Bayer’s proposals to construct yet another chemical plant in Taiwan offended
local grassroots sentiment.
China and Taiwan provide an opportunity to test the ‘race to the bottom’
thesis, that is, whether business firms gravitate toward those jurisdictions with
the fewest environmental regulations and controls. China’s opening to trade
and investment from Taiwan in the late 1980s excited an ‘opportunistic
strategy of exit’. A large number of smokestack factories moved from Taiwan
to China, which was then a pollution haven, resembling the behavior of
multinational corporations entering Taiwan before 1980. However, some of
Taiwan’s firms export clean technology to China, which makes the evidence
for a ‘race to the bottom’ less than conclusive. In addition, several large
conglomerates have been able to use ‘investment strikes’ to relax Taiwan’s
environmental controls.
The role of business organizations in both China and Taiwan is changing, as
is the broader set of state-society relationships. We explored aspects of this
change most relevant to biodiversity conservation by examining the evolution
of ENGOs and their current status in both jurisdictions. In Taiwan, ENGOs
formed and multiplied in the 1980s. During the process of Taiwan’s
democratic transition, they accumulated social capital by enlarging channels
of social participation and communication. By emphasizing democratization
as well as environmental protection, ENGOs attracted public notice and then
trust. However, at the transition of power from the Kuomintang (KMT) to the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the 2000 presidential election, the
relationship of ENGOs to the state changed. The party considered by most of
Taiwan’s residents to be ‘green’, the DPP, acknowledged the need to develop
ties with the business community to remain in power. Still, Taiwan’s ENGOs
remain a political force.
To some observers, China’s ENGOs resemble the state of environmental
organizations in Taiwan before the onset of democratization two decades ago.
In our view, they are a new and essentially unpredictable agent of social and
political change. Until the mid-1990s, most environmental organizations were
organized by the government, as governmental-organized non-governmental
organizations (GONGOs), to do its work. Since the mid-1990s, other branches
have grown on the tree of environmental protest: national ENGOs, student
environmental organizations, international NGOs operating in China, and
grassroots ENGOs. In 2005, the majority of environmental activists work
at grassroots levels on local projects, but only a small number of groups
(largely those with offices in Beijing) have much of an impact on government
policy.
Individual ENGOs in both jurisdictions have affected environmental
outcomes, particularly in their work of identifying threats to endangered
species and ecosystems and publicizing these threats through the media. In
224 Governance of biodiversity conservation in China and Taiwan