Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 269

logics in solving the environmental crisis, the informational dynam-
ics, China's integration in the global networks (e.g., the wide cover-
age of this disaster in all the major global news agencies and media)
and the relative autonomy of the various Chinese media, all forced
another form of governance with public accountability, disclosure
of information and independent scientific scrutiny (by the leading
Tsinhgua professor Jining Chen). Part of China's media has been
particularly open and tough on the government and party reaction
to the disaster, among which are the China Youth Daily and China
Newsweek , although official Party instructions aimed at preventing
too much news coverage and in-depth investigation.
Although this Harbin case was soon followed by reports in China
and abroad of similar disasters of industrial water pollution and
accidents and environmental governance innovations to deal with
that, at the same time numerous other environmental irregularities
and disasters continued, outside the domestic and global informa-
tional flows and pressures, and unable to activate the networks of
power inside and outside China. Although the Harbin disaster gives
us - also under conditions of poor information and information con-
trol - hope for the powers of informational governance, at the same
time it shows that informational governance has its limitations.
The new media are also a vital source of environmental information,
especially in these countries where information has been hard to get
for such a long time. Environmental groups, students, scientists, con-
cerned citizens and others have now access to a variety of information:
on local and national facts and figures of environmental pollution, on
environmental regulations and policies in other countries, on environ-
mental movements in democracies and so on. In addition, they are
able to get into easy and frequent contact with colleagues worldwide.
In that sense, the new media have done much more in creating a knowl-
edgeable and active civil society than the efforts of a limited number of
international NGOs that have landed the past ten years in China and
Vietnam. But one still has to be cautious not to overestimate the con-
tributions of Internet to environmental democracy. It has been espe-
cially the urban intelligentsia and the organizations they work with,
who have seen their political possibilities and empowerment increasing
through the Internet, and not so much the larger share of the popula-
tion. The distinction between those with access to the new modes of