China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 151

China Policy Journal
cities. These polluters often operate in
the absence of governmental regulation
and they can easily evade government
inspections and sanctions by operating
at night, secretly shutting off treatment
facilities, concealing outlets, or simply
abandoning the old factories and moving
into new sites.
4. Formal Compliance Regime
and Coercive Enforcement
China’s environmental regulators
mainly rely on formal administrative
and legal enforcement
instruments to deter and sanction those
firms which breach the pollution limits.
Most of the regulatory responsibilities,
including daily monitoring, inspections,
and administrative penalties, are
decentralized downwards to the EPBs—
these take charge mainly at municipality
and county levels. The Guangzhou
EPB is responsible for the regulation of
the SMSs administered by the MEP and
prioritized polluting sources at the municipal
level. As grassroots level regulators,
the district-level EPBs focus their
law enforcement mainly on small polluters
and they also assist the municipal
EPB to regulate the prioritized sources.
4.1. Formal Monitoring and
Inspection to Catch Noncompliance
Most administrative and financial resources
for monitoring pollution in
China in general or in Guangzhou in
particular are devoted to prioritized
areas identified by governments at all
administrative levels, i.e. centrally, provincially,
and municipally prioritized
sources. The centrally prioritized polluting
sources, or the SMSs, are usually
large polluters directly managed by the
MEP under the Automatic Monitoring
Management Program (AMMP).
The Guangzhou EPB then generates
a more inclusive monitoring lists by
adding polluting sources prioritized at
the provincial and municipal levels to
the MEP SMS catalog. In practice, the
local EPBs do not always differentiate
between the locally prioritized sources
and the SMSs. All the SMSs under the
AMMP are required by the MEP to install
automatic monitoring and reporting
systems that can submit real-time
pollution data and serve as the primary
source of compliance-monitoring information
for the environmental regulators.
In Guangzhou, the automatic
monitoring systems installed at the
SMSs became fully operational in 2009,
and similar devices were gradually deployed
to the locally prioritized sources
in the following years.
Besides formal monitoring, inspection
is another important administrative
enforcement instrument for
China’s environmental regulators. Before
the deployment of the automatic
monitoring systems, inspection was actually
the most important method used
by local EPB officers to collect information
on pollution and execute sanctions.
Even after the diffusion of the automatic
monitoring systems, inspection is
still an important instrument by which
the local environmental regulators can
detect and catch the small polluting
firms insufficiently covered by the formal
monitoring system.
Inspection mainly takes two
forms, namely regular monitoring in-
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