China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 162

Chronic Noncompliance and Ineffective Enforcement in Guangzhou
The newly-modified Environmental
Protection Law passed in 2014
marked a watershed moment for China’s
private environmental enforcement
by allowing NGOs to bring public interest
environmental lawsuits. Although
the new legislation still sets strict legal
and even political limitations on
the participation of nongovernmental
prosecutors, such as registration at municipal
administration and no records
of any administrative and legal violations
in three years, some professional
ENGOs that had been advocating for
public interest litigation immediately
seized the newly-acquired opportunity
to file lawsuits against the enterprises
responsible for pollution incidents that
severely harmed the local environment
and communities. In 2015, among the
48 public interest cases in China, 41 of
them were initiated by ENGOs and the
government-sponsored Environmental
Protection Federations (EPFs) (Li
2016). In Guangzhou, the first public
interest case took place soon after the
implementation of the updated EPL
and the litigant was the All-China Federation
of Environmental Protection
(ACFEP).
Although the revised EPL did
enable the NGOs to enforce environmental
laws and deter noncompliant
behavior of polluting firms with public
interest litigation, effective implementation
of the new legislation still needs
to address numerous barriers such as,
to name a few, the lack of professional
knowledge and resources on the part of
nongovernmental litigants and the weak
capacity and will of the legal authorities
to catch the infringers. The limitation
of the newly-empowered litigation was
clearly shown in the first public interest
case in Guangzhou. Although the infringers
and illegal emissions were local,
the plaintiff was the ACFEP, based
in Beijing, and therefore, neither the
local public procurator nor the municipal
FEP were technically and politically
prepared to file the environmental public
interest litigation. More importantly,
as an actor from the political capital of
China, the involvement of ACFEP in
this case showed the MEP’s determination
to set a precedent in the regulation
of illegal industrial waste dumping and
strengthen the law enforcement in this
field. But as with enforcing the law on
those small polluters operating on the
periphery of the formal regulatory system,
the local courts found it difficult to
enforce the verdicts because the polluters
responsible for the illegal dumping
simply disappeared.
6. Conclusion and Discussion
Chronic noncompliance by polluting
firms is one of the most
serious challenges for China’s
policymakers and law enforcement
agencies in the face of environmental
degradation and widespread pollution
in China. With rich empirical firm-level
data derived from Guangzhou, we have
examined both formal and informal environmental
enforcement actions and
their effects on corporate environmental
behavior.
We found that combined efforts
by both state agencies and civil society
actors, represented by environmental
NGOs, have not been able to funda-
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