China Environment in Spotlight, Can Leaders Act?
Date: 11-Oct-07 Country: CHINA Author: Emma Graham-Harrison A commitment to balanced growth will be added to the Party charter, some officials tipped for promotion have been burnishing their green credentials and the meeting could set the stage for a strengthening of the weak environmental watchdog. But analysts warn that until the leadership is willing to introduce political changes that would allow real supervision of growth-hungry bureaucrats, the new emphasis on green growth will do little more than slow environmental devastation. “They are seriously interested because they recognise that it impinges on a range of other issues that are important to them,” said Elizabeth Economy, author of “The River Runs Black”, a book cataloguing China’s environmental challenges. “The question is do we get a leader in China who seizes the issue and realises that to clean up he or she needs to open up the system.” The engineers who rule China now were brought up on Chairman Mao Zedong’s declaration
