SEPA Director Says Public Protests Over Pollution Rising by 29 Percent Per Year

Zhou Shengxian, the Minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), said in a May 4 Beijing News interview (in Chinese) that mass protests over pollution have risen by 29 percent per year in recent years. Zhou said that more than 51,000 disputes over environmental pollution occurred in 2005.

Zhou told the Beijing News interviewer that SEPA's current environmental protection efforts focus on clean drinking water. According to Zhou, incidents of water pollution made up 50.6 percent of all environmental accidents in 2005. SEPA Vice Minister Pan Yue said in March that more than 300 million people in rural China lack access to water clean enough to drink, according to a March 16 China Daily report. On May 18, Vice Minister of Water Resources Jiao Yong said that over 400 cities suffer water shortages, and that 110 cities face a water crisis, according to a May 22 People's Daily report. In November 2005, an explosion at a chemical plant in Jilin province contaminated the Songhua River with 100 tons of dangerous chemicals, resulting in a severe shortage of drinking water for millions of residents in Harbin city, Heilongjiang province, according to a China Daily report.

According to SEPA Minister Zhou, the 11th Five-Year Plan for State Environmental Protection, issued on February 9, 2006, includes measures to enforce official responsibility for and increase government supervision of, environmental protection. Zhou said the plan seeks to reduce heavy pollutants such as sulfur dioxide by 10 percent over the next five years. SEPA will release specific numbers in July detailing government responsibility for pollution reduction at each level of government from provincial to county level. He also said that SEPA would "resolutely investigate the illegal environmental actions of state administrative agency personnel."

Zhang Lijun, the Deputy Director of SEPA, announced on May 2 that SEPA will build three regional environmental supervision centers in the northwest, northeast, and southwest regions of China, in addition to the two currently in operation in Nanjing and Guangzhou, according to a May 5 China Daily report. The centers will focus on supervising environmental protection and coordinating environmental responses involving more than one provincial-level government. According to the report, "SEPA intends to utilize the centres to tackle regional problems... more efficiently."

According to Zou Shoumin, Deputy Director of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, an agency under SEPA, the Chinese government did not achieve eight out of the 20 environmental goals it set in the 10th Five-Year Plan for State Environmental Protection (in Chinese) due to high power consumption, as reported in an April 13 China Daily article. The article points out that "the five-year plan stipulated that discharges of sulfur dioxide should be cut by 10 percent, but compared with discharge levels from 2000, levels of the pollutant increased by 27 percent in 2005." According to an April 13 Legal Daily report (in Chinese), Zou also said that there has not been progress over the past five years in perfecting environmental protection laws, and that implementation of existing laws remains weak. For more information on The Environment in China, see Section III(g) of the CECC's 2005 Annual Report.