China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 158

Chronic Noncompliance and Ineffective Enforcement in Guangzhou
Guangzhou EPB established a specific
coordinative mechanism with the local
public security departments. The municipal
Public Security Bureau also established
a special division specializing
in investigating environmental crimes.
Despite all these efforts made by the
local authorities, it still takes time to
effectively implement these new mechanisms
for environmental criminal enforcement.
Our fieldwork found that the
police forces were still poorly trained in
the investigation of environmental cases
and they were therefore unwilling to
receive cases transferred from the environmental
protection agencies.
5. Informal Compliance
Regime and Noncoercive
Citizen Enforcement
The informal compliance regime
is characterized by active intervention
in unregulated polluting
behavior and enforcement of environmental
standards by private citizens.
Informal regulation takes many forms.
In the context with well-established
regulatory environment, citizen enforcement
mainly takes the forms of citizen-initiated
law suits and reporting.
In developing countries, where environmental
regulation is generally weak,
typical citizen environmental enforcement
usually happens outside of the
institutional framework, such as public
campaigns, resistance and boycotts led
by NGOs and community leaders.
In China, citizen enforcement is
profoundly structured and influenced
by the authoritarian state, and public
participation in environmental law enforcement
mainly takes on cooperative
instead of confrontational approaches.
The past decade has witnessed the
growing impact of citizen enforcement
on corporate environmental noncompliance
(Johnson et al. 2018). As a response
to increasing environmental
pollution and inadequate regulatory
resources, the Chinese government has,
over the past decade, been trying to encourage
public participation in reporting
environmental offences and monitoring
polluting plants. A variety of
laws, institutions, and polices have been
established by governments at various
levels to enable and encourage ordinary
citizens to monitor and report illegal
discharges from polluting firms. On the
other hand, the growth of the public’s
environmental awareness and the continued
development of ENGOs during
the past decade have also given rise
to more vigorous citizen enforcement
activities and they have also provided
supplementary instruments to the formal
environmental regulatory system.
5.1. Informal Reporting and
Monitoring by Citizens
The major forms of informal enforcement
of environmental regulation in
China include citizen reporting and
monitoring. Ordinary Chinese citizens
can report illegal discharges to local
EPBs through a variety of channels,
such as telephone hotlines, official websites
and the microblogs of EPBs, and
conventional letter-and-visit systems.
More importantly, the formal law enforcement
activities conducted by the
environmental regulators have become
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