Punishing Polluters: Trends, Local Practice, and Influences, and Their Implications for Administrative Law Enforcement in China

Scholars and politicians often complain about how weak administrative law enforcement is in China. To better understand the challenges in law enforcement, as well as variation in actual practices and influences on such practices, the current paper analyzes Chinese pollution law enforcement data from the last two decades as well as in depth qualitative case studies of everyday enforcement practices. It finds that recently enforcement has become much more frequent and stricter. It finds that recent changes in national legislation, centralization reforms, increased citizen complaints, as well as enforcement campaigns all played a role in this. While this has helped strengthen enforcement, and maybe has played a part in recent pollution reductions, it has not fundamentally overcome structural enforcement impediments. The increased authority, independence, and pressure on environmental authorities for stricter enforcement, does not seem to be matched with sufficient investment in resource capacity and support for regular procedural enforcement practices. In addition, the ad-hoc pressure on enforcement has undermined regular legal procedure and stimulated greater socio-economic inequality. These findings about pollution enforcement force us to question simplistic static generalizations of administrative law enforcement and instead develop both large-scale studies that map change over time as well as in-depth case studies that provide a thorough picture of actual practices on the ground. Moreover, the paper concludes that a true picture of administrative enforcement must move beyond looking at the enforcement itself, to looking at how it arrives at the regulated companies and shapes their compliance.