Solutions abounded. But relatively little was being done by government or industry to implement them. The difficulty, Ma realized, was not a lack of technology, but of political will. High-tech fixes existed that could make industry cleaner and more efficient. The country could certainly afford the investment; in 2000, China was the sixth-largest country in the world by total GDP (and by 2010, second only to the US).

Moreover, the government was aware of the need to address environmental issues. China was ahead of other developing countries in environmental legislation and monitoring activity. In 1989, it enacted the Environmental Protection Law, giving local government agencies the right and responsibility to inspect polluting enterprises in their jurisdiction, and penalize those exceeding national or local standards. ^[4] The law stated that violators would be “warned or fined” if they refused on-site inspections, submitted false reports, failed to pay fees for excessive discharge, imported sub-standard equipment, or transferred a polluting facility to another entity that was unable to curtail its emissions. Intransigent polluters could be shut down. The law put enforcement squarely in the hands of local authorities:

Article 16. The local people’s governments at various levels shall be responsible for the environment [sic] quality of areas under their jurisdiction and take measures to improve the environment quality.

On the world stage, meanwhile, China was a growing power both economically and politically. It took steps to burnish its image as a global citizen, ratifying in 1991 both the Montreal Protocol on protecting the ozone layer and the Basel Convention on the movement of hazardous wastes and, in 2002, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. To oversee provincial EPBs, the central government in 1998 established the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, upgraded a decade later to ministerial level as the Ministry of Environmental Protection, or MEP).

A framework was in place. Enforcement, however, lagged. Local EPBs were understaffed and underfunded for the enormous task at hand. Fines were too small to function as deterrents; many businesses willingly paid nominal penalties instead of installing expensive pollution controls. As the EPBs got a sizeable portion of their funding from these levies, there was incentive to keep a polluting factory open, paying up regularly, rather than shut it down entirely. Some EPB officials accepted bribes to ignore violations.

A major issue was decentralization, which had underpinned economic growth in China since Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978. Ambitious industrialists were encouraged, aided and abetted by provincial, city and township officials, who in turn were rewarded by their superiors for fast economic growth in their jurisdictions. This set up a system of perverse incentives. Local officials often interfered with the EPBs’ work, protecting polluters from scrutiny and stiffer penalties. Some were directly invested in errant enterprises, while others wanted to protect family members or cronies who ran the outfits. Corruption was endemic.

Even for those without direct ties to industry, there was a compulsion to favor economic growth over a clean environment. Closing dirty factories would mean laying off workers, creating conditions for civil unrest. Since the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, the number one job of local government was to prevent unrest that could undermine the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The way to do that, the Party concluded, was to continually boost living standards. This meant keeping people employed and factories running at full tilt, regardless of the ecological impact. Promotions and favorable transfers were granted to officials with a record of rapid growth and low dissent on their watch. Jonathan Watts, author of When a Billion Chinese Jump , argued that the power of local officials had grown beyond what the central government could contain. He wrote in 2010:

China’s political system now exhibits the worst elements of dictatorship and democracy: power lies neither at the top nor the bottom, but within a middle class of developers, polluters, and local officials who are difficult to regulate, monitor, and challenge. ^[5]

A get-rich-at-any-price attitude permeated society, in fact. When Deng Xiaoping took over the country’s leadership, he did an about-face on collectivism, urging people to harness their entrepreneurial spirit to make money and modernize the country. Export-oriented factories sprung up, private business thrived, and over subsequent decades, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty. Deprived of so much under Mao, people’s appetite for TVs, watches, fashionable clothing, a meat-heavy diet—and in time high-tech gadgets, expensive cars and glittering high-rises—was insatiable.

After Tiananmen, when a student-led democracy movement was brutally crushed by government hardliners, young people were taught to focus on gaining personal wealth rather than political freedoms. Most willingly put their energies to the task. Historian Judith Shapiro describes this complicity as resulting from a “crisis in confidence” in a corrupt and disappointing leadership, which caused “people to cling to consumerism as a way to provide meaning to their lives and to be willing to tolerate a government which otherwise had betrayed them.” ^[6]

Thus, through the 1990s and early 2000s, relatively few protested the mounting pollution, seeing it as the price of economic freedom and an improving standard of living. Many reasoned that China was going through the same growing pains that the West had experienced over the previous century, only in a compressed timeframe. For those who objected, there was little recourse anyway. Officials wouldn’t help. China’s weak legal system, with courts and judges susceptible to political pressure, made it nearly impossible to be heard in court. Laws forbade public demonstrations. Those suffering the most from pollution were often the poorest, least educated, and least able to take a stand.