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Bureaucracy Meets the Environment: Elite Perceptions in Six Chinese Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2007

Yanqi Tong
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Abstract

A survey of local government officials and enterprise managers in six Chinese cities demonstrates relatively high environmental awareness. However, this awareness remains primarily an abstraction and does not always shape specific policy preferences. This article shows that the development-driven model works well overall, indicating the reluctance of policy makers to implement environmental protection policies at the cost of sacrificing the rate of economic growth. The pollution-driven model applies only to more developed areas, in which elites in more polluted cities are more concerned about environmental protection than those in less polluted cities. A non-linear model that takes into account the interaction between pollution and development works the best in explaining elites' policy preferences. It suggests that pollution becomes a significant factor affecting policy preferences only when a certain development level is reached.

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 189 , March 2007 , pp. 100 - 121
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2007

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University for the collaborative work on this project. The author would also like to thank Harry Harding and John Francis for their comments, and Xiahong Feng and Eric Posmentier for their invaluable technical assistance.