Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
but changes the meaning of the term from “expert” to “brick house.” The result is a fairly
unsubtle critique of experts—who claim to know what is best, who make policy recom-
mendations, but who are not held accountable for the consequences and who are ultimately
used as tools by those with political and economic power.
The “rule of experts” is especially evident in the higher echelons of political leadership.
As of 2000, more than half of all top political posts in China were filled by CCP members
with engineering or technical college degrees. This trend holds for the hydropower sector,
too: former premier Li Peng, for example, who trained in hydroelectric engineering at the
Moscow Power Institute in the 1940s and eventually served as minister of electrical power,
became one of the most strident proponents of the Three Gorges Project (Yeh and Lewis
2004:454).LiPeng'sson,LiXiaopeng,becamethefirstheadofChinaHuanengGroup,the
largest of the Five Energy Giants that were spun off from the Ministry of Electrical Power
in 2002 and the one that holds hydropower-development rights on the Lancang River.
RIGHTS AND REDRESS
The rise of petitioning (
shangfang
) as a primary strategy for addressing the problems of
displacement can be explained in part by the lack of other viable alternatives. Access to
the judicial system, like many aspects of political life in contemporary China, is a difficult
pursuit, for a variety of reasons. First, only individuals directly harmed by a given pro-
ject have the legal right to sue. This means that although domestic and international en-
vironmental organizations can provide moral, logistical, and even financial support, they
cannot be plaintiffs in a lawsuit. In 2012, the Civil Procedure Law was amended to allow
“government departments and concerned organizations as designated by law” to engage in
public-interest litigation, and this amendment will likely result in a dramatic increase in the
volume of environmental lawsuits in the near future (Ngo 2012; see also Wang 2007).
Second, in the case of collective lawsuits involving many parties, each individual party
must opt into the lawsuit and provide a copy of his or her national identification card
(
shenfen zheng
), which can make collective lawsuits logistically complicated and politic-
ally risky because plaintiffs may fear reprisal. Furthermore, Chinese courts are notoriously
difficult to access for those who lack political clout. Although lower-level courts are easier
forplaintiffstoaccess,theyareparticularlyvulnerabletothepoliticalinfluenceofbigplay-
ers such as state-owned firms or private and shareholder corporations. As the legal scholar
Rachel Stern concludes following an analysis of environmental litigation related to pollu-
tion damages, “Despite occasional successes, civil environmental litigation remains a weak
tool for environmental protection” (2011:310). For all its shortcomings,
shangfang
remains
one of the only readily accessible tactics for many people seeking redress.
