China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 94

Subjective and Objective Air Quality in Urban China
As a policy tool to break the deadlock,
Chinese central government has given
high hope to environmental transparency.
The Regulations on Open Government
Information was enacted by
the State Council in 2007 and took effective
in 2008. According to the Regulations,
governments are required to
disclose public information and citizens
are entitled to request government
information. Almost at the same time,
The National Bureau of Environmental
Protection (the predecessor of Ministry
of Environmental Projection, MEP)
promulgated the Measures on Open
Environmental Information (OEI) in
2008 to mandate local environmental
protection bureaus (EPBs) to disclose
environmental information.
For individual citizens, environmental
transparency can educate
citizens to realize the importance of
environmental sustainability and proactively
take measures to protect themselves
from pollution. Pollution is more
than a pure objective fact. It is actually
social constructed. The definition of
pollution changes with people’s understanding
of the causes and consequences
of environmental changes. With
more environmental information, the
public is informed and educated to understand
the consequences of economic
growth and development so as to make
an informed decision to adjust their
expectations toward pollution. Their
attitudes or behaviors would change
accordingly. In China’s unique historical
and cultural context characterized
by government secrecy, disclosing environmental
information to the public
exhibits government’s genuine wiliness
and commitment in constraining corruption
and abuse of power and controlling
pollution (Yu 2011).
In China, due to the lack of a
vibrant civil society, government monopolies
environmental information
provision. However, citizens themselves
can also acquire information from other
channels (Fung, Graham, and Weil
2007). When government information
is absent, information from other
sources would significantly influence
their perceptions on government performance
in a way government may not
like. In 2009, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing
began to provide air quality information
to its employees and American
expatriate due to the frequent appearance
of choking haze. The publicity of
air quality assessment went viral in social
media. After accusing the Embassy
for intervening China’s internal affairs,
the MEP was forced to release air quality
information. However, the continuous
inconsistence between the two
data sources further jeopardized public
confidence and trust in the MEP (Ma
and Zhang 2015). What is even worse
is that the information released by government
and other sources (including
citizens themselves) is inconsistent or
mutual conflicting, which may result in
citizens’ discontent and distrust toward
government.
Theoretical Hypotheses
Objective and Subjective Air Quality
In public administration literature,
since 1970s, a stream of literature
has examined the congruence be-
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