The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative
Lecture Series under the Cornell East Asia Program.
The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
Hello everybody. We're delighted to welcome you to the third lecture
of the spring 2020 Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series
on China's environmental transformations. We have the honor to have with us
Anna Ahlers, Dr. Anna Ahlers, from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
She will be talking about China's air pollution policy and state-society relations.
You can see the title behind me. Might as well say it.
"Governing the Airpocalypse - Insights from China's War on Smog."
We want to thank our cosponsors who include the Department of Global Development
at the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Polson Institute
for Global Development, and the Environment and Sustainability major
at Cornell. Dr. Ahlers will be talking for 45 minutes to an hour
and then we'll have a chance for questions and answers and I look forward
to an exciting talk and an exciting conversation afterwards.
So thanks to Dr. Ahlers.
Hello everyone. Thank you Jack for the introduction and thank you all for coming.
In times of COVID-19 and of course fantastic weather outside I appreciate that.
Jack just read my title roughly a decade after it first occurred.
The narrative of China's so-called apocalypse now seems to have a
much less dystopian ring to it than when it first emerged. The new and more
positive main storyline now arguably seems to be that the existential experience
of heavy smoke episodes of especially the early 2010s stimulated broad
awareness of the risks of air pollution in Chinese society and eventually
brought about major changes in related policy and politics in China.
In fact in recent years we see seasonal ups and downs in the concentration and
composition of air pollution in China but the overall verdict seems to be that
the Chinese government was largely successful in reducing average air
pollution in urban centers. We don't even need to look at all the scientific data
and chemical component analyses to observe for instance that the previously
all too common heavy smog episodes in cities such as Beijing have decreased.
Not least for instance air pollution seems to not even be such a dramatic issue
anymore for expat employees pondering on the quality of life for their families
in their new home, China. But I will leave these evaluations to the actual experts.
I feel more comfortable talking about the great smog of China from a political
science or a political sociology perspective and that is what I'm trained
to do at least. Altogether it seems that the deep societal concern with a risk
accompanying heavy air pollution has also stimulated reforms of China's
overall environmental policy and governance. Moreover for some observers
this turn towards putting environmental pollution issues higher on the political
agenda and to try to tackle them fast and effectively can be described as a
type of authoritarian environmentalism. This implies that an authoritarian
government can revert to much harsher measures such as ad hoc decision making,
the top-down enforcement of technocratic solutions, and the restrictions
of individual consumption and mobility, among other things,
in order to reduce pollution. This is a narrative I think we see
nowadays when we look at reactions to the COVID-19 crisis. It is another
question whether these measures are effective and whether the
stated ambitious goals for air pollution reduction were and can be attained
and at what costs.
In this talk I will first of all very briefly run you through the overall
apocalypse story and its effects again. Although I don't think it's necessary
to highlight all the details again as this topic has been covered quite
broadly over the last decade including in Western language popular media.
I would like to point out why in my view the apocalypse was indeed
a game changer for Chinese air pollution and environmental politics.
I would like to remind everyone of how for the first time in China's
environmental history, political, scientific, and media or public discourse
did interface in new and in sufficiently powerful ways which eventually
brought about these changes. I will then however leave this macro view
and focus our attention on some more concrete aspects of this story.
Not only do I think that local or microscopic stories are always necessary
to add nuance, they reveal that reality is often much more complex than what
macro data and statistics can tell us. But also it is usually on the ground
where the action is I would say. This has always been my approach,
my very qualitative approach to studying Chinese politics.
I will pick two aspects that I discovered over the course of my
empirical studies of Chinese air pollution policies during the last
6 years or so and that I find most intriguing from a governance perspective
and which again make the apocalypse story special. Governmental strategies of
policy bundling that I will argue are most prominent and possible and entice
mock politics in China today. And newly emerging science policy interfaces
end up transformed or transforming role of science and scientists and Chinese
environmental governance which not least offer reasons for some hope although
scientific expertise in Chinese politics is of course still heavily constrained.
But let me first give you a bit of the background for my studies.
I'm not going to talk very heavily about methodology but just to show you where
my insights that I would argue I have gained over the last six years come from.
When I moved to Oslo in 2014 and I became part of a larger project
framework which was called "Airborne," "The Airborne Project: Pollution,
Climate Change and Visions of Sustainability in China." I led a team
that consisted of political scientists and sociologists but we worked very
closely with all these other disciplines that you see listed on the left together
in this project. There was a challenge sometimes but there were also a lot of
benefits from working together. People came from different places.
The core group was based in Oslo but we collaborated with mainly
Zhejiang University in China as well. So I said I'm going to talk you through
the main apocalypse storyline again just to remind us all of what actually happened.
In China since roughly 2008 you might remember the big concern for air
pollution around the Summer Olympics. Many countries were worried
that their athletes might be affected by the health risks around air pollution.
And so the US Embassy started to tweet real-time air pollution data from their
bases in Beijing. That was also accessible for many people in China
and it triggered this whole debate about the actual risk, the actual concentration
of air pollution in China. From then on, so from 2008, there was this talk about
do we actually get real data about air pollution in China. And the government,
although it treated actual air pollution data as a taboo or as a sensitive topic
sometimes, it started to set up measuring stations across the country.
For different reasons of course it was also becoming more and more important
for the government itself to have a better picture of the actual crisis
around air pollution in China. But I would say it was only with the
winters of 2012 and '13, that was also when Western media came up with this
drastic term apocalypse or Armageddon, that we see the actual effects of massive
smog episodes on Chinese society. We had massive episodes again in 2015
and 2016 and '17 but it's very clear that you can trace from 2012 and '13 onwards
what effects the smoke perception or the smoke exposure has. For example,
the actual term for smog, 雾霾 [wumai], was only coined or actually broadly used
from this time onwards. We did some media searches where you can see
for example that in 2012 the term 雾霾 appeared only, again this is
anecdotal evidence from our superficial search but it tells you something,
so only 45 times in newspapers and scientific articles. And then the number
jumped to 766 in just a year when this term became more common.
Also from then on you had more and more articles, scientific but also popular
science articles, and blogs and everything pointing out the effects
of air pollution with regard to health and the overall national economy,
and also triggering a lot of public debate about can we actually trust the government
in doing something about it. You see beyond that air pollution becoming
much more prominent in people's everyday life. This was an exhibition
about other countries' ways of dealing with air pollution that I saw in Wudaokou,
the Wudaokou shopping street in Beijing. You had like 20 of these posters talking
about other cities worldwide problems, Paris L.A., with air pollution and
where this pollution comes from and what these countries did about it.
So the focus was on foreign countries but at least there was an exhibition about
smoke at Wudaokou. Then you have all these, say, technologies emerging.
The AQI air quality index apps which people now check as much as they
check the weather reports or at least for a certain period of time.
For Beijing residents and other larger cities these measures of air quality
have become as important when you think about what should I wear,
should I send my children out, can they exercise outside.
We have face mask fashion coming up. This is an extreme example maybe
but you could see face masks again reemerging as a daily life tool.
And of course we have surveys showing, and this was in 2015, that air pollution
became a problem that was ranking just below corruption in China.
So a lot of public concern with air pollution. Air pollution was taken up in education.
There is, and a colleague of mine has studied this very intensively,
the historical concern about fresh air. Not only 气 or anything but ventilation
is very important. He wrote many articles actually about ventilation
as a national concern in China. So there is a history to this.
But now you have air pollution as a content in environmental education
in schools. And I think, I would say, that China is probably the only country
where you could stop a child on the street and ask what is PM 2.5,
the particulate matter, and you would get an explanation. I think the chances
are pretty high and I don't think that you can do it anywhere else.
This is another example of how broad the popular concern was with air pollution.
You've probably all heard about this story about "Under the Dome," a documentary
by a very well known Chinese TV anchor who in this documentary talked about
the dimension of the air pollution problem, especially particulate matter pollution
and where it comes from, also pointing at collusion between political authorities
and the business sector as a reason for not doing anything about it,
not doing enough about air pollution. Surprisingly it was only censored
after a week so there were hundreds of millions of clicks. People were able to access
the video from someplace or another. This has triggered some suspicion
about whether Xi or the people behind the film had some help
from the Ministry of Environment who were actually for having this public education out.
So a lot of studies have actually looked into that but it's a very
prominent example of public debate about air pollution.
I mentioned some of the apps where you check air quality as you
do check the weather report. There are also apps that emerged
where you trace or you map pollution. There's one. It was actually also in Chinese
called "Pollution Map" and then later they had to change the name again
to make it sound a bit more positive I think by one of China's most famous
environmental activists. And here you don't only get information about where
a polluting source is located, a factory for example. You could also report pollution.
We tried very hard to trace how this works. So there are different apps around.
This is the biggest but there are also some local apps with report functions.
So what does actually happen? Once you report something
you could take a picture and then upload it to the app and then it said it goes
straight to the local Environmental Protection Bureau. It's very hard to trace
what actually happens to this information. In Hangzhou there was an NGO that was
in between sitting as an intermediary before these reports went on to the local
Environmental Protection Bureau. But it was all a bit sensitive
and as you can imagine hard for us as foreign researchers to get access.
Even our Chinese colleagues had to deal with a lot of sensitivity. So I would say,
it's an interesting feature, I don't think that we should put too much
emphasis on it because it still depends a lot on what happens
to this data. But you give people the impression at least that they are
empowered to report pollution and especially air pollution. The government
also changed its ways of framing and dealing and talking about air pollution.
It was in the title. They actually said they now have to fight a war against air
pollution as it says in Li Keqiang's statement in around 2014.
And when China Daily, that's a cartoon from China Daily try to illustrate what
it actually means. They came up with this, I don't know, China representative
fighting against a pollutant or something. This i found interesting because
the main strengths or the power comes from as it said technology and law
in the war against air pollution. And we see also that around that time
China's environmental protection law was revised and the air pollution prevention
and control law was also amended. It existed as you can see since the 1980s
as most of the environmental law so it's not a new thing. China had very actually
quite sophisticated comprehensive environmental laws all the time,
stemming from the end of the 1980s. So it's not correct to say that
this all triggered environmental legislation. But of course laws
had to be amended and extended and revised because as we know
law enforcement in China is pretty weak. I'm going to talk about that again
in a second. And what we also see around the same time, 2013, is that
an action plan for air pollution prevention and control was launched and that is
actually from a Chinese governance perspective. I think more important
because it's these plans that actually communicate to all officials, everyone
involved that this is something you need to do. It's like a joint plan by the
political leadership saying that this is our top goal and you have to do something.
A law is like some kind of nice to have administrative thing. I'm exaggerating
but if you have an action plan, a political action plan, this is what you have to do.
Policymakers in China would know and the plan lists also
very ambitious goals regarding the reduction of PM 10 and PM 2.5
so particulate matter pollution. It pointed out target regions across China
and pointed to specific sectors and industries, cement production for
example or coal use, to do something about air pollution emission.
And importantly here in the bottom it also left some space for local
adjustment of these plans. So you have very crucial, hard, ambitious, big goals.
Some of the measures, some of the tools that you could use for achieving these
goals are stated in the plan but you also leave a lot of room for local
adjustment. So the message is okay we have to achieve this, whatever you do
you can choose your own tools sometimes but we have to achieve these goals.
And main goals were reduction of PM 2.5 concentration.
So that's the document side. We also see, and that's also important
in Chinese politics of course, that it's accompanied by ideology
or slogans. And one of the main backup slogan for environmental politics
is ecological civilization. I think those of you who are professors in this class
have heard about that I guess before. It's not a new thing. It's actually
an older slogan that was around for quite some time. But then it was elevated
to a central slogan in 2015 and gave an ideological framing
for the new environmental policies. It bets heavily on technology
and individual responsibility to achieve this goal of having or building
a beautiful China by 2035. The law was amended
and expanded. And importantly it now included among the tools
much more emphasis on local officials' performance indicators in a wa y.
The law itself made it possible to put a lot more pressure on local officials
to treat environmental target as something very crucial.
It was made a cadre's lifelong responsibility if an environmental haze
or something happens in his or her locality that our study's showing
that it's not implemented and not used that comprehensively this tool.
So there are officials who were not drastically punished for environmental
problems in their localities but other studies show tracing for example leading
cadres' careers that it is employed. So it's a mixed picture. At least on paper
it now exists and that was a big change because it did not exist before,
environmental targets as something very crucial in officials' performance record.
And there were also attempts to make data faking or whitewashing
less possible across China. So I mentioned in the beginning there
are first successes of these changes and transformations. You see these are older
data but at least it shows that from very early on these measures
did produce some tangible outcomes. A lot of cities improved their standing
and national rankings and national performance rankings
with regard to air pollution. Average particulate matter pollution in Beijing
for example decreased by 40% in the first years. And even Greenpeace,
who is of course usually a big critic of the Chinese government and its
environmental record, they wrote in a report already in 2015 that China's air
pollution problem is slowly but surely receding. New data shows more than
3 years on from its infamous apocalypse China's pollution levels are dropping
at an average rate of 12% a year following emergency government action.
So it seems now that the storyline around the apocalypse
is a bit more positive in a way. Also you can see from some of the aspects
that I've just superficially mentioned that there seems to be a realignment
between political authorities, science or the knowledge about air pollution
and its health risks and other things dimensions of pollution, and the public
concern. And this I think is something that brought about changes because that
didn't exist before. You always had concern also about air pollution
and different fields but not in such a concentrated and aligned manner.
And you see also that in the following years after '13 '14 other pollution areas
or pollution problems were lifted to the status of being treated in action plans,
water pollution, soil pollution, and eventually also climate change
or global warming, as something that had to be tackled.
The action plan was renewed in 2018 and the government included
some new tools that were missing from the older plan,
for example more coordination between different localities
or between different departments which, as I will point out in a minute,
has some reasons for why it was added. And, as I already mentioned, climate
governance became much more prominent and it is also reflected much more
in this transformed Ministry of Ecology and Environment that was found in,
or reemerged in 2018. For me I don't evaluate the pollution data as
an expert, as a natural scientist. But for me it was through all these years
very interesting to look at what actually happened there from a government.
or governance perspective. So the fact that we've suddenly had an action plan,
I think it's due to the fact that law usually doesn't really work as a
good tool in environmental policymaking or in policymaking in general in China.
So there had to be something that was accompanying or amending,
complementing, the weak judicial system. China of course also has to deal with
a lot of local differences in industrial development but also in
many many other terms. The action plan is designed in the way that it can be
locally adjusted to local circumstances. And in order to do so also
what's also interesting is that although I see that Chinese environmental policy
or Chinese anti-air pollution policy has transformed tremendously,
it still doesn't really look like environmental policy would look like
in other countries. I think you still see some, I hate to say policies
with Chinese characteristics, but something that is a bit more
interesting and local in this regard. For example references to traditional means,
more informal instruments, propaganda that is targeting the cadres actually,
those who have to implement the policies, and sometimes also campaigns
like really concentrated, targeted actions against environmental pollution.
So I'm now leaving this macro story and trying to give you some more
examples from the field. There could be many more but I've chosen two areas
where many many interesting aspects for me especially from a
governance perspective become relevant. And one is what I would call
policy bundling, could maybe be called differently. There's one colleague of mine,
[unintelligible], she has used the word in CO2 emission policies in China.
I'm not sure whether Professor Zinda would agree, I think you wrote
about dual function policies once? We can discuss whether
that is what I mean. Maybe it's another word for what I mean.
So what I mean is that in this context of new targets with new rules
and somehow open toolbox and a lot of pressure, there emerged a new
necessity for local governance to come up with solutions and they
often chose to bundle policies. You could also say they use evolution as
a framing for particular measures that sounds maybe a bit more negative.
And I think one of my examples actually shows that it's sometimes
a little, it can have a little suspicious ring to it.
So the official definition of policy bundling would be, there are different definitions
in the literature, it could mean that you merge quite different policy measures
that are pursued simultaneously for one goal. It could mean that you reframe
something that was previously unsuccessful under one name and then
give it another name for an older cause or even a new cause. But it could,
that's what I just meant, also mean an undisclosed inclusion of certain
measures in a policy framework. That's still the theory. I think when I now talk
about these examples you will get more of an impression what I mean.
One measure that I guess you have heard about before is car driving restrictions.
I think we mostly hear about the odd and even system, which means that
based on the last digit of your license plate your driving would be restricted.
For example if you have an odd number you can only drive on odd days
and even and so. Beijing did it very early in 2008 for the Olympics.
I think that was when it was first also reported in our media, this strange thing
that prevent people from driving their car on certain days. But it can also mean
限牌限行, that you limit the amount of cars that are allowed to drive on city streets
at all. So you buy a car but then you don't get a license plate.
City governments reduce the number of license plates that are issued
in order to reduce the overall number of cars that are allowed to drive.
And there are places where a lottery is in use or an auction is in use
and some places use both restricting measures. Still here you can see
the timeline. Shanghai was using the odd and even system already in the '80s.
But it was only with the Beijing Olympics 2008 that it was more widely used.
But still it's just a handful or maybe two handful of cities in the whole of China
who actually make use of this measure. Some do both. Fewer do the overall
license plate ban.
So what is special about it? First of all it in recent years
it has always been labeled as a pollution reduction measure.
Not when it started in '86, and I'm coming back to that. But the overall framing
mostly is air pollution. Some years previously it was still traffic, like traffic
management, congestion reduction. And now suddenly it got the framing of
okay everyone has to reduce driving their cars in order to keep the city's
air healthy. And there's only a few Chinese cities to actually do this
because it's also a very risky policy. You can imagine that the government was
very aware of the fact that people might be very unhappy about that. It causes a lot
of trouble and discomfort for people and not being able to drive.
There was limited legitimacy because at no point did Beijing or the central
government say this is a measure you should use. It's something that
developed locally. At some point in the early 2010's with new legislation there
was this encouragement of using all sorts of local measures which backed up
some city's enactment of these measures. But there was at no time did
Beijing say okay this is what you should do. It was really a local choice.
It was highly centralized, very top-down, ad hoc, also very secretively, especially in
Hangzhou after a while because Hangzhou was following after a few other places
had chosen this measure. So you would tell people just a few hours in advance
that from tomorrow we'll limit the amount of license plates that we give out.
And so you can imagine the drama that caused in the population.
There was, different from many other policies now in China, very little
input from the public in advance. So there was no hearing, no drafting period,
where what is usually now common for many of the laws where people can
comment on things and experts are invited for hearings and have to give
their suggestions. That all didn't happen because it was treated like a super
confidential highly sensitive policy in these cities because the government
knew what was going to happen. It only happened afterwards when they
tried to improve the policies that they invited public feedback. The costs were,
or are, pretty high. If you want to play the lottery of the bidding you have to
invest a lot of money, sometimes as much money as you would need for buying a car.
There's different numbers. This is one from Hangzhou where it says you only
have a 2% chance of actually succeeding in the lottery for a license plate.
So this shows that it was actually a drama but of course there
were some loopholes and people with connections could still get license plates.
And this all caused a lot of discontent. And it also became apparent to us,
when we looked into a few of these cases and traced the evolution of this policy,
that you could actually always trace it back to one leading figure
who transferred from another post in another city and had implemented it there.
For example Hangzhou's party secretary came from Tianjin where he had
done that before and so he imported this measure to Hangzhou.
So this whole story about policy diffusion and policy learning is little distorted
in this case. You can actually see that it has a lot of personal side to it.
And it could only happen, that's also on the slide here, that if
this party secretary was very powerful, he had connections high up to Beijing,
and only that made it possible that you could actually come
with this very new measure suddenly. So what happened here.
What we see and what we learned in our interviews, and we also interviewed
some of the traffic studies people who were involved in improving
the policy afterwards, that this air pollution framing was actually really
strategically used to make the policy more acceptable. And many in the
government didn't actually try to hide that fact. They said yeah at some point
we just had to find a way to clear the street, I mean still don't clear the street,
but to have fewer cars on the city streets we need to construct public transportation.
We cannot do this when there are so many cars on the streets.
We have to avoid traffic jams and everything. And suddenly in our
interviews after a while this air pollution framing, the air pollution reasoning
actually completely disappeared. So we will learn that, I think it is somehow
possible to regard air pollution as an actual policy bundling framing here
which actually just served to legitimize the local traffic management policies.
Experts are very unclear, they're not very clear or they cannot really show us
that it has been a very effective measure when we talk about air pollution.
They always point to the fact it needs much more other effects, like better
fuel use, reduction of heavy traffic, in order to get to these results.
But I think you could have a whole debate among natural scientists and among
traffic management people about the effectiveness of this policy.
What we found surprising was the acceptance among the public.
The people we talked to, residents of Hangzhou, but also some of the surveys
that we had access to show that actually the measure is publicly
accepted to a surprising degree. People complain that yeah some days
I just have to find other means of transportation but overall it seems to be
by now pretty much accepted and overall it has continued for a while
until recently many of these among, it's not so many cities, but among
those few cities some, under the impression of the economic crisis
and following the US-Chinese trade war of recent years, began to soften this
policy again. And here then suddenly while it was always sold as
a anti-pollution policy, now it's very clear that you softened the policy
because you want to increase demand, economic demand. So a long long and very
complex story short, I come to the second example. A bit different. But the bunting
here is for me. So that's the industrial air pollution source transport policy
where urban governments have to move factories out of the city
especially out of the vicinity of residential areas. But sometimes it
really means like it is shown here in the cartoon that you want to get rid
of any industrial facility around in urban areas. No stacks anymore, nothing.
Therefore you either have to close these facilities down completely or you
have to move them to another place. And we observed some cases in Zhejiang
where we found that local governments were acting, after a while and after quite
a learning process, quite strategically in moving about these transfers.
Of course it needed a special context but the context we found was that
the implementation of this policy moved from being a bilateral thing to a
trilateral strategy. I'm going to tell you what what I mean by that.
But usually if you have problems with industrial air pollution it's
a bilateral process. It's either people living there protesting against this source of
pollution, perceived or real, and you have the local government, mostly the
Environmental Protection Bureaus going against industries trying to make them
upgrade their technologies, at the same time appeasing local populace.
So it's usually the EPB is in the middle. It's usually very weak because it doesn't
have a lot of power to move to do anything vis-a-vis the industries
or in order to appease the public. But in some of the cases we observed
at some point the local EPBs made use of this context in a way.
When protests against the sides got escalated more they suddenly found
a way of utilizing or exploiting this public anger in order to push the local industries
to move away much faster than they would have usually done. All these facilities
in the cases we observed were already scheduled to move or close down
but there was a lot of public discontent and then suddenly the local EPBs thought
that they could even make a name for themselves if they managed to move
these facilities out at a faster pace than usually planned. And what they did was
they brought together all the stakeholders, on the one hand side
the protesting residents, and the industrial managers, to talk about the process.
And for them they hope to or they expected that this dialogue, as I called it,
would build trust, would help them appease the public on the one side
and also push the industries. And in some of the cases we saw
that was actually pretty successful. There are the cases of course where that
doesn't work but we have some cases where it worked. And suddenly you had
this dialog platform where the EPB managed to bring everyone to the table
and where as a result these factories were actually moving out pretty quickly.
There was a lot of back and forth and people wanted to, representatives of
the residents wanted to know when exactly and they wanted to see the
new site and make sure that the factory doesn't come back and all.
So it's a very complex story. We wrote about it but the basic
procedure was like that. So what happened was that the EPB
was utilizing this public anger and actually was pushing against the industries that
usually you would expect. And there is of course lot of evidence showing that
there's usually a lot of collusion between local industries and the government.
But suddenly under the impression of new environmental policies
and this hard target of moving out all industrial facilities and suddenly got a
very different dynamic. Still I would say, I mean the cases we observed I wouldn't
say that they are overly generalizable. It was Zhejiang
we have to remember. But this was employed as a strategy. And then of course
another problem is that you don't really know, in our cases we
follow that up, but you often don't know when these industries are transferred,
where they are transferred to. Some are transferred to upgraded industrial parks
and that's probably a very positive development. Also the chemists and the
environmental engineers that we work with, they were pretty positive about
that kind of upgrading. Sometimes you of course close those facilities down
completely. Then it's gone. But sometimes they are moved
out of the countryside in a hidden in some villages where then of course the village
community has to deal with pollution. We had a PhD candidate who wanted to
trace some of these transported factories. But as you can imagine that is very
difficult to do especially for in that case a Norwegian running after the factories
and trying to check out the new sites so he had to give up that.
There is some quantitative studies which I think don't really, you get
an overview but they don't really get to the actual question whether it's just a
transfer of pollution or not. So there's lot to be done still in this field I think
Now I move to the second aspect that I find very intriguing. There are many more.
But I chose two. And the second one is the transforming role of science
and knowledge and especially of scientists in this whole transformation
of Chinese environmental policymaking. In general you could see that, or you could
say that we don't know a lot about scientific impact or the role of science
and local policymaking. We have this narrative of China or the Chinese
government after the reform era as a technocratic government. And you can see
this in leaders' biographies and they suddenly all have university degrees
and are engineers. But what actually happens in the smaller in the micro context?
It's not so well known and don't see so many studies about it.
We know about individuals and their initiatives, for example
for rural development. But this day-to-day interaction between scientists and the
government that absolutely happens, I don't see that there are many studies
about that. And that was also inspired by the experiences we had during
our research. We didn't start out with an interest in that but it emerged
as something that we wanted to look in to further and that I think is pretty prominent
especially in environmental policymaking in China now. The case,
again there are different cases you could look at environmental impact assessments
where scientists do contracted studies for local governments.
One thing we found pretty fascinating is how these what I would call
the blue sky fabrication actions work in China. So you know these
stories when suddenly for the Olympic Games 2008 and for larger top-notch
political events, the APEC summit in Beijing or the G20 in Hangzhou,
you suddenly magically have blue skies over these venues. And 2008 it was still
a little clandestine. The government has now opened up much more
information about that they actually they do this. It's blue sky engineering
as I would say. And they also say what they do. They shut down factories,
they move out people, they stop construction and car driving.
So it has become a business of its own, this blue sky fabrication I would say.
There are terms being coined like APEC blue, APEC 蓝 [lan].
I just read this story by some colleagues, Brimblecombe and Zong, 2019,
where they do a linguistic analysis of the emergence of this term for this
phenomenon, this magical but engineered blue skies over China over specific cities.
And the government did use that too after a while. I said we did it.
We did APEC 蓝. But now APEC 蓝 has for some, that's what they show
in this article where they do some social media analysis, also turned into something
like a word, a term for saying something is a fleeting episode of something,
a temporary phenomenon. You could say I had a romantic date
but it was just APEC 蓝. Like everything was just vanishing again after a few days.
That's how this is used. So you see that it steered again some public
discussion of this phenomenon. You have this for all these different events
that I've mentioned. There's data also showing that in advance of these events
the government slowly tries to bring down pollution, then on the day of the event
when you stop basically everything pollution is going rapidly down, starkly down,
but then after the event is over everything is increasing again and sometimes
stronger than before because factories have to make up the loss
of production they face during the event. And this is just CNN so of course
there's much more sophisticated analyses but I like the picture here
because it shows these spikes and peaks. So in a way it's something like what the
government does or what the actors do for blue sky engineering,
something in between weather modification, like you also use
substances to make it rain or to stop rain clouds from raining above
or on the venue or something, and geoengineering, which is of course
much more sensitive, where you also involves the military.
That is also done in China. It is of course very hard to get to information about it.
But we again looked at blue sky fabrication, or the blue sky guarantee
it is called in Chinese, as a governance problem.
And what makes it special and different from the usual
environmental policymaking is that it is a temporary measure. It's ad hoc steps
you have to take in order to make it happen to make the sky blue. It's again
very centralized very top-down. It requires a lot of resources.
Factories are being shut down, you have to stop street traffic,
you have to invite experts, I'm going to come back to that, you use the substance
and everything. It requires a lot of coordination between entities,
between departments that usually don't work together. And you have to steer
everything that's going on in all these different domains, industry, traffic,
construction, by many different actors, public or private, for one point in time.
And this makes it very special I think. We have many cases that we can now
compare. I mentioned some of them already, the Summer Olympics in Beijing,
but also things like the military parade, very prominent example.
So most of this naturally is occurring in Beijing. But you have also some other
events like sports events in Nanjing or the G20 in Hangzhou or the expo
in Shanghai where you have to find new ways for each new venue again
to make it happen. Just to give you again an overview of what it all takes
takes to make the sky blue. So what we were focusing on was this interaction
between governmental authorities and experts because I'm going to explain in
a minute what they needed the experts for in more detail. One thing is to close
everything down. But still you need to have an overview of okay how far
does this zone where you close things down go. What is the main
pollution source for one place. What do you do if you close
everything down but then suddenly there's a weather change or inversion
or something and then you have pollution again, is there something you can still do.
And that was very crucially why they needed scientific experts onboard.
Major industrial facilities they have to stop their production.
You have to manage traffic, construction, because of the dust that construction work
is producing, has to stop for a while. You need, and that's important again,
coordination between different localities. So for example Hangzhou
is very close to Anhui province so we actually have to work together
with authorities in this other province which is always a challenge in China.
And it even includes private activities. So households, their cooking, their mobility,
constraining the movement of city residents. You maybe
have seen these particular measures where you either declare a holiday
for the duration of the event and make people leave the city, maybe aided
by some special benefits they get. For example Hangzhou residents
were receiving tickets for tourist attractions in other provinces during
that time in order to motivate people to leave the city. So many many many many
different measures you have to take around this very concentrated events.
And of course here you could also say that this is part of, you could
tell the story of policy bundling here again because you tell people it's good
for the air, if you leave the city there's less traffic and less people
based pollution but of course it also makes it easier for authorities to
do their security control. And there were policymakers who said
yeah of course it's easier for us if we tell people this is for
making Hangzhou a good host, having a beautiful venue, instead of
telling people for the security of these state leaders so you have to leave,
it's too hard to control all of you on the street. So again there's maybe the
small aspect of policy bundling here again involved. But the thing is the main
goal here is really to clear up the skies for a beautiful venue. When we
wrote about it and we wrote mainly about the Hangzhou case, the G20 summit.
We are now preparing a manuscript where compare different events of this sort.
But we wrote about it, we had to find some concepts which could best describe what
we see there. And for us it is sort of a campaign style enforcement policy that
is going on here. Because campaign or campaign style enforcement would have
a clearly defined goal. It has strong political sponsorship,
a high degree of urgency for a very confined period of time,
a tightly coordinated operation, and the very clear pooling of resources
with some degrees of public involvement and mobilization. We then amended this
looking at these very particular events of blue sky fabrication
and we actually thought that so of course that all had to happen.
The campaign is for the goal or it is for an even shorter period of time.
So campaigns usually have this temporary nature often but you usually
you still give people some years to achieve these goals. Here it's much more
urgent and what we find really impressive or quite insightful was this
expert input in the process. I'm going to speed up a little so I don't use up too
much time for our discussion.
So for once it's interesting to see what actually had to be done
when these expert task forces were formed.
You do these things in many different places and you suddenly see
that of course these places have very different contexts in which they have to
act in order to bring down pollution. So while Beijing and these events in Beijing
they have to deal with a very high degree of average pollution,
cities like Qingdao, where one of the last of these big events was held, they usually
are within the national standards so they don't have to do all that much
in order to get the skies blue. You need to identify the pollution sources
and the interesting thing is that this task force of experts is usually
the experts who have a lot of experience in Beijing and who then travel around
as the task force for blue skies around in China and consult with
the local scientists who are involved. So there's a lot of institutional history
or learning among the same group of actors for this sort of policy.
And then you amend. As I just said you learn how far do you have to, for example,
draw these zones of halting industrial pollution in order to keep a venue
smoke-free. That is adapted over time. So the actual diffusion of knowledge
and the learning process is within this group of scientists.
They have a lot of power, I would say, because the local government
really depends on them, especially the places that are not Beijing.
So Hangzhou, Qingdao when they for the very first time
have to make the skies blue for an event they heavily heavily depend on
this expert input in order to plan for that. So we said that while this action,
this making the sky blue action, is usually ridiculed, of course there's a reason
for that. There's a lot of waste of a lot of resources and there's limited general
implications that we can draw from it. But especially this science policy
interfaces that we observed when we talk to for example some of the scientists
which are usually involved in these task forces, they give room for some insights
that I think are pretty interesting. So of course you produce a lot of data.
You suddenly have a map of pollution sources around the venue that you before
did not have. You have installed a lot more measuring equipment than before.
You train people in the local environmental policy bureaus to read these data
and to do more modeling than they usually did. So there's an increase
in knowledge of also the local officials. And they eventually explained that
they came to a bit better modeling for what are now called the
red smog alerts in cities like Beijing based on this increase in data
that they drew from these measures. So overall I think there is, the effect of this
for governance it makes, you could say, this very harsh measures a bit more
sophisticated over time. Measures become much more selective and flexible.
You don't do an all-out halting of production or a total stop of all traffic.
You know then better what to do for certain reasons.
And we can show that when we compare the different events over time.
We see also, and the scientists involved have explained to us, that for example
the reduced rigor that these measures are used for, for example,
for the Lianghui, the big political events in Beijing that we see over the last years,
are because for one it becomes less legitimate to do these harsh campaigns
anymore for domestic meetings. but it's also because they have
found different ways of more pointed interventions in order
to reduce air pollution. It's overall a black box but I think there's a lot of
room to do more studies on science policy interfaces
in Chinese environmental governance. That brings me to my last remarks.
So what do I hope that I have conveyed to you over the last hour?
I can only repeat my argument and I just scratched the surface.
There's a lot more data in the publications of course. But here I wanted to tell
more of a story. And I think there has been a qualitative change in environmental
policymaking in China. And I would trace this back to the apocalypse
and its effect because when you look into the details of the developments over time
you see this what I call the realignment of political concern, scientific knowledge,
and public worries and activities over time. And this has transformed air pollution
visibly. But also when we look at the specific tools that are used,
and actually then also triggered substantial changes in Chinese environmental politics
as a whole, and theoretically you could say it's a mixture of what some authors
would call consultative authoritarianism, where you consult with societal actors
for example in the dialogue forums, and more authoritarian form of top-down
technocratic rule sort of policymaking. It's a mixed picture. The local tools,
the local measures are sometimes successful, sometimes they can
take very odd forms. You could for example say so the car driving ban
is not actually an air pollution policy at all. You have these examples
where cities in the northeast have banned coal use from one day to another,
or very ad hoc, so that people were shivering because they lacked another
source of fuel for heating their homes. So it can have all sorts of outcomes
and effects and we can only hope that these pointed demands for quick
and ad-hoc action will transform into something more sustainable.
I said the smog episodes were reduced. I think there again you can say
we see less of these episodes now. There have been these news
coming out of China now that because of COVID-19 and the reduced production
but also reduced mobility among the population there's less smoke
in northeastern China but you have other stories from 2019 for example
where you saw a return of these heavy episodes. I think these are very
pointed impressions. We have to see developments over time.
And then of course that is only dealing with the smog in this particulate matter
air pollution. But there are other pollution sources in the air or pollutants in the air.
Methane, indoor air pollution, that was a very important topic for our group
showing how much of an exposure you have indoors especially in rural China
where you have less action being taken against it, and ozone, something that
the scientists we talked to actually they told the local governments
they worked with that ozone is a big problem. For example in Hangzhou
ground-level ozone. But because it wasn't in the target list of local officials
it wasn't tackled at that time. So I also hope I showed you some
of the avenues and some of the fields that are still very worth looking into
as a researcher. And with this I thank you for your attention.