Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 10.1 Harbin, China (Carter and Mol, 2006)
The environmental disaster in the Songhua River, centred on the city
of Harbin in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang in Novem-
ber 2005, provides an illustration of the current trends that charac-
terise China's system of environmental governance. At first sight, the
Harbin disaster looked like a classic example of an industrial envi-
ronmental accident that could happen anywhere, when old facili-
ties, poor risk management and the limited environmental capac-
ities of state and private agencies come together. An explosion at
a large PetroChina chemical factory at Jilin on 13 November 2005
released a huge spill (more than one hundred tonnes) of highly toxic
benzene into a major river, threatening the water supplies and river-
based economic activities not only of various Chinese cities (among
which the metropolis of Harbin 200 km downstream) and villages
along the river, but also towns downstream on the Russian bor-
der. Only a decade ago, such accidents might have received little
publicity in China or have been reported only as a successful exam-
ple of disaster management by the local authorities weeks after the
accident. Now, however, the old and new media coverage in China
focussed not only in great depth on the disaster itself, but even more
on the attempt by PetroChina, local officials and the national SEPA
to conceal details of the pollution threat and then to release mis-
leading information about it. Moreover, citizens held the company
as well as their local government directly responsible and account-
able for both its inadequate response to the incident (particularly its
failure to safeguard water supplies) and for the attempt to cover up
the disaster. And, at the national level, politicians held SEPA respon-
sible and accountable for misinformation and cover-up, leading to
the resignation of the SEPA minister, Xie Zhenhua. The rapid spread
of the news to the wider world, especially via the Internet, put addi-
tional pressure on Chinese leaders to act directly and forcefully,
and to provide full information (the order to go public with the
information is said to have come directly from the State Council in
Beijing). This example has all the ingredients of a mix of emerging
informational governance with conventional Chinese state policy-
making routines. Although the knee-jerk official instinct in China is
still to suppress and conceal bad news and to follow state and party
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