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Last updated:
August 18, 2011



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Wisconsin Style: New Approaches to Regulatory Innovation

Building bridges across oceans: China's role in a sustainable world

By John Morgan
For Multi-State Working Group

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If one of the main messages of the 2005 MSWG Annual Workshop in June 2005 in Grand Rapids was that it’s time to get together and work toward sustainability in a collective manner, the second was that the issues are definitely global in perspective.

China is the biggest player emerging in the game. How this enormous country with incredible resource needs and a bulging population plans for its unavoidably mammoth effect on the environment could very well determine the future of the planet.

A refreshing part of the MSWG conference then was its inclusion not only
of discussions about China, but also of the keynote speeches by Chinese experts in environmental policy and science as well as the attendance by a group of Chinese graduate students studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Who doesn't want healthy food, clean water and fresh air?” asked Rongxun Wang, a doctoral student in geography. “I am excited to see the participation of Chinese in such an important international conference.”

And while to some, China may seem like a world away, the presence of this contingency at the conference reinforced that there truly are many international friends for the environment and that the call for collaboration must be a worldwide endeavor.

This point was made particularly clear by the presentation of two speakers, Dr. Hongjun Zhang of the firm Holland and Knight, LLP, and Dr. Zhenjun Sun, a professor in the College of Resources and Environmental Sciences at China Agricultural University and an expert in the emerging study of biofuels. Sun is on a research sabbatical at the University of Illinois-Champaign.

Zhang explained that one reason “China gets attention from the international community is Chinese law also has been developing very fast.” He noted that “the situation has been changing in the past two years or three years and multinational companies feel more comfortable [in China].”

As such, with this influx of companies also comes an increase in job opportunities, growth of the Chinese economy and a burgeoning need for energy. But, as one of the graduate students at the conference pointed out, Guangqing Chi, China is struggling with growing pains and trying to manage the influx of these multinational companies whose motives, he said, are not always sincere.

“One of my concerns with China’s environmental problems is that China is sometimes treated unfairly by some other countries. Some multinational companies have been making huge profits in China by taking advantages of low labor costs and loose environmental regulations, and at the same time their governments blame China for not being able to protect labor rights and environment,” he said.

“China’s environmental problems are definitely the most complex, and it requires a synthetic understanding of historic, cultural, political, economic, and demographic reasons. What we lack are not solutions, but effective solutions.”

Indeed, many of the “effective solutions” that Chi calls for are precisely what people like Dr. Sun are seeking to devise in China. He said that you can’t walk up to a farmer and say, “please protect the environment.” That’s not enough, he said. Instead, waste recycling needs to be seen as a “new industry” that will be profitable for them. “We believe that no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

The environmental issues of facing China and the rest of the world are mind-numbing. Yet, the attendees at this conference expressed a methodical and unwavering motivation to work together towards solutions.

“I'd like to be a bridge,” said Ying Zhu, a graduate student in chemical and biological engineering, “ to introduce good policies from America to China and meanwhile let the Americans know more about Chinese environmental status.”

 

Reportage from MSWG's annual workshop

Bringing power to the people: a journalist's view

Environmentalism: death or rebirth? The debate rages on

Pushing the paradigm limits: metagovernance and the environmental movement