China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 142

China Policy Journal • Vol. 1, No. 1 • Fall 2018 Chronic Noncompliance and Ineffective Enforcement in Guangzhou Lin Peng 2 , Yuan Xu 1,3 * , Hua Zhong 4 , Tai Wei Lim 5 , Fengshi Wu 6 Abstract Industrial pollution is the most important cause of China’s current environmental crisis. This article concentrates on those firms that continue to seriously deviate from compliance even though they have been repeatedly caught and punished for breaching environmental regulations. This chronic noncompliance is explained through examining formal and informal enforcement activities by the state and by civil society, respectively. Guangzhou, a metropolis located in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, has been selected for this study because of data availability, its relatively more mature civil society, and its political status as a provincial capital. We employ both publicly available government law enforcement data and fieldwork-based first-hand data from individual firms. Special attention is given to the period 2007–2015, during which market fluctuations after the 2008 global financial crisis could have affected the firms’ compliance decisions. Formal monitoring and enforcement by the local environmental agencies are found to have 1 Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China 2 Department of Government and Laws, Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, Guangzhou, China 3 Institute of Environment, Energy and Sustainability, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China 4 Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China 5 East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore & Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore 6 Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia * Corresponding author: [email protected]; Tel: [phone] doi: 10.18278/cpj.1.1.6