The greying of greenspeak? 101of a truly green public sphere. Unlike its counterparts in liberal-democratic
countries, the Chinese government, operating under one-party rule, does not need
to be concerned with making popular decisions in the name of jobs and economic
growth in order to win votes and stay in office. At the same time, precisely because
it operates under one-party rule and its political legitimacy does not come from
democratic elections, the need to establish and maintain political legitimacy is
constant and paramount. From the point of view of the party-state, the government’s
capacity to engage in “stability maintenance” (weiwen) through sustained economic
growth is key to its sustained claim of political legitimacy. The preoccupation with
maintaining stability dominates the history of rule of the Chinese Communist
Party, and the current regime led by Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang is no exception.
Stability—or the threat of instability—has provided a justification for oppression,
censorship, and inaction on the part of the media. Having taken on a life of its own,
stability maintenance is not just a political aspiration; it is a powerful assemblage
of discourses, policies, processes, and institutions.
Yang and Calhoun point out that for ENGOs to operate effectively in China,
they have to appear non-political and therefore non-threatening to the political
regime. Indeed, as Peter Ho also points out, a key strategy of survival of the
ENGOs in China thus far has been the “depolitization of environmental politics”
(Ho 2007, p. 195). A decade ago it may still have been possible to represent
environmental issues as non-political issues, to a certain extent. Recent
environmental disasters in China, however, particularly the lingering smog
in major cities, mean that social stability, the political legitimacy of the party,
and people’s health and well-being all have become perilously entwined. In the
past, the government’s dilemma between economic growth and environmental
protection may have been a theoretical issue concerning only policy makers. No
longer: The increasing prevalence of smog in the country’s urban centers has led
ordinary people to question its causes and consequences and the price of their
government’s relentless drive for economic growth. This development has one
serious implication: News coverage of environmental issues is becoming more
and more sensitive in the political sense.
A survey of how key state media outlets such as Central Chinese Television
(CCTV), the People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and Economic Daily covered
smog in 2013 points to this sensitizing process. First, during that period, most of
the perspectives and informed opinions on smog were provided by government
and state-authorized scientists, and the voices of ENGOs were seldom heard.
Second, most journalists engaged in various degrees of self-censorship while
reporting on the smog. They avoided touching on a wide range of underlying
factors, including how economic interests and power struggles were bound up with
environmental issues. Nor did they touch on the complicity between government
and big businesses. Third and related to the first two, the main angle in covering the
smog was to “deal with the matter factually” (jiushi lunshi)—i.e., to give readers
scientific “facts” about smog, such as its chemical components or the number
of days on which it had manifested—without delving into politically sensitive
interpretation of what caused the pollution, who was responsible, the extent of