by a lack of funding. For the most part, EPBs relied on the pollution fees they were able to collect from local industries, which made them functionally dependent on continued pollution (Jahiel 1997). Meanwhile, the funds redistributed from the centre were scarce and irregular. It was not until 2007 that SEPA got a fixed budget line in the National Budget (Wu and Ma 2011).

SEPA’s responsibilities remained primarily circumscribed to environmental pollution issues, with nature and resource conservation, sustainable development, energy conservation and climate change largely beyond its reach. In time, this fragmentation led to increasingly severe bureaucratic turf wars. For instance, in the 1980s and 1990s, the industrial ministries implemented energy conservation in their respective domains. Only loose coordination was achieved via a cross-ministerial joint-meeting system for energy conservation from 1985 to 1990, and then by a powerless Energy Conservation Office (节能处). However, this weak organisation excluded TVEs, and it fell apart when the industrial ministries were abolished in the late 1990s. Climate change was also not added to SEPA’s responsibilities. SEPA was only one of the participants in the loose National Climate Change Coordination Group (NCCCG 国家气候变化协调小组) that was set up in 1990 to coordinate China’s participation in international climate negotiations (Zou 2008). In 1998, the office of this group was transferred from the Meteorological Agency to the State Planning and Development Commission and then, in 2003, to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). This move resolutely defined climate change as an economic development issue. In sum, despite the upgrading of the environmental bureaucracy, its mandate remained narrow with limited financial capacity.

In the 2000s, the adoption of the doctrine of Scientific Development and Ecological Civilisation led to major institutional changes. First, in 2008, SEPA was upgraded to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), a full ministerial-level ministry, and became a department of the State Council. Second, the Climate Change Office was upgraded to a department of the NDRC. Third, the National Commission on Climate Change was merged with the newly established Energy Conservation Leading Group into a ‘double-hatted’ National Leading Group on Climate Change, Energy Saving and Emissions Reduction (Guojia yingdui qihoubianhua ji jieneng jianpai gongzuo lingdao xiaozu 国家应对气候变化及节能减排工作领导小组) chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao to resorb the coordination issues derived from the bureaucratic fragmentation, though it never quite succeeded. This group kept enlarging in the subsequent decade and reached 31 members in 2018. Local governments were encouraged to follow suit (Qi et al. 2008).

The latest step in this progressive upgrading and centralising process occurred a decade later, in 2018. Following the inclusion of ecological civilisation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Constitution, the MEP was dismantled and replaced by a revamped and potentially more powerful Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE shengtai huanjing bu 生态环境部). Given greater authority over policies touching on climate change, it was hoped that the new MEE would finally resolve the problems of coordination and fragmentation of authority (Ran 2013; Kostka and Zhang 2018). However, while the MEE appears to have solved some problems, in 2021, the portfolio for climate change, reframed as carbon neutrality, was largely reverted to the NDRC, and coordination with the new Ministry of Natural Resources over nature conservation has remained complicated.

An element of continuity throughout this bureaucratic restructuring and upgrading has been that the environment was considered a specialised, non-political portfolio and a dead-end for promotion in the cadre evaluation and promotion system.⁹ This started to change under the second mandate of Xi’s ecological civilisation era. Some exemplary promotions at the central level after 2013 started to signal to other leading cadres that accepting environmental leadership positions could be career enhancing. For instance, as illustrated in Table A9.1, two recent environmental ministers, former Tsinghua University president Chen Jining (2015–17) and long-term MEP administrator Li Gangjie (2018–20), were rapidly promoted into very important positions: Chen became the mayor of Beijing and Li became vice-secretary and governor of Shandong Province, both very attractive career posts in China.¹⁰ Some evidence at the provincial level further suggests that local environmental bureau leaders have also begun to be promoted to important positions.¹¹ The fact that a career or passage in the environmental bureaucracy is now a promotion pathway signals the elevation of the ecological civilisation agenda, and that the CCP has adjusted its organisation to reward those who help in implementing it.

Recentralisation and Personalised Responsibility

Fragmentation and lack of capacity were key problems in China’s environmental bureaucracy during the reform era. The reason was not only the limited scope but also the influence of local governments over local EPBs. Under Xi Jinping, the introduction of a bureaucratic reform that transferred more powers from local to provincial governments marked an important step to address this problem. In October 2015, the Fifth Plenary Session of the Eighteenth National Congress of the CCP launched a direct management system of municipal EPBs by the provincial EPB (and of county EPBs by municipal EPBs). Before this reform, although guidelines had been sent vertically from superior EPBs, the local government made final decisions, especially on budget and personnel matters. As local leaders often prioritised the economy over the environment, this organisation gave rise to problems of ‘local protectionism’ and lax enforcement of environmental regulations (Kostka and Mol 2013; Lorentzen, Landry and Yasuda 2014). Under the new ‘vertical management’ system, provincial EPBs have acquired the authority to nominate and pay the salaries of the director and vice-director positions of municipal EPBs (and municipal EPBs have the same authority over county-level EPB leaders). In addition, environmental monitoring and inspections, previously the responsibility of municipal and county EPBs, have been brought up to the provincial level (Ma 2017).

However, while the outcomes of this reform were still unclear in 2022, scholars have observed that similar vertical management reforms in the fields of quality and technology supervision and land management had stalled or even reverted to a horizontal-based management system after failing to bring significant improvements in enforcement (Ma 2017). Moreover, the experience of EPB recentralisation pilots in 12 provinces between 2016 and 2020 indicated that, while the reform might have increased their independence from local governments, it also showed pronounced disadvantages. Some observers noted that the pilots became isolated in their localities, as local government officials no longer viewed EPB leaders as ‘their’ agents. This reform has also not addressed the problem of ‘central protectionism’ whereby local regulators face tremendous difficulties in regulating the activities from higher-ranked central-level state-owned enterprises in their jurisdictions (Eaton and Kostka 2017). Importantly, this isolation not only restricted their access to information critical to their regulatory work but also could shrink the promotion opportunities for local EPB staff, making it difficult to attract competent personnel (Ma 2017). Thus, it is unclear whether this reform can solve the longstanding dilemmas faced by the EPB in the complex politics of the local state.

The increasing use of ad hoc working groups and reliance on the personalised responsibility of leading Party cadres at different administrative levels point to the efforts to concentrate environmental management. Xi has appointed his closest collaborators to head critical environmental CCP leading small groups, signalling the importance he places on environmental issues. For instance, upon taking power in 2013, Xi created the Task Force for the Promotion of Economic Development and Ecological Civilisation (Zhongyang jingji tizhi he shengtai wenming tizhi gaige zhuanxiang xiaozu 中央经济体制和生态文明体制改革专项小组),¹² led by Liu He, who was also director of the General Office serving the Communist Party’s Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs and a close adviser to Xi. In 2019, this task force was seemingly replaced by a more important Central Ecological Environmental Protection Supervision Work Leading Group (Zhongyang shengtai huanjing baohu jiandu gongzuo lingdao xiaozu 中央生态环境保护督察工作领导小组), which was entrusted to CCP Central Committee Politburo Standing Committee Member and Vice Premier Han Zheng. Local Party committees were encouraged to follow suit to strengthen their supervision over the ecological and environmental protection work of lower Party committees and governments and their relevant departments.¹³ In 2021, following the announcement of the Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality goals, a Leading Group on Carbon Peaking and Neutrality (Tan dafeng zhonghe gongzuo lingdao xiaozu 碳达峰中和工作领导小组) was established jointly by the Party Central Committee and the State Council, also chaired by Han Zheng, which may replace the State Council National Leading Group on Climate Change, Energy Saving and Emissions Reduction and upgrade it by placing it under the CCP Central Committee rather than the State Council. The increasing reliance on ad hoc working groups under Xi, which has been observed in other sectors as well, may have allowed the CCP to shift its environmental priorities (from pollution to climate change) but may also signal the persistent weakness of the MEE.

Perhaps the most typical illustration of how the CCP has used personalised leadership (by which responsibility for environmental issues is nominally assigned to individual local leaders, rather than specialised departments) is the new River Leader system (hezhang zhi 河长制) deployed across the country during the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (FYP) (2016–20). In December 2016, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council established a four-level River Leader system (provinces, cities, counties and townships),¹⁴ which was enshrined as the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law in June 2017. Building on decades of experimentation, the system requires that the responsibility for all the lakes and rivers in any given jurisdiction must be individually assigned to the leaders of its Party committee or government, who, through their cadre rank, concentrate decision-making power in their jurisdiction. These River Leaders sign dedicated responsibility contracts that make them responsible for achieving specific goals related to the quality of rivers and lakes. They are expected to deploy their political authority to mobilise resources, organise relevant departments and supervise the River Leaders at the administrative level directly below them (Chien and Hong 2018). Their performance is evaluated based on detailed criteria put in the responsibility contracts, and incentivised by financial bonuses as well as severe penalties, including a lifelong political (and penal) responsibility for any damage caused to the ecological environment of the river or lake during their mandate.¹⁵ Figure 9.1 summarises a typical River Leader coordinating system for river and lake governance.

This system aims specifically at breaking the bureaucratic and jurisdictional fragmentation that has plagued transboundary water basins in China. However, many observers have highlighted its shortcomings, including the (notorious) defects of the top-down and non-transparent cadre evaluation system, compounded by a lack of public participation, despite the institution of so-called Civilian or Folk River Leaders (Wu et al. 2020).

Figure 9.1: The River Leader System Coordinating River and Lake Governance.

Source: Author’s research.

The Emergence of Authoritarian Environmentalism and Retreat of Participatory Governance

The choice of environmental governance tools and instruments has mostly followed the dominant ideological and institutional setup of the particular era. Whereas the Mao era relied on campaigns, the reform and opening-up era promoted the use of regulatory, market-based and participatory governance approaches, even though planning was always important. By contrast, under Xi Jinping, the use of command-and-control instruments such as planning, campaigns and crackdowns has been given renewed impetus as a means to achieve rapid and tangible results. While official central documents present the combination of top-down control supported by innovative data technologies and public supervision as the model of China’s ‘modern environmental governance’,¹⁶ critics have denounced an emerging authoritarian model that is inefficient, socially costly and detrimental to civil liberties (Li and Shapiro 2020).

Environmental Campaigns and Attempted Policy Interventions in the Mao Era

During most of the Mao era, the main vector of party-state action in society was campaigns and mass mobilisation, such as the 1952 ‘Patriotic Health Movement’ (aiguo weisheng yundong 爱国卫生运动), which campaigned for the removal of garbage and the building and rebuilding of public toilets and water wells. Some of these campaigns are infamous for their severe repercussions on nature, and others directly targeted environment-related projects. An example of a campaign with severe repercussions is the campaign to eliminate the four pests (chu si hai yundong 除四害运动): rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Examples of specific environment-related projects include the large-scale ‘greening the motherland’ (lühua zuguo 绿化祖国) tree-planting campaign in 1956, for which Mao enlisted the country, especially the youth, as well as the massive deforestation campaigns during the Great Leap Forward (1958–62). During the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), projects and campaigns affecting the environment were driven less by utopianism than by the coercion and chaos from erratic class struggle mass mobilisation campaigns.

Shortly after the PRC was established, the new ministries in charge of forestry and health started introducing some preliminary environmental guidelines. For instance, in 1951, the Ministry of Forest Reclamation issued the first Interim Regulations on Forest Protection, and the first nature reserve, the Dinghushan Nature Reserve, was established in 1956. In 1963–65, new forest protection policies were issued, and more natural reserves were created in an attempt to reverse the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. Similarly, in the 1950s, the Ministry of Health introduced the first policy mandating the comprehensive utilisation of industrial waste, management of the ‘three wastes’ (san fei 三废) – gas exhaust, water sewage and waste residues – and, particularly, management of the toxic effluents from industrial and mining enterprises. A national Conference on Industrial Wastewater Treatment and Comprehensive Utilisation of Wastewater held in late 1959 further emphasised the prevention of industrial harm and flagged the ‘three simultaneous’ (san tongshi 三同时) concept requiring that new projects install facilities to prevent and control pollution and other hazards at the same time as the main project.

Most environmental regulation efforts stalled when the state collapsed during the Cultural Revolution. They only resurfaced when the country emerged from chaos in the early 1970s. The first National Environmental Protection Conference convened by Zhou Enlai in 1972 proclaimed a landmark ‘32-Character Environmental Policy Order’ that paved the way for the adoption of a series of environmental regulations, including the first environmental document of the State Council on the Provisions on Protecting and Improving Environment and the industrial ‘three wastes’ emissions standards, jointly issued by the State Planning Commission, State Capital Construction Commission and Ministry of Health. These new provisions and standards helped to lay the groundwork for the inclusion of environmental protection rules and environmental harm prevention principles in the PRC Constitution in 1978 and the adoption of the interim EPL in 1979.

Modernising Environmental Governance in the Reform Era: Promotion of the Law, Markets and Civil Society Participation

In the reform era, the newly established environmental regulators pursued significant changes to environmental governance, from issuing comprehensive environmental plans, regulations and laws to introducing market-based instruments. During this period, civil society participation was also relatively welcome in the environmental field, which encouraged the growth of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) and new public participation channels, although environmental awareness remained low.

In the early period of opening up, environmental administrators relied mainly on traditional planning instruments by introducing environmental plans. The first 10-year plan for environmental protection was produced by the State Council’s Environmental Protection Leading Group in 1975 for the Fifth FYP (1976–80). This plan promoted the overall goal of ‘controlling environmental pollution within five years and solving environmental pollution within 10 years’. In 1982, environmental protection was, for the first time, included as an independent chapter in China’s Sixth FYP (1981–85), which set the goals of preventing new pollution, treating pollution from old enterprises, improving the ‘three wastes’ treatment capacity, and strengthening legislation and law enforcement. The Seventh FYP (1986–90) included an independent five-year environmental protection plan focused on urban pollution, industrial pollution and environmental capacity constraints.

In parallel, there was a build-up of regulatory and legal tools to implement environmental plans and policies. Inspired by foreign legislation and written in cooperation with international partners, the legal and regulatory corpus for environmental protection developed rapidly. In 1993, an Environment Protection and Resources Conservation Committee was established in the National People’s Congress, and Qu Geping was appointed to chair it. Both he and Xie Zhenhua, who was trained as a lawyer and had replaced him as chair of SEPB in 1988, strongly advocated environmental legislation. These efforts led China to sign more than 30 multilateral environmental agreements to catch up with the adoption of environmental standards and regulations before and after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (Jahiel 2006). However, these laws were more often a list of general principles rather than precise rights and obligations (Wang, He and Fan 2014). Moreover, the institutional basis for enforcing these laws was weak.¹⁷ Penalties were often insignificant and violators could hardly be sued for damage in court (Stern 2013). Enforcement relied on the EPBs, but their ability to enforce environmental regulations and deter polluters was very limited.

In the 2000s, learning from its counterparts in Western countries, the Chinese environmental bureaucracy sought to expand its capacity by outsourcing environmental protection services to third-party organisations. This was most notably the case with the environmental impact assessment (EIA) agencies, which had to be remunerated for delivering the certificates required to approve industry projects. Unsurprisingly, however, these agencies rapidly turned into a hub for corruption and malpractice.¹⁸ To address this, between 2005 and 2007, the MEP cancelled numerous projects that had been approved without valid EIAs. However, the problems persisted, and many instances of corruption were uncovered during the Anti-Corruption Campaign launched by Xi Jinping in 2014–15.¹⁹

In the 2000s, influenced by international partners and development agencies such as the World Bank, SEPA introduced several market economy instruments and market-based approaches to alleviate the lack of budget, leading Carter and Mol (2006) to praise a convergence with OECD practices and a ‘shift away from a rigid hierarchical command-and-control system of governance’. For instance, during the Tenth FYP, with foreign assistance from the United States and the OECD, there was experimentation with emissions trading to reduce SO₂ emissions. However, they did not yield good results. In a still poor legal environment with a lack of independent third-party regulators, it turned out to be impossible to organise a system based on companies’ self-reporting and voluntary trading. Moreover, there were no markets or price-based systems on which the economic incentives underlying compliance with such a system could operate. One of the experts sent by the OECD to assist with the project strongly criticised the advocates of market-based policy instruments who had ‘written their prescriptions without first doing a physical examination of the patient’ and had ‘first recommended environmental instruments and secondarily tried to bend institutions to support the already identified cure’ (Bell 2003). During this period, the MEP further experimented with ‘green GDP’ accounting and various environmental tax schemes.

Notwithstanding the failure of SO₂ emissions trading pilots, the idea that ‘command-and-control’ policies were inefficient and that the market had to ‘play a bigger role in resource allocation’ gained traction within the NDRC, which was tasked with tackling climate change.²⁰ Following the successful introduction of renewable energy projects in China through the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘clean development mechanism’, foreign and domestic policy advocates successfully pushed for the introduction of a carbon emission trading scheme as the principal policy instrument to mitigate climate change. From 2011 onwards, emissions trading became a significant symbol of China’s openness to international cooperation, featuring prominently in China’s joint declarations with the US and the EU (Biedenkopf, Van Eynde and Walker 2017). At the same time, the carbon emissions trading pilots served China’s ambition to be seen as a global rule-maker, even though their implementation was fraught with difficulties and their impact on domestic carbon emissions reduction was limited (Goron and Cassisa 2017). The official narrative around the need to use the market instead of commands has regained momentum with the commitment of Xi Jinping to develop a national emissions trading scheme and with the pressure to use market-based mechanisms in many other environmental sub-fields, including energy and water uses, as a more cost-effective alternative to using blunt-force enforcement of environmental targets.

Another important development of the 2000s was the unprecedented support for civil society and for promoting consultative decision-making.²¹ This new emphasis on public participation came largely in response to the growing number of environmental protests. For instance, a specific petition system was introduced for environmental governance in 1991 and further institutionalised with a national ‘12369’ petition hotline in 2001, which was subsequently upgraded and made accessible directly through the environmental ministry’s website and social media accounts. As an example, starting in 2006 and continuing until 2014, China’s ENGO Friends of Nature could edit annual China Environment Green Books (Zhongguo huanjing lüpishu 中国环境绿皮书) with the help of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which gave unprecedented recognition to environmental activist voices.

From the mid-2000s onwards, the regime also acknowledged the right of citizens to participate in environmental governance. For example, SEPA’s vice minister, Pan Yue, and Premier Wen Jiabao sided with protestors’ demands in the landmark mobilisation against the construction of a PX plant in Xiamen in 2007. Subsequently, and more stringently under Xi Jinping, the party-state has striven to channel public participation by acknowledging certain environmental grievances and modes of action while delegitimising and repressing any politicised form of environmental activism. Legal instruments have featured prominently among the regime’s favoured depoliticised participation channels. They include the public consultation requirements in the EIA law and the environmental information disclosure regulations of 2008. People’s ‘right to information, supervision, and participation’ was enshrined in the revised EPL of 2014 (which was written in collaboration with several environmental lawyers and ENGOs). A central document on environmental governance issued in March 2020 further institutionalised these pathways for citizens to participate in environmental governance, which also includes the development of Environmental Public Interest Litigation (EPIL). Notwithstanding the opening of these official participation channels, most forms of public mobilisation and the public sphere have become significantly more controlled in the Xi era.

Xi Era: Growing Authoritarianism in Environmental Governance

In the Xi era, a noticeable change has been the increased use of ‘sticks’ and coercive supervisory mechanisms. Under the revised 2014 EPL, polluting companies face a stricter fine system with uncapped penalties, higher minimum fines and daily fines. Local government officials can be held criminally liable if they fail to punish polluters.²² While it was once common for upper-level authorities to turn a blind eye to local officials’ non-fulfilment of environmental targets and the manipulation of environmental data (Kostka 2016), such infractions now often result in severe punishment. Consequently, the procuratorate-led EPIL has boomed, from 791 cases in 2016–17 to 3,454 in 2020. By contrast, Chinese courts have accepted a steady number of 50–60 lawsuits brought annually by ENGOs. Moreover, until 2018, the number of first instance judgements for these lawsuits was very small (less than 20 per year). While the number of judgements picked up to 100 in 2020, it remains small both in absolute terms and compared with procuratorate-led litigation, due both to the lukewarm attitude of some courts and to the very small number of NGOs that are able and willing to engage in EPIL (Ren and Liu 2020). The impact of procuratorate-led EPIL has been hotly debated. While it represents a sea change in the role that the judiciary branch can play in environmental governance, especially against local governments, which only procuratorates are allowed to sue, several authors have worried that procuratorates may be used for political gain or manipulated for bureaucratic infighting (Gao 2018). They are also suspected of concentrating on small and easy cases that boost their caseloads and meet their quantitative evaluation targets (Ren and Liu 2020).

In parallel, there has been more extensive use of planning and targets, along with campaigns and crackdowns. The Eleventh and Twelfth FYPs adopted under the Hu–Wen leadership significantly increased the number of environmental targets by upgrading them to a mandatory ‘veto target’ (yi piao foujue 一票否决) in the cadres’ evaluation system. In the Xi era, binding environmental targets continue to play an important role. As before, these targets have often been neither scientifically nor fairly allocated, especially at the local level (Kostka and Goron 2021). In parallel, since 2016, the use of spatial planning for conservation has been expanded beyond the traditionally remote and less developed regions to the entire territory through the deployment of the ecological redlines (shengtai hongxian 生态红线) concept. While welcomed by those who have long requested more effective conservation and biodiversity protection measures, the top-down enforcement has also raised concerns regarding the potential adverse impacts on local economic development and communities.

Xi Jinping has also heavily relied on large political campaigns and crackdowns. Campaigns were sporadically used throughout the reform and opening-up era, but their use has been significantly increased under Xi. Typical examples of recent campaigns include the 2013 Action Plan for Air Pollution Prevention and Control (APAP), an ambitious effort to remedy severe air pollution in the Beijing–Hebei–Tianjin area, the 2016 clean-up of ‘black and smelly waters’ campaign (Hsu, Yi Yeo and Weinfurter 2020) and the 2018–20 blue sky war (Li and Shapiro 2020). Many of these campaigns have used drastic measures, including summarily closing polluting plants or cutting off factories’ access to electricity and water (Kostka and Hobbs 2012). While such ‘blunt-force regulation’ (van der Kamp 2021a) may offer quick results in the short term (as shown in the rapid decline in PM2.5 pollution resulting from APAP measures), their ad hoc and arbitrary nature hinders the creation of long-term compliance and routine enforcement mechanisms, while also undermining the rule of law (Ma 2017; Van Rooij et al. 2017; van der Kamp 2021a). Moreover, many of these campaigns have focused narrowly on particular regions and pollutants (Kostka and Nahm 2017; Van Rooij et al. 2017). Van der Kamp (2021a) points to the considerable costs of such blunt-force regulations, as closing companies negatively affects local development and employment. In addition, with the sheer number of campaigns being launched every year, local bureaucracy has faced an ‘over-mobilisation problem’ that risks dampening cadres’ enthusiasm and ability to implement future environmental campaigns with the same drive.

Another important new tool introduced in this period to contribute to the success of the campaigns is central environmental inspections, which have been rolled out in batches nationwide every year since 2016. While regional inspection centres were set up in various regions in 2006 to supervise the environmental law enforcement of local governments, it was under Xi that inspections were employed more systematically and forcefully than before. In 2016 and 2017 alone, national inspection teams punished more than 10,000 people for breaching environmental protection regulations.²³ In 2019, the central leadership adopted a central policy that made central environmental inspections a permanent mechanism of environmental governance rooted in the five-year terms of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.²⁴ Subsequently, in an unprecedented action, in December 2020, the central environmental inspectors used ‘unusually trenchant and critical vocabulary’²⁵ when openly criticising the National Energy Agency for not limiting the country’s expansion of coal power plants.

Importantly, the central environmental inspectors’ power has been significantly enhanced through support offered by the CCP Central Discipline and Inspection Commission (CDIC, Zhongyang jiwei jiancha weiyuanhui 中央纪律检查委员会). The new reliance on both environmental and CDIC inspections is seen as a strategic move to strengthen Party oversight and centralise control measures by leveraging the ‘double responsibility’ (yigang shuangze 一岗双责) of local officials under the state and Party.²⁶ These new top-down environmental inspections have been ‘effectively above the law’ and have created tremendous pressure on local governments, which sometimes choose to close local factories or entire industries in the expectation of upcoming environmental inspections (Li and Shapiro 2020; van der Kamp 2021a). Although the campaign was effective in curbing air pollution, the effectiveness of inspections in the long run and as a tool to address less visible and more complex sources of pollution, or climate change, is questionable. Li and Shapiro (2020, 55) note that:

in the end, environmental enforcement becomes contingent on the arbitrary dictates of the central inspection team and the fears and ambitions of grassroots cadres, as opposed to transparent, accountable environmental laws and standards.

Recentralising Party supervision and reducing local discretion have, therefore, apparently emerged as new ways for leaders in Beijing to keep bureaucrats in check. While the CDIC’s supervision of local officials is not new, since the start of Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Campaign in 2012, its use of disciplinary actions within the Party has increased dramatically. These actions tackle not only issues of corruption, but also and primarily the implementation of Party guidelines and priorities, of which the all-encompassing ecological civilisation is an integral part (Liao and Tsai 2020; van der Kamp 2021b). By looking at CDIC-led investigations and disciplinary actions taken against cadres in the environmental bureaucracy, van der Kamp (2021b) has found a sharp increase from a couple of hundred actions per year in 2012 to as many as 1,500 after 2016.

Besides control on officials, control over society has also been tightened. Firstly, discursive space has shrunk. While critical voices and confrontational actions pointing out failures to solve environmental problems have been increasingly repressed, the Party has increased its capacity to disseminate ‘correct’ ideas and ‘guide’ online opinions about the environment (Hilton 2017). Ecological civilisation has been marshalled by the Party’s propaganda organs in every corner of the public sphere, including in academia (Goron 2018), traditional and new media²⁷ (Goron and Bolsover 2019), and public spaces, encouraging the production of ‘model environmental citizens’ (Arantes 2020).

Secondly, the space for and recognition of social mobilisation for the environment has shrunk, even though formal channels of grassroots participation, such as through environmental impact assessments and environmental petitions, have been maintained (Fu and Distelhorst 2017). However, the number of environmental petitions has not appeared in the reports of the environmental ministry since 2015, and the large-scale environmental mobilisations of the 2000s have vanished. Under Xi Jinping, the Party control of civil society organisations has been significantly increased (Thornton, Chapter 2, this volume). Capitalising on mature horizontal networks (Wu 2013), Chinese grassroots ENGOs have shown resilience to the new environment. Some have been able to use public interest lawsuits (Ren and Liu 2020) and a series of other strategies to influence local environmental policies (Dai and Spires 2017). However, the 2017 foreign NGO law and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly affected available funding sources, which severely constrains grassroots ENGOs’ capacity. Li and Shapiro (2020, 38) point out that:

mistrust and even fear of public participation, civil society organisation, and democratic processes mean that the public space for environmental activism is carefully delimited, even if the boundaries can be murky and changeable across time and space.

Finally, the Xi era has also seen the emergence of digital technologies to identify, analyse, report on and respond to polluting activities (Kostka, Zhang and Shin 2020). Advanced technologies such as geographic information systems, the global positioning system and remote sensing technologies have ‘opened the door to new modes of monitoring and managing the environment’ (Hsu et al. 2017, 2). For instance, Shanghai began to employ big data to manage different issues of urban governance as early as 2011, including the creation of a data platform for air quality monitoring and air pollution source management (Hsu et al. 2017; Kostka and Zhang 2018). Digitised governance has also gained ground in less developed western provinces such as Guizhou. By integrating and uploading hydrological, environmental, meteorological and biological data into the Caohai Big Data Monitoring and Management System under real-time surveillance, the province aims to improve the protection of the Caohai Grassland Reserve in the south-west.²⁸ The adoption of these new digital technologies in environmental management raises important new issues surrounding data sharing and data privacy practices, diverging interests between private tech firms and governments on the one hand, and government surveillance on the other.

To sum up, since the beginning of the reform and opening-up era, the CCP has pursued a regulatory governance style that was progressively enriched with the use of market-based instruments and participatory instruments in the 2000s. However, as these instruments failed to solve seemingly intractable implementation issues, they were supplemented and partly supplanted by Party-led authoritarian techniques of campaigns, crackdowns and inspections in the Xi era.

Conclusion

This chapter has looked at how the CCP has managed the environment since the founding of the PRC by providing a detailed review of the evolution of its environmental ideology, bureaucracy and governance. We found that major changes to how the CCP views the importance of environmental issues are reflected in the radical change to its environmental discourse and the way it has been woven into its vision of its developmental mission. We also showed how this environmental ideology integrated the CCP’s changing vision of the appropriate way to govern the economy and society, from highly politicised campaigns in the Mao era to law- and market-based regulation in the reform era and, finally, a recentralisation and mobilisation of the structures of the CCP under Xi Jinping.

This change is reflected in the evolution of the environmental bureaucracy, which was non-existent under Mao, developed into a regulatory state apparatus during the reform and opening-up era, and became recentralised in the Party under Xi Jinping. This shift occurred because, while the reform era saw a progressive build-up of legislative and regulatory capacity, it was not sufficient to overcome the focus on GDP growth that was rewarded, incentivised and sanctioned by the CCP political system. The CCP and Xi seem to have concluded that they need to overhaul the productivism logic through a realignment of the CCP’s political reward and sanction system if they want to achieve the new developmental goal of ecological civilisation.

As these transformations have unfolded, the leadership has promoted different governance approaches and tools. For more than two decades, leaders in the reform era pursued Western-inspired neoliberal ideas – namely, that markets and the environment needed clear and solid laws and regulations and that society and markets had to be freed from direct state intervention but incentivised and supported in their efforts to protect the environment. However, starting in the 2000s, and with dramatic acceleration under Xi, the view that solving the environmental crisis and taming local bureaucrats’ ‘wild pursuit of economic growth’²⁹ required much more direct and political interventions from the party-state has become dominant. This has been pursued through an increased use of ‘sticks’, as well as the direct mobilisation of personalised CCP leadership and propaganda. While the regulatory institutions and participatory mechanisms of the reform era have been maintained under Xi, their performativity has been severely undermined.

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Appendix

Table A9.1: Career Tracks of Leaders in the Environmental Bureaucracy

Agency	Leader’s name	Leader’s position in the state	Term	Leader’s position in the Party	Next appointment(s)
State Council Environmental Protection Leading Small Group (国务院环境保护领导小组), 1973–82	Yu Qiuli (余秋里) (1914–1999)	Vice premier of the State Council, director of the State Planning Commission, group leader of the Environmental Leading Group of the State Council	1973–82	1977–80: Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee 1980–82: Secretary of the Central Office of the CCP Central Committee Secretariat	1980–82: Director of the National Energy Commission 1982–83: State councillor and deputy secretary-general of the Central Military Commission of the CCP 1983–?: Member of the Central Military Commission
Environmental Protection Bureau under the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction (城乡建设环境保护部内设环境保护局), 1982–88 Office of the State Council Environmental Commission, 1984–88	Qu Geping (曲格平) (1930– )	Deputy director of the Office of the State Council Environmental Protection Leading Small Group (absent a director)	1978–84	Party secretary of the National Environmental Protection Bureau	1988–93: UNEP China permanent representative, director of the Office of the Environmental Protection Commission of the State Council 1993–2002: Leader of the Environment and Resources Protection Committee of the National People’s Congress and Member of its Standing Committee 2002–  : Chairman of the China Environmental Protection Foundation
		Director of the Environmental Protection Bureau	1982–93
State Council Environmental Protection Commission (国务院环境保护委员会), 1984–98	Li Peng (李鹏) (1928–2019)	Vice premier of the State Council, director of the State Council Environmental Protection Commission	1984–88	Member of the Politburo of the CCP Central Committee and secretary of the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee	1988–1998: Premier of the State Council
	Song Jian (宋健) (1931– )	State councillor, State Council Environmental Protection Commission, and director of the National Science and Technology Commission until 1993	1988–98	Member of the CCP Central Committee	1998–2002: President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering
National Environmental Protection Bureau (国家环境保护局), 1988–98 Office of the State Council Environmental Commission until 1998	Xie Zhenhua (解振华) (1949– )	Director of the National Environmental Protection Bureau, deputy director and secretary-general of the Environmental Commission of the State Council	1993–98	Party secretary of the National Environmental Protection Bureau	2006–15: Deputy director and secretary of the Party committee of the NDRC 2015–18: Member of the Twelfth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), deputy director of the Committee of Population, Resources and Environment 2015–22: China’s special envoy for climate change
		Director of the State Environmental Protection Agency	1998–2005	Party secretary of the State Environmental Protection Agency
State Environmental Protection Agency (国家环境保护总局), 1998–2008	Zhou Shengxian (周生贤) (1949– )	Director of the State Environmental Protection Agency	2005–08	Party secretary of the State Environmental Protection	2015–18: Member of the Twelfth National Committee of the CPPCC, deputy director of the Population, Resources and Environment Committee of the CPPCC National Committee
		Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection	2008–15	Party secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection
Ministry of Environmental Protection (环境保护部), 2008–18	Chen Jining (陈吉宁) (1964– )	Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection	2015–17	Party secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection	2017–18: Deputy secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee, deputy acting mayor 2018– : Party secretary of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government, mayor of Beijing
	Li Ganjie (李干杰) (1964– )	Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection	2017–18	Party secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection	2018–21: Deputy secretary of the CCP Shandong Provincial Committee and Governor 2021– : Secretary of the CCP Shandong Provincial Committee
		Minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment	2018–20	Party secretary of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment
Ministry of Ecology and Environment (生态环境部), 2018–	Huang Runqiu (黄润秋) (1963– )	Minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment	2020–	Not a CCP member	NA
	Sun Jinlong (孙金龙) (1962– )	Secretary of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment	2020–	Party secretary of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment	NA

Source: Compiled by the authors from multiple sources, including online CVs and government websites (2022).

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