Bryan Tilt - The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil Society

THE

STRUGGLE

FOR SUSTAINABILITY

IN RURAL CHINA

THE

STRUGGLE

FOR SUSTAINABILITY

IN RURAL CHINA

Environmental Values and Civil Society

BRYAN TILT

Columbia University Press New York

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-52080-5

All photographs by author

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tilt, Bryan, 1974

The struggle for sustainability in rural China : environmental values and civil society / Bryan Tilt.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15000-2 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-15001-9 (pbk : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-52080-5 (e-book)

1. Economic developmentEnvironmental aspectsChina.

2. Environmental policyChina. 3. Sustainable developmentChina. I. Title.

HC430.E5T55 2009

338.951'07dc22

2009017783

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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T HIS BOOK is the result of a decade of research on economic development and environmental degradation in the Chinese countryside. It is based on three periods of ethnographic fieldwork between 2001 and 2006, totaling about seven months of residence in Futian, a township in the southwestern province of Sichuan. I employed a combination of methodological approaches, including approximately 100 semistructured interviews and 150 survey questionnaires with government officials, industrial workers, farmers, and scientists and bureaucrats in the State Environmental Protection Administration. I also relied on participant observation, living for much of my time in the township with Li Jiejie, or Elder Sister Li, a middle-aged ethnic Shuitian woman from a large and well-connected clan.

Li Jiejie lived in the townships open district (kaifa qu) in a modern-style cement house that doubled as the family-planning office, which was overseen by her estranged husband, a cadre in the township government. She operated a small retail store (xiaomaibu) out of the front of her house, selling basic household goods and personal items such as laundry soap, chewing gum, and cigarettes. For extra money, she rented my wife and me several rooms and a bathroom with a squatter toilet. Interacting with Li Jiejie, her family, and other villagers on a daily basis allowed me to participate in the ebb and flow of life in the township, to ask the probing and sometimes awkward questions common to anthropologists, and to solicit more detail about the subjects I was studying. I do not intend to portray the township as representative of China as a whole; rather, my goal is to take a close look at how the recent processes of economic development, industrial pollution, and the politics of environmental regulation have played out in this community, and to elucidate what consequences these processes have wrought in the lives of villagers.

Quite a few details in the story of this book relate to Chinas national environmental-oversight bureaucracy, which, like many things in the reform era, is a moving target. The institutional structure of environmental protection has evolved considerably over the years. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the key agency was the National Environmental Protection Administration. In 1998, the agency was upgraded to the State Environmental Protection Administration. Most recently, in March 2008, the National Peoples Congress voted to elevate the agency to full ministerial status, renaming it the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Since most of my research was conducted during the SEPA years, I refer to SEPA throughout this book in order to maintain consistent usage. Nevertheless, I want the reader to be aware of the fact that todays MEP is the successor of these previous institutions, similar in its charge but carrying more bureaucratic authority. It remains an open question whether this new administrative structure will help China strike a better balance between economic development and environmental protection.

THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH IN CHINA

It has become e asier for foreign researchers to work in the Peoples Republic of China as the nation deepens its political and economic ties with the international community, but it is still by no means a simple task. Acquiring the necessary research permits and credentials is the primary official hurdle. Much of the research for this book was conducted under the auspices of the School of Economics at Sichuan University, located in the city of Chengdu, where I have been fortunate to find many willing and capable scholars with whom to collaborate. But in China, support from above is no guarantee that local officials will cooperate. Before setting up residence in Futian in 2002, for example, my colleagues and I endured scrutiny from the Panzhihua Cultural Office, the Panzhihua Commission for Minority Affairs, and the mayor and Communist Party secretary of Futian Township, each of whom reviewed our research protocol carefully before stamping our paperwork in the official red ink that has been used in civil service offices in China for centuries. The vice general secretary of the Communist Party for Panzhihua City was the highest-ranking official to approve this study. I will not soon forget the trepidation I felt as I waited for him to review my documents, staring anxiously at the door to his office, which bore dual slogans written in beautiful calligraphy: one Maoist (Serve and People!), and one Dengist (Liberate Your Thinking, Seek Truth from Facts!).