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The social making of authoritarian environmentalism: protest-litigation nexus and policy changes in China

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The social making of authoritarian environmentalism: protest-litigation nexus and policy changes in China

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Content The Social Making of Authoritarian Environmentalism: Protest-Litigation Nexus and Policy Changes in China Mengxiao Tang Dissertation committee: Prof. Jefferey Sellers (Chair, POIR), Prof. Daniel Lynch (POIR), Prof. Shui-Yan Tang (Price) UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL Doctor of Philosophy (POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS) May 2018 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................... 3 1. REPERTOIRES OF CONTENTION: THEORY, CONTEXT AND COMPARATIVE EFFECTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE ..................................................... 15 1.1 Intellectual Lineages ................................................................................................................. 18 1.1.1 Environmental authoritarianism with consultative civic participation ................................ 18 1.1.2 Repertoires of contention .................................................................................................... 23 1.1.3 Authoritarian rule of law and legal participation ................................................................ 27 1.2 An Integrative Framework and the Theoretical Contributions ........................................... 30 1.3 Bridging the Gap: Protest and Litigation in Tentative Comparison ................................... 32 1.3.1 Developing the tentative hypotheses ................................................................................... 33 1.3.2 Data analysis and findings ................................................................................................... 39 1.4 Summary ................................................................................................................................... 44 2. PROTEST-ADVOCACY LINKAGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONTENTIOUS OUTCOMES .......................................................................................................................... 49 2.1 Power in Protest: Decision Change vs. Policy Change .......................................................... 50 2.2. From Protest to Policy Change ............................................................................................... 52 2.2.1 Existing explanations and beyond ....................................................................................... 52 2.2.2 Advocacy in contention: actors, mechanisms, and strategies .............................................. 54 2.3 Methodology: QCA ................................................................................................................... 57 2.4 Data Processing ......................................................................................................................... 58 2.5 Analyses and Results ................................................................................................................ 66 2.5.1 Occurrence of environmental policy change: necessity analysis ........................................ 66 2.5.2 Occurrence of environmental policy change: sufficiency analysis ..................................... 70 2.5.3 Non-occurrence of environmental policy change: necessity and sufficiency ..................... 74 2.6 Discussion .................................................................................................................................. 75 3. Enforcing Green Transparent Governance: Court Attitudes and Bones of Contention in Environmental Information Disclosure Litigation ......................................................... 80 3.1 Courts under Authoritarianism .............................................................................................. 82 3.2 The Administrative Litigation of Environmental Information Disclosure ......................... 85 3.2.1 The plaintiffs, the defendants, and the information requested ............................................ 86 3.2.2 Judgment results: regional variation.................................................................................... 88 3.3 Court Attitudes ......................................................................................................................... 89 ...................................................................................... 91 ................................................... 92 (minus one point) .............................................................................. 92 ................................................................................. 94 3.3.5 Court attitude distribution across regions ............................................................................ 95 3.4 Bones of Contention: Complexities and Ambiguities ............................................................ 98 3.4.1 The third party ..................................................................................................................... 99 ................................................................................................... 102 3.4.3 The legal standing of social organizations ........................................................................ 106 3.4.4 The burden of proof ........................................................................................................... 110 3.5 Summary and Discussion ....................................................................................................... 112 4. THE PROTEST-LITIGATION LINKAGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL CONTENTION: PATTERNS, CHALLENGES, AND PROSPECTS ......................................................... 117 4.1 Patterns of Protest-litigation Linkage ................................................................................... 119 4.1.1 Concerted reinforcement: the Kunming anti-PX case ....................................................... 123 4.1.2 Interlocked compelling: the anti-discharge project in Qidong .......................................... 129 4.1.3 Situational concentration: the anti-incinerator cases in rural Qinhuangdao and urban Beijing .................................................................................................................................................... 134 .................................................... 140 4.2 Environmental Public Interest Litigation (EPIL): Challenges and Prospects .................. 146 4.2.1 A substitute for environmental protest? ............................................................................ 148 4.2.2 Legal development and institutional innovation ............................................................... 151 4.3 Summary ................................................................................................................................. 156 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 157 APPENDICES ...................................................................................................................... 169 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 176 INTRODUCTION On May 12, 2008, a baby boy was born to the Xie Family of the Xie River Village, who live about 623 foots (190 meters) away from a waste incinerator in Huai an, Jiangsu Province. Shortly after, the baby boy was diagnosed of cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Excluding the factor of gene mutations and other possibilities, Mr. Yong Xie, the boy s father, then aged 28, brought the energy corporation of the incinerator to the local court in 2010, which was later on referred to as the first anti-incinerator lawsuit in contemporary China. Since then, Mr. Xie has quitted his job and devoted himself wholeheartedly to the prolonged battle for justice redress, going through multiple failed attempts of first-instance trail, final-instance judgment, rehearing review, as well as repeated applications for information disclosure, starting from the grassroots level of the state s administrative system all the way up to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). Fortunately, I m not fighting alone! declared Mr. Xie. Throughout years of excruciating struggles, his perseverance has been sustained by the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) and the high expectation of fellow victims among similarly affected villagers in broad regions. Albeit close media attention and the profound ramification it potentially has, this case has still been dismayingly pending so far, stuck with the burden of proof, i.e. to establish a cause and effect relationship between the toxin of the incinerator and the boy s injury. 1 In 2007, the Party secretary and local officials of the Huangtutang Village in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, tricked 77 percent of the villagers signatures in the name of building a temple for the local god. Then 1 [The Five-year Tug of War between Yong Xie and Waste Incinerator], (March 20, 2013), [The Procuratorial Daily], Retrieved from <http://newspaper.jcrb.com/html/2013-03/20/content_122684.htm>; [Jinmei Liu: Observation of Jiangsu Hai an Waste Incinerator], (May 20, 2013), [Sohu.com], Retrieved from <http://green.sohu.com/20130520/n376485197.shtml>; interview with CLAPV staff in Beijing, October 2015. they sold the collectively-owned land to the developer of East Xi Incinerator, while the villagers were all kept in dark. It was not until early 2011, when the incinerator under the first stage of construction started its trial-for-ignition and sent forth strong, repellent odor, that the villagers realized that they had been swindled and begun to stage demonstrations and sit-ins against the construction. As none of the preceding contentious efforts worked, a large-scale protest broke out on April 11. Tens of thousands of engraved people marched to the streets and strong violence was involved in the confrontation between the protesters and anti-riot police. Under high social pressure, the project was tabled. 2 Yet who are the winners and losers of such a result? The city of Wuxi produces over 3,000 tons of waste a day. Its two existing incinerators can only dispose of two thirds of that and have been in overloaded operation for years, whereas the East Xi Incinerator now sits idle in the village due to the protest, with the1.5-billion-yuan (US$242 million) investment down the drain. Neither were the officials held accountable for the ridicule of public participation fraud with signature cheating, nor have any improvement been seen in subsequent governmental decision-making for the siting issue, including transparency, participation, and monitoring, in order to prevent the repetition of the same mistake. In November 2009, also against a proposed local incinerator, over a thousand residents of Panyu District staged a relatively small-scale and peaceful demonstration in front of the Guangzhou municipal government building. After the local officials promised to halt and relocate the project, Panyu campaigners and supra-local anti-incinerator activists or groups continued to crystalize the 2 [Wuxi Incinerator Tabled, Protest of Ten Thousand People Not Over] , (April 13, 2011), Radio Free Asia. Retrieved from <https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/wx-04132011151050.html>; [Poison Gas of Waste Incinerator Stinking, Ten Thousand People Protesting in Jiangsu Wui] , (April 11, 2011), China Digital Times. Retrieved from <https://chinadigitaltimes.net>; China s Waste Incinerator Deadlock, (July 21, 2014), China Dialogue. Retrieved from <https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7150-China-s-waste-incineration-deadlock>; [Inspection to the Problem of Waste Management in Wuxi under Not-In-My-Backyard], (July 3, 2014), [people.cn]. Retrieved from <http://fj.people.com.cn/changting/n/2014/0703/c355599-21568640-5.html>. contentious result into formal organizational structure and carried on the coalitional search for a sustainable solution to municipal solid waste (Steinhardt and Wu 2016). Throughout and in the wake of the protest, anti-incinerator campaigns gradually developed expertise on waste management, took ownership of this policy issue, and shifted their arguments from the Not-In-My-Backyard pejorative to a public interest perspective (Johnson 2013). Significantly, a Public Consultative and Supervision Committee for Urban Waste Management was established, which promises the new development of consultative participation in authoritarian policy-making processes (Wong 2016). Map 1 Distribution of Waste Incinerators in China (Green icon: in operation; Orange icon: under construction; Blue icon: Proposed for construction. Source: Informational Platform for Domestic Waste Incineration [shenghuo laji fenshao xinxi pingtai], website: http://www.waste-cwin.org/map/node More than 520,000 tons per day of trash is piling up in China. 3 With the speedup of urbanization, an increasing number of incinerators have been constructed intensively or proposed for construction, which are swarming across half of the vast stretches of the country s territory along the northeast-southwest diagonal line (Map 1). The three contentious episodes introduced above are all social mobilization against incinerators built in or close to dense communities of residents in recent years. Situated in rural or urban settings, or crossing the rural-urban division, these contentions can be based on accomplished fact of environmental grievance or on anticipated health risk that incurs pre-emptive action; they may stick with conventional legal institutions of the authoritarian system or employ disruptive protest as the contentious approach; they can unfold in large-scale or relatively small-scale forms in terms of the numbers of protesters taking to the streets; they may involve violence or proceed peacefully; and eventually, they may yield fruitful policy outcome in environmental governance, or extract ad hoc compromise from local government, or reach an impasse, or end in complete failure. In the face of an upsurge in environmental contention in contemporary China and their intriguing empirical varieties, this dissertation pays particular attention to the presence of two salient approaches of contention conventional litigation and disruptive protest, their different impacts on environmental governance of the authoritarian state, and the dynamic patterns of 3 The Burning Problem of China s Garbage, (February 20, 2017), NPR. Retrieved from <https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/02/20/515814016/the-burning-problem-of-chinas- garbage>. protest-litigation interaction. Given that collective contention is practically illegal and risky, and that legal institutions are widely regarded as week and dependent, it is indeed phenomenal that both forms of contention have run high in China in recent years. In this dissertation, I propose such an overarching research question: how do popular environmental contentions, in their divergent and interactive forms, affect environmental policy and/or law enforcement in China? Specifically, it also addresses a few sub-questions: For protesters, what are the conditions for the success or failure in soliciting positive policy change (toward more transparency and public participation) from local states? For litigation, how do citizens legal participation in courts promote governmental enforcement of environmental regulations? More interestingly, how have the two approaches converged, if they ever do, in environmental contentions, and what are their interactive patterns? As pollution-based concerns across the country keep touching the nerve of ordinary citizens, environmental contenders have arisen from all walks of life. It is clear that they are not fighting alone; yet how to fight and how to fight effectively are much less obvious problems, which have driven me into and sustained me throughout this research. An Integrative Framework: Overview For the scholars of Chinese environmentalism, the topics of environmental governance, activism, and contentions are all subject to distinct theoretical frameworks and have not engaged in adequate dialogues with each other. The theses of environmental authoritarianism (Beeson 2010) and consultative authoritarianism (Teets 2014), respectively, look at the shaping and reshaping of green governance in China either from a state-driven viewpoint or a society-oriented angle. Meanwhile, a dichotomy exists (Johnson 2010) between the studies on civic activism that focus on environmental NGOs (ENGOs) (Ho and Edmond 2007) and the research on grievance-based popular protests, which are analyzed with the traditional variables of contentious politics and social movements (Mertha 2008, Cai 2010). All these existing works are illuminating and valuable by themselves, but they fall short of expounding sufficiently the effects of the phenomenal coexistence of the two contentious approaches on environmental governance of the authoritarian state. This study attempts to build up an integrative framework of environmental contention in China based on critical incorporation of three important intellectual lineages: environmental authoritarianism with civic consultative, repertoires of contention, and legal participation under authoritarian rule of law. Drawing on the merits of these literatures, I emphasize two previously understudied linkages, or two sets of nexuses, of the integrative framework: one is the protest- advocacy linkage, which transcends the dichotomy between the studies of environmental activism and popular resistance, and the other is the protest-litigation linkage, which uses the contentious repertoires expressions but is mainly devoted to the diverse patterns of interaction between repertories. Overall, I argue that environmental protest and litigation in their divergent forms have different effects on governance. In general, protests are prone to soliciting more transparency and policymaking toward broader public participation from local states, dependent on whether policy advocacy efforts are involved in the contentious campaigns, while litigation has been found effective in binding local governments to enforce environmental regulations, which, however, is also a function of court attitudes based on regional diversity. When protest and litigation do interact with each other in the empirical world, the two repertories do not necessarily converge but unfold in multifold patterns, according to whether the protest is advocacy-spirited and whether the litigation is public interest oriented. Methods of Inquiry This study employs mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative analyses, including regression analysis, data visualization, crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA), and in-depth case studies. In addition to supplementary interview data I collected in fieldwork in Beijing, Jiangsu Province, and Yunnan Province in 2015 and 2016, the main sources of data for the analyses in this work include: Online court decisions databases. For litigation, as China has gradually stepped into the digitization era of court decisions since 2010, national databases of legal documents of all types of lawsuits are now made available electronically for public access. I have mainly sourced on the China Judgments Online Dataset 4 of legal documents, including civil and administrative 4 [Court Decision Website of China] , <http://wenshu.court.gov.cn/>. arbitrations and judgments of environmental tort liability cases, supplemented by the statistics of environmental administrative litigations published by China Environment Yearbook (2006- 2015). Chinese and English-written literatures and news report. As for protests, since there is no reliable statistics on traceable and well-documented cases of environmental protests by regions, I have mainly searched the Chinese and English-language academic writings on the topics of environmental activism, environmental protests, social access to justice, and environmental governance and policies. I have also dug into a variety of other secondary materials, including and media coverage of environment-related social contentions, official news reports, and online reports of Chinese ENGOs. Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI). I resort to PITI (2008/09-2015/16), developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), to operationalize transparency as one component of local environmental governance. Since 2009, IPE and NRDC performance in disclosing information on pollutants and pollution sources at the prefectural level and the Ministry of Environmental Protection Measures on Open Environmental Information (trial) the two milestone regulations for Chinese green transparency promulgated in 2008. With minor adjustments annually, the assessment scope of the PITI usually consists of enterprise emission data, Environmental Impact Assessment information, routine supervision records, automatic monitoring data, and so on and so forth; they are either published by the Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) of each respective city or acquired from information disclosure upon request, and then scored according to four evaluation criteria systematic-ness, timeliness, comprehensiveness, and user-friendliness. Beidafabao. The final main data source is Beidafabao, a comprehensive and widely-used search software of Chinese legal documents, including local laws and governmental regulations as well as court decisions, developed by Peking University. I have relied on the keyword search on Beidafabao to 1) identify new promulgation of local environmental regulations in the years immediately after the occurrence of protests in different localities (Chapter 2), and 2) collect court decisions of administrative lawsuits of environmental information disclosure for the analysis of court attitude (Chapter 3). Dataset complied (one big for regression and one original-small): Based on these data sources, I have compiled a time-series cross-sectional dataset to test hypothetical associations between the two contentious repertoires protest and litigation with the ce at the provincial level from 2005 to 2014. The reason I intercept this one-decade time period is primarily concerned with data availability, which will be further explained in Chapter 1. Meanwhile, I have also hand-coded an original, small dataset of court attitude toward a particular type of administrative litigation, i.e. citizens legal claim-making in environmental information disclosure lawsuits. The dataset is mainly used in Chapter 4 to visualize court attitude across broad subnational regions and to explore the implications of authoritarian legal participation for environmental enforcement. Given the variety of data sources and limitations in case selection, however, this dissertation is unable and not intended to provide more than an exploratory framework of the contentious outcomes of protest and litigation in their divergent and interactive forms in environmental contention. For instance, the court-decision digitization process is still in its embryo stage, susceptible to problems such as delayed publication, uneven disclosure rates, and missing cases. And the number of the administrative lawsuits of environmental information and that of environmental protest are only the tip of the iceberg of all such cases that occurred within the time frame of this study, most of which might be underrepresented or simply undocumented. the cases in this study are neither exhaustive nor representative of all the open environmental information lawsuits filed in the whole country. Yet the completion of this study has revealed important, nuanced, and hidden mechanisms and dynamics of a socially-made aspect of environmental authoritarianism in China. And it will serve as a building block of a contemporary theory of contentious repertoires in authoritarian regimes. Plan of the Dissertation In the chapters to come, I seek to proceed as the research questions lead. First all, Chapter 1 sorts out the three main intellectual lineages that have richly informed this study. Based on these insights, I put forth an integrative framework of environmental contention that connects environmental protest and litigation, which gives the layout of the whole dissertation at the same time. Based on existing literatures and the time-series cross-sectional dataset, Chapter 1 also sets out to develop and test hypotheses on the comparative effects of the two contentious approaches on the state s environmental governance, in a general and tentative manner. It suggests that environmental protests have promoted more transparence and improved local states policy- making, while litigation has mainly affected governmental enforcement of environmental regulations. Follow the guiding results of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 continues to examine the micro- mechanism that leads environmental protest to better governance as the contentious outcome. With the methods of csQCA of twenty influential and well-documented cases, I argue that a protest-advocacy linkage is necessary for street mobilization to yield positive fruits in policy change toward transparency and new promulgation of environmental laws or regulations locally. It also emphasizes a substantial distinction between decision change (ad hoc governmental compromise at instance level) and policy change (locked-in commitment at institutional level) as the contentious outcomes. Chapter 2 will focus on the latter and explain why. Chapter 3 shifts to litigation and looks into the role of law and court in authoritarian settings. In particular, it zooms in to the type of environmental information disclosure litigation and discusses court attitude, regional variance, and controversial issues with the original, hand- coded dataset and specific cases. The main finding is that citizens legal participation in court has been able to pressurize governmental compliance of environmental green regulations; yet the capacity of litigation is shaped by most local courts conservative and cautious generally speaking attitudes. After examining them in divergent forms, Chapter 4 juxtaposes the two contentious repertoires and explores the dynamic patters of their interaction, which is by no means a simple converge. Dependent on whether the protest is linked with policy advocacy and whether the lawsuit embraces a public interest orientation, environmental contentions with both protest and litigation may unfold in four typical patterns: of concerted reinforcement, interlocked compelling, situational concentration, and strategic leveraging. These patterns will be illustrated with case studies. In addition, the chapter also addresses the emerging environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) and discusses its significance for social contention and legal advocacy in Chinese environmental politics. The conclusion part explores the theoretical implications of this study and proposes future research agendas based on the findings. 1. REPERTOIRES OF CONTENTION: THEORY, CONTEXT AND COMPARATIVE EFFECTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE Environmental politics in China is a dynamic twofold landscape. On one hand, social contention triggered by environmental concerns has posed an increasingly salient challenge to authoritarian state in recent decades. A most widely cited figure released by Yang Chaofei, vice-chairman of the Chinese Society for Environmental Science, in a special lecture organized by the Standing in 2012, showed that environmental protests grew at an average rate of 29 percent annually between 1996 and 2011. 5 On the other, we have been observing a restless seeking spirit in the authoritarian state, who keeps renovating its toolkit of environmental governance through a series of lawmaking efforts, legal experiments and ad hoc institutional innovations since early 2000s. These efforts may include shifting the burden of proof to the defendant in pollution lawsuits (2001) 6 , enacting the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Law (2002), setting up multiform environmental courts in various experimental localities (2007-13), revising the Civil Procedure Law to allow environmental 5 29% 1% [Environmental Mass Incidents of the Country Increasing 29% Annually, Judicial Resolution less than 1% ], (October 27, 2012), [Caijing.com]. Retrieved from <http://politics.caijing.com.cn/2012-10-27/112233970.html>. 6 The instruction on shifting the burden of proof to the defendant in civil environmental cases was first seen in a . Then it was written into the 2004 Solid Waste Law, the 2008 Water Pollution Law and the revised 2009 Tort Liability Law. The principle was entrenched by the end of the 2000s (Stern 2011). public interest litigation (EPIL, 2012), which is further specified in the revised Environmental Protection Law (2015), etc. country, policy makers and scholars are advocating emphatically for the resolution of environmental conflicts through established legal system. Although legal relief institutions are traditionally viewed as incapable and inefficient, environmental protesters, pollution victims and social organizations have started to engage the law and courts through manifold legal participation. Prominently, reports show that environmental lawsuits against the government agencies have been increasing both in number and in the scope for admissible cases. About 225,000 such cases were filed in 2016, an increase of 13.6 percent over the previous year (Lubman 2017). However, it is unclear how different approaches of environmental contentions the disruptive approach in the form of taking to the streets and the institutionalized approach that resorts to established legal channels of the regime solicit state response in environmental governance differently. This lacuna of knowledge is worthy of emphasis given the phenomenal fact that both the numbers of environmental protests and lawsuits in China have been markedly on rise concomitantly in the decade. More interestingly, while more episodes of environmental contention have begun to demonstrate the momentum of protest-litigation linkage, the patterns of how these two approaches engage each other may vary considerably. The overarching research question I address in my dissertation is: How do popular environmental contentions in China, in their divergent and interactive forms, affect environmental governance of the authoritarian state? By divergent form, I am interested in exploring the effects of protest and litigation, respectively, on environmental governance; and by interactive form, I examine a variety of patterns of protest-litigation linkage based on different dimensions, the diversity of which by no means implies that protest and litigation necessarily converge in contentious practice. In the following substantive chapters, I will move forward to address specifically three sub-questions: For environmental protests, why do some succeed in soliciting favorable policy change from the state, while others fail? For environmental litigation, how effective is citizens legal participation in court in promoting governmental enforcement of environmental regulations, and how do court attitudes toward citizens legal participation vary across sub-national regions? For contentions that involve both protest and litigation, what are the patterns and pattern conditions of protest-litigation linkage, and what are the implications of the patterns for the success or failure of the contentions? Meanwhile, basic components: transparency, enforcement, and behaviors. Environmental transparency, or answerability, mainly speaks to the obligation of the officials in environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) to disclose environmental information mandated by relevant la reports, statistics on environmental petitions, complaints and their handling results. Environmental enforcement refers to the behavior of enforcement agencies to hold polluters liable for above-standard emissions and penalize non-compliance with environmental regulations. I include an additional dimension of institutionalization into the concept of environmental governance in order to explore at what aspects and to which degree changes in the -making, institution- building, or institution-reforming, rather than merely ad hoc responses to case-specific grievances. The rest part of this chapter will first review three strands of intellectual lineages, with which the study of environmental politics in China is informed. Secondly, it attempts to build up an integrative framework, which succinctly points to the theoretical contribution of this study and also serves as the roadmap for the whole dissertation. Thirdly, it develops and tests a few hypotheses of the comparative effects of environmental protest and litigation on governance. With some preliminary statistical analyses, it suggests that the two approaches of social contention have affected different aspects of environmental governance, including information transparency, enforcement, and the degree of institutionalization. 1.1 Intellectual Lineages 1.1.1 Environmental authoritarianism with consultative civic participation What factors have been driving the evolution of environmental governance in contemporary China? Recent literature of Chinese environmental politics reflects the reviving debates between traditional, state-corporatist framework (Unger and Chan 1995) and a new direction (Howell 2004) of Chinese state-society relations. Specifically, the state-driven thesis of environmental authoritarianism (Beeson 2010) and the collaborative, society-oriented theory of consultative authoritarianism (Teets 2014) both provide guiding perspectives for our understanding of the shaping and reshaping of the state s environmental governance. Neatly defined by Gilley (2012), environmental authoritarianism is a public policy model that concentrates authority in a few executive agencies manned by capable and uncorrupt elites seeking to improve environmental outcomes, and limits public participation to a narrow cadre of scientific and technocratic elites, while others are expected to participate only in state- led mobilization for the purpose of implementation (p. 288). Despite theoretical and empirical underspecificity, Beeson (2010) basically suggests that authoritarian regimes unattractive as they may be may prove more capable of responding to the complex political and environmental pressures than some democracies. With careful refinement, however, Gilley (2012) puts forward a key finding that environmental authoritarianism is more effective in producing policy outputs than policy implementation or outcomes, reflected in the case of China s climate policy. The model resonates well with the call to bring the state back in and the notion of green leviathan or environmental state, which counters the expression of global environmental politics that emphasizes the role of international organizations, communities, groups and individuals, and reaffirm the state as a central object of environmental politics (Duit, Feindt, and Meadowcroft 2016). At the same time, however, the alleged benefits of the model in the Chinese political context is also challenged by many other studies. For instance, Eaton and Kostka (2012) point out that the advantages of China s model of environmental authoritarianism might be undermined by the high turnover of leading cadres at the local level and their short-term time horizons, which motivate them to opt for rapid-fire, low-quality implementation to state-led green growth initiatives. Edmonds (2011) identifies the continuing inhibitors to China s ability to control environmental degradation, including lack of transparency, elite manipulation, and bureaucratic weaknesses. And domestic critics hold that the authoritarian model is detrimental to policy formulation and implementation (Friends of Nature 2007, Guan, Sun and Cao 2011). The main problem with the model of environmental authoritarianism is decidedly concerned with its non-participatory nature. As Gilley observes, discussions about climate change by ecoelites in China take place almost exclusively within technocratic and regulatory discourses that make little or no mention of society; public participation is narrowly defined in terms of citizens internalizing state-produced knowledge and complying with state policies; activism is limited to rules-based activism rather than attempts to shape public policy (p. 291). He therefore anticipates three promising factors that may prompt reform of the authoritarian model: a major environmental incident that spurs social mobilization, a trickle-up effect from successful local experiments in participatory models that generate good results, and norm diffusion and pressure from international organizations (p. 299). Gilley s projection has been partially and increasingly under realization, testified by a fair amount of current literature that has begun to document and highlight a broadly defined socially- made aspect of the environmental-authoritarianism model. Most obviously, studies show that the enforcement priority and actions of environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) were not only guided by State Council directives and State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) policy, but also influenced significantly by citizen complaints and media exposure regarding polluting factories (Tilt 2007). New kinds of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), operating directly on policy advocacy, transparency, monitoring, and legal issues, have developed controlled boldness and necessary expertise in confronting local governments and enterprises (Van Rooij 2010), which differentiate themselves from earlier embedded organizations (Ho and Edmonds 2008, Yang 2005). Finer-grained analysis even finds that social forces have not only been able to counterbalance the regulatory behaviors of the governments, but their increased support for the environment may have a double-edged impact on enforcement (Van Rooij, Fryxell, Lo, and Wang 2013), which calls for more nuanced research on the conditions for the society to play out positive policy results. This study is situated within an overall backdrop of environmental authoritarianism blended with restricted yet indispensable civic participation. The model of consultative authoritarianism proposed by Teets (2013) epitomizes the features of such a political context of Chinese environmental politics closely enough. Specifically, the model encourages the simultaneous expansion of a fairly autonomous civil society and the development of more indirect tools of state control, (p. 20) which challenges the conventional wisdom that an autonomous civil society is operationally incompatible with authoritarian regimes. A caveat here, however, is that the consultative authoritarianism model suggests a contingent symbiotic relation between grassroots NGOs and local governments in terms of the utility of the former in reducing the social welfare burden of the latter (Spires 2011). Such an overly sanguine viewpoint fails to take adequate consideration of the increasingly contentious context of Chinese society, where the delicate status of ENGOs cannot be easily maintained and where they cannot operate in entire separation from mounting environmental contentions. Therefore, acknowledging the relevance and contribution of the consultative authoritarianism model, or environmental authoritarianism with consultative civic participation in general, my study mainly takes issue with the dichotomy the literature assumes between civic green activism and popular protests in the form of street mobilization. As Johnson (2010) points out, while ENGOs with general environmental passions tend to engage in rules-based activism on a long-term basis to improve public participation institutions, the grievance-based protesters oftentimes employ contentious tactics based on one-off, imminent concerns with local unpopular projects. Although both have effects on promoting participatory rules, they are prone to doing it on their own terms and shunning engagement with each other. Accordingly, Chinese environmental activism literature has thus far focused on either aspect and treated them as largely separate facets of activism. More recently, however, activists engaged in street protests have been increasingly documented as policy advocates in collaboration with local or supra-local ENGOs or other eco- elites (Bondes and Johnson 2017, Sun, Huang and Yip 2017, Steinhardt and Wu 2016, Johnson 2013a, 2013b). Chapter 2 will delve into the protest-advocacy linkage and discuss systematically the micro mechanisms that connect street mobilization and favorable policy change in environmental governance as the contentious outcome. 1.1.2 Repertoires of contention The difference in the forms of environmental contention for this study, protest versus litigation s. Tilly (1993) uses this shared, and acte (p. 264). The key features of contentious repertoires are their subjugation to the limitations of times and their glacial pace of evolution over time. s or the impromptu skits of a troupe of strolling players (rather than, say, the more confining written music interpreted by a string quartet), people in a given place and time learn to carry out a limited number of alternative collective-action routines, adapting each one to the immediate circumstances and to the reactions of antagonists, authorities, (Tilly 1993, p. 265) Repertoires represent the culturally encoded and structurally conditioned ways in which people interact in contentious politics, involving not only what people routinely do but that they know how to do and what to expect, although they are invariably narrower than all of the hypothetically available forms they may employ (Tarrow 1998, pp. 30-31, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001, p.16). Do repertoires, therefore, ever change fundamentally? While contenders do combine scripting and improvisation constantly, they generally innovate at the perimeter of the existing repertoire, which is set by the history of their previous interactions, rather than by breaking entirely with old ways. Most innovations fail and disappear; only a rare few succeed in advancing claims durably and having subsequent contenders borrow rapidly, and fashion long- term, institutionalized changes in a form of contention (Tilly 1993, pp. 265-266, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001, p. 137). Tarrow (1998) calls these rare cases the paradigmatic change in repertoires (p. 102), such as the shift from the brawls and rick burnings in Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century to the petitions and demonstrations that dominate the historical record in the nineteenth century (Tilly 1995), and the development of nonviolent forms of resistance in the twentieth century. The occurrence of such paradigmatic changes major breakthroughs in the way people mount claims and how authorities respond to them usually depends on major fluctuations in interests, opportunity, and organization, which in turn correlate roughly with changes in the macro processes of state-building and the development of capitalism. As a result, contentious repertoires help produce a number of social arrangements, from police practices, to laws of assembly, rules of association, routines for informal gathering, means of reporting news, and else, which are not part of the collective action itself (Tilly 1993, p. 264). In a more general sense, they help formulate the socio-political understandings and norms about prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden claim-making behaviors as well as possible government responses claim-makers should expect. Furthermore, in addition to this structurally deterministic portrait of repertoires, an interesting question would be: Within the same temporal frame, would social movement activists and groups subscribe to different repertoires, and if yes, what might be the factors that shape selection of repertoires? Sherman (2008) takes up this question head-on in his study of the social opposition against low-level radioactive waste disposal sites in two rural New York State counties in 1988. For Tarrow (1998, p. 104), there are three basic types of contentious repertoires: 1) Violence, which is the easiest to initiate for small groups who lack resources and are willing to risk repression; 2) convention, the predominant form of contention, which is institutionalized and acceptable to authorities but lacks excitement; and 3) disruption, existing on the shifting frontier between violence and contention, which obstructs the routine activities of opponents, bystanders, or authorities, thus poses a risk to law and order. But Sherman demonstrates that the classical explanatory agenda for the analysis of contentious politics is insufficient to explain why two counties identical on political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing processes, the variables commonly associated with different forms of contention (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001, p. 17) exhibit distinct repertories. He therefore complements the variable-based approach with a process-based approach, and argues that the relationship developed between local governments and citizen activists, through the social mechanism of brokerage, has a dramatic effect on the dominant repertoire adopted by the contenders. The concept of contentious repertoires and existing analyses on it have provided valuable insights for this study. According to Tarrow s typology of repertoires, environmental litigation in authoritarian China obviously belongs to the contentious category of convention, while demonstrations and protests are constitutionally encoded yet practically proscribed, and characteristic of disruption. The usefulness of this concept is also reflected by its compatibility with the prevailing, though not exhaustive, explanatory agenda of contentious politics that focuses on the three primary variables: Specifically, factors of political opportunity (e.g. relative openness of or the presence of ecoelites within local political system, see Van Rooij and Lo 2010, Wong 2016), mobilizing structures (e.g. the maturity of green organizations in different regions, see Steinhardt and Wu, 2016, Wong 2016, Zhan and Tang 2013, Wu 2013), and the framing processes (e.g. justice, legal, or nationalist frames, see Lu and Chan 2016) are all relevant in our understanding of environmental activists employment of different contentious forms. Nevertheless, the literature is relatively weak in, or not geared toward, explaining the coexistence of multiple repertoires within the same temporal context or sorting out their interactive patterns, distinctive ramifications and nuanced effects on policy change. As the original repertoire analyses have shown, most of them are only interested in observing paradigmatic shifts of repertoires associated with macro movements, revolutions, and sociopolitical arrangements with a long-term time horizon. Despite a limited degree of contentious diffusion (Zhu 2017), environmental activism, on the whole, is locally contained, parochial, and disconnected; thus, it has arguably fallen short of a social movement (Bondes and Johnson 2017). Existing literature on repertoires therefore cannot provide ready answers to the specifics of the interactions between different forms of repertoires for this study, protest and litigation and correspondent policy adjustments in environmental governance. Besides, classical analyses on repertoires are deeply rooted in social movement experiences in democratic regimes or democratization processes, which await both theoretical and empirical complements from the contentious stories in authoritarian contexts. 1.1.3 Authoritarian rule of law and legal participation The literature on authoritarian rule of law and legal participation mainly addresses two related puzzles, or one puzzle with twofold components: First, why do authoritarian regimes and their leaders promote (a certain type of) rule of law to restrict their own exercise of power? And second, why do citizens (and social groups) in authoritarian regimes, knowing the incompetence and dependence of the legal institutions, bother to take up legal weapons and practice legal participation, and how effective is their legal mobilization? Contrary to the conventional assumption that democracy is a prerequisite for judicial power (North and Weingast 1989; North 1990; Olson 2000), courts in nondemocracies are not invariably the pawns of their regimes, nor do they advance the interests of the ruling elites in a straightforward fashion. Throughout vast authoritarian regions and histories across the world, interesting empirical research has revealed that even in tightly controlled political systems, courts don t necessarily side with the authoritarian government or pro-government elites but may uphold a constitutional spirit (Helmke 2002, Ginsburg 2002, Popova 2010). Litigation in nondemocracies has been increasingly regarded not just as an extension of state authority, but a hard-fought struggle that makes visible daily conflicts over class, citizenship and power. Although these courts are often deployed to ameliorate authoritarian pathologies in order to consolidate the regime, they also simultaneously and paradoxically open new avenues for civil challengers or even political opponents (Moustafa 2007). Regarding the case of authoritarian China, a variety of studies have been devoted to explaining why the Communist Party takes efforts to endorse the rule of law and empower the judicial institutions. For example, some argue that the central government promulgates the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) and establishes the administrative court system to , expecting to alleviate the principal-agent problem with legal tools 4; Peerenboom 2002, 2003; Shapiro 1981). For another instance, Wang (2015) argues that the authoritarian rulers will respect rule of law when the organized interest groups, who have valuable and mobile assets but are politically ill-connected, such as foreign investors, demand restraint of favoritism and an equalized playing ground through judicial empowerment. Moreover, courts may also be utilized to defuse social unrest, which is undoubtedly a critical issue that touches the most sensitive nerve of every authoritarian state. By channeling collective anger into individual lawsuits in established legal political purpose of dissolving mass incidents and maintaining social stability (Su and He 2010). However, whilst operating to fulfill their political mandate or pave way for economic infrastructure, it is still unclear whether and how social actors and groups in China, making use of the interaction with courts and other legal institutions, crack open meaningful avenues of everyday political participation and contestation specifically, and structure the state-society relations in general. As the demand-side theory of authoritarian rule of law (Wang 2015) suggests, it is inadequate to solely consider the rulers political and utilitarian calculations when exploring the logics for authoritarian legalism; considerations for the preferences and commitments of important economic and social actors are indispensable. Recent studies on environmental litigation have proved to be very fruitful at this aspect, especially on the effect of citizens and groups filing open environmental information lawsuits on the enforcement of transparency policies (Wang 2014), and the promise of EPIL for shaping new legislation and promoting institutional innovation in an ambivalent political context (Stern 2013). Acknowledging the rich findings of these studies, a regrettable point with this scholarship in general is that litigation as an institutionalized form of social contentions is almost examined in isolation from other types of claim-making activities. Although their analyses crossly refer to and occasionally compare filing lawsuits or complaints with popular protests (e.g. Stern 2013), little research has been seen to undertake a comparative work that puts litigation, protest, and their interaction in effective dialogues; just as the contentious politics literature reviewed above, by and large, misses the interaction between conventional and disruptive repertoires within the same temporal frame. In the political settings of Chinese authoritarianism, disr and Li, 2006; Mertha, 2008; Cai 2010) and institutionalized litigation (Finder, 1989; Liebman, 1998; Diamant, Lubman and are oftentimes studied separately as divergent repertoires of contention. Even for C. K. Lee (2007), who deliberately compares the difference between desperate, retired workers in Northeast China, who take to the streets, and the sweatshop workers in South China, who make legal rhetoric their idiom for mobilization, has predominantly examined the contentious form of protest only. This lack of conversation to some degree manifests the disciplinary division between political science and law scholars, who may regard the social phenomena they study as distinct from one another in terms of their respective actors, political parameters, mechanisms, dynamics, as well as the research methods employed to study them. Thus, consciously or not, they avoid substantial dialogue with each other, confining the comparison between protests and litigations or the reference to each other to a very limited degree. This has unfortunately affected our understanding of the varieties, dynamics and complexities of the forms and nuanced effects of environmental contention in contemporary China. 1.2 An Integrative Framework and the Theoretical Contributions Based on the foregoing threads of intellectual lineages, this study is devoted to bridging the theoretical gaps by making and emphasizing two previously overlooked linkages: one is the protest-advocacy linkage, which connects street mobilization and civic environmental activism; the other is the protest-litigation linkage, which pays particular attention to the various patterns of how disruptive protest and conventional litigation interact with each other under different conditions. Diagram 1: Overall Structure An Integrative Framework Chapter 4: Interactive patterns of protest-litigation linkage Chapter 2: Environmental protests With advocacy linkage Public interest oriented Chapter 3: Environmental litigation Without advocacy linkage Private interest oriented Specifically, I argue that environmental protests necessitate ample effort of policy advocacy from a variety of social agents with multifaceted mechanisms and strategies in order to extract better governance, including information transparency and new promulgation of environmental regulations, from local states in authoritarian settings. The significance of protest-advocacy nexus in highlighted among other traditional variables of contentious politics, such as violent versus peaceful forms, large versus small scales, costs for local governments to make compromise, and the attitudes of the central government (Li, Koppenjan, and Verweij 2016; Cai 2010; Mertha 2008). For litigation, my study showcases that, due to legislative ambiguities, discrepant court attitudes across subnational regions, and judicial discretion, legal contenders for environmental information have to struggle over a variety of vague and controversial issues daily create reversed pressures on governmental enforcement of green transparency policies through courts (Wang 2014), regional courts may refract this effect through their own bent glasses. As for environmental contentions that involve both protest and litigation, I propose that different dispositions of the two contentious approaches translate into different patterns. Depending on whether protests possess a spirit of policy advocacy and depending on whether lawsuits are private or public interest oriented, the correspondent patterns of environmental contention will take the shape of concerted (mutual) reinforcement, interlocked propelling, situational concentration, and strategic leveraging. Finally, I summarily demonstrate the significance of EPIL for legislative advocacy, law enforcement, and institutional innovation in environmental governance recently and in the years to come. 1.3 Bridging the Gap: Protest and Litigation in Tentative Comparison How do the disruptive form of protest and the conventional form of litigation affect environmental governance of the state differently? The rest part of this chapter attempts to get a basic idea of how protest and litigation, as two approaches of environmental contention in China, might in terms of its three components differently. Specifically, it suggests that environmental protests tend to bring in more information transparency and new environmental regulations promulgated by local governments, while environmental lawsuits might have affected enforcement significantly, measured by pollution discharge levies in this chapter. The following chapters will demonstrate they both provide a public platform for societal environmental advocates i.e. protesters, pollution victim plaintiffs, lawyers, environmental NGOs (ENGOs), media - to stimulate local governments to practice policy learning and innovative measures in ambivalent political settings, which reverses the traditional dynamic of the principal-agent problem embedded in central-local governmental relations and makes promising space for bottom-up driving forces that promote responsive environmental governance. 1.3.1 Developing the tentative hypotheses In their recent enlightening work, Steinhardt and Wu (2016) point out that one of the defining characteristics of the old repertoire of environmental protests in China since the early 1990s was ex post facto victimhood-driven resistance, rooted in a lack of access to information and decision-making process. Yet with the case study of the anti-paraxylene (PX) campaign in Kunming and other similar protests since late 2000s, they demonstrate that the landscape of public contention is changing as ENGOs have taken on the role of environmental watchdogs and focused on public access to environmental information, making full use of the legal status of the enacted in 2008). Zhan and Tang (2013) point out that, although Chinese NGOs traditionally adopted a non-confrontational stance toward the authoritarian regime and kept distance with large-scale social movements, with the expansion of public participation channels and growing access to diversified sources of funding in recent years, ENGOs with their collective campaigns have demonstrated increased strength in their policy advocacy activities, calling for better environmental information disclosure and requesting for public hearing procedures in environmental impact assessment. Although their research does not address environmental protests directly, as ENGOs have become increasingly involved in the wake of protests, their policy advocacy orientation toward information transparency is very likely to infiltrate into protests and shape the contentious outcome of protests. Therefore, the first hypothesis regarding environmental contention and governance this study proposes to explore is: H1: The more environmental protests that take place in a region, the higher degree of environmental information transparency is observed in the region. The second component of environmental governance this study examines is enforcement. Environmental enforcement in China is known as one of the best-documented cases of regulatory enforcement in a developmental setting (Lo et al. 2009). A remarkable body of empirical work has emerged about the enforcement of environmental regulations in China from various angles. inspection resources toward areas where individuals or communities have a high propensity to complain. Wang et al. (2003) employ econometric models to explore the determinants of emissions, measured by the presence and number of complaints, the smaller the bargaining power of the firms with local environmental enforcement authorities. Tilt (2007) argues that citizen complaints and media exposure regarding polluting factories played a key role in enforcement. Lo et al (2009) trace the changes in the enforcement styles over time in a dynamic context where enforcement officials shift their styles toward formalism and coercion in response to the external pressures. It is particularly interesting that environmental enforcement is repeatedly shown to be influenced by the expression of public opinion, especially in the form of environmental petitions and complaints; yet there is little research known on how other forms of social pressure influence enforcement. Would the theoretical mechanism that connects petitions and complaints with stringent enforcement work similarly for litigation another conventional form of contention in the authoritarian state? With the variable of environmental petitions controlled, I tentatively bring forth the second hypothesis: H2: The more environmental lawsuits that are filed in a region, the more stringently the environmental regulations are enforced. The final component of environmental governance, the institution governing behaviors, tries to capture the conceptual essence of political modernization the renewal and reinvention of environmental politics and governance institutions to improve state capacity to cope with the environmental challenges of a changing modern order (Lo and Tang 2006). Emphatically, how have environmental institutions in China been modernizing themselves in order to maintain effective governance? I explore the degree of institutionalization in three aspects. especially in the sense of bureaucratic restructuring and streamlining, administrative agencies in China alike are striving toward the same ultimate aim: to create a leaner and more efficient public sector by shedding the non-essential functions and by downsizing the state (Brødsgaard 2002). It is important to acknowledge that local EPBs have made some achievements in this respect, such as delegating many major responsibilities to service organizations as a means to handle financial and personnel constraints (Lam and Perry 2001). EPB officials typically regard the spinning-off of non-regulatory and profit-making activities from core administrative agencies as political and social progress, which would result in a clearer accountability system (Lo and Tang 2006). Most recently, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has even put more to completely unhook them with the governmental environmental protection system and drop them out of the EIA service market for construction projects. 7 Yet it is unclear which form of environmental contention is more likely to be associated with institutional streamlining, if such association does exist, since the administrative reforms are broadly concerned with efficiency 7 The Ministry of Environmental Protection: 8 Ministry-Affiliated, 140 Local EIA Agencies Unhooked with the Environmental Protection System. February 2, 2016. http://politics.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0202/c1001-28105002.html and accountability in order to serve increasingly complicated social needs. Accordingly, I try to test such a sub-hypothesis, regarding the effects of environmental contention either in the form of protest or litigation on the streamlining of environmental bureaucracy: H3(1): The more environmental protests or lawsuits that take place or get filed in a region, the more streamlined local EPBs there will be. Meanwhile, party authorities of China have a long history of national policy-making through local experiments, which is the encouragement of provincial, municipal, township, district and even village officials to try out new approaches so that the best ideas and practices of governance can be adopted nationally (Heilmann 2008, 2011). With regard to environmental -profile pilot ones in Guiyang, Wuxi and Kunming, are just such a local innovation, aimed simultaneously at addressing social problems, including environmental pollution accidents and grievances, and at political achievements to advance in the bureaucratic hierarchy (Stern 2014). Since their establishment in 2007, they have been noteworthy in setting for rules or implementing a variety of innovations in standing, jurisdiction, and remedies, among other legal practices (Wang and Gao 2010). Nonetheless, the establishment of specialized environmental courts is not a step forward judicial empowerment but an effort to enlist courts to serve alongside government bureaus in a multi-pronged environmental campaign, where judicial activities reach beyond dispute resolution to include policy advocacy, education and social control, playing a role between administration and law (Stern 2014). Until 2013, China has boasted over 130 environmental courts unevenly across the country. Assuming this is now a national trend to establish environmental courts, why have they come into existence earlier in some regions than others? -building efforts in respond to the surge of environmental lawsuits in that region? I consider this question with another sub- hypothesis: H3(2): The more environmental lawsuits that are filed in a region, the more local environmental courts will be established. Last but not least, judicial participation of social actors, through continued practice at the frontline of law and politics, could yield accumulative results in new promulgation of environmental laws or regulations at local and even supra-local levels. The development of EPIL is a prominent example of how legal advocates and practitioners, among political elites, social organizations, law firms, and ordinary plaintiffs, work together to contest for the right to sue and promote the institutionalization of a new kind of litigation at local levels first and finally also at national level (Wang and Gao 2010, Stern 2013). Along a similar vein, recent studies on environmental protests oriented toward public policy suggestion, as reviewed above, have also demonstrated the potential of the disruptive form of contention for long-term policy change in environmental governance. Additionally, other than possible effects of protest and litigation, Yu, Gao, and Gong (2014) show in their study that public environmental demands, such as visits paid (PC) and the Political Consultative Conferences (PCC), can also stimulate the government to take more environmental protection measures, including making more environmental laws and regulations. Therefore, with complaints, PC proposals, and PCC proposals controlled, the final sub- hypothesis inspects the effects of environmental contention protest or litigation on the making of new laws or policies: H3(3): The more environmental lawsuits or protests that are filed or take place in a region, the more local environmental laws or regulations will be promulgated locally. Examined together, these three sub-hypotheses on streamlining EPBs, establishing environmental courts, promulgating new regulations may convey a general sense of the degree to which environmental governance has been institutionalized in front of the challenges posed by social forces. Agnostic of what effect(s) each repertoire of environmental contention disruptive protest and/or conventional litigation would have on what aspect(s) of environmental governance, including transparency, enforcement, and institutionalization, the rest part of this chapter tries to provide some tentative answers through statistical analysis, which will serve to guide the following chapters to delve into details on the findings. 1.3.2 Data analysis and findings I employ a time-series cross- environmental governance at the provincial level from 2005 to 2014. The reason I intercept this one-decade time period is primarily concerned with data availability. The Chinese government and a few non-governmental legal teams have set out to compile national databases of legal judgment documents of all types of lawsuits, including different types of environmental cases, which are made available electronically for public access (e.g. China Judgment Online, the legal team at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, and Huanzhu, the legal team under the guidance of the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims affiliated with China University of Political Science and Law). But due to current immature status of such tremendously challenging work, the documents from previous years, especially before 2005 or 2006, are disproportionally fewer than those of most recent years. As for environmental protests, although instances of environment-related popular struggles took place now and then from 1970s to early 2000s, it was in 2005 when media widely exposed the violent, anti-pollution mass riots of villagers in Dongyang, Zhejiang Province, that environmental protests as a distinct issue of social contention came into view, followed by an increasing number of such cases based on pollution grievance as well as more media coverage of environmental protests. In addition, by the time of completion of this chapter, the latest publication of official data, China Environment Yearbook 2015, where I draw most of the statistics to operationalize the theoretical constructs of environmental governance, only reports the statistics as recent as of 2014. Overall, the dataset consists of 121 instances of environmental protests and 3,339 environmental lawsuit documents from 30 provinces, province-level autonomous regions (excluding Tibet), and province-level municipalities directly controlled by the central government of mainland China. Since there is no reliable statistics on traceable and well- documented cases of environmental protests by regions, I have mainly searched the Chinese and English-language literatures on this topic and media coverage of environment-related social contentions. This number is largely consistent with those given by a few scholars who have done some preliminary quantitative work of environmental protests in China or social resistance in general (Ong 2015). As for environmental litigations, I have mainly sourced on the China Judgments Online 8 dataset of legal documents, including civil and administrative arbitrations and judgments of environmental tort liability cases, supplemented by the statistics of environmental administrative litigations published by China Environment Yearbook. environmental governance, I first decompose this compound concept to three theoretical constructs: transparency, enforcement, and institutionalization of governing behaviors. developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). PITI measures the degree of pollution information transparency at the of China on Open Government Information and the MEP Measures on Open Environmental Information (trial) since 2008 the year these two milestone regulations for Chinese environmental governance entered into effect. Then I calculate the provincial PITI average based 8 [Court Decision Website of China] <http://wenshu.court.gov.cn/>. operationalized with the amount of pollution discharge fees every provincial government levies have collected data on 1) the total number of EPBs for each province (China Environment Yearbook); 2) the number of specialized environmental courts established at local levels; 9 and 3) the number of new environmental laws and regulations promulgated by local governments (Beida Fabao 10 ). Meanwhile, I control three groups of variables: 1) the economic-financial group, including GDP per capita, the rate between the second and the tertiary industry (industrial structure), the degree of openness of local economy, and the financial deficit of provincial governments; 2) the general pollution status group, which is the incorporation (through principal component analysis, PCA) of industrial waste gas emission, industrial solid waste generation, waste water discharge, sulfur dioxide (SO2) discharge, and soot and dust discharge; and 3) the social-political initiation group, including the total batches of environmental petitions, the total number of people that filed environmental petitions, the number of environment-related proposals submitted in the -related proposals proposed in the Political Consultative Conference (PCC proposal). All these statistics are drawn from China 9 , : 2014 6 24 [Environmental Courts and Tribunals in China, last updated on June 24, 2014], (November 17, 2008), [JCRB.COM]. Retrieved from <http://ahlawyers.fyfz.cn/art/406851.htm>. 10 The website of [Beida Fabao] has a subsection of local laws and regulations that keeps tracking newly enacted laws and regulations of various types at different governmental levels. Retrieved from <http://pkulaw.cn/cluster_form.aspx?Db=lar&menu_item=law&EncodingName=>. Environment Yearbook, China Statistical Yearbook, and China Financial Yearbook, 2006 to 2015. Table 1 reports the results of random-effects GLS regression, using the numbers of environmental protests and litigations to predict the five aspects of the governance. First, Model (1) and (2) with information transparency as the dependent variable suggest that, controlling local factors of general pollution status, economic-financial conditions and proposals submitted in PC and PCC, the number of environmental protests is positively associated with the score of transparency and the association is highly significant. Yet when we also control petitions and complaints, the level of significance decreases slightly to the level of 5%. It therefore corroborates Hypothesis 1 more protests, greater transparency of environmental information and lends further support to the well-established argument that social petitions promote better governance in terms of their effect on the transparency aspect. Second, Model (1) and (2) with local new regulations as the dependent variable suggest that environmental protests, rather than litigation, positively associated with new promulgation of local environmental laws or regulations, which addresses Hypothesis 3(3). And the significance of this association is not influenced by environmental petition and complaints. For litigation, its impact on environmental governance is manifested mainly in enforcement, shown by Model (1) and (2) with pollution levy as the dependent variable. The results denote that more environmental lawsuits are correlated with smaller amount of pollution levies at the significance level of 1%, which is a little tricky to interpret for Hypothesis 2. The implication of this seemingly paradoxical finding is not hard to comprehend. It is plausible that more litigation has contributed to more stringent enforcement of environmental regulations, which leads to a decrease in pollution discharge of enterprises and, in turn, lesser discharge fees levied by law-enforcement agencies. Although the mechanism is still up to clarification, the analysis has demonstrated a strong effect of environmental litigation on the enforcement aspect of governance. However, no conclusive findings can be drawn from the statistical analysis regarding Hypotheses 3(1) and 3(2), i.e. the effects of environmental contention on the streamlining of local EPBs and the establishment of environmental courts. For H3(1), with different measures (by the total number of units or the personnel), the four models of the streamlining effect only report inconsistent results. It seems to suggest a negative association between protests and local EPB s streaming. Yet its significance disappears when the measurement changes. As for litigation, it has no such effect with either measurement. For H3(2), neither protest nor litigation is found with any significant association with the establishment of local environmental courts, which is therefore speculated to be influenced by other socio-political factors, events of environmental crises, and elite decision. 1.4 Summary In this chapter, I have critically reviewed three main intellectual lineages: environmental authoritarianism (in dialogue with consultative authoritarianism), repertoires of contention, and authoritarian rule of law (and legal participation). Based on these insightful and informative literatures, I propose to juxtapose the two prominent repertoires of environmental contention disruptive protest and conventional litigation and incorporate them into one comprehensive framework, which also displays the main layout of the whole dissertation. Importantly, this framework stresses two previously understudies linkages as the primary theoretical contributions of this work: the protest-advocacy linkage that highlights the emerging policy-advocacy spirit demonstrated by some episodes of street mobilization, and the protest-litigation linkage, of which a variety of dynamic patterns have begun to map out the new direction of environmental contention in China. In addition, this chapter has made some tentative efforts in generating and testing hypotheses to compare how the two contentious repertoires advance environmental governance at different aspects. Specifically, preliminary statistical evidence show that environmental protests tend to bring in more information transparency and new promulgation of environmental laws or regulations at local governments, while environmental litigations might have significant effect on enforcement. Accordingly, the following chapters will concentrate on protest, litigation, and the combination of protest and litigation, respectively. Overall, with social stimuli embedded in both protest and litigation, the state cannot afford ruling sluggishly any more but is constantly impelled to enhance its environmental governance and buttress its authoritarian legitimacy by experimenting new institutional arrangements with the society, the process of which manifests the socially made aspect of authoritarian environmentalism. Table 1 GLS Regression: Environmental contention and governance Dependent variables: Environmental governance Information transparency Pollution levy (log) local new regulations (log) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) Environmental 0.101** 0.074* -0.013 -0.017 0.260** 0.265** protest (0.8314) (0.8479) (0.0300) (0.0295) (0.0489) (0.0501) Environmental -0.003 0.003 -0.072** -0.075** 0.042 0.040 litigation (0.0288) (0.0317) (0.0008) (0.0007) (0.0015) (0.0014) General pollution -0.080 -0.070 0.359*** 0.364*** 0.151 0.138 statue (1.0088) (0.8697) (0.0406) (0.0404) (0.0389) (0.0366) Petition_batch -0.742*** -0.077 0.277 (log) (2.2189) (0.0648) (0.0952) Petition_people 0.562*** 0.019 -0.169 (log) (2.2840) (0.0604) (0.1134) PC proposal -0.092 -0.007 -0.110 -0.090 0.249 0.200 (log) (2.8686) (2.0558) (0.0623) (0.0638) (0.0717) (0.0641) PCC proposal 0.113 0.117 -0.014 -0.006 -0.351 -0.343 (log) (2.6275) (1.6344) (0.0643) (0.0674) (0.0961) (0.0930) GDP per capita 0.709*** 0.479*** 0.774*** 0.738*** -0.085 0.002 (log) (3.1556) (2.7459) (0.1322) (0.1545) (0.1127) (0.1201) Industrial -0.071 -0.073 0.138* 0.134* -0.082 -0.099 structure (4.6767) (3.6208) (0.1452) (0.1451) (0.1567) (0.1613) Economic -0.102 0.010 -0.421*** -0.411*** 0.033 -0.013 Openness (log) (0.8689) (0.7163) (0.0287) (0.0302) (0.0284) (0.0296) Financial -0.209** -0.176** -0.180* -0.191** -0.075 -0.090 deficit (0.0021) (0.0019) (0.0001) (0.0001) (0.0001) (0.0001) Observations 282 282 298 298 149 149 Standardized beta coefficients; Standard errors in parentheses * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001" Dependent variables: Environmental governance Streamlined EPBs (log) Local environmental (total number of units) (total personnel) court (1) (2) (3) (4) (1) (2) Environmental -0.043** -0.045** 0.006 0.006 -0.127 -0.125 protest (0.0140) (0.0141) (0.0086) (0.0083) (0.9701) (0.9579) Environmental 0.028 0.031 0.023 0.026 0.070 0.058 litigation (0.0008) (0.0008) (0.0005) (0.0005) (0.0350) (0.0352) General pollution 0.261** 0.266*** 0.214** 0.223** -0.069 -0.063 statue (0.0335) (0.0336) (0.0353) (0.0354) (0.8673) (0.8681) Petition_batch -0.075 -0.028 0.184 (log) (0.0262) (0.0193) (0.9921) Petition_people 0.087 0.060* -0.311 (log) (0.0310) (0.0153) (1.9643) PC proposal 0.031 0.028 0.004 -0.007 0.215 0.257 (log) (0.0379) (0.0368) (0.0375) (0.0378) (2.1511) (2.5288) PCC proposal -0.012 -0.017 0.008 0.002 -0.088 -0.062 (log) (0.0326) (0.0325) (0.0340) (0.0360) (0.8540) (0.7201) GDP per capita -0.018 -0.047 0.028 0.017 0.222 0.260 (log) (0.1009) (0.1091) (0.0609) (0.0733) (2.3891) (2.7004) Industrial 0.048 0.050 0.080 0.083 -0.052 -0.052 structure (0.1237) (0.1254) (0.1117) (0.1112) (2.8336) (2.9672) Economic 0.191 0.188 0.223 0.222* -0.041 -0.018 Openness (log) (0.0403) (0.0402) (0.0389) (0.0384) (0.4340) (0.5034) Financial -0.072 -0.073 -0.026 -0.022 -0.157 -0.192 deficit (0.0001) (0.0001) (0.0000) (0.0000) (0.0022) (0.0026) Observations 298 298 298 298 298 298 Standardized beta coefficients; Standard errors in parentheses * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001" 2. -ADVOCACY LINKAGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONTENTIOUS OUTCOMES IN CHINA In this chapter I seek to answer two questions: How effective is environmental contention in ? Why have some environmental protests resulted in policy changes while others have not? To investigate these questions, I first demonstrate a substantial d of protests: One is to extract one-off concession from the government on the particular project and redress a specific the other is to stimulate the government to implement transparent, accountable, or inclusive environmental o . Secondly, I review existing explanations for decision change and policy change, and highlight the variable of advocacy efforts and strategies in environmental campaigns. Thirdly, I employ crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) to examine 20 influential cases of recent environmental protests in China in the past decade. Finally, I analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for environmental protests to promote environmental policy improvement at local levels and emphasize the role of social Without denying the indispensable role of a greening leviathan (Duit, Feindt, and Meadowcroft 2016), my study engages the theoretical dialogue of state-society interaction in general and emphasizes the aspect of a socially constructed environmental authoritarianism. It demonstrates that Chinese local states have been actively refurbishing their governing tools with increasingly inclusive institutions of public participation mostly because they are passively compelled to do so by various societal thrusts. 2.1 Power in Protest: Decision Change vs. Policy Change The power in people taking grievances to the streets is often examined by whether they can pressurize local governments to make change, including decision change at the instance level or policy change at the institution level. Existing research has mostly focused on decision-specific outcomes defined by cancellation, relocation, or continuation of polluting facilities targeted by protests (Mertha 2008; Cai 2010; Li, Koppenjan, and Verweij 2016). In contrast, the research looking into policy outcomes i.e. institutionalized changes in environmental governance that have longer-term, broader-range effects rather than ad hoc compromise for a single case are rarely read. It is not to deny efforts in recent studies that have begun to investigate the dimension of policy change beyond singular decision change as protest outcome. In particular, the new development of contention-advocacy linkage in environmental contentions has been increasingly recognized, which is showcased by the mutual reinforcement of street mobilization and policy advocacy (Steinhardt and Wu 2016), the vertical ties between local contenders and supra-local activists or environmental NGOs (Bondes and Johnson 2017; Sun, Huang and Yip 2017), or the strategy shift from a Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) approach to a broad policy advocacy perspective oriented toward public interest (Johnson 2013a, 2013b). However, these studies are not intended to systematically establish the relationship between advocacy efforts and policy change in environmental governance. Before I press forward, the significance in distinguishing policy change from decision change as the outcome of environmental protest is worthy of further illustration. For one thing, it is precarious to operationalize protest outcome with decision change. Seemingly a political expedient for public appeasement under imminent pressure, and at risk of reversion after social outcry subsides. Many empirical cases involve the scenario of secret resumption of temporarily halted projects under protest (Daily News Sina 2015). For another, decision change to cancel or relocate the project, though remarkable, cannot capture nuanced contentious fruits borne in the process of protest. As noted in the cases below, protesters often hone their networking abilities and environmental expertise regardless of whether the project they oppose is cancelled or not. Additionally, some protests are more opposed to the opaque decision-making process such as fraud in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure than the project per se (He, Mol, and Lu 2016 unfair to regard the protest as a failure only because the construction continues.. In comparison, policy change is a more theoretically valid way to connect processes to outcomes. Instead of setting decision change as an abrupt ending point immediately after protest, examining policy change avoids severing artificially the long-term spillover effect of protests on public policy and allows observing whether achievements of social contention can be institutionalized by local states to upgrade environmental governance. Therefore resist righ winning th involves renegotiation of the terms and facilitates the redress of generic grievance of the same type in the future. The inconformity between decision change and policy change is conspicuous in light of empirical evidence (see Table 2.6). Occurrence of policy change toward better governance does not necessarily go hand in hand with the occurrence of decision change. In other words, local -spot decision to compromise in a particular case by no means denotes a corresponding adjustment in environmental policy orientation. Existing research focuses on the of environmental protests rega . Yet the empirical world is replete with diverse sc . In this study in environmental governance from two and 2) local implementation of environmental accountability policies. Details about measurement of policy change at these two aspects will be covered in the methodology part. Admittedly, new publishing of environmental rules and improvement in information transparency do not guarantee that policy change achieved by protest will be securely shrined as a higher standard of governance in the future. Yet it is a big step toward institutionalized protest outcomes from those ad hoc, fickle, and tokenistic decisions. 2.2. From Protest to Policy Change 2.2.1 Existing explanations and beyond Owing to fertile literature of contentious politics and social movements (Tarrow 1994; Tilly and Tarrow 2007), a variety of factors explaining contentious outcomes in China have been developed in existing studies. Among them, four conditions were pointed out that are relatively important in explaining variances of local govern project cancellation, relocation, or continuation in environmental conflicts (Li et al. 2016). 1) The scale of the protests. The larger the protest is, the more likely it is for protesters to reach their goals (Cai 2004). A well-known popular maxim reflects the widely-believed association between larger-scale unrest and bigger compromises from governments. 2) The form of protest, particularly in terms of whether violence occurs in the confrontation. Given violence increases pressure on local governments and thus raises the pr concession (McAdam,1983; Tarrow 1994). 3) The cost for local governments to compromise. Local governments invoke cost-benefit analysis in face of collective social challenge (Cai 2010). The earlier the stage of the project is, the less costly it is for local governments to change course, and thus more likely for the protest to succeed. 4) The position of central government. In the setting of an authoritarian regime with significant local between a legitimacy-oriented central government and interest- local governments to concede and protesters to prevail. After enumerating these four conditions, Li et al. (2016) utilize csQCA to determine which condition or combination of conditions are necessary and/or sufficient for environmental protests to result in decision change. Specifically, they emphasize the impact of central support and the explain occurrence of governmental compromise (Appendix 1). However, these conventional variables have hindered explanation for efficacy of popular above can convey effectively the policy advocacy component of environmental campaigns, which is increasingly prevalent in protest cases across regions and issues. Therefore, my research introduces a fifth condition, which is the of environmental protest, to highlight the strategic role of policy-oriented social agents in bringing forth better governance. 2.2.2 Advocacy in contention: actors, mechanisms, and strategies The advocacy dimension of the protest, as will be detailed in the analyses below, is broadly conceptualized to include the claims, agendas, propositions, and strategies of different types of social agents, who either initiate the momentum of protest, participate directly in demonstrations, or echo the public appeal following the protest, in order to explore broader meanings of protests beyond their immediate localities and concerns. Channeled through social networking of ENGOs (e.g. Sun et al. 2017), proposal submission of disgruntled state and academic elites (e.g. Johnson 2010), or online activism of concerned netizens (e.g. Lu and Chan 2016), the claim-making or agenda-setting activities involved in advocacy efforts typically carry a strong tendency toward rationality rather than emotions (Johnson 2013b) or even demonstrate social agents ownership of the issue at hand through self-learned environmental expertise on (Shemtov 1999; Lora- Wainwright 2013; Johnson 2013a). In general, I hypothesize that the presence of advocacy efforts in or right after the protest contributes to policy change toward better environmental governance. There are three prominent social agents that practice policy advocacy. The first kind among them are ENGOs. Although mainstream studies of Chinese politics have traditionally portrayed social organizations in China as weak, dependent, and non-confrontational, or a co-opted collaborator of the state at best, my research argues that some ENGOs have become capable of abstaining from leading protests on the outset yet swaying processes at critical moments, riding -oriented campaign that translates to policy adjustment in environmental governance. I call such a the afterward-intervening mechanism. The rise of Chinese ENGOs in recent decades, with their increased political leverage and maneuvering s strategy (Ho 2007). Naturally, ENGOs with greater policy advocacy opportunities tend to have better financial resources and connections to the party-state system (Zhan and Tang 2013). Although such a delicate position of ENGOs has drawn some critical concerns (Yang 2005; van Rooij 2010; Johnson 2010), gradually, by performing the afterward-intervening mechanism, ENGOs in some of the empirical cases have found a niche in environmental protests to bridge the power of collective action and subsequent policy advancement (Sun et al. 2017). The second kind of social agents who actively practice environmental policy advocacy are green-minded public figures, including political elites such as representatives to the National (CPPCC), well-known scholars, media entrepreneurs, and entertainment figures. Among them, NPC representatives and CPPCC members are outstanding at exposing controversial projects by submitting opposition proposals to the annual meetings of NPC and CPPCC. These quasi- democratic formal institutions, traditionally perceived as a rubber stamp, have begun to play a bigger, albeit limited, part in responsive or consultative authoritarianism (Truex 2014; Malesky and Schuler 2010) - as these actors have capacity in the beginning stage to arouse public attention, disseminate information on unlawful siting decisions, ignite opposition against opaque procedures, and garner sufficient momentum for the outburst of collective action. Last but not least, activists among ordinary citizens, usually the direct victims, constitute the third type of social agents for advocacy. All environmental protests involve directly affected citizens, but not all citizen participants employ advocacy strategies, which may range from legal- based, technical-based, to policy suggestion-based ones. Citizen activists may practice legal- based advocacy by framing their opposition according to legal terms expressly stipulated in environmental legislation (e.g. the 2003 EIA law, and the 2008 Measures for Open Environmental Information) and emphasizing procedural justice and the right-to-information. They often solicit assistance from environmental lawyers to frame their legal claims. Meanwhile, citizen activists can also engage technical-based advocacy by educating themselves with expertise and producing research reports to counter g . These activities are characteristic of a few anti-incineration campaigns in Beijing (Johnson 2013a). As for policy suggestion-based strategy, the highest degree of advocacy efforts, they are often employed by citizen activists in accordance with ENGOs to exert broader influence on policy change. Overall, social agents, their participatory mechanisms, and advocacy strategies constitute a multifaceted advocacy dimension of environmental protests. Their distinctions are not definite. And the combination of actors, mechanisms, and strategies in each case vary. Through the method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) detailed below, I argue that, among all relevant factors, the presence of advocacy efforts is necessary for environmental protests to compel the state to change policies toward better environmental governance. 2.3 Methodology: QCA QCA is a set-theoretic method that helps discern necessary and sufficient causality with qualitative data in comparative research. It aspires to discover causal patterns across socio- political phenomena with a relatively small number of cases and allows for context-specific causal complexity, which may be both conjunctural and equifinal (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). Without attempting to overgeneralize causality outside the sample, QCA resorts to substantial knowledge and contextual backgrounds of cases obtained through in-depth case studies and avoids a black-box approach in abstract statistical models. QCA works with binary (crisp-set QCA) or ordinal variables (fuzzy-set QCA). Due to sensitivity, limited availability, and compromised accuracy of data on contentious issues in authoritarian China, I use csQCA in this study with the Truth Table approach to organize data (Ragin 1987). Its data analysis ability is based on the Boolean algebra, with logical AND operator connoted by [*] (multiplication) and logical OR operator connoted by [+] (addition). The connotation for occurrence [1] and non-occurrence [0] of a condition [X] or the outcome [Y] are [X] and [~X], or [Y] and [~Y], respectively. The Truth Table analysis, using the fs/QCA 3.0 software (Ragin and Davey 2016), produces three types of solution formula: the complex solution, the parsimonious solution, and the intermediate solution. In the language of QCA, these solutions a combination of causal conditions that lacks empirical cases is treated (Ragin and Sonnett 2004). I employ the complex solution in this study to avoid making assumptions about any hypothetical cases and depend exclusively on the empirical information at hand (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). The results of analysis also report and . assesses the degree to which the cases sharing a given condition or combination of conditions agree in displaying the outcome, i.e. the theoretical strength of the subset relation, whereas assesses the degree to which a condition or causal combination accounts for instances of an outcome, i.e. the empirical relevance of the subset relation (Ragin 2006). 2.4 Data Processing In this chapter, I examine 20 cases of environmental protests that took place between 2007 and 2014 in urban China (Appendix 2). They cover an expansive geographic region of ten provinces or municipalities and various types of unpopular projects as protest targets, including seven anti- incinerator cases (Panyu, Liulitun, Gao antun, Asuwei, Wujiang, Tianjingwa, Wuxi), four anti- PX cases (Xiamen, Dalian, Kunming, Maoming), three against transport infrastructure projects (Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing), two against nuclear power plants (Rushan, Jiangmen), and four against other power plants (Haining, Haimen, Shifang, Qidong). Date collection is mainly dependent on news reports, Chinese and English-written academic articles, government documents of laws and regulations, publically accessible official datasets, ENGO research reports, etc. The selection of these cases by no means present the universe of environmental protests sensitive statistics unknown to the public from 2007 to 2014 in the whole country. Neither are these 20 cases in any way representative of the population of Chinese environmental protests based on any randomization procedure. However, they are all significant and influential cases with high degree of media exposure, academic interest, and social attention in the recent decade, which might be emulated by potential environmental contenders in the future. In addition to the consideration for case impact, the decision to include or exclude a case is made practically according information availability. Specifically, some of the cases are left out due to difficulties in obtaining enough empirical information for meaningful comparative analysis of important factors such as the attitude of central government, stage of the targeted project, or policy advocacy effort involved in the protest, while other more recent ones (e.g. the anti-PX protest in Jins land case in Changzhou, Jiangsu, in 2016) have not allowed adequate time to pass for the evaluation of their impact on policy change by the time this chapter is completed. The rest part of this section introduces specifically how I process the 20 cases with the methods of csQCA. First of all, Table 2.1 below displays the 14 cases with the occurrence of policy change toward better environmental governance in the wake of popular protests, operationalized by a) increased environmental information transparency in the following year, measured by the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI 2008/09-2015/16 ) , OR b) environmental institutionalization, measured by new promulgations of local environmental laws or regulations in the following two years, given that institutionalization usually lags. Since 2009, the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs and the Natural Resource Defense Council have been assessing the country s performance in disclosing information on pollutants and pollution sources at the prefectural level based on Open Government Information and the Ministry of Environmental Protection Measures on Open Environmental Information (trial) the two milestone regulations for Chinese green transparency promulgated in 2008. With minor adjustments each year, the assessment scope of the PITI usually consists of enterprise emission data, EIA information, routine supervision records, automatic monitoring data, and so on and so forth; they are either published by the Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPB) of each respective city or acquired from information disclosure upon request, and then scored according to four evaluation criteria systematic-ness, timeliness, comprehensiveness, and user-friendliness. As for new promulgations of local environmental laws and regulations, they are identified through keyword search ( [environmental protection]) in Beidafabao, an online database of Chinese legal documents developed by Peking University. Notably, in a few cases, especially large-scale ones, the local governments did promulgate new environmental-relevant regulations after protests (e.g. Maoming, Haimen); yet they were mainly focused on strengthening stability control and enforcing emergence measures in environmental crises, rather than geared toward public inclusion in environmental decision-making or policy-implementation processes. Thus, these new social regulations are not indicative of environmental institutional change considered in this research. Table 2.1 The 14 Cases with policy change as protest outcome In the next step, I transform case information to membership scores in sets (variables) of csQCA, the process of which is called calibration of set membership scores (Ragin 2008; Schneider and Wagemann 2010). As detailed in Table 2.2, qualitative anchors (the set in csQCA) are specified for calibrating the outcome and the five explanatory variables. Specifically, for the variable of central position, the positions of the State Council or Chinese national mass media (e.g. ) after the occurrence of protests are taken to interpret and approximate the attitude of the central government (Li et al. 2016). Statements in national media trying to vindicate the debated projects and criticizing the mass incidents are indicative of the presen ), while statements ordering local governments to reconsider the project according to the public concerns, or pointing out increase in public environmental awareness, or urging local officials to balance inter-governmental, competing priorities between economic development and environment protection, etc., indicate abs ). For the variable of policy advocacy, the condition of main interest in this study, I calibrate cases as if any kind of social agents (e.g. ENGOs, public figures, or activists among citizens) engaged policy advocacy efforts (e.g. legal-based, technical-based, public suggestion-based) to voice their opposition and advance their agenda narrow or broad before, during, and/or after protest. Cases without any documentation of . After this procedure, the calibrated data can now be transformed to a dichotomous data matrix (Appendix 3), ready for use in the fs/QCA software with the Truth Table Algorithm, as displayed in Table 2.3. Finally, the Truth Table Algorithm produces the results of conjunctural causal paths from environmental protests to policy changes in environmental governance, which include the necessary conditions (Table 2.4) and sufficient solutions (Table 2.5). Table 2.2 Calibration of set membership scores (1) Outcome variable (O) (2) Variable: protest scale (L) 11 11 The numbers of protests can only be approximated since there is no official data on this. I work with the cross-over point of 5,000 participants. (3) Variable: protest form (V) 12 (4) Variable: project stage (E) (5) Variable: central position (S) 12 Although violence occurred, the influence was limited (Li et al., 2016). (6) Variable: policy advocacy (A) Table 2.3 The Truth Table generated by the fs/QCA software Row Conditions Outcome Cases L V E S A O 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 Rushan, Panyu, Liulitun, Asuwei, Tianjingwa, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing 2 0 0 0 1 1 1 3 0 1 0 0 1 1 Haining 4 1 0 1 0 1 1 Xiamen 5 1 1 1 0 1 1 Qidong 6 1 0 0 1 1 1 Dalian 7 1 1 1 0 0 0 Haimen, Shifang 8 1 1 0 0 0 0 Wuxi 9 0 0 1 0 0 0 Jiangmen 10 1 0 1 0 0 0 Wujiang 11 1 1 1 1 0 0 Maoming (L=protest scale, V=protest form, E=project stage, S=central support, A=policy advocacy, O=outcome, i.e. policy change in environmental governance) 2.5 Analyses and Results 2.5.1 Occurrence of environmental policy change: necessity analysis In the necessity analysis, is used to exclude all contradictory configurations (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). As the results in Table 2.4 indicate, policy changes only occur when the protests involve advocacy efforts during environmental campaigns. Other factors, with , fall short of being a necessary condition for the outcome. Table 2.4 Analysis of necessary conditions for policy change -occurrence or absence of the condition.) Among the 14 cases, where policy advocacy efforts are present with the environmental protests (Table 2.3, shaded area), a variety of activists employed multiple strategies to varying degrees to corroborate their oppositions. For instance, the anti-incinerator cases of Panyu and Asuwei and the anti-PX protest in Kunming are most distinct with their advocacy direction at Conditions Consistency Coverage L 0.21 0.38 ~L 0.79 0.92 V 0.14 0.33 ~V 0.86 0.86 E 0.71 0.67 ~E 0.29 0.80 S 0.21 0.75 ~S 0.79 0.69 A 1.00 1.00 ~A 0.00 0.00 promoting broad public interest and providing policy suggestion (Johnson 2013a, 2013b; Steinhardt and Wu 2016), while the campaign against the nuclear power plant in Rushan still resembles a typical NIMBY case, with its legal- and media-based advocacy energy strictly confined to opposing a specific siting decision (Zeng, Dai, and Wang 2014). As a result, the Panyu, Asuwei, and Kunming cases harvested both the promulgation of new environmental regulations and increased implementation of information transparency policy after protests (see Table 2.1). Furthermore, the Public Consultative and Supervision Committee for Urban Waste Management was established in Guangzhou (Wong 2016), which highlights the profound impact of the Panyu protest on public participation in environmental governance at a higher institutional level. In comparison, although the city of Weihai, where the Rushan protest took place, improved in its information transparency record in 200 in 2009/10), no environmental law or regulation was issued locally to consolidate the fruit of the campaign. As for the actors of advocacy, there are three salient types. First, when the tide of protests ebbed, ENGOs, realizing that relocating PX projects or incinerators to remote or suburban areas after urban opposition is not a sustainable solution, pick up the undertaking of policy suggestion beyond parochial interest. In the wake of the Panyu protest, Beijing-based NGOs such as Friends of Nature, Green Beagle Environmental Institute, and the Nature University provided mentorship for the campaigners in Guangzhou to redirect their focus onto policy recommendations for the municipal government. A new local ENGO, Eco Canton, was established in 2012 as a formal organizational structure to carry out long-term, cross-regional policy initiative for urban waste management (Lang and Xu 2013; Wong 2016; Steinhardt and Wu 2016). Similarly, after the Kunming protest, two influential and active local ENGOs, Green Watershed and Green Kunming, launched an advocacy coalition also with ENGOs in Beijing to push for a more transparent decision-making process with public monitoring and consultation in deciding any future PX projects. In contrast to these high-profile post-protest advocacy efforts, however, many other ENGOs with fewer resources and connections limit themselves within the realm of conservative strategies, focus on localized concerns, and stay vigilant about any mass incidents. For instance, the Ocean Commune for Environmental Protection in the Rushan case collected thousands of signatures of opposition online and submitting them to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) (He 2008). The Dalian Association of Environmental Protection Volunteers conducted evidence collection at the site of the broken dyke near the PX plant before the Dalian protest (Minzhu yu Fazhi 2011). In the Xiamen case, the Green Cross Liulitun protest, Beijing NGOs distanced themselves from the campaign despite being approached by residents (Johnson 2010). Secondly, public figures, such as political elites, journalists, and entertainers, have played an important role in encouraging public discussion and assembling social momentum to initiate collective action or reinforce the campaign. For instance, In the Xiamen case, Zhong Xiaoyong, a local blogger and columnist, was devoted in publishing media reports in the initial stage of the campaign. And Zhao Yufen, a Xiamen University professor, submitted a proposal to the r members, to question the adjacency between the PX plant and residents (Zeng and Jiang 2008). It was only by then that the citizenry became aware of the project, which was hitherto quietly under construction. The Nanjing case garnered sympathy and support from sports commentators, movie directors, television hosts, and associated with Nanjing (Meng 2011). NPC representative, CPPCC members as well as former officials also played similar roles in the Qidong case (Lu and Chan 2016), the Liulitun case (Johnson 2013a) and the Shanghai case. Especially in the anti-maglev protest in Shanghai, Wang Mengshu, an NPC representative and also a renowned academician at Chinese Academy of Engineering, not only called for broad social opposition based on his political prestige but made good use of his technical expertise to challenge the scientific reliability of the project (Finance.ifeng 2009). Finally, activists among ordinary citizens were also indispensable actors in policy advocacy. In the cases of Panyu, Liulitun, Asuwei, and, to a lesser degree, Gao antun, citizen campaigners have gradually acquired contentious savvy, become legal and technical experts on waste disposal through self-study and networking, and shifted their strategy from a NIMBY-style opposition to broad advocacy on consultative incineration policy (Johnson 2013a, 2013b). In Nanjing, citizen representatives of the affected homeowners framed their opposition toward the Tianjingwa project on legal terms and repeatedly invoked the EIA law to demand public hearings during the prolonged contentious process (Yang 2009). And in the Shanghai case, the solid middle-class community of affected residents, with a strong sense of being part of a global society, even wrote to German chancellor Angela Merkel and requested her intervention, given that German companies Siemens and ThyssenKrupp were part of the maglev-construction consortium they were fighting against (Stern 2013: 92). Overall, these cases of protest-advocacy linkage in environmental campaigns demonstrate how one-off street actions can evolve into policy advocacy for environmental transparency and public participation in policy making. The ENGOs, public figures, and active citizens, resonating with and supplementing each other at different aspects in their advocacy efforts before, during, and after protests, have brough at the local level. Generally speaking, although ENGOs usually cautiously estrange themselves from local protests for the sake of their very survival, they are more passionate about general environmentalist interest and better positioned to promote public policy in an afterward-intervening fashion. Public figures and all sorts of political as well as social elites are most effective in exposing the controversial project, arousing public attention, and playing a beforehand-initiating role in the campaigns. As for active citizens, they may penetrate throughout the whole processes and exert flexibly their collective clout on the direction of issues at hand. 2.5.2 Occurrence of environmental policy change: sufficiency analysis As for sufficient causality for the occurrence of policy change after environmental protests (Table 2.5), the Truth Table generates the following solutions: ~V*E*~S*A + ~V*~E*S*A + tion f multiple conjunctural causation 1987), contains four combinational paths; each of them leads to the occurrence of policy change sufficiently. Except the presence of advocacy (A), which is the necessary condition according to the necessity analysis above, all other conditions are INUS causes (Mackie 1980). The perfect consistency scores of these four paths (i.e. all 1s) denote that there are no contradictions in the data. Table 2.5 Analysis of sufficient conditions for policy change: complex solution Raw coverage a Unique coverage b Consistency Cases 1. ~V*E*~S*A 0.64 0.57 1 Xiamen, Rushan, Panyu, Liulitun, Asuwei, Tianjingwa, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing 2. ~V*~E*S*A 0.21 0.21 1 Dalian, Kunming, 3. L*E*~S*A 0.14 0.07 1 Xiamen, Qidong 4. ~L*V*~E*~S*A 0.07 0.07 1 Haining Solution coverage c : 1 Solution consistency d : 1 (a. measures the proportion of memberships in the outcome explained by each term of the solution. b. measures the proportion of memberships in the outcome explained solely by each individual solution term. c. measures the proportion of memberships in the outcome that is explained by the complete solution. d. measures the degree to which membership in the solution, i.e. the set of solution terms, is a subset of membership in the outcome. For calculation details, see fa/QCA manual) Path 1, which is the combination of peaceful protest, early-stage project, absence of central support, and policy advocacy efforts (1. ~V*E*~S*A), captures causal dynamics in nine out of the 20 cases in total, which reports the highest coverage score in the data. Together with Path 3, which is the combination of large-scale protest, early-stage project, absence of central support, and policy advocacy (3. L*E*~S*A), these two causal combinations account for almost 80 per cent of the cases (11 out of 14) with the occurrence of policy change. These findings are consistent with conventional wisdom, which maintains that environmental protests are more if targeted projects are in their early stage and if the central government does not evidently support the project. In other words, treating either policy change or decision change as protest outcome, results demonstrate that project stage and central support tend to be more important conditions than the scale and form of protest. Here the only added value seems to be that when protests against early-stage projects, without central support, are joined with additional advocacy efforts, they a p . in the assessment of protest outcome is not perceivable in most cases covered by Path 1 and 3, the three cases covered by Path 2 can most evidently expose the salience of such a discrepancy. The cases of Dalian, Kunming, and Gao antun, combining conditions of peaceful protest, late-stage project, central support, and policy advocacy (2. ~V*~E*S*A), all failed to pressurize local governments to cancel or relocate the projects. Specifically, the targeted projects were either under substantial investment (Kunming) or in the operational stage (Dalian, Gao antun). Moreover, the central government signaled support to the projects in all three cases: In the Gao antun case, the State company secrets (Johnson 2013a); in the Dalian case, the National Development and Reform Commission framed the protest as a result of unsafe production rather than environmental hazard; in the Kunming case, national media propagated the harmlessness and economic necessity of the project (Li et al. 2016). In spite of adverse conditions and futility in changing governmental decision, these three protests succeeded in bringing better environmental governance at policy level. The Kunming municipal party committee and government promulgated the Notice on Strengthening Environmental Monitoring and Law Enforcement in unicipal Party Committee The PITI score of Kunming also increas - - in 2014/15, after standardization). The Dalian government initiated new implementation measures on environmental education in 2013, especially geared toward public participation of citizenry, social media, and ENGOs 2013). And the Beijing government, concerned with the case of Gao antun, issued the Suggestion on All-round Promotion of Domestic Waste Management Work in 2009 ijing Municipal Party Committee which also mentioned the importance of collecting public opinion and expanding public participation for the policy making process of urban waste management. Lastly, Path 4 covers the single case of Haining, the combination of small-scale and violent protest, late-stage project, absence of central support, and advocacy efforts (4. ~L*V*~E*~S*A). The Haining protest is worthy of exceptional explanation due to the afterward-intervening role of the Jiaxing Confederation of Environmental Protection (JCEP), a government-organized NGO. In this case, advocacy efforts by local NGOs or residents were scant except that this JCEP reportedly investigated the pollution problem after the protest. This of that time. Later on, the so- Environmental was broadly propagandized and promoted across Zhejiang Province to encourage local integration of administrative and civil resources for environmental protection (Shen 2014). 2.5.3 Non-occurrence of environmental policy change: necessity and sufficiency The results of necessity and sufficiency analyses of the protests with no policy change are displayed in Appendix 4 and 5, respectively, as supplements to this study. The absence of advocacy efforts is the necessary condition for policy changes not to occur in the aftermath of environmental campaigns. And the complex solution to non-occurrence of policy change is For the six cases of no policy change, governments made concessions to protesters and changed their decisions in three instances: Maoming, Shifang, and Wuxi. For the remaining three cases Jiangmen, Haimen, and Wujing, governments also suspended projects to appease heightened social grievance but resumed them later. These empirical cases clearly demonstrate that protests, especially large-scale ones (Wuxi, Maoming, Shifang, Haimen), may achieve vola . Regrettably, without bringing in policy improvement, these one-off protests can hardly exert long-term clout on local environmental governance. 2.6 Discussion Table 2.6 Protest outcomes: project battle vs. policy war 13 This chapter has examined the protest-advocacy nexus in environmental contention and the resultant policy change at the level of Chinese local states. It has contributed to the scholarly debates on environmental protests and politics in China at three important aspects. First, it distinguishes between decision change and policy change, and thereby specifies the difference between local officials one-off compromise on particular unwelcome projects, which is previously and somewhat misleadingly lumped under policy change, and longer-term, institutionalized change in environmental governance. As shown in Table 2.6, the two types of contentious outcomes are contradictory to each other in seven out of the 20 cases under this 13 In the cases of Kunming, Jiangmen, Wujiang and Haimen, projects were suspended after protests but resumed later. In the case of Asuwei, the decision about the project remained uncertain for a few years after the protest until was resumed in 2015. study (the bottom left cell and the top right cell). Even when they appear in conformity, the causal mechanisms linking protest conditions to these two types of outcomes may significantly differ. It therefore makes sense to conceptualize environmental contentions with distinct achievements in project battles and policy wars. Second, rather than depending on ad hoc and unstable decision change to assess protest outcome, this study has resorted to policy change, operationalized by improvement in transparency policy implementation and new promulgation of environmental rules, as the indicator of a profound protest for advancing environmental governance. Using the method of csQCA, it has identified advocacy efforts as the necessary condition for policy change as well as four sufficient paths, combining different conventional factors of popular protest in China, for environmental protests to be translated into institutionalized policy adjustments. Admittedly, QCA based on the 20 cases cannot be stretched to make a sweeping causal argument that attributes policy change to the protest-advocacy linkage solely; and the findings with this method have by no means discredited the effect of conventional variables (scale, form, cost, and the attitude of the central government) in the complex and holistic political processes of popular protests. Yet my study has stressed the necessity rather than sufficiency of the advocacy variable for policy change, and explored plausible micro-mechanisms of advocacy strategies with methodological refinement, which previous research has begun to uncover but not yet been able to specify. Third, it has exhibited a multifaceted realm of various social agents (ENGOs, public figures, activists among ordinary citizens) practicing manifold strategies (legal-based, technical- based, policy suggestion-based) and mechanisms (beforehand-initiating and afterward- intervening) for policy advocacy, which goes beyond grievance-based, NIMBY-natured local contentions. It thereby enriches the new insights on a trend of mutually reinforcing dynamics of protest and policy advocacy that highlight the role of social forces in inducing environmental policy change, even though they have to remain weakly coordinated and decentralized. How significant might the emerging protest-advocacy linkage be for environmental politics and state-society relations in authoritarian China in general? In one sense, the prospect of increased and deepened protest-advocacy ties can be limited. In an increasingly restless society under one-party rule, ENGOs have to abstain from organizing popular protests directly and maintain a distance to them so that their very survival and delicate t be jeopardized (Ho and Edmond 2007). Meanwhile, except for a few influential ones like the Friends of Nature and Green Watershed, ENGOs that are capable, resourceful, and determined enough to exert a clout in policy change are pitifully rare across the country. In addition, the involvement of government-organized ENGOs after the protest, such as the JCEP in the Haining case, may lead some cautious observers to doubt the genuine nature of social agents engaging popular power and argue for the mechanism of state co-optation instead. On the positive side, however, the study suggests that the sobering sociopolitical condition of Chinese ENGOs in China has also stimulated them to seek broad, strategic alliance with green-minded elites, media, or activists among ordinary citizens, and piggyback on local people s collective power to renegotiate the terms of local environmental governance of the state. This is not to say there has been a retreat of the state but to emphasize the role of social collaboration with the state and stress a socially-made aspect of environmental authoritarianism. Moreover, going beyond the established argument for fragmentation and pluralism of Chinese authoritarianism, which contends that governmental agencies or regime insiders seamlessly ally with NGOs, the public, and the press to oppose certain developmental projects (Mertha 2008), my study implies that, even when sympathetic regime insiders are hard to identify and the central government is supportive of the projects (e.g., Dalian, Kunming, Gao antun), grievance-based local protests with the contentious orientation shifting from parochial interests to public concerns at institutional level can still succeed in improving policy in spite of failing to stop the projects themselves. Collectively and gradually, environmental activism in the form of protest-advocacy conjunction may amount to be an indispensable dimension of the state-led yet society-shaped Chinese environmental authoritarianism. Finally, although I am refrained from claiming for national policy influence of the protest- advocacy linkage due to the limit of the methodological design of this study, the findings here have obvious implications for environmental governance in far-reaching regions beyond those directly affected by the protests. Contentions diffuse; so do public policies (Tarrow 2010; Zhang 2015; Bondes and Johnson 2017; Zhu 2017). Horizontally, in the aftermath of the high peak of anti-incinerator protests in 2009, the municipal governments in Guangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing all promoted the Domestic Waste Management Work, which are the policy responses to respective protests locally but also suggest the learning processes and spillover effects of popular resistance and public policymaking across localities. Vertically, an influential, large-scale protest might induce upward scale shift in policy response at different governmental levels. For instance, after the protest in Qidong, which is under the jurisdiction of Nantong Municipality, not only did Nantong EPB issue the Major-decision Notice on Detailed Regulations for Implementing Social Stability Risk Assessment, but the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Environmental Protection (2012) promulgated the Suggestions on Feasibly Strengthening Public Participation in Environmental Protection of Construction Projects, which further specified the announcement, questionnaire and media coverage requirements for EIA approval. What is more, the Ministry of Environmental Protection also issued a new requirement promptly after the protest that all EIA reports submitted to EPBs should be accompanied by an abridged version directly made available to the public (Feng and Wang 2012). These implications, therefore, might be indicative of the directions for future research on the dynamics of protest and policy diffusions, which spells out the role of contentious protest-advocacy linkage in promoting transregional and supra- local policy change in environmental governance of the Chinese state. 3. Enforcing Green Transparent Governance: Court Attitudes and Bones of Contention in Environmental Information Disclosure Litigation Since the passage of the Environmental Protection Law (Interim) in 1979, the Chinese state has taken great efforts to build up an impressive legal framework of environmental protection (McElwee 2011). It is now generally accepted that Chinese environmental laws and regulations are complete and advanced but the enforcement is despondently weak (Wang 2006). To enhance enforcement, environmental protection bureaus (EPBs), environmental courts, legal practitioners, green-minded activists and ordinary pollution victims are all striving to deal with local protectionism, navigate in fractured bureaucracy, and achieve environmental justice with various approaches (Van Rooij 2006; Knudsen 2013; Stern 2013). In this chapter, I set out to explore the environmental enforcement. Traditionally treated only as an official mediator settling disputes between two rivals, courts have now been increasingly recognized as an important vehicle in political processes, which provide citizens with avenues for participation in decision-making processes, communication with official authorities, and protestation against these authorities (Dor and Hofnung 2006). Environmental public interest litigation, in particular, has resulted in improved governance and delivery of public services and enhanced accountability of public servants (Rajamani 2007). In the Chinese case, the legal framework of transparent government including the (DGI), the Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information (DEI, Interim), and the supplementary rules, regu or the State Council has been effective since 2008. Yet investigations show that the enforcement of green transparency legislation is severely impeded in practice. Local EPBs often de an experienced environmental lawyer, described the implementation of green transparency policy in its first Recently, against the backdrop of enforcement plight, citizens have been engaging law and when they believe the administrative organs fail to comply by transparency policies (Wang 2014). This also arguably explains the paradox of swift and substantial increase in open environmental information lawsuits in spite of a low winning rate. Although it is difficult to disentangle public policy interests from private grievance motives when citizens approach the court, it is increasingly acknowledged that litigation as political participation has been influencing public policy implementation and shaping the rule of law in China in a nontrivial way. In this chapter, I look environmental information lawsuits, and discuss the controversies involved in the legislation and enforcement of green transparency policies. 3.1 Courts under Authoritarianism Contrary to the conventional assumption that democracy is a prerequisite for judicial power, courts in nondemocracies are not invariably the pawns of their regimes, nor do they advance the interests of the ruling elites in a straightforward fashion. Interesting empirical research reveals that these courts are often deployed to ameliorate authoritarian pathologies and consolidate the regime, while paradoxically opening new avenues for civil challengers or even political opponents (Moustafa 2007, p.10). Regarding the case of China, a variety of studies have been devoted to explaining why the Communist Party takes efforts to endorse the rule of law and empower the judicial institutions. For example, as a remedy for the principal-agent problem, the central government promulgates the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) and establishes the cal misdeeds that the authoritarian rulers will respect rule of law when they need the cooperation of the organized interest groups that have valuable and mobile assets but are politically ill-connected, such as foreign investors (Wang 2015). Therefore, the local governments relying on them must restrain favoritism and equalize the playing ground through judicial empowerment. Moreover, courts may also be utilized to defuse social unrest, which is undoubtedly a critical issue that touches the most sensitive nerve of every authoritarian state. In comparison reperto -disruptive opposition and non- threatening to the regime (Tilly 1978; Tarrow 1998; Sherman 2008; Mahboubi 2014). In China, s repressed by the government, judicialization of discontent through filing lawsuits has been encouraged as an alternative approach for the public to redress grievance. For instance, Su and He (2010) al states in labor disputes, where the courts spearhead a league of relevant government agencies, engage the protesters on the street, individual lawsuits in established legal system, the authorities transform part of the function of maintaining social stability. However, whilst operating to fulfill their political mandate or pave way for economic infrastructure, it is unclear how courts in authoritarian systems, in return, structure the everyday conflicts over resource, power, information and the general state-society interaction, or whether these legal institutions open meaningful avenues of political participation and contestation. At this aspect, studies on environmental litigation as an alternative approach to environmental protest are particularly insightful (Van Rooij 2010; Stern 2011, 2013). For instance, Wang (2014) most explicitly argues for the effect of filing open environmental information lawsuits on the shaping of new legal opportunities. She emphasizes that the maximum use of the new mechanism of open environmental information has been emerging in China. With the continuous effort of all actors approaching the court through administrative litigation, changes have occurred with regard to both procedural requirements and substantive issues to open Intrigued by this new perspective and phenomenon, in this chapter I move forward to inese citizens and local governments in administrative litigation for environmental information disclosure. I propose to answer these question: Is litigation as an institutionalized form of contention effective nmental failure in disclosing environmental information? How do courts rule the lawsuits of this kind? To which extent do court decisions main promises, obstacles, and controversies in enforcing DGI/DEI regulations? To answer these questions, I resort to Beidafabao, a comprehensive and widely-used search software of Chinese legal information developed by Peking University, and succeed in collecting 121 court cases for environmental information disclosure in China from 2011 to 2017, excluding cases withdrawn by the plaintiff. Then I hand code all the 121 cases according to an original set of court attitude tags present disparities of court attitudes across subnational regions. Finally, I analyze four highly struggles over environmental information in courtrooms daily, resulting from legislative ambiguities, discrepant court attitudes, judicial discretion and their interactions. The focus of this chapter, obviously, shifts more toward the state side of state-society interaction; it is not only concerned with legal participation of citizens as social contention, but concentrate on how Chinese courts practice the rule of law with vagueness in authoritarian settings and what attitudes they possess toward increased civil demand for government transparency. 3.2 The Administrative Litigation of Environmental Information Disclosure Since 2010, China has gradually stepped into the digitization era of court decisions. The SPC has since then issued three versions of the regulations that direct and guide online publication of court decisions across the country (e.g. SPC 2013). By June 2017, its website has posted twenty- nine million legal documents. Meanwhile, the digitization process has encounters a series of problems, such as incomplete publication, uneven disclosure rates across regions and different levels, missing cases due to sensitivity, low formalization degrees, and uploading inefficiency and delay (Ma, Yu and He 2016; Liebman, Roberts, Stern and Wang 2017). Admittedly, the court decisions provided by Beidafabao suffer the same drawbacks, and thus the cases in this study are neither exhaustive nor representative of all the open environmental information lawsuits filed in the whole country. Although the resulting 121 cases in my dataset is far from complete, the process of reading their full text produces a granular portrait of how courts rule this kind of litigation in practice and reveals the hidden dynamics of controversies that cannot be readily captured by simple statistics. In the following part, I shall first summarize the overall situation of citizen participation in environmental information disclosure litigation, and then present the judgment results in the seven main regions of the country. 3.2.1 The plaintiffs, the defendants, and the information requested According to the cases collected, the plaintiffs in environmental information disclosure litigation may include individuals (one or two plaintiffs), collective individuals (more than two plaintiffs), enterprises, and sociopolitical groups. In my dataset, the vast majority of the cases 94 out of 121 are filed by one or two individuals. Among the rest, there are ten cases filed by collective individuals. The one with the largest number of plaintiffs is filed by 288 villagers from five different villages against local EPB in Dawa County, Liaoning Province (Case No. 28). Another five cases are filed by enterprises. And the remaining 12 cases are filed by groups, including village communities, government-organized environmental NGOs (ENGOs), such as All-China Environment Federation (ACEF) and Zaozhuang Environment Federation in Shandong Province (ZEF), and grassroots ENGOs, such as Fans of Source Environmental Research Center (FOS) in Beijing and Fashu Information Consultant Center (FICC) in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. Some plaintiffs have actively filed multiple lawsuits in these years. For instance, among the 12 cases filed by groups, FOS is responsible for seven of them. While these plaintiffs target primarily at local EPBs in environmental information litigation, governments, forestry departments, land and resources bureaus, housing and urban-rural development bureaus, environmental hygiene departments, and landscape and greenery bureaus. Due to the nature of these defendants, almost all environmental information disclosure lawsuits guiding legal framework. As for the information the plaintiffs demand to disclose in the lawsuits, more than one third of the cases 44 out of 121 involve environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports of certain projects and/or the official replies issued by the defendant EPBs. Twenty-one cases request the monitoring data and/or reports of specific facilities, such as incinerators, energy plants, and transportation projects. Fifteen cases particularly involve the discharge, disposal, transfer and other related information of industrial waste gas, waste water or hazardous waste. Ten cases are concerned with information about certain administrative decisions or acts, such as the issuing and enforcement of administrative permits, sanctions, or penalties. The plaintiffs mostly demand the courts to rule -reply, late-reply, or not-to-disclose behaviors are unlawful and order that the defendants disclose the requested information within the legal time limit of 15 business days. The courts usually refer to provisions of DGI or DEI and make their judgment in a case-by-case manner. 3.2.2 Judgment results: regional variation Due to asymmetric power structure, People suing the governments in China used to be likened as institution of judicial review of administrative actions has been consolidated, reflected by the rising rate of settlements that provide effective judicial relief to the plaintiffs and the declining percentage of rulings in favor of government agencies (Pei 1997). As a nascent subtype of administrative litigation, however, environmental information are myriad reasons that the plaintiffs may lose their cases in court. For instance, the 288 Liaoning villager s mentioned above lost their case simply because before they brought the case to the court they had applied for administrative reconsideration [xingzheng fuyi], the result of which had not come out yet. Therefore, it is procedurally illegal to file a lawsuit at that point of time. More common reasons given by the courts in their closing statements include: nor acquired the information, thus is The request information e.g. internal personnel management, the legality of certain provisions, or information produced and issued by party committees f The plaintiff fails to provide adequate evidence that the requested information pertains to their is not unlawful; and others. Of the 121 cases in my dataset, the plaintiffs lost 85 cases and won only 36 cases. Figure 1 above presents the numbers of cases in seven main regions of the country and the win-versus- lose contrast in terms of court rulings. The EC and the MY regions report the lowest and highest EC (eastern-coastal): Jiangsu (21), Zhejiang (11), and Shanghai (10); NC (northern-coastal): Shandong (10), Beijing (8), and Hebei (4); SC (southern-coastal): Guangdong (10), Hainan (5), and Fujian (2); MYT: (the midstream region of the Yangtze River basin): Anhui (7), Hunan (6), Hubei (2), and Jiangxi (1); SW (southwestern): Chongqing (6), Sichuan (4), and Guizhou (3); MY (the midstream region of the Yellow River basin): Henan (4) and Shanxi (2); NE (northeastern): Liaoning (3), Jilin (1), and Heilongjiang (1). Note: Numbers in parentheses demote the number of cases collected from that region. Source: Beidafabao ratio of cases won to lost, respectively (7:35; 4:2). Notably, only the ruling result in the EC region is significantly different from that of others (p-value=0.01356). 3.3 Court Attitudes environmental transparency policy reflected categories like positive, neutral, or negative to classify the general tones of each document as most content analysis studies would do (e.g. Liu and Yang 2015), I read between the lines and develop a refined scheme of attitude score with five tags: supportive, specific, general, restrictive, and critical. These tags carry with them positive, negative, or zero points for the calculation of an aggregative attitude score for each case. The vagueness of the provisions of Therefore, cases in which the plaintiffs request similar information in similar manners might receive different results in different courts. Notably, my analysis places emphasis on the concluding paragraph of each document, the courts recapitulate the case, apply relevant provisions of laws and regulations, and clearly and succinctly provide the reasons for their decision. This portion of the contents is therefore toward the case. The following part specifies how I label the 121 cases with the five tags: 3.3.1 right to information. Among the 121 cases in the dataset right of citizens, legal persons, and other organizations and an important measure for public and non- followed, which is the guiding spirit of the DGI/DEI regulations but not literally written into them. This case is listed in the Ten Public Interest Lawsuits of China by the SPC in 2011. have real application significance for the court. But in the case of Fan Jianzhen vs. Environmental Protection Department (EPD) of Jiangsu Province (Case No. 53), where the jurisdiction, the court cited this very provision and holds that it is unlawful for the defendant to ask the plaintiff to request the information directly from the six cities respectively. 3.3.2 where the courts particularly apply concrete provisions of the DGI/DEI regulations, relevant judicial interpretations and State Council regulations, whereas in general cases, the courts only mention certain sweeping statements or definitional provisions with no further explanation or clear reference to the implementation aspects of the regulations. certain type of judgment attitude of the judicial branch as one aspect of how transparent government regulations are implemented in practice. Among the 83 specific cases, some most frequently applied provisions include the 15- business-day time limit for reply (DGI, Art. 24; DEI, Art. 18), the relevance of the information to circumstances in which the requested information does not fall within the scope of disclosure or should not be disclosed by the environmental bureau (DGI, Art. 13; OEI, Art. 17). As for the 38 general cases, although some of them may also enumerate a few provisions in their concluding statements, they tend to have only marginal relevance or vague significance for application. 3.3.3 or invokes other relevant laws or regulations to override DGI/DEI provisions. In my dataset, 75 out the 121 cases are regarded as restrictive in their various circumstances. For instance, in quite a few cases, the courts agree to disclose only the EIA reply from the EPBs but not the full-text of to release the full-text version (e.g. Case No. 19). Others invoke the non-retroactivity principle to exempt older projects from the newly promulgated laws (e.g. the 2015 new Environmental Protection Law) or regulations (e.g. the 2014 Guidance of Government Information Disclosure of the EIA of Construction Projects), which explicitly stipulate full disclosure of all EIA report (Case No. 20, 21, 22, 24, 60). Another example concerns the frequently applied Art. 2 of the DGI/DEI, which defines the produced or acquired and recorded or kept in certain forms by administrative organs in the -inclusive definition, in the disclosure obligation of the environmental bureaus who did not produce but acquired or kept the requested information (Case No. 27, 84). In other cases, the courts may even impose their local regulations upon national ones. For rovision that has the administrative organ seek disclosure consent from the third party, whose information might involve business secret or individual privacy (Art. 14), a court in Shanghai goes ahead to apply its local version, the Provisions of Shanghai Municipality on the Disclosure of Government Information, which specifies that no-reply from the third party should be regarded as a denial to disclose by default (Case No. 93). Apparently, the restrictive judging style has in most cases constrained the pl and adversely affected their winning rate. 3.3.4 information disclosure demand. For instance, one its official seal (Case No. 15). In another case, the court commented on the information disclose application form of the plaintiff, who is only a student, tha know (, which the plaintiff himself put down as the purpose for the information when filling out the information application behaviors a al and appropriate use of right to k 3.3.5 Court attitude distribution across regions The violin plot (Figure 2) below displays the distribution of court attitudes in the seven main regions in China. The shape of the violin plots changes in width according to the density of cases reporting the particular score of court attitude, ranging from minus two points as the most critical and restrictive attitude to three points as the most accommodating and supportive attitude. The grey dots plot all the values of court attitude score coded from each case in the dataset, with the hollow, diamond-shaped dots denoting the mean and the black dots denoting the median. Apparently, for the seven main regions, court attitudes in a clear majority of the cases fall into the moderate range between zero and one point, showing quite a conservative ruling style of most Chinese courts in environmental transparency litigation. Among the seven regions, the attitude scores in the eastern-coastal region and the southern- coastal region are significantly different from those of other regions (p-value = 0.03732 and 0.0379, respectively). More interestingly, both located in the most affluent and open economies in China, eastern-coastal courts have a much more restrictive attitude than those in other regions, while southern-coastal courts have a much more supportive one. The explanations for such a disparity, as well as for the exceptionally low winning rate for plaintiffs in eastern-coastal courts in Figure 1, go beyond the purview of this study and entail supplement of data and further research. But it is worthwhile to have some speculative discussion here, especially in dialogue with an important existing theory of partial rule of law in authoritarian regimes. In , Wang (2015) contends that local governments in parts of China, seeking to attract and maintain foreign investment, enact rule of law in the commercial realm to meet those politically ill- Therefore, regions with higher levels of foreign investment particularly those from outside the so- tend to be equipped with less corrupt and better funded court system than those with a dominant presence of large state-owned EC (eastern-coastal): Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai; NC (northern-coastal): Shandong, Beijing, and Hebei; SC (southern-coastal): Guangdong, Hainan, and Fujian; MYT: (the midstream region of the Yangtze River basin): Anhui, Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi; SW (southwestern): Chongqing, Sichuan, and Guizhou; MY (the midstream region of the Yellow River basin): Henan and Shanxi; NE (northeastern): Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang. Diamond-shaped dots: the means of attitude scores; black dots: the medians attitude scores. enterprises. More specifically, he makes a comparison between Guangdong Province in the southern-coastal region and Jiangsu Province in the eastern-coastal region. Although the two provinces are similarly rich and both recipients of a large amount of foreign investment, investment in Guangdong origins mainly form within the China circle, while Jiangsu has attracted foreign investors from outside the China circle, primarily the United States and Japan (p. 142). As his theory suggests, ethnic Chinese investors with better connection in the mainland have much less incentive to support legal reform than the foreign competitors. Although Wang has repeatedly warned that his theory of partial rule of law in authoritarian China speaks to the commercial realm only, this chapter seems to have provided mixed complementary findings in the environmental realm. On one hand, a general implication of Wang s theory is that the incentive of local autocrats to implement better legal institutions are primarily driven by revenue and the demand of economic elites; they hardly have any genuine commitment in empowering the legal system, installing independent courts, or strengthening the environmental realm documents the same underlying logic as judges uphold a conservative and relatively restrict ruling style in most of the information transparency cases across the country, which is also consistent with the conventional wisdom that authoritarian courts tend to shield local businesses and governments. On the other, however, the environmental cost of running local businesses knows no apparent difference in the origin of the investment, meaning that all business prefers a lenient legal framework of environmental enforcement. Thus, the specifics of the theory are ambiguous for explaining why courts in one region are friendlier and more accommodating to environmental cases than those in the other region. It is probable that eco-friendly judgments of southern-coastal courts might be used as a means to balance the well- connected business interest of the investors of the region, whereas eastern-coastal courts still stick with judicial protectionism and privilege foreign investment with low environmental cost. nd- realm. However, and maybe more importantly, the topics of judicial fairness, corruption and financing Wang examines and the subject of court attitudes in this chapter are relevant variables yet provision with a restrictive or supportive attitude is not necessarily the same thing as he or she for reference, the explanation for the divergent court attitudes across the regions warrant much systematic investigation in the future. 3.4 Bones of Contention: Complexities and Ambiguities The vagueness of many Chinese environmental statues offers judges flexibility and discretion (Ma and Ortolano 2000, p. 91-92). At the national level, a law typically includes only broad policy statements. Key terms are often left undefined and generally not specified. A rationale for keeping national laws ambiguous is to prevent excessively specific laws from tying the hands of environmental legislation has also brought much controversies, inconsistency, or complexities to court enforcement of environmental rules. The litigation of environmental information disclosure effectively testifies to this point. 3.4.1 The third party d of the DGI stipulates, involves any business secret or individual privacy and that its disclosure may damage the legal rights and interests of a third party, the organ shall solicit the third party's opinion in written form; if the third party disagrees with the disclosure, the organ may not disclose such information, unless it believes that failure to disclose such information would exert great influence on public interests, and under such circumstance, the organ shall notify the third party of the content of the government In an appellate case tried in Guangzhou Intermediate Court in 2014, Zhang XX, the appellant, submitted an information disclosure application to Guangzhou EPB, the appellee, for the night work permit, the EIA report and approval documents, and the public consultation proof of a portion of the cit the appellee sent a letter to the Underground Railway Corporation of Guangzhou (URCG), the third party, to solicit its opinion. The URCG later replied and expressed disagreement to disclose the requested information, reasoning that the project has been incorporated into the -nuclear and anti-chemical functions as well as other important information such as its siting coordina Guangzhou EPB decided not to disclose the information, which is supported by Yuexiu District Court of Guangzhou, the first-instance court. In the second-instance hearing, Zhang appealed to argue that, grees to disclose the information, the administrative organ should examine the information and then decide whether to disclose it, rather than directly deciding not to disclose e reply given by the third party and quoted by the appellee, the information obviously does not touch upon business an accredited institution, which is absent in this case. Even if certain part of the information is indeed concerned with state secretes, the remaining parts should still be disclosed. The appellee should distinguish them and provide the appellant with the parts that can be On the other side, the appellee shunned away from direct counterargument but shifted to only its version for initial review, which should belong to enterprise rather than government information. Thus the information can only be disclosed voluntarily by the enterprise rather than suppor overturned the original judgment, ruling that Guangzhou Xiong XX, the appellant requested Jiangsu Provincial Department of Environmental Protection (EPD), the appellee, to disclose the EIA documents of a 220KV power transmission project (Case No. 42). Jiangsu EPD also consulted the party, Wujiang Power Supply Company, which specifically agreed to disclose parts of the South Kaihuan Circuits EIA report and the 220KV Jiangcheng Project EIA report, while refusing to disclose other two relevant reports. The third party clearly pointed out that in these reports the information about local power grid plans, the floorplan and layout of the transformer substation, the geographic wiring and pipeline diagrams, and the transmission line routing belong to business secrets, which should not be disclosed. The first-instance c EPD had lawfully done its examination and provided Xiong with parts of the requested information the third party agreed to disclose. Although Xiong appealed to the higher court, emphasizing individual vital interests and citing the new Environmental Protection Law, the first-instance judgment was sustained and the appellant finally lost the case. observe certain degree of clarity and consistency with which Chinese courts apply Art. 23 of the DGI under different circumstances. In reality, it is not difficult to imagine that almost all third parties, when being consulted by EPBs, would prefer not to disclose its information in the name of Although the provision itself is not crystal clear about the role and responsibility of the administrative organ in every situation, the courts seem to have adopted a distinct set of judging standards, including a) whether the third party has made a specific and persuasive argument; b) administrative organ has distinguished the contents of information and provided the applicant with those not involving business secrets or individual privacy. 3.4.2 In the lawsuits of environmental information disclosure, although the plaintiffs are oftentimes the interested parties of the requested information or direct victims of certain environmental pollution, the relations between the plaintiffs and the information are not always self-evident. In these situations, how the court result. The most frequently cited provision here, Art. 13 of the DGI, appears to be a generous and inclusive stipulation. It states that n light of their special needs for production, living or scientific research, [may] apply to the departments under the State Council, the local people's governments at various levels and the departments of the local people's government at or above the county level for accessing the relevant government for the Disclosure of Government Information (Sc refuses to disclose the government information based on the reason that it is irrelevant to the However, these seemingly supportive provisions are also conditioned by a few restrictive parallels. Art. 12 of the Sc Some Issues concerning Implementing the Regulation of the People's Republic of China on the Disclosure of Government Information may not provide the government information that is applied for disclosure by an applicant and does not relate to the production, living, scientific research or any other special needs of the Given the presence of these equivocal provisions, the key to court decision resides in the T, Art. 12) of how the applied government information relates to the production, living, and scientific research. It therefore In the appellant case of Fan Jianzhen aga in trial a copy of the Supplementary Explanations he submitted to the defendant as the proof of the applied information will be used to study, analyze, and verify technical data in order to realize environmental protection are the rights granted by law; thus, applying relevant information to be disclosed meets the requirement of special needs. Forth, (I need) to write a research article about -level Recommendation and Stringent Control in the Procedures of Establishing Demonstration Districts of National Ecological However, based on these explanations, the court concluded that the study or monitoring ds of) information. judges to accept, there is also an example where the information concretely relates to the other appellants against Wenchang Land and Resources Bureau in Hainan Province (Case No. 102), the information involved is a series of land expropriation documents of the Little Macau Project. As the fruit trees and forests cultivated by the three appellants belong to the construction site, what they request, such as the procedure and approval documents of this land expropriation project, is obviously the down-to-earth information relevant to their needs for production and living. However, the information they request also include a name list of the villagers whose lands are expropriated in this project, the areas and types of their lands, and the amount of compensation. Such a request is understandable since the appellants have issues with the counting and compensation of their young crops and are concerned with fairness involved in the process. Yet the court simply ruled that this part of information should not be disclosed due to the judgment of this case had been made upon the reason for individual privacy. Furthermore, Art. 13 of the DGI is unclear whether the proof of the relevance of the st. In the case of Wu XX against Zhenhai EPB in Zhejiang Province, the defendant cited Art. 13 of the DGI to monitoring station. As a counterargument, the plaintiff claimed that the EPB should have asked - proof was inadequate, it still ruled in favor of the defendant (Case No. 17). n. Without citizens from participating in environmental transparency polices. 3.4.3 The legal standing of social organizations Another issue also highlights the centrality of the relation between the information and its applicant in official proceedings. This is the issue of legal standing, i.e. the right to sue. Art. 2 of its lawful rights and interests have been infringed upon by a specific administrative act of an administrative organ or its personnel, he or it shall have the right to bring a suit before a people's disclosure is almost blank. Given the special and inherent significance of environmental information for pubic interests, it inevitably causes troubles in courtroom, especially when the court encounters green-minded and public-spirited organizations. Among the cases filed by social organizations, four scenarios can be observed regarding the entirely overlooked throughout the hearing. In other words, all parties the plaintiff, the defendant, and the court For instance, in the case of ACEF against Xiuwen EPB for the EIA report, project completion inspection, and pollution permit and levy information of the Haoyiduo Dairy Company (Case No. 1), and the case of Beijing FOS against Anhui Provincial Department of Forestry for information about several wildlife farms (Case No. 8), no questions are raised about whether the NGO is a lawful plaintiff, regardless of its nature being a government-organized NGO or a grassroots one. but the court does not respond to it in its decision. In an appellant case also filed by Beijing FOS, where it requested the information about the quantity, location, and health condition of black assistance with the (first-instance) investigation does not prove that it has standing in this case. And the appellant does not have direct legal interests in [falü shang de lihai guanxi] this case, thus disclose some of its administrative penalty and monitoring information. The defendant argued research institute. The information the plaintiff applied to be disclosed is irrelevant to its special needs for production, living, or scientific research. And this organization is registered with the Downtown District rather than the Xuecheng District, which constitutes a transregional, irrelevant application, thus the cases based on other factual aspects according to the DGI/DEI provisions. by individual business rather than an environmental public interest organization and that it is not the dministrative act (Case No. 44). FICC However, its standing was turned down once again as the appellant court sustained the decision of the first-instance court and stressed that the information FICC requested was irrelevant to its expli filed by FOS, where it also asked for information about black bear, the defendant, Guangdong Provincial Department of Forestry, not only questioned the relevance of the requested its failure to prove its authenticity and legitimacy as a social organization. In the closing e] the defendant, when replying to the , based on the claim of the organization code issued by the Civil Affairs Bureau and the Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau of Fengtai District, Beijing Municipality, as a legally registered organization, FOS is their standing. One opinion holds that the issue of standing should strictly comply by the Implementation of ALL, just as the third pattern has demonstrated with Case 44 and 45. But the other three patterns prove that not all the courts subscribe to the same degree of rigidness. In fact, , a substantive trial, rather than a condition in deter (Official Reply of the SPC on Whether a Requester for Public Disclosure of Government Information Irrelevant to Its Production, Living, Scientific Research, and Other Special Needs Has Standing to Sue, Dec 14, 2010) legal stakes the plaintiff has in the specific administrative act in the lawsuit, rather than in the information the plaintiff applies to disclose. Thus, it shows that, whereas the laws and legal interpretations reveal a spirit of high acceptability concerning the issue of standing, local courts may apply varied degrees of flexibility in accepting social organizations as the plaintiffs and in judging the relevance of the information they request. 3.4.4 The burden of proof The last controversial issue worth noting here is whom the burden of proof is upon. In environmental civil litigation, it has been increasing, if not fully, established that the burden of proof is upon the defendant (Wang 2006; Van Rooij 2010; Stern 2011). In administrative framework of government information disclosure, in particular, emphasizes again that it is incumbent upon the defendant to provide the lawful basis, evidence and explanations if he or she refuses to disclose the information the plaintiff requests (Art. 5 of the ScT). However, when the administrative organ claims that the requested information does not exist or has never been produced, it is quite unpredictable whether the court will base its decision on the obligation of the defendant or the plaintiff to prove the non-existence or existence of the information, respectively. In some cases, the court emphasizes the failure of the defendant in explaining why it does not procure or keep the requested information and rules the cases in favor of the plaintiff. For instance, in the case of FOS against Beijing EPB for the production and disposal information of produce or require such information. However, based on the fact that Kaibi Company declared defendant provided no evidence to support its own claim and thus lost the case (Case No. 6). In another case, the plaintiff applied to the defendant, Rugao EPB in Jiangsu Province, for the scope court stated that, he county level, the defendant has the statutory duty of participating in the demarcation, ecological conservation and pollution reasons to believe that the de on requested by the plaintiff, nor was it able to prove it indeed did not produce or keep such information Meanwhile, in some other cases, however, the courts may blame the plaintiffs if they fail to prove the defendants indeed have the requested information that they claim not to have and rule in favor of the defendants. For instance, Wu Hongying and two other appellants asked for the EIA report of the rerouting project for a national highway (Case No. 18). National projects like appellants lost their case as they failed to prove that the defendant, Anshun EPB in Guizhou Province, had also acquired the information in the process of carrying out its administrative adequate evidence for the existe burden of proof on Chizhou EPB to explain why it does not have the EIA report (Case No. 75). 3.5 Summary and Discussion As ordinary Chinese citizens take legal action as a formal form to contest government non- disclosure decision of environmental information, courts have become important political actors and provided a vigorous arena of state-society contention. This increasingly visible phenomenon ushers in a new research agenda for the studies of authoritarianism that further blurs the disciplinary divide between law and politics. This chapter gives an overview of environmental litigation, as an alternative contentious approach to protest, in the arena of implementing green citizens resort in order to safeguard their right to information and ensure governmental enforcement of information disclosure. In the midst of a legal framework replete with ambiguous, inconsistent, and unspecific provisions, the courts in different regions have embraced varying degrees of expansiveness and restrictiveness when ruling the cases, especially those involve controversial issues such as the t and the burden of proof. From the societal perspective, the phenomenon of litigation as participation reflects that not only the rights-defending [wei quan] awareness among ordinary citizens is on the rise, but they are increasingly willing to utilize legal weapons to protect their civil rights. Contrary to the of environmental information might even confront the government with outspoken and assertive words that voice their strong intention to take the case to the court. When Leshan EPB omitted a few items of the information applied to be disclosed, Mr. Li, the applicant, replied to Leshan EPB and assertively declared that, lawsuit to safeguard the lawful rights of citizens, even at the risk of being accused of wasting judicial No. 87) Admittedly, judicial activism is no guarantee of governmental transparency, denoted by the high losing rate of environmental information disclosure lawsuits across subnational regions. Even for the cases won by the plaintiffs, the court orders that the defendant EPBs should re-reply to the applicants do not equal to full disclosure of the requested information next time (Case No. 103). Yet the momentum of such litigation may nonetheless be sustained or continue to rise as a routine contention for the citizens to impose pressure on the government. In addition to the pressure-for-enforcement mechanism, the paradox of judicial activism in spite of a high losing rate has also been explained by the mechanisms of citizens engaging the courts to advance public policy (Dor and Hofnung 2006 lawsuits, this chapter acknowledges that in the arena of green transparency the replicability of a handful successful lawsuits is quite limited. Take the case filed by the ACEF against Xiuwen EPB (Case No. 1) as an example, which is the first public interest lawsuit on environmental information disclosure won by a social organization and has drawn high-level attention in the legal profession and media nationally (Zhao 2013). It seems doubtful, however, how the success of such singular cases is replicable given pronounced variances in the attitudes of the courts and the socio-political prestige and resources of the plaintiffs. After all, the environmental tribunal of liberal and accommodating to environmental public interest litigation; and the ACEF is a high- profile government organized ENGO directly under the supervision of the MEP. Although the privileges this case enjoys can be hardly imagined by other cases, it holds out the prospect of litigation as participation for the making of public policy and the expanding of legal -disclosure been confirmed to be officially written into the new DGI, which is currently under revision for some legal practitioners in China (Li 2007); and they do not have to be many to make a difference. It is not the quantity but their very existence that matters. much more tolerable, controllable approach than protest and is therefore encouraged by the authorities. But it does not mean that doors will open automatically throughout the litigation process or appeals for redress can be smoothly achieved. In addition to the well-studied difficulty in having the case accepted by the court in the first place (Stern 2013; Wang 2014), this chapter goes forward to inspect court attitude in applying the DGI/DEI regulations. It finds out that most courts hear the cases of environmental information disclosure with scrupulous and conservative attitudes within the politically safe domain of the authoritarian regime. More often than not, they summarize the cases by referring to the specific provisions in the legal framework of government information transparency in a rather restrictive manner. Yet it is unclear why courts in eastern- coastal and southern-coastal regions, the two most open and developed regions in China, tend to hold somewhat opposite attitudes. Both being highly vulnerable to the threat of environmental protest in recent years, why are the southern-coastal courts willing to be more accommodating in information disclosure lawsuits than their eastern-coastal counterparts? While this question awaits enlightenment from future research, it may suggest that the political mandate of the courts in the authoritarian state does not reign in all regions indiscriminately and that it can be balanced by the discretion power of regional courts. On the other hand, however, if the state truly intends to channel social grievance from eems contradictory when litigation simply dodges social stability concerned cases. In Case No. 61, for example, the application for the information about an incinerator was declined by Wuhan EPB after consultation with the municipal government, especially the leadership team of stability maintenance work. The defendants cited the fact that - and argued that, according to Art. 8 of the DGI, administrative organs - disclosure decision. This dilemma clearly shows that, with social stability still being the paramount political concern, the state has not figured out how to make use of legal institutions to absorb and defuse social unrest while pushing out unwanted risks. The next chapter will return to the linkage between protest and litigation, and explore the implication of increased activism in conventional legal contention for disruptive protest as well as for the environmental governance of the state. 4. THE PROTEST-LITIGATION LINKAGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL CONTENTION: PATTERNS, CHALLENGES, AND PROSPECTS Recently in academic research and news reports on environmental contention in China, two environmental concerns have been increasing by 29 percent annually since 1996, while less than 2012, Li 2008). As they were announced by Chaofei Yang, vice-chairman of the Chinese Society of Environmental Sciences, in a special lecture hosted by the Standing Committee of the aura of authority, disregarding the issue of data reliability or transparency. Many interesting questions can be proposed here regarding the salient contrast of protest and litigation as two approaches of environmental contention. The most obvious one might be why formal legal options are less favored by Chinese pollution victims and other concerned citizens. In fact, in both the US and in China, citizens prefer to seek informal options rather than turn to formal legal institutions to resolve their disputes (Miller and Sarat 1980-1981, Michelson 2006). Based on a body of social-legal work analyzing this question, Van Rooij has summarized systematically four types of obstacles citizens meet when attempting to take legal action, which are related to the justice-seekers themselves (lack of resources, time, awareness, experience, and economic independence), justice institutions (costs, slowness, lack of impartiality), legal conditions (lack of proper rights provision), and intermediary institutions necessary for success in some legal fora (lawyers, experts, witnesses, informal legal aid providers) (Van Rooij 2010). In the case of environmental disputes in China, specifically, a distinction can be made -making through established channels of administrative or judicial relief, such as applying for administrative reconsideration or administrative review [xingzheng fuyi], filing tort litigation against enterprises, or filing administrative litigation against enforcement authorities, while the latter encompasses complaints, petitions to higher levels of government, and collective action through sit-ins, demonstrations, and protests, etc. Studies show that legal action has remained the least used of the two for environmentally discontent citizens in China. Oftentimes, they may encounter multiple obstacles from a long list of daunting tasks in filing an environmental lawsuit: demonstrating the existence of a polluting act, providing evidence of damages, proving the causation between the polluting act and the damages, addressing complicated standing and procedural issues, crossing the case-filing threshold, collecting case acceptance fee, dealing with -and-demoralize maneuvers in class action cases like threating the lawyers or bribing the representatives (Van Rooij 2010, Stern 2011). As Rachel Stern observes, the vast majority of current environmental disputes in the country are handled through government-brokered deals, private concessions or simply when plaintiffs give up and go away (Stern 2011). Thus, being highly aware of the clear distinction between them, most studies tend to treat environmental protest and litigation as two entirely isolated approaches of contention as if one explain the empirical world, which is replete with cases involving both contentious repertoires. Driven by this problem, in the following parts of this chapter, I shall first present four typical patterns of interplay between street mobilization and legal activism, demonstrated by four cases of environmental contention where both protest and litigation play a role to different extents. Then, I continue to explore a particular type of litigation, the emerging Environmental Public Interest Litigation (EPIL), introduced in by the last case. The focus there will shift to the discussion of whether the EPIL can substantially assuage, if not substitute for, the widespread occurrence of environmental protests. Meanwhile, I shall also comment on the significance of EPIL for legislative advocacy, law enforcement, and institutional innovation in environmental governance. Finally, I suggest future research agendas in the conclusion part. 4.1 Patterns of Protest-litigation Linkage For the environmental contentions where both litigation and protest take place, how do these two approaches usually interact? A scrutiny of empirical cases produces four typical patterns of protest-litigation linkage according to the combinations of their dispositions (Figure 1). Policy-spirited versus Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY)-natured protests. As Chapter 2 has shown, policy advocacy differentiates the environmental protests that strive to improve long-term, rules- based public participation and transparency institutions from those NIMBY protests that are solely driven by one-off, imminent concerns with local unpopular projects. Multiple policy advocacy agents, strategies, and mechanisms are characteristic of policy-spirited protests, whereas NIMBY-natured Private- versus public-interest-oriented litigation. As the revised Civil Procedural Law and new Environmental Protection Law took effect in 2013 and 2015, respectively, the emerging EPIL opens up a new realm of filing lawsuits parallel to the traditional legal channel of private-interest-dominated litigation. Prominently, EPIL has increasingly become a fertile field for environmental non- governmental organizations (ENGOs) to promote legislative advocacy, law enforcement, and institutional innovations for state-society collaboration. Associated with the combination of these two dimensions, four provisional patterns of protest-litigation nexus in environmental contentions can be distinguished. First, when the protest joins its advocacy efforts with EPIL, the pattern of concerted reinforcement is likely to be observed. The two approaches may echo with and enhance each other to push for broadly defined environmental interests through institutional change. In the case of anti-paraxylene (PX) project in Kunming, Yunan Province, the two approaches proceeded in a convergent manner, with preceding protests evoking and providing an entry point for a series of subsequent lawsuits, including an EPIL case, which in turn have sustained the social ramification of the protests with continual legal participation. Second, when private-interest litigation is coupled with public-spirited protest, such contentions may proceed in the fashion of interlocked compelling, with one approach stimulating the other to carry on the opposition with its own strength. The preceding protest or litigation is oftentimes incapable of success in itself; but it creates impetus and compelling rationale for the ensuing approach to intensify the contention. This pattern is typified by the anti-discharge case in Qidong, Jiangsu Province, where years of repeated attempts in litigation efforts and other conventional contention seemingly had ended up nowhere. Nonetheless, they propelled and legitimized the outburst of a massive street mobilization. Third, if private-interest litigation is present with a NIMBY-natured protest, such narrowly- inclined contentions are probably restricted by particular conditions or specifically guided to copy from previous successful experience in similar cases. They usually have to or choose to focus on one approach and only employ the other as a supplement, thus take the pattern of situational concentration. In the anti-incinerator cases in the rural area of Qinhuangdao, Hebei contrasted strategy, opting for minimal or self-restrained protest and concentrating primarily on litigation. Their choice is simultaneously shaped by local situations as well as the spillover effects of other similar contentions. Finally, when EPIL is linked to a NIMBY-natured protest, ENGOs often take advantage of the new law momentum of public interest litigation to rekindle local environmental conflicts, especially those unresolved, influential cases. Hence the pattern of strategic leveraging is likely to unfold, demonstrated by a recent environmental incident in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province. Regarding the soil pollution problem near a local school, the parents organized small-scale sit-in protest for school relocation; later on, two non-local environmental NGOs (ENGOs) filed jointly an EPIL case against the polluting enterprises for soil restoration compensation. However, the linkage between the two approaches appeared quite disjointed as they have nothing in common in terms of the actor, strategy, goal, or idea of the contention, except that they were both The rest part of this section introduces these cases in details and shows how they embody the four patterns of protest-litigation nexus one by one. The cases are selected according to the presence of both contentious approaches and the availability of data for in-depth analysis. Although they do not turn out to be many in number, each case is characteristic of a particular pattern of the interplay between protest and litigation. In this chapter, I have also resorted to different data sources, including online court decision database, official news reports in Chinese, online reports of Chinese ENGOs in both Chinese and English, secondary academic research of environmentalism, access to justice, and contentious politics in China, and supplementary interview notes in my fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2016 in Beijing and Jiangsu Province. Given the variety of data sources and limitations in case selection, however, this chapter cannot provide more than an exploratory examination of the protest-litigation nexus with a view for hypothesis-formulation in future studies. 4.1.1 Concerted reinforcement: the Kunming anti-PX case announced that a ten-million-ton/year refinery project was approved by the National Park, 32 kilometers southwest of downtown Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan. When the project was exposed to public attention, its environmental impact assessment (EIA) report had already been passed secretly in July 2012 a typical closed-door approach local governments adopt in advancing unpopular developmental facilities (Sun, Huang, and Yip 2017) and the project was in fact already under construction. On May 4, a few thousands of residents took to the streets of Kunming to protest against the opaque decision making process and the planned refinery, which was believed to produce suspected carcinogen paraxylene. After the protest, however, Xiaojia Ma, then deputy director of Yunnan Development and Reform Commission and the Energy Bureau Chief, still insisted that the EIA report of this project was of 14 On May 16, a second, large protest broke out and the organizers took to the internet to call for another protest on June 6, the opening day of the first China-South Asia Expo in Kunming. 15 Facing increased social tension, Mr. Li Wenrong, then Kunming mayor, made a pledge in of the Expo into account and preserve a harmonious, stable environment for it. As for the EIA report that had been the focal with procedure, release the EIA re 16 On June 25, in order to quell public anger and alleviate social pressure, PetroChina-Yunnan Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (YPCC) finally decided to disclose the EIA report of the project and the approval document of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), available for public 14 : [Yunnan: the EIA Report of PetroChina s An ning Project Classified, Can t Publicize] , (May 14, 2013), [Chinanews.com]. Retrieved from <http://www.hi.chinanews.com/hnnew/2013-05-14/302869.html>. 15 Kunming to Release Environmental Report after Protests over Petrochemical Plant, (June 3, 2013), South China Morning Post. Retrieved from <http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1252276/kunming-refinery- report-be-made-public>. 16 [The Mayor of Kunming Said Information Disclosure should be further Strengthened and that Opinions and Suggestions should be heard], (June 3, 2013), [People.cn]. Retrieved from <http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2013/0603/c1001- 21706887.html>. The disclosure of the EIA report turned out to be significant for the whole campaign in that it provides an important connecting nexus between disruptive protest to conventional litigation in subsequent contentions. Among those who resort to conventional channels to voice opposition, ENGOs, including Beijing-based Friends of Nature (FON) and the Institute of Environmental & Public Affairs (IPE) as well as Kunming-based Green Watershed, were most prompt in reaction upon the disclosure of the EIA report. After viewing the report, they immediately noticed that there was no coverage on public participation at all, which was obviously against the EIA Law - inadequate openness, officials in Yunnan claimed that they did distribute questionnaires and hold public hearing. However, this public participatory process was entirely missing in the report. Bo Li also emphasized that, although YPCC explained that information involving business secrets and technology patents were deleted from the publicized report, these was no reason such information would include public participation contents. Therefore, these ENGOs joined up and applied to the MEP for administrative reconsideration against the blatant procedural deficit. 17 -round efforts through administrative relief institutions was left unsettled, however. ENGOs retched up the contention to formal legal avenue by convincing and supporting 17 [PetroChina under Inside and Outside Pressure of Ecological Environmental Protest], (July 19, 2013), [New York Times, Chinese]. Retrieved from <https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20130719/cc19wangqiang/>. , [The EIA Report of PetroChina s Yunan Project Missing Public Participation , Multiple Environmental Groups Applying for Administrative Reconsideration], (July 2, 2013), [Yicai.com]. Retrieved from <http://www.yicai.com/news/2828122.html>. local residents to file lawsuits against responsible local governmental departments (Sun et al. hometown in Yunnan in the immediate aftermath of the anti-PX upsurge in Kunming protests. She submitted multiple applications for environmental information disclosure to local government, enterprises, and the MEP regarding the refinery project, as well as brought an ccording to its EIA report, the the Yunnan Ethnic Village, which is 27.2 kilometers away, while Ms. Luo lives approximately ten kilometers (straight-line distance) from the project. 18 However, the dismissed her case. Jun Xia, the attorney of Ms. Luo and also an experienced environmental lawyer, revealed that they might consider soliciting professional mapping and drawing team to measure the actual distance, and then appeal against this court judgment. Moreover, he held that since the EIA report already admitted the Yunnan Ethnic Village and implied possible practical impact on it, all residents living along the 27.2-kilometer, instead of the 10-kilometer line, should ü 18 [Kunming Citizens Bring the Ministry of Environmental Protection to the Court regarding the PetroChina Project, the Court Deciding to Dismiss], August 28, 2014), [Thepaper.cn]. Retrieved from <http://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1264183>. with the right to sue sident, Yunfeng Yang, applied to the NDRC for administrative reconsideration on June 26, 2014, also demanding the revocation of its approval. On August 22, the NDRC dismissed his application, arguing that it was the State Council, the superior of the NDRC, that approved this project and that Yang should apply to the State Council instead of the NDRC. However, Xia Jun pointed out that the project was in fact approved [pi zhun] by the NDRC and ratified [he zhun] by the State Council. 19 After years of contests between governmental, business and social parties, the refinery was finally halted and fined by the MEP in August 2015 as it found that major modifications had occurred with the project without resubmission of environmental assessment documents. Reportedly, PetroChina- the resubmission procedure. 20 Later on, the FON took a somewhat symbolic, given the project was already on hold, initiative and filed an EPIL against PetroChina-YPCC on October 27, 2015, demanding complete closure of the construction, withdrawal of its EIA report, and an apology to the public. 21 19 Same as above. 20 20 [The Ministry of Environmental Protection Issuing a 200,000-yuan Fine, PetroChina s An ning Refinery Project Halted], (September 1, 2015), [Finance.china.com.cn]. Retrieved from <http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/energy/sytrq/20150901/3321491.shtml>. 21 [The Environmental Public Interest Lawsuit of the Friends of Nature against PetroChina-Yunan s Refinery Project], (May 12, 2017), [Fon.org.cn]. Retrieved from <http://www.fon.org.cn/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=10522:2017-05-12-08-14- 21&Itemid=111>. submitted nine supplemental legal documents as evidence for major risk the project posed to public interest. Since then, however, the lawsuit still has not been accepted and ended up nowhere to this day. We may observe from this case a pattern of concerted reinforcement as the two medium- large scale of protests and a series efforts of litigation exerted the contentious force in a convergent fashion, especially with the momentum in the former evoking and encouraging the latter. Apparently, the power of protests alone in the first stage was fierce and swift, but not the project. As noted above, officials refused to budge after the first protest on May 4. It was not until the second protest and the threat of further ones that the government revealed the willingness to compromise. And even after consecutive protests, pictures shot by Green Watershed in August 2014 demonstrated that the project was still under continuous construction. However, the preceding protests and the social tension they caused successively pressurized the government to release the full text of the EIA report, which virtually changed the political opportunity structure for the contenders to employ the repertoire of litigation. This opening up of a new realm sustained subsequent social contention as environmental groups and citizens started to seek administrative relief or file formal lawsuits against the government. Subsequent administrative litigation and EPIL efforts were far from smooth. The struggling experience of Luo, Yang, and the FON testified to the fact that, given great strategic stakes in massive energy projects like this one, authoritarian courts would strive to thwart the legal proceedings and that administrative organs would pass the buck when citizens apply for administrative reconsideration. Although the litigation efficacy itself in this case is less impactful, it joined the forces of previous protests to sustain their social ramifications and maintain media exposure about the progress of the project throughout the years. As a result, the two contentious repertoires constituted concertedly an environmental watchdog to ensure the project could no longer get an easy pass on environmental inspections. 4.1.2 Interlocked compelling: the anti-discharge project in Qidong Qidong is an affluent costal city in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, endowed with the geographic advantage that three water bodies the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the Yangtze River converge near the city. Since the opening of the Chongqi Bridge in December 2011, Qidong has been seamlessly welded to the one-hour economic zone of Shanghai and become the economic development zone of Nantong to establish its plant. And the municipal government agreed to build a drainage pipeline as an auxiliary facility that would discharge waste water to the Yellow Sea through the Lüsi port of Qidong at the rate of 150,000 tons per day. As the largest foreign investment project in the history of Nantong, it was estimated that the plant would bring an annual tax payment of 700 million yuan for the government (Li and Ruan). In 2007, the project was approved by the Jiangsu Provincial Development and Reform Commission (JPDRC) and the Qidong section of the project was about to break ground in April 2012. 22 Oppositional voices against this project have been heard as early as in 2005, when political elites from within the regime started to present proposals that cast doubt on the planned project informal gatherings such as the New Year tea parties. Social volunteers from all walks of life joined together in multifaceted forms and gradually gained increased momentum to resist the project (Lu and Chan 2016). The online activities were particularly vibrant. By posting in exchange ideas, update the progresses of the project, and discuss their countermeasures. They also tried institutionalized approaches to contest government decision, such as writing petition letters and filing lawsuits. Yet none of the above were effective in getting the government to reconsider the project. and attended by representatives of all parties, including retired officials, aquaculture practitioners, fishermen, netizens and other concerned citizens. Yet the officials only seemed to 22 [Where to Discharge the Waste Water? Qidong Revelation] (August 4, 2012), [China Management]. Retrieved from <http://www.cb.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=26&id=403286&all>. ise that the project would not commence in Qidong until it was approved by the public. Half a month later, the project quietly finished bidding and became all ready for construction. 23 As the public felt fooled by the government, activists distributed An Address to All Qidong Citizens online and called for city-wide unification to confront pollution and defend the homeland. Years of contention culminated in a large-scale, violent protest on July 28, when thousands of angry Qidong protesters stormed governmental buildings, ransacked the offices, overturned police vehicles, and forced the mayor of Qidong to strip off his shirt. 24 On the same day, the city government announced that the Oji discharge project would be scrapped permanently. Among all the contentious activities that finally led up to the large-scale protest in 2012, Qidong citizens were most prominent in their perseverance in filing administrative lawsuits. Since 2010, those who have some knowledge of law volunteered to take established legal route of administrative litigation to redress their environmental grievance. On February 8, 2010, Weixing Cao and other volunteers brought an administrative lawsuit to the Nanjing Intermediate ment No.168 (2009) that approved the Oji discharge project. However, the NIPC neither accepted the case nor 23 [Seven-year Game on the Qidong Discharge Project] May 3, 2012), [In-Depth Investigation], p. A25. 24 (August 6, 2016), Business Insider. Retrieved from <http://www.businessinsider.com/qidong-protests- turn-violent-mayor-sun-jianhua-forced-to-strip-2012-7>. adjudicated non-acceptance within the legal time limit of seven days. Thus, they mailed their angsu Province (HPCJ) and were again left without response. Eventually, on March 30, the NIPC adjudicated non-acceptance of their case. It denied that Document No.168 was the approval document of the project and claimed that, without external legal validity, the revocation of this document was beyond the acceptance scope of administrative litigation. 25 Refusing to give up, Qidong citizens then submitted information disclosure application to the JPDRC and obtained the confirmation that Document No. 168 was indeed the project approval document. Once again, they went back to the NIPC in May and repeated their case-filing demand, while persistently seeking help from the HPCJ and hoping it can pressurize its subordinate to accept the case. However, since then their efforts through legal recourse were never answered again. Although failed in changing government decision, their endeavors to engage the court were worthwhile in that they made two critical achievements as the outgrowth of litigation. First, the government information the activists gained through repeated litigation, although fragmented, exposed piece by piece the image of the government as self-contradictory, opaque, and untrustworthy in the decision making process of this project. It therefore worked to strengthen the discourse power and mobilization advantage of the opposition camp. Second, the frustrated case- 25 [The Qidong Incident: Street Movement Defeating Stability Politics], [Inside Information], No. 9, 2012. that was questioned by citizens. 26 Their failure even in having the case accepted by the court marked the blockage of all lawful channels of civil contention, which left the opponents with no other options. In other words, the fact that the activists have exhausted established approaches to seek change in government decision helps justify and rationalize the choice of taking to the street as the last resort. From this point of view, the large-scale protest on July 28 was more like the 27 The Qidong case demonstrates a typical litigation-protest nexus in the form of the two repertoires interlocking to ratchet up the contention, especially with the former being failing but able to compel the latter. In this sense, social contenders in Qidong were forced to the streets determinedly after doing everything they could with established channels but failed. The links of failed litigation in the chain of opposition are by no means futile but ratchet up the contention and provide inflammatory materials for the explosive power of the subsequent massive protest. 26 [Some Courts Refusing to File Cases for Sensitivity Concerns, Pushing Environmental Grievance to the Streets], (October 28, 2012), [People.com]. Retrieved from <http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2012/1028/c1001-19412238.html>. 27 728 [Initiators of the Qidong Incident on July 28: The Fear for Revenge Didn t Come], (December 25, 2012), [ifeng.com]. Retrieved from <http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/detail_2012_12/25/20488059_0.shtml>. 4.1.3 Situational concentration: the anti-incinerator cases in rural Qinhuangdao and urban Beijing In Qinhuangdao, Heibei Province, an incinerator was secretly roughed out for construction next to the Panguanying village in April 2009. Upon discovering this plan, a small crowd of villagers confronted the village head to voice their opposition (Bondes and Johnson 2017). On one hand, llagers depended on for subsistence; on the other, the villagers were strongly influenced by the media reports on the Liulitun anti-incinerator campaign in Beijing and the suspected carcinogen of incineration like dioxin. 28 In September 2009, the construction was temporarily tabled due to 29 yet it was resumed after eight months. Different from the environmental contentions in big cities like Xiamen and Guangzhou, 30 Therefore, they decided to 28 Interview with Jun Xia in Beijing, April 2016. 29 [Qinhuangdao Villagers Sniping Waste Incinerator], (March 27, 2013), [China Weekly]. Retrieve from <http://news.sina.com.cn/c/sd/2013-03-27/104226656237.shtml>. 30 [The Sniping War of Qinhuangdao Farmers against Waste Burning], (March 1, 2011). [ifeng.com]. Retrieved from <http://news.ifeng.com/fhzk/detail_2011_03/01/4905732_0.shtml>. solicit the legal service of Jun Xia and embarked on the path of litigation as the main contentious approach. In June 2010, through information disclosure application they obtained the EIA approval document issued by the Heibei Provincial Department of Environmental Protection (PDEP), which acknowledged that the project had gone through public participation procedures like making public announcement, distributing 100 questionnaires, and organizing inspection. Knowing that none of them had ever seen any announcement, the villagers applied to the MEP for administrative reconsideration and demanded revocation of the EIA approval. Meanwhile, they also submitted multiple administrative reconsideration applications to the Heibei Provincial Government, the Heibei Provincial Department of Land and Resources, and the Qinhuangdao Municipal Government. 31 With all the results of seeking administrative relief turning to be utter failures, they eventually decided to file administrative lawsuits against them. In January 2011, Panguanying villagers brought the Heibei PDEP to the Qiaoxi District Court of Shijiangzhuang Municipality and succeeded in having their case accepted. Then surprisingly, Pan received the full EIA report from the Heibei PDEP in February, which was produced by the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences in March 2009. Attached with this report were 100 public opinion questionnaires that express approval of this project. However, the subsequent fact-checking proved that 35 names could not be verified, while the remaining 65 villagers claimed that they had never seen or filled out those forms. The whole 31 Same as above. verification process was videotaped by Mr. Pan, who then burned it to DVDs and submitted Intermediate Court and the MEP. 32 Another fraud in the public participation chapter of the EIA report was the signatures of villager representatives attached to the meeting minutes of Panguanying Village Committee as evidence of their approval for the project. In fact, these meetings were never held and the signatures were secretly taken from an unrelated subsidy distribution meeting. 33 Finally, in May 2011, the Heibei PDEP revoked the EIA approval before the court session began and ordered that the construction of the incinerator should be discontinued until approval of a resubmitted EIA report. With their goal being temporarily achieved, Panguanying villagers withdrew the lawsuit. But they did not withdraw from their long-term legal endeavors altogether. They kept a vigilant eye on any new developments relevant to the incinerator. For instance, as the construction contractor of the project, Weiming Environmental Protection and Energy Company, had been seeking to pass environmental examination and go public, Mr. Pan and other villager representatives initiated another round of contention and even brought the MEP to court. 34 Although this time their case was not accepted, through years of experiences 32 Same as Footnote 29. 33 [The Qinhuangdao Waste Incineration Project being Boycotted: The EIA Fraud], (July 2, 2012), [Caijing]. Retrieved from <http://business.sohu.com/20120702/n347062082.shtml>. 34 Same as above. Panguanying villagers became increasingly persistent and determined in carrying on their contention with rational, legal weapons. In the Qinhuangdao case, the anti-incinerator campaign was set against the rural backdrop with minimal street mobilization. The villagers opted for legal-based strategies instead of dabbling too much in protest efforts, except that a small crowd of villagers contained and confronted the village head in the beginning of the contention. Its urban counterpart, the case of anti- uch a contrasted strategy of concentrating through similarly painstaking processes, from petitioning the government, to applying for administrative reconsideration, and to filing administrative and civil lawsuits. Ms. Lei Zhao, from a residential community nearby, was infected with bronchitis in 2008 and sued the incinerator. Yet she lost her case as the Chaoyang Court District ruled ironically that local residents legal term that caused a nationwide uproar in social media at that time. 35 In order to obtain the al monitor data, another local resident, Ms. Zi Yang, filed an administrative lawsuit in the Haidian District Court against Beijing EPB in 2009 and demanded the disclosure of the information she applied for 35 [Residents Losing the Lawsuit against the Foul Smell of the Incinerator regarding Sickness], (May 22, 2010). [Finance.qq]. Retrieved from <http://finance.qq.com/a/20100522/000285.htm>. ed them (Beijing EPB officials) whether they had the data. They answered yes. And the judge asked on what legal basis they refused to disclose the information. They answered that they did not have any. Even so, we still lost the within the so- - 36 Yang then appealed to the BIPC and lost again due to the same reason. Some differences between these two cases are also worth noting. First, although contentions signatures and petition, it was after the project was virtually completed that the surrounding communities were fully mobilized. In the ot 2013). Second, instead of applying for approval revocation to a local EPB as in the Qinhuangdao -level environmental protection agency, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, the predecessor of the MEP), to w transportation vehicle on 30 August 2008. Since they deliberately restrained their action until 36 : [Beijing Citizen Yangzi: The Ministry of Environmental Protection Claiming the Catalog of the EIA Report of the Gao antun Incinerator Business Secret], (May 11, 2011), SinaBlog of the Friends of Nature. Retrieved from <http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_69a4de060100rurd.html>. after the Beijing Olympic Games, their protest won them the promise from the government to apologize to the public and invest in the treatment of the stench in 20 days. 37 Afterwards, however, the stench remained. In stark contrast to the Qidong and Kunming cases, disruptive protests in Qinhuangdao and -restrained. A more interesting question on how the contenders arrived at the particular choice of the combination of repertoires entails further research. very beginning, study shows that their persistence with a legal course of action throughout the contention was strongly influenced by the advice of the environmental lawyers and grassroots ENGOs, who had previously succeeded in assisting other incinerator opponents with legal-based environment in itself is no -scale, peaceful protest, it is hard to argue for any substantial value it had for the whole campaign. Instead, the backbone of these two cases are legal-based strategies through steadfast endeavors in seemingly impossible lawsuits, which bore accumulative fruits in multiple attempts. The irrefutable evidence of EIA fraud collected by Mr. Pan in the Qinhuangdao case, in particular, left the local EPB with no other choice but to 37 [Gao antun Environmental Counterattack], (April 27, 2009), (Southern Metropolis Weekly). Retrieved from <http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org.cn/news-492.html>. court decisions of the administrative and civil lawsuits not only received much media coverage, but might spur more contention through legal participation of this type from the society. 4.1.4 The Changzhou Foreign Language School is a renowned private secondary school founded in 2001, which inherits the educational tradition and prestige of the top-one high school in the city, the Changzhou High School of Jiangsu Province. The majority of the students in the school boast in both the academic records and their well-to-do families. In September 2015, the school was moved to the newly built campus in the New North District of the city. Right across the road, a 38 was under restoration of the government. Before long, some parents noticed that their children started to have symptoms of health issues like tiredness, loss of appetite and drowsiness. With spontaneous discussion in the online instant chatting group, they realized that declining health condition was widely shared among the 38 Jiangsu Changlong Chemical Co., Changzhou Changyu Chemical Co., and Jiangsu Huada Chemical Co. were all old factories, dating back to 1970s, late 80s, and early 90s, respectively. In 2010, the local government reclaimed the land-use right. always smelled when they picked up their children from the school. 39 In January 2016, 1,200 parents submitted a joint letter to the city government, local EPB, the education department and physical and mental health. 40 Meanwhile, hundreds of parents participated in a sit-in protest with banners and persevered until at least 4 am. A police SWAT team was dispatched to maintain stability on the spot and briefly detained a few people for admonition. 41 Although the school once announced the suspension of classes under pressu protesting effort did not seem to yield any substantial fruits. For one thing, the school entrusted a onvinced by the result, the parents funded money themselves to hire another third-party company from Shanghai to redo the assessment, which went nowhere eventually. 42 For another, the parents were repeatedly obstructed in their protesting process by local o 39 [Joined Inspection Group Going to Changzhou land School and Sampling], (April 20, 2016), [The Beijing News]. Retrieved from <http://epaper.bjnews.com.cn/html/2016-04/20/content_631683.htm?div=0>. 40 : [Landmark: Toxic School Parents Warned away from Making Troubles or Petitioning], (April 20, 2016). [163.com]. Retrieved from <http://zhenhua.163.com/16/0420/15/BL3T568F0004662L.html>. 41 [Several Matters regarding the Toxic Pollution of the New Campus of Changzhou Foreign Language School], (April 20, 2016), BBC.com. Retrieved from <http://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/china/2016/04/160420_changzhou_school_follow_up>. 42 , [Changzhou Toxic Land Restoration: Who Should Pay the Bill?], (January 25, 2017), [News.cn]. Retrieved from <http://news.xinhuanet.com/legal/2017- 01/25/c_1120378345.htm>. ü actions. 43 As a result, their opposition faded as the health of their children gradually improved and the students were reoriented to their heavy schoolwork. To the surprise of the local government, the Live Newsroom [xinwen zhibo jian] program of Ch ecedented level and immediately grabbed intensive official attention. According to the news report, 493 out of 641 students who went for medical examination had been found with dermatitis, eczema, bronchitis, abnormal blood indices, or leukopenia since the school moved to the new campus, including a lymphoma case and a leukemia case. 44 While the local government and the school officials were prompt to refute the CCTV report with their own version of evidence and medical statistics in their public announcement, the Education Steering Committee of the State Council, the MEP, the Jiangsu Provincial Government, and the Health and Family Planning Committee quickly formed 45 The inspection went on for a few months. As a result, the deputy head of the New North District and other ten local 43 Same as Footnote 40. 44 [The School that Be Built], (April 17, 2016), CCTV13 News. Retrieved from <http://tv.cntv.cn/video/VSET100232480132/9e11b1bf4f064007a630668bddd854b2>. 45 Same as Footnote 39. officials were held accountable for the problems in the land restoration project. 46 And the city government later adjusted land use planning from commercial purpose to public green space. Yet it substituted the restoration procedure of six-meter soil removal and replacement with one-meter covering on the surface in order to eliminate the stench right away, which was an expedient measure that laid a hidden crisis for the future. 47 and the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), two of the most resourceful and established ENGOs in the country, picked up this case and filed an environmental public interest lawsuit. After submitting 15 information disclosure applications to the local EPBs, they took to court the three chemical manufacturers responsible for the land pollution, demanding that they remove the pollution, compensate for the land restoration costs, and make a public apology in official media. 48 Court (CIPC) accepted the case. In the eight-hour open court trial on December 22, the debate between the two parties pivoted on how to distribute the restoration liability of the land that had been historically polluted by the manufacturers but was reclaimed by the government afterwards. 46 Same as Footnote 44. 47 : , [Comment: Scientists, Why Are You in Collective Silence?], (April 20, 2016), [People.cn, Technology Daily]. Retrieved from <http://scitech.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0420/c1007-28289216.html>. 48 [Changzhou Intermediate Court Accepting the Public Interest Litigation on the Soil Pollution near Changzhou Foreign Language School], (May 21, 2016), [People.cn, Legal Daily]. Retrieved from <http://legal.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0521/c42510-28368752.html>. On January 25, 2017, the CIPC ruled against the plaintiffs, who were also charged 1.89-million- yuan (US$270,000) litigation fees. The court reasoned that as the local government had taken back the right to land use and carried out remediation, the responsibility of the original polluters was transferred to the government as well. 49 On February 7, the FON lodged an appeal, with its - only small-scale and short-lived but took on a nature strongly resembling the Not-In-My- Backyard (NIMBY) mindset. The demand put forward in the protest was narrowly framed as with the high pressure of getting the students into good high schools, the parents would prioritize an undisrupted study environment and reconcile with the school as long as the health issue was under control. Meanwhile, although among the parents of this prestigious school there was no lack of those who were wealthy or politically well connected, 50 most of them flinched in the face of the prohibitive costs in sustaining the protest, including self-fundraising for environmental assessment and imminent political threat from local government. 49 (2016) 04 214 [Changzhou Intermediate People s Court of Jiangsu Province Civil Judgment (2016) Su 04 Civil First-instance No. 214]. 50 One of the parents, who was interrogated by local police station and forced to promise not to petition, was itical Consultative Conference. See Footnote 40. As for the lawsuit filed by the two ENGOs, they picked up a public-interest frame and distanced itself from the sensitivity of protest, targeting the polluting manufacturers instead of the local government or the school. As will be further discussed below, recent EPIL has ushered in brand-new opportunities and challenges for environmental litigation to echo with environmental protest. However, in comparison with other cases, the protest and litigation efforts in the Changzhou case appeared more like two relevant but separate events that happened sequentially than one coherent campaign with convergent repertoires. The FON and the CBCGD le a public interest lawsuit in the new Environmental Protection Law (2015) framework, which was obviously -purposed protest in the beginning of the case. Although the first-instance judgment ruled against the ENGOs, 51 this public interest lawsuit left its own mark on the evolution of the legal framework of soil protection in China, especially given the ce again, it pushed the legal institutions in China to face up to the persistent problem of lacking clear and specific rules to implement overarching 51 The second-instance hearing of this case has not been convened by the time of the writing of this dissertation. 4.2 Environmental Public Interest Litigation (EPIL): Challenges and Prospects he years, jurists, scholars, and environmental agents have devoted themselves into the research and debate about this narrow regulation on legal standing. In late 2000s, some local legislatures, judicial organs started to make exploratory efforts in the practice of accepting and ruling EPIL cases filed by ENGOs even before national legislation (Li 2016, p.256). At the national level, Article 55 of the 2012 amended version of the Civil Procedure Law indicated a significant move toward a broader standing, whi such as causing environmental pollution or damaging the interests of a large number of consu litigation, its ambiguity and abstraction leave the question of who exactly has such right to sue answered (Cao and Wang 2011). 52 Consequently, instead of increasing, not a single EPIL case was accepted in 2013 (Li 2016, p. 269). Finally, on January 1, 2015, the new Environmental Protection Law (EPL) became effective, with its Article 58 specifying three conditions for social organizations to be eligible to 52 Cao and Wang (2011) discuss four kinds of plaintiffs in EPIL agencies/enforcement authorities, individuals, and ENGOs, and argue for ENGOs, despite all the obstacles, as best plaintiff of EPIL. become the plaintiff in EPIL: 1) registration with governments at or above municipal level; 2) specialty in environmental public interest activities for five consecutive years or more; and 3) no law violation records. In 2015 and 2016, Chinese courts accepted 112 EPIL cases that are initiated by social organizations and concluded 54 cases. They not only indicate a substantial growth in quantity compared with the annual average of eight cases before 2015, but have also covered extended geographic areas and a variety of case types, including air, water, soil, ocean, forest pollutions, and conservation of endangered plants, cultural relics, natural reserves and countryside. 53 Yet different from what some would expect given current condition of environmental degradation and rampant protests, the EPIL cases did not erupt in number after the new EPL became effective. 54 Although there are approximately more than 700 social organizations in the country that are eligible to file EPIL according to the new standards, over 80 percent of them are estimated to be academic, industrial, or research associations and only a small fraction work specifically on pollution and ecological protection. 55 For those eligible ENGOs that do have 53 [The Supreme Court Publishing Ten Typical =Cases of Environmental Public Interest Litigation], (March 8, 2017), [People s Court News]. Received from <http://rmfyb.chinacourt.org/paper/html/2017-03/08/content_122672.htm?div=-1>. 54 700 NGO [More than 700 Environmental NGOs Eligible to Sue; Has the Spring of Environmental Public Interest Litigation Come?], (January 14, 2015), [ifeng.com]. Retrieved from <http://gongyi.ifeng.com/a/20150114/40943843_0.shtml>. 55 Why Are China s Anti-Pollution Lawsuits Stalling? (June 23, 2015). China Dialogue. Retrieved from <https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7986-Why-are-China-s-anti-pollution-lawsuits- stalling->. intention to initiate EPIL, many of them might be cash-strapped and shy away from the prohibitive cost such as litigation deposits, 56 attorney fees, and environmental judicial authentication fees. 57 environmental tribunals and many judges are unfamiliar with EPIL cases, 58 the judicial system as a whole still harbors a hesitative attitude toward the acceptance of EPIL cases, especially those touch the large taxpayers of local governments. Statistics of -instance environmental civil cases, among which 2,595 were on pollution damage compensation, while the widely anticipated civil EPIL only added up to 45 cases. 59 4.2.1 A substitute for environmental protest? A more relevant concern here is that only a few of the existing EPIL cases tend to engage 56 Litigation deposits are calculated as a proportion of the compensation being requested, and are only returned to the plaintiff if they win. Environmental cases often involve huge sums of compensation. 57 Environmental Law Blunted by Crippling Court Costs, (August 22, 2016), China Dialogue. Retrieved from <https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/9203-Environmental-law-blunted-by-crippling- court-costs>. 58 Growing Pains for China s New Environmental Courts, (June 17, 2015), China Dialogue. Retrieved from <https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7972-Growing-pains-for-China-s-new- environmental-courts>. 59 45 [The Supreme Court: Courts Accepting 45 Cases of Environmental Public Interest Litigation in Total This Year], (December 29, 2015). Retrieved from <http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2015/12/29/389877.html>. linked to the protest, the only EPIL case that can be traced to a preceding environmental unrest was the one filed by the FON against PetroChina-YPCC in October 2015. 60 Given the large number of victims of most environmental conflicts, we may suppose that public interest lawsuit is inherently a promising substitute for street mobilization. Specifically, EPIL directly fulfills the case lost their lawsuits mainly due to their failure in meeting this requirement. Now with EPIL, any seemingly irrelevant or indirect legal persons, enterprises, or social organizations are potentially eligible to sue the polluters lawfully as the plaintiffs in the name of public interest. Even the officials of the authoritarian state themselves uphold such inclusive legal participation in the form of EPIL as an alleviator for environmental mass incidents. 61 Why then, is it empirically uncommon for EPIL to take up the cases with protest-inclined conflicts? Thomas Johnson argues that there exists a dichotomy between environmentalism and NIMBYism in China (Johnson 2010). While ENGOs engage in rules-based activism on a long- 60 By May 2017, the FON still has not received any legal document on whether the court accepts this case [The Environmental Public Interest Lawsuit of the Friends of Nature against the Refinery Project of Petro-China Yunnan], (May 12, 2017), [Fon.org.cn]. Retrieved from <http://www.fon.org.cn/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=10522:2017-05-12-08-14- 21&Itemid=111>. 61 [Sever Problems of Our Countries Environmental Legal System and Environmental Protection], (November 23, 2012), [Npc.gov.cn]. Retrieved from <http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2012-11/23/content_1743819.htm>. term basis to improve public participation institutions, the NIMBY protesters employ contentious tactics based on one-off, imminent concerns with local unpopular projects. Although both have effects on promoting participatory rules, they are prone to doing it on their own terms. In this sense, the traditional private-interest lawsuits in the other three cases may echo with the protests all the better than the EPIL in the Changzhou case. Notably, it is different from the cases of protest-advocacy linkage we have discussed in Chapter 2, where some protests take up a public yield fruits in policy change. As far as the contentious repertoires of litigation is concerned, ENGOs in EPIL can only utilize pure legal expertise to navigate in an ambiguous yet confined, formal justice system (Stern 2013), where street mobilization could not lend any substantial support. Another reason that EPIL could not be a ready alternative to environmental protest is concerned with the stage of the projects these two approaches target. In his study of recent environmental protests, Xutao Zheng deliberately differentiates pre-emptive protests, which are particularly driven by peop remedial ones, where the environment has already been polluted by the projects (Zheng 2013). Environmental protest often target projects at different stages, from earlier planning to construction to operation. However, the vast majority of civil EPIL cases currently only focus on compensation for environmental restoration, 62 which implies that the project is complete and that pollution has already been caused. At present, the EPIL case with the FON against PetroChina- YPCC is reported to be the only and first attempt of preemptive public interest litigation. 63 4.2.2 Legal development and institutional innovation Although far from being a ready alternative to protest, EPIL has its undeniable significance for advancing environmental governance of the country, especially in the realms of legislative advocacy, law enforcement or monitoring, and institutional innovation. First and foremost, previous and accumulative experience in filing EPIL has been contributing to expert legislative advocacy toward further establishment of an EPIL-friendly legal framework. ENGOs, particularly those that have been actively practicing EPIL for years before national legislation, have become ardent and perspicacious participants in the lawmaking processes. Take the amendment of the 2015 EPL as an example. It went through a three-year period of debate and revision with multiple drafts, including a second-time initiation of public opinion soliciting, which process, the FON led research seminars, publicized legislative suggestions, and submitted public 62 Interview with Feng Ge in Beijing, May 2016. 63 Same as Footnote 60, [Fon.org.cn]. Consultative Conference members to push for revision on the standing of EPIL. 64 Under sustained opposition, the standing was able to be expanded from only one government-organized social organization, the ACEF, to the social organizations registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs under the State Council, which virtually excluded all grassroots ENGOs, and eventually to all those registered with municipal civil affairs departments (Yang 2013). For another example, during the public opinion soliciting period for the Soil Pollution -based environmental legal clinics and other local ENGOs and submitted a joint suggestion letter to the NPC standing committee. Speaking from the experience in filing EPIL in the case of Changzhou the court decision to leave the burden of restoration for the government was precisely due to the ambiguity of pollution liability after the polluters transferred the land use right. 65 As a result, the environmental cost of enterprises was unfairly shifted to taxpayers, which was detrimental to the formation of a benign order of environmental conservation among state, market, and society. 64 : NGO [Environmental Organizations Triple Thresholds : The Predicaments of NGOs Public Interest Litigation Remain], (April 24, 2015), NGOCN. Retrieved from <http://www.ngocn.net/news/363247.html>. 65 , [Soil Being Polluted; Who Is Responsible for Management and Restoration? The Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law Should Give Explicit Previsions], (June 20, 2016). China Dialogue. Retrieved from <http://www.fon.org.cn/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=12777:2017-08-03-03-30- 47&Itemid=177>. Secondly, the significance of EPIL for environmental compliance monitoring or law enforcement is also manifest. To answer the general theoretical question of why the authoritarian state would allow litigation at all, Carpenter-Gold puts forward the principal-agent relations and fragmented authoritarianism arguments, stating that public interest litigation in China can be used not merely as a dispute-resolution mechanism but a tool for monitoring compliance with environmental regulations (Carpenter-Gold 2015). In other words, as China lacks an effective environmental monitoring system for local noncompliance, citizens engaging EPIL can be After the new EPL took effect in 2015, some eligible social organizations were still denied of their standing in that the courts managed not to comply by the provision on standing through overly restrictive interpretation of their organizational constitution. In the Tengger Desert s Court against eight polluting enterprises. Under local pressure of governmental intervention, both courts refused to grant the CBCDGF standing, environmental public int 92- first and second- reinforced practical implementation of the provision on standing in the new EPL and was listed as one of the ten iconic EPIL cases in 2016 by the SPC. 66 Last but not least, EPIL has provided a fertile field for institutional innovation, especially with new opportunities for state-society collaboration. To make up for the lack of local support since no local ENGOs were eligible to sue under the new EPL, the Kunshan Procuratorate acted as a supporting prosecutor and joined the plaintiff the ACEF, a national ENGO in a soil pollution case in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, in 2015 (Li 2016, pp. 85-92). Similarly, a local ENGO, the Fujian Green Homeland counselled the local Changting EPB to be its supporting prosecutor in a water pollution case to bolster its legal clout (Li 2016, pp. 68-85). The cooperation between social organizations, local EPBs and prosecuting apparatuses in EPIL now represents an innovative direction of state-society alliance to combat pollution. Another - court in Guiyang, Guizhou Province in 2012 (Wang 2016, pp. 83-85; Zhao 2013, pp.17-20). After the closure of an EPIL case, the court takes the lead to have the plaintiff, the defendant, and a third party oftentimes a credible environmental foundation or social organization sign an oversight agreement, which authorizes the third party to monitor the defen environmental renovation or restoration according to court decision. As a result, not only can the 66 [The Supreme Court Publishing Typical Cases of Environmental Public Interest Litigation], (March 17, 2017), [News.cn]. Retrieved from <http://news.xinhuanet.com/legal/2017-03/07/c_129503217.htm>. court reinforce its judicial capacity, but more social initiative can be recruited through public participation to hold polluting enterprises in leash. More procedural innovations of consultation committee, expanded jurisdiction over multijurisdictional disputes, which may -in- tripartite distinction between criminal, civil, and administrative cases. 67 It is noteworthy, however, that the new strategies of environmental courts are not a step toward judicial empowerment in the sense of obtaining more independence. As Daniel J. Knudsen puts forward, Chinese divergence from the typical environmental courts makes the case alternative administrative institution that exists in competition and cooperation with the EPBs already operating at a local level (Knudsen 2013). More specifically, courts are enlisted to serve alongside government bureaus in a multi-pronged environmental campaign, tasked with not only dispute resolution but also policy advocacy, education and social control. As Rachel E. Stern emphasizes, judges are team players, meant to be responsive to the views of other agencies, and intra-government communication often reminds them that economic growth and social stability targets are as important as, if not more than, environmental ones (Stern 2014). 67 , [Environmental Public Interest Litigation Breaking off; Two Lakes and One Firing the Opening Shot], (December 30, 2008). [People.com.cn, China Environment News]. Retrieved from <http://env.people.com.cn/GB/8599408.html>. 4.3 Summary This chapter has analyzed the recent cases of environmental contention in China that involve both the protest and the litigation approaches. According to the dispositions of protest and litigation toward public intrest, I present four patterns of the protest-litigation nexus: 1) the two repertoires may engage concerted reinforcement, with one evoking and encouraging the other to sustain the contention; 2) they may exhibit a interlocked compelling dynamic, with one form of contention failing but being able to foment and culminate in the outburst of the other; 3) shaped by different situations, contenders may concentrate on conventional litigation and supplement it with self-refrained protest; and 4) protest and litigation may happen sequentially but disjointedly as one form of contention is strategically leveraged to shift to a new orientation. In the cases of Kunming and the Changzhou, the EPIL emerges as a new type of litigation under the new EPL framework that establishes the standing of ENGOs and other relevant agencies or lawful organizations. Despite its rise in recent years, EPIL as a new legal channel for justice-seekers is confronted with a variety of practical ordeals and challenges and hardly a ready alternative to environmental mass incidents. Accordingly, protest and litigation are very likely to coexist in the landscape of environmental contention and link to each other in manifold patterns in the long term. Meanwhile, EPIL has proved to be a fertile field for legislative advocacy, law enforcement, and institutional innovations. Its potential prospect for a more inclusive policy making process with deepened public participation should become a more salient topic for socio- legal studies of authoritarian regimes in the years to come. CONCLUSION The Socially-made Aspect of Environmental Authoritarianism As current political regime endures in China, the public policy model of environmental remains relevant for the analysis of shaping and reshaping of Chinese environmental politics. Yet its emphases on concentration of authority and limitation in public participation need to be balanced by the role of social contention, in its divergent and interactive forms, in stimulating and pressurizing the state to refurbish its environmental governance. This study has made an explorative effort to juxtapose two salient repertoires of environmental contention disruptive protest and conventional litigation, which were previously approached as two separate topics with different disciplinary perspectives in an integrative framework, and argue that they have affected different aspects of environmental governance and demonstrated manifold patterns of engagement. For environmental protest, this study has highlighted the necessity of a protest-advocacy nexus in bringing in policy change at the level of Chinese local states. With the methods of csQCA, it also identifies four sufficient paths, combining different conventional factors of popular protest, for environmental protests to be translated into institutionalized policy adjustments. With plausible micro-mechanisms of advocacy strategies, this research chimes in with and contributes to the emerging research on the reinforcement between street mobilization and policy advocacy (Steinhardt and Wu 2016), which has gained increasing attention in Chinese environmental studies but not yet been able to specify systematically the micro processes. Meanwhile, it distinguishes between decision change and policy change, and thereby specifies the difference between -off compromise on particular unwelcome projects and longer-term, institutionalized change in environmental governance, which are previously and somewhat misleadingly lumped together. Even when decision change and policy change appear in conformity, the causal mechanisms linking protest conditions to these two types of outcomes may significantly differ. It thus makes sense to conceptualize environmental contentions with Rather than depending on ad hoc and unstable decision change to assess protest outcome, this study has resorted to policy change, operationalized by improvement in transparency policy implementation and new promulgation of environmental rules, as indicators of a profound protest for advancing environmental governance. For environmental litigation, its effect on environmental governance is mainly manifested in the enforcement of green regulations. Particularly, I have looked into Chinese citizens taking legal action as a formal form to contest governmental non-disclosure decision of environmental information. In the midst of a legal framework replete with ambiguous, inconsistent, and unspecific provisions, the courts in different regions have embraced varying degrees of expansiveness and restrictiveness when ruling the cases, especially those involve controversial issues. For the lawsuits of environmental information disclosure, issues such as the third party, and the burden of proof, are highly contested between litigants, lawyers, and judges. And the contrast in court attitudes between eastern- coastal and southern-coastal regions suggests that the political mandate of the courts in the authoritarian state does not reign in all regions indiscriminately, which is balanced by the discretion power of regional courts. Apparently, courts have become important political actors and provided a vigorous arena of state-society contention. Most courts hear the cases with scrupulous and conservative attitudes within the politically safe domain of the authoritarian regime. Yet there are also a couple of successful cases that document the mechanisms of citizens engaging the courts to advance public policy (Dor and Hofnung 2006 Given pronounced variances in the attitudes of the courts and in the prestige and resources of the plaintiffs, these seminal cases might not be replicated readily; nevertheless, they amount to examples of , which do not have to be many to make a difference. In addition, local courts have so far tended to dodge cases sensitive to social stability, which is still the paramount political concern of the state. Obviously, the state has not figured out how to make adequate use of litigation to absorb and defuse social unrest while pushing out unwanted risks. Beyond their divergent forms, protest and litigation are very likely to coexist in the landscape of environmental contention and link to each other in multifarious patterns in the long term. Four typical patterns of protest-litigation linkage have been illustrated with recent cases in this study: concerted reinforcement, interlocked compelling, situational concentration, and strategic leveraging, dependent on whether the protest is advocacy spirited or Not-In-My- Backyard (NIMBY) natured, as well as whether the litigation is private-interest driven or public- interest oriented. Involving different actors, strategies, frames, opportunity structures, and contentious goals, protest and litigation in their divergent forms by no means simply converge. Findings on the variant patterns, therefore, provide interesting insights for updating the repertoires studies in the classical contentious politics literature. They also invite further theoretical research to examine the relations between the patterns and the outcomes of the contentions that combine protest and litigation. Furthermore, I have also paid particular attention to emerging environmental public interest litigation (EPIL). Due to existing practical challenges, EPIL as a new legal channel for justice-seekers is hardly a ready alternative to environmental mass incidents. Yet EPIL has proved to be a fertile field for legislative advocacy, law enforcement, and institutional innovations. Promises and Caveats The Strategic role of ENGO Both the linkages emphasized in this study, the protest-advocacy linkage and the protest- litigation linkage, highlight an inevitable role of ENGOs. For one thing, empirical cases have shown that ENGOs are critical in nurturing a public policy orientation of environmental protests. Even though they have to mass incidents and remain weakly coordinated, Chapter 2 has exhibited an expanding realm for ENGOs, sometimes together with activists among ordinary citizens, to practice legal-based and/or technical-based strategies in an afterward-intervening mechanism of policy advocacy, which gradually directs one-off, grievance-based NIMBY protests toward broader issue framing of environmentalism. In one sense, the prospect of increased and deepened protest-advocacy ties can be limited. Except for a few influential ones, ENGOs that are capable, resourceful, and determined enough to exert a clout in policy change are pitifully rare across the country. Meanwhile, the involvement of government-organized ENGOs after the protest may lead some cautious observers to doubt the genuine nature of social agents engaging popular power and argue for the mechanism of state co-optation instead. On the positive side, however, the study suggests that the sobering sociopolitical condition of Chinese ENGOs in China has also stimulated them to seek broad, strategic alliance with green-minded elites, media, or activists among ordinary environmental governance of the state. This is not to say there has been a retreat of the state but to emphasize the role of social collaboration with the state in promoting better environmental governance. For another, the role of ENGOs is also pivotal to the protest-litigation linkage. For instance, the Qinhuangdao case in Chapter 4 and other studies have recorded the scenarios in which local contenders choose to concentrate on conventional litigation and pursue for legal relief under strong suggestion given by the ENGOs they work with (Bondes and Johnson 2017). For another example, in the Kunming case, it was the ENGOs who encouraged and assisted somewhat reluctant local residents to submit environmental information applications and file such administrative lawsuits (Sun, Huang, and Yip 2017). Furthermore, as the case of Changzhou toxic land has suggested, although disengaged local interest oriented protesters, it was their strategic involvement in the form of filing an EPIL lawsuit, that rekindled the unsettled opposition, steered it toward a brand-new prospect for public interest, and resulted in specific legislative advocacy for the national legal framework of soil protection in its formative stage. However, a concomitant caveat here is that NIMBY protests do not necessarily share the same contentious goal with environmental activists, who have been striving to make better use of legal institutions and create better environmental legal environment in the long run. In other words, therefore, we cannot simply say that the two contentious repertoires converge toward the same destiny of environmental dispute resolution with different paths, at least for the strategic leveraging pattern of protest-litigation linkage. With the new Environmental Protection Law becoming effective in 2015, ENGOs are surely down to the road of litigation to exercise their legal rights in the expanding structure of political opportunity, while NIMBY protesters may still see necessary value in street mobilization as a means to extract a quick decision change from local government. As the dichotomy between environmental activism and grievance-based localized protests has been increasingly transcended in some cases (Johnson 2010), it nevertheless persists in many others. The Tacitus Trap The idea of Tacitus Trap is said to be derived from Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire (Li 2011). The phrase has gained currency in China s political and academic circles since early 2010s, which basically conveys the notion that neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if they distrust the government. President Xi Jinping himself used the term to highlight the need to maintain governmental credibility, without which the Party s legitimacy foundations and power status will be threatened (Huang 2017). Such a distrust crisis is highly visible in social unrests concerning government-approved environmental assessments. An article in China Daily emphasizes that, It is not enough for the government to publicize information demanded by the residents in fear of environmental hazards; the public have the right to know at the beginning of the s project plans and the right to participate in debating the project s feasibility. (China Daily, 2012) The Tacitus Trap is exacerbated in the new media era, especially in terms of the strategic significance of information, exemplified by the case of Qidong anti-discharge protest (Lu and Chan 2016). The city government, who should have played the role of an authoritative information releaser concerning the economic, social and environmental impacts of the discharge project, only appeared evasive and pusillanimous when it was confronted with public query. The mysterious, anonymous and unidirectional way, in which the government chose to communicate with the public, only exposed its lack of confidence and earnestness toward public participation and information transparency. On the contrary, environmental activists gradually took over the initiative power in social media, through vigorous collection and exchange of information with various channels, resources, and connections of their own. As a result, at the dawn of the large- scale protest, local residents trust in these online public opinion leaders had overcome the -spoken video speech and made the mass movement irrevocable. In fact, the Japanese-invested project was not more detrimental to the environment than most local, small-scale, private chemical plants, in terms of its pollution treatment and discharge standard. Why did the residents aside from nationalism and localism factors oppose this one unanimously instead of other more or equally polluting enterprises? Very plausibly, the preceding, repeated failures in obtaining transparent governmental information through litigation played a substantial role in simmering public distrust, which finally led up to a massive burst in the streets. Similarly, the PX project in Maoming, Guangdong Province, became the target of strong public opposition, despite the fact that the chemicals emitted by other plants exceed PX both in terms of production and toxicity (Chen and Wang 2012). Meanwhile, lengthy article in June 2013, claiming that PX was no mor the public had exaggerated the dangers of PX projects (People.cn 2013). Counterproductively, however, this article ignited widespread skepticism and criticism among the public who suggested that the government was speaking for the petrochemical interest group (Zi 2017). The backfire of the -emptive propaganda only testifies to the fact that quite a few Chinese local governments have already been entangled For yet another example, Weiming Environmental Protection and Energy Company, the construction contractor of the Panguanying Incinerator in the Qinhuangdao case, has in fact acquired its own intellectual property rights of waste incineration technology and established good reputation in the industry. And the company has successfully completed incineration projects in Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces in recent years, with relatively mature measures to monitor dioxin discharge indirectly and reach national standards. Yet at that point, the expertise or credential of the company was reduced to an irrelevant matter; upon discovering the EIA fraud, the villagers had totally lost trust in the local government, and accordingly, whomever it contracted with. According to Mr. Xia, the environmental lawyer representing the villagers, this case was no longer merely an environmental dispute but a reflection of transparency and participation deficit (Caijing 2012). Rethinking the tolerance obligation and beyond Citizens pressure and enterprises noncompliance put local governments into a dilemma. As local EPB officials grumbled to Ms. Yang, an activist in litigation antun anti- incinerator, The laws have said so and so but the enterprises are incapable to do it. What could you possibly do? The laws have set standard for dioxin discharge. But enterprises simply do not have such a technological force. (Friends of Nature, 2011) The hopeless sentiment of local governments somehow explains the ironically sounding term of tolerance obligation [rongren yiwu], which the local court charged (and advised) the plaintiff to bear in the Gao antun case. It suggests a simple, sobering fact: economic concerns still riding roughshod over pollution abatement in this country, at least at local levels, for the time being. To which extent does tolerance obligation make sense for a defect-ridden Chinese society today? Well, one has to admit that this term captures effectively an underling logic the authoritarian regime holds for the governed, which resembles the survival-of-the-fittest rule in the natural world: Chinese citizens very habitation in this country denotes a tacit consent to its sociopolitical environment, in which they may either tolerate and adapt, or simply perish (Sima 2010). Therefore, it implies that the authoritarian rule of law may operate well in the cases where reasonable citizen litigants are wronged in trivial disputes, but not in those where the same reasonable citizen litigants confront the will of local leadership or significant local interests. Moreover, it also implies that it is incumbent upon good Chinese citizens to be considerate of the country s special situations and aware of Chinese characteristics. In this sense, sympathetic judges could not provide any better justification for their judgment than advising the plaintiffs to bear the tolerance obligation. Admitting the grim reality of legal practice conveyed by tolerance obligation, this work has demonstrated that efforts of the practitioners in environmental litigation, as well as in the cases of protest-litigation linkage, have amounted to incremental and sustained effects on the shaping of Chinese environmental legal framework and environmental governance in general. Arguments put forward in this work are not suggesting a carefree, sanguine attitude toward the role of social forces in Chinese environmental politics, but a cautious optimism for state-society collaboration. Such a mechanism for state and social actors to join forces is particularly missing in the process of front-end control, as opposed to that of end-of-pipe treatment, for waste management. Mr. Feng Yongfeng from Nature University, a grassroots ENGO, recalls that he suggested that local residents in Liulitun should practice waste separation themselves first, in order to increase their confidence in rights-defending opposition. Unfortunately, they were just too lazy to do it. But upon hearing of the resumption of the incinerator, they got concerned and worried immediately. Mr. Feng lamented (Southern Weekend, 2009). Given this, while it is an ironic political justification for governmental irresponsibility to claim that citizens have toleration obligation, it is also selfish, simple and brute for citizens to oppose whatever projects they believe to be polluting yet shun away from the obligation of forming a sustainable, eco-friendly lifestyle. Following a few positive examples of anti- incinerator campaigns such as in Asuwei and Panyu, a promising space has been recognized for more citizen-ENGO cooperation, especially in educational and practical areas of waste separation, such as the Zero Waste Alliance, an emerging grassroots ENGO focused on management of solid waste, has been promoting in recent years. In the final analysis, environmental protection as an important issue topic has provided and will continue to serve as a dynamic platform for the state, society, market and ordinary citizens to constitute and reconstitute their interests, identities and preferences in various interactions. Looking Forward Taking these findings as a starting point, future research is geared toward a full-blown theoretical framework of -litigation nexus. In particular, beyond describing the four combinational patters of protest and litigation, the next step is to work on the theoretical arguments for 1) the choices and structures that condition the repertoires of social contenders; and 2) the effects of the linkage patterns of legal participation and street mobilization on environmental governance. Overall, the theory-building efforts will concentrate on the dynamic interface of Chinese environmentalism with populous collective action in the streets crisscrossing legal participation in the courts. In general, future research along this line will continue to advance the studies of environmental authoritarianism, authoritarian legal development, and contentious politics as well as state-society relations in nondemocracies. It also contains conspicuous prospect for cross- national and cross-regional studies that put China, or parts of China, in comparison with other countries in the developing world. The development of EPIL is such a focal platform where interesting comparative findings on China, Indian, Brazil, and others, can be drawn. Unless the authoritarian regime figures out how to rescue its environmental legitimacy in time, through necessary honing of its governing wisdom with the society and other countries, it would be possible that environment-related crises would gain quickly an overwhelming momentum and grow out of control to pose a fatal threat to the rule of the Party in near future. APPENDICES Appendix 1 Summary of findings in Li et al. (2016) Appendix 2 List of the 20 cases of Chinese environmental contention in Chapter 2: 1. The Xiamin Case: In June 2007, tens of thousands of citizens peacefully rallied against a PX plant, which was under its early construction stage, in Xiamen, Fujian Province. The protest forced the government to relocate the project to Zhangzhou, an inland city in the province. 2. The Dalian Case: In August 2011, a storm broke the dyke around an operational PX plant, sparking the fear of toxic leakage and a peaceful protest of more than ten thousand residents in operation was resumed later. 3. The Kunming Case: In May 2013, two large protests took place against a PX project in the An in Kunming, Yunnan Province. The mayor announced the suspension of the project. But later the planning of the project was resumed. 4. The Maoming Case: In March 2014, local citizens in Maoming, Guangdong Province, rallied in front of the municipal government compound to protest against a PX project. The estimation of overall participants varies from a few to ten thousand. Project was suspended after protest upon further investigation and decision. 5. The Rushan Case: From March to December in 2007, the property owners of the Yintan Community in Rushan, Shandong Province, mobilized against the Hongshiding nuclear power project and challenged its controversial siting. The number of participants is unknown but estimated to be small. The project was cancelled in the end. 6. The Jiangmen Case: in July 2013, about one thousand residents took to the streets in headquarters to scrap the project. 7. The Panyu Case: From October to December in 2009, about five hundred residents peacefully protested against an incineration power plant in Panyu, Guangdong Province. A network of activists and groups thrived to attract public attention and propose policy suggestions. The local government was pressurized to relocate the project. 8. The Liulitun Case: In June 2007, a peaceful demonstration of more than one thousand local residents took place in front of the headquarter of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in Beijing to protest against the Liulitun Incinerator in Haidian District. Eventually the local government confirmed that the project would be relocated. 9. The Gao antun Case: From August to October in 2008, residents mobilized against the Incinerator in Chaoyang District, Beijing. The project was virtually completed by the time of protest. Residents few hundred protesters were organized. Ultimately, they failed to prevent the incinerator from operation. 10. The Asuwei Case: In September 2009, more than one hundred residents of the Aobei Community in Changping District, Beijing, converged at the Agricultural Exhibition Center to protest against the Asuwei Incinerator. Later, activists proposed waste management policy suggestions. The project remained in limbo for several years and was re-started in 2015. 11. The Wujiang Case: In October 2009, as many as twenty thousand residents in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, occupied an incinerator plant and confronted several thousand policemen. The city government suspended the construction after protest. Yet reports show operation was resumed in 2016. 12. The Tianjingwa Case: In February 2009, about one hundred residents protested against the Tianjingwa Incinerator in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. Some people from local environmental protection bureau used force to suppress it. The plant under planning was finally relocated. 13. The Wuxi Case: From April to May in 2011, a large-scale protest of about ten thousand local villagers occurred against a waste incinerator, which was in its trial operation, in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. It involved strong violence in the confrontation between protesters and anti-riot police. Eventually, the project was dismantled. 14. The Beijing Case: From June to December in 2012, in Chaoyang District, Beijing, over one hundred thousand residents in 34 neighborhoods along the proposed Beijing-Shenyang high- speed railway (HSR) invoked in a variety of activities of public protests against EIA fraud, including a demonstration of more than one thousand participants. As a response, the Ministry of Environmental Protection rejected the 3 rd EIA report of the project and commanded further adjustment. 15. The Shanghai Case: From March to April in 2007, worried about a 22.5-meter safety zone, residents along the proposed Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev line in Minhang District, Shanghai, organized weekly demonstrations of more than five hundred participants at the city and district governments. The project was eventually cancelled. 16. The Nanjing Case: In March 2011, a few hundred citizens gathered for a peaceful sit-in in front of the city library in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, to protest against the cutting down of phoenix trees, regarded as the symbol of the city, due to a new subway line. On the following day, the local authority ordered the line to be altered. 17. The Haining Case: In September 2011, around five hundred local villagers protested against a solar panel plant (JinkoSolar) in Haining, Zhejiang Province, which was accused of contaminating a nearby river and causing high cancer rates of the village. Some violence occurred during the protest. The plant was ordered to suspend production until it constructed proper waste-processing facility. 18. The Haimen Case: In December 2011, thousands of residents blocked the freeway in Haimen, Guangdong Province, to protest against a coal-fired power plant. Violence occurred in the confrontation with police. The project was temporarily suspended after the protest but was reportedly resumed later. 19. The Shifang Case: In July 2012, thousands of protesters against a local copper plant in Shifang, Sichuan Province, which was in its planning and early construction stage, stormed a government building and smashed vehicles. Police reportedly shot tear gas and stun grenades into the crowd 20. The Qidong Case: In July 2012, thousands of citizens in Qidong, Jiangsu Province, took to ct, which would dump industrial waste water into the neighboring sea. Protests ended after the government promised to permanently scrap the project. Appendix 3 Data matrix of Chapter 2 Row Case ID Conditions Outcome L V E S A O 1 Xiamen 1 0 1 0 1 1 2 Dalian 1 0 0 1 1 1 3 Kunming 0 0 0 1 1 1 4 Maoming 1 1 1 1 0 0 5 Rushan 0 0 1 0 1 1 6 Jiangmen 0 0 1 0 0 0 7 Panyu 0 0 1 0 1 1 8 Liulitun 0 0 1 0 1 1 9 0 0 0 1 1 1 10 Asuwei 0 0 1 0 1 1 11 Wujiang 1 0 1 0 0 0 12 Tianjingwa 0 0 1 0 1 1 13 Wuxi 1 1 0 0 0 0 14 Beijing 0 0 1 0 1 1 15 Shanghai 0 0 1 0 1 1 16 Nanjing 0 0 1 0 1 1 17 Haining 0 1 0 0 1 1 18 Haimen 1 1 1 0 0 0 19 Shifang 1 1 1 0 0 0 20 Qidong 1 1 1 0 1 1 (L=protest scale, V=protest form, E=project stage, S=central support, A=policy advocacy, O=outcome, i.e. policy change in environmental governance) Appendix 4 Analysis of necessary conditions for no policy change in Chapter 2 Conditions Consistency Coverage L 0.83 0.63 ~L 0.17 0.08 V 0.67 0.67 ~V 0.33 0.14 E 0.83 0.33 ~E 0.17 0.20 S 0.17 0.25 ~S 0.83 0.31 A 0.00 0.00 ~A 1.00 1.00 Appendix 5 Analysis of sufficient conditions for no policy change: complex solution Raw coverage Unique coverag e Consisten cy Cases ~V*E*~S*~A 0.33 0.33 1 Jiangmen, Wujiang L*V*~S*~A 0.50 0.17 1 Wuxi, Haimen, Shifang L*V*E*~A 0.50 0.17 1 Maoming, Haimen, Shifang solution coverage: 1 solution consistency: 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY Chapter 1 Beeson, M., (2010) Environmental Politics, 19 (2), 276-294. 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Creator Tang, Mengxiao (author)

Core Title The social making of authoritarian environmentalism: protest-litigation nexus and policy changes in China

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science and International Relations

Publication Date 04/26/2018

Defense Date 03/06/2018

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Tag China,environmental authoritarianism,environmental governance,environmental litigation,environmental protest,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Language English

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Advisor Sellers, Jefferey (committee chair), Lynch, Daniel (committee member), Tang, Shui Yan (committee member)

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