The contributions to this Special Issue were first presented as discussion papers for a conference entitled “The Chinese Environment” convened by The China Quarterly and held in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies in January 1998. The papers benefited from the input of discussants and guests: Elisabeth Croll, Christopher Howe, and David Norse, and Fran Monks who served as rapporteur. James E. Nickum later wrote a general article on water issues which has enhanced and complemented the conference set. These combined efforts produced a volume which measures the state of the environment and pinpoints the environmental problems that China will face in the first decade of the 21st century.

China's long-term history – social, economic, political, and intellectual – has been interwoven from the start with its environment. In counterposed fashion, the history of the Chinese environment has been entwined with that of anthropogenic forces. The Chinese landscape was one of the most transformed in the pre-modern world as the result of its reshaping for cereal cultivation, re-engineering by hydraulic works for drainage, irrigation and flood-defence, and deforestation for the purposes of clearance and the harvesting of wood for fuel and construction.

In March 1998, the Ninth National People's Congress swept in a radical reform of government administration. When the dust had settled, the number of government ministry-level bodies had been reduced from 40 to 29, and 50 per cent of government employees had been slated for elimination from governmental payrolls within three years. Amidst this massive effort to cut central government administration, the environmental protection administration emerged as a bureaucratic exception: after years of lobbying, it was finally upgraded to ministerial status. With this unexpected promotion during a time of strict administrative austerity, the new Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji administration issued a clear signal that environmental problems were a serious central government concern in need of increased attention.

In the post-Mao era, one highly significant dimension of China's official programme of reform and integration into the international economy has been a commitment to legal construction. This commitment has included a sustained effort to fashion a basic corpus of environmental protection law alongside supportive institutions, administrative norms and policies, in order to create a “basic legal system of environmental protection” (huanjing baohu de jiben falii zhidu).' In the eyes of the authorities in the People's Republic of China, such efforts reflect a degree of environmental concern that is unusually strong for a developing society.2 China's achievements, we are often told, must be placed in the context of the considerable difficulties the PRC faces in terms of the pressing need to raise living standards, a serious problem of over-population, a shortage of natural resources, an outdated industrial infrastructure and poor industrial management.3 Of course, viewed comparatively, the PRC's embrace of environmental protection law was somewhat belated,4 only properly commencing after its participation in the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm. The subsequent expansion of environmental legislation and enforcement has been some-what erratic. Nevertheless, there appears to be a continuing intent to fashion a substantial body of environmental law, and concern with the construction and revision of this was further enhanced by China's participation in the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro. Following this, Premier Li Peng “made a commitment to conscientiously implement resolutions adopted at the Conference”5 and, given the PRC's very substantial size and population, a positive embrace of internationally acceptable standards of environmental welfare is highly significant for future global environmental protection. This article examines the principal features and significance of the PRC's domestic environmental protection law, and considers briefly the implications of the Chinese approach to environmental law for understanding the development of law more generally in post-Mao China.

Environmental protection in the international context constitutes a type of soft or functional regime directed at the control of behaviour by states which generally does not present an overt threat to their neighbours. Rather, the principal danger is one of everyday social or economic activity presenting risks within the state in which it originates, to that state's neighbours and, possibly, the global commons. Thus, it is typically the activity's externalities rather than any intent to cause harm or encroach on neighbours' territory which is the cause of concern. Control is complicated by sovereignty issues, which become paramount when externalities cross a country's boundaries and affect the originator's neighbours and/or the wider international community. Although there have been cases of countries obtaining judicial relief for environmental harms that originated in another country, such issues are overwhelmingly non-justiciable. It is more likely that any international regimes that are established will provide no avenue for judicial relief.

Success in agriculture depends on many factors embracing the natural environment, economic and demographic policy, institutions and technology. China's agricultural resource endowment has long encouraged reliance on land-intensive methods to raise farm outputs. Indeed, the record of agricultural growth in China since 1978 is most remarkable for the overwhelming debt it owes to increases in yields per hectare.

Is there a water crisis in China? Certainly there are many sub-crises, many of them hardly new to that hydrologically complex, densely settled monsoonal landscape. Droughts, floods, befouled flows, and water-short northern cities have long been integral to the Chinese experience. The last half-century has witnessed remarkable efforts to control and reshape waters to ameliorate the traditional ravages of flood and drought. Yet many of these projects, and their water sources, are ageing at the same time that state financial capacity is diminishing. Simultaneously, economic development – especially industrialization, urbanization, chemical agriculture and livestock production – have placed increasing stresses on the quantity and quality of water.

China has good resources of land and water. The problem is that they are often not in the same place. The south, which is water-rich, is too hilly for extensive farming. The North China Plain is flat, like France or the Ukraine, but lacks water. It produces 27 per cent of China's grain, but at the cost of serious stresses on its water resource. Deficits in the surface water supply have led to intensified use of the groundwater well beyond the “safe yield” where recharge balances withdrawal. Hence the water table has fallen greatly under both rural and urban areas ever since electric- or diesel-powered tubewells became widespread in the early 1970s. In addition to increased pumping costs and the need to bore ever deeper wells, consequences have included land subsidence, compressing the emptied aquifer in a number of areas and salt water intrusion in coastal areas.

Despite the transformative effects of millennia of human occupation, China remains a tremendous storehouse of biological diversity. The extremely mountainous terrain has fostered speciation by continuously isolating populations of plants and animals. This topography (combined with the large area of the country that is sub-tropical and tropical) also provided refuge for many taxonomic groups during the major climate change-induced mass extinctions of the Pleistocene era, as well as the more recent Ice Ages. As a result, China is one of the world's major centres of biological diversity (or biodiversity), a term which refers to the variety of ecosystem types, the number of different of species and the genetic variability within a single species. In certain respects, thousands of years of human habitation has actually enhanced this diversity. Rice, soybeans, oranges, tea and many other crops were first domesticated in China, and generation upon generation of careful selection by farmers and pastoralists have made it one the earth's richest centres of crop and domesticated animal germplasm. The country's variety of wild plants and animals is greater than that of either North America or Europe, and equal to one-eighth of all species on earth.

Recent writings on China's achievements during the last quarter of the 20th century stress, almost without exception, the enormity of change. But, for both universal and particular reasons, this survey of the country's energy resources and uses will stress continuity as much as change. Taking the inertia of complex energy systems as the key universal given, the most important particular explanation lies in peculiarities of China's resource endowment.

This paper presents an analysis of the adoption and implementation of Chinese environmental policies and pollution abatement measures. It sketches the role of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and the recently adopted Five-Year Plan for the years 1996–2000 in coping with China's increasing problems of water, air and soil pollution. Remedial measures, which could be legal, administrative or economic, are analysed both as part of more general programmes of legal and economic reform, and as specific designs for local or sectoral problems. In previous articles, I have discussed several major environmental concerns: environmental damages, scarcity of water, control over emissions by township and village enterprises (TVEs), investments and management methods. The present contribution will focus on wider political issues, such as participatory policies, differences in implementation between regions and sectors, and most recent developments in industrial pollution problems and abatement measures. This survey cannot be complete: the limitations of space and the need to give some concrete examples make it necessary to be selective. Therefore, while some problems will be highlighted – such as water treatment in the Huai River basin, sulphur dioxide emissions, and pollution by TVEs – other problems such as noise pollution will be omitted.

To the extent that China's population size or population growth rate causes environmental destruction, such damage has already been done over the last several centuries, especially in the most recent 50 years. The impacts of China's large population and continuing population increase are basically irreversible in the medium-term. But in the coming decades, the relatively low PRC population growth rate will be a minor continuing environmental problem. Other environmental effects associated with population will be twofold. First, China's current age structure is strongly skewed toward the working age groups, and the population aged between 15 and 64 will increase dramatically in the coming decade. This contributes to huge unmet current and future demand for employment. Because the legitimacy of the PRC government depends in part on its success in generating jobs, it will continue to endeavour to meet the challenge of employment generation. This imperative, aggravated by the age structure changes, can be expected to take precedence over environmental considerations where these goals conflict. Secondly, the rising living standards of China's population will contribute to further environmental deterioration. When an enormous population rapidly multiplies its per capita income, the impacts can be massive and ecologically destabilizing.

The world's environmental technology and service industry, although comparatively young, is already important in global terms. In 1992 the value of the world market was estimated at US$210 billion, which was comparable to the global aerospace and pharmaceutical industries. By the year 2000 the market is expected to have grown to around US$335 billion and to have reached a value of US$640 billion by 2010.