2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley [distributor], 2016. xxiv, 228 pp. US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7456-9864-9.
The first edition of Shapiro’s textbook was published in 2012 and received very good reviews. This volume updates the text and expands information in several areas, such as climate change.
A brief introductory chapter sets the themes—globalization, governance, national identity, civil society and environmental justice. Chapter 2 spells out the causes of environmental problems: population growth, very rapid economic change (including positive aspects—the rise of a middle class, along with the negative—increased urbanization and land pressures). The chapter also introduces climate change as consequence and cause of environmental change and then concludes with a discussion of pollution and food safety cases.
Chapter 3 explores the top-down nature of environmental policy-making. Shapiro discusses very generally the structure of government (its overlapping of functions and contradictions), and the unclear demarcation of policy and law. Her assessment of implementation is that problems (e.g., food safety, heavy metal contamination, bullet trains, etc.) result from the “confusing policy-making landscape in which actors sometimes work at cross purposes” (73). While she believes China’s pathway to sustainable development is blocked by political difficulties, she uses the next chapter (chapter 4) to consider historical and cultural factors. Here, she argues that China has an identity crisis, displaying a “superiority-inferiority” complex. Then in discursive and tangential sections on philosophical traditions, biodiversity, animal welfare, and Mao’s legacy, she states that the Chinese are conducting a cultural debate, which has moved “between jingoism, or pugnacious nationalism, and insecurity” (110).
The fifth chapter takes a different tack from the third by looking from the bottom up; also, it focuses on public participation in civil society. The review of environmental NGOs—domestic (including GONGOs) and foreign—is positive. Most consideration is given to the role that NGOs play in transmitting information, networking, attempting to hold officials accountable, and engaging in symbolic politics. The chapter too briefly treats journalists and filmmakers, citizen and celebrity activists; and it explicates ways in which grassroots activists/NGO leaders attempt to change environmental outcomes through “naming and shaming,” including campaigns against polluting multinationals. The limited use of courts is also reviewed.
Chapter 6 considers environmental justice, emphasizing relations between urban and rural China and the dominant Han as compared to racial and ethnic minorities, most of whom live at the periphery of the nation-state. Shapiro discusses the new middle class of China and its vocal opposition to pollution in its backyards (the NIMBY-effect), while explaining that the effect of this activism is to displace pollution from urban to marginal and rural areas. She presents stories of horrible pollution effects, such as China’s many cancer villages. Most of the chapter compares the poorer environmental fortunes of rural people to city-dwellers (featuring Inner Mongolia and Tibet). She emphasizes that ethnic minorities in China’s periphery whose resources are exploited themselves suffer from environmental degradation. Also treated are China’s imports of polluted goods (such as computer waste) while it forages for resources globally and in the process contaminates foreign sites.
The final chapter is the most rhetorical, suggesting optimistically that China “is inching toward a greater alliance with the green movement, as part of an overall trend toward an expanded civil society and rule by law” (196) and that China has not “reached a point of no return in terms of environmental degradation” (200). Writers of other introductory texts on China’s environment, such as Joel Kassiola and Guo Sujian’s in China’s Environmental Crisis (Palgrave, 2010), are less sanguine.
This second edition remains a serviceable introduction to China’s environmental problems. Each chapter concludes with questions for research and discussion and a brief list of additional resources. Shapiro uses personal examples effectively; her exuberant language surely will engage students.
Two flaws mar the analysis. First, there are insufficient citations to sources, particularly when Shapiro is making global statements with which some readers may disagree (for example, “the Taiwanese mafia is also heavily involved” [97]; Chinese ENGOs have built in “spectacularly creative ways” [113–114], IPE staff work has “deeply empowered the Chinese people” [134], and China has “world class environmental regulations” [194]).
A second problem pertains to the treatment of implementation. Shapiro makes several references throughout the book to the implementation deficit, which she attributes variously to central-local tensions, conflicting objectives, and contradictions of policy. Many writers on the environmental problems of developing nations mention the implementation deficit, but it seems an incomplete explanation, especially in the case of a rising economic power like China. What is left out of Shapiro’s analysis is the incentive system for those who implement policy in China, as noted among others by Alex Wang’s study of the nomenklatura system and the evaluation of cadres for promotion (“The search for sustainable legitimacy: Environmental law and bureaucracy in China,” Harvard Environmental Law Review, vol. 37 [2013]). The simple point is that an authoritarian state has superior opportunities for implementing policy as compared to democratic states. Notwithstanding these flaws, this revised edition has much to offer students of China’s environment.
Jerry McBeath
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA
pp. 337-339