102 Wanning Sun
the risk to people’s health, and what needed to be done in the future to bring
about fundamental change (Jia 2014). It seems that while China’s environmental
journalism may have been more open to critical reflection in the past, this critical
space has been diminished rather than expanded since environmental problems
have assumed a national and more political dimension.
To be absolutely clear, the Chinese government is more acutely aware than ever
of the risk of further environmental degradation in China, and it is sincere in its
intention to fix China’s environment. In November 2014, China and the United
States announced a landmark agreement on carbon cuts, with China’s President Xi
Jinping pledging to set China’s carbon emissions to fall after 2030 (The White House
2014). Some have gone so far as to point to a process of the “greening of the Chinese
state”, given that the Chinese government has passed a wide range of environmental
laws and regulations and set up key environmental bureaucratic bodies (Ho and
Vermeer 2006). However, despite the government’s pro-environment rhetoric
and regulations, its hands are tied by its own agenda of developing the economy,
maintaining stability, and securing support and legitimacy from its population.
For instance, the Chinese government has been very proactive in supporting green
industries and now is a world leader in areas such as solar panel production. At the
same time, the evidence suggests that such seemingly pro-environmental successes
are sometimes achieved at the cost of polluted lands and rivers. For example,
Chinese producers of polycrystalline silicon, a material used in key components of
solar cells, are responsible for the dumping of toxic byproducts that are harmful to
humans, animals, and soil (Liu 2013). China has become the world’s largest and most
important promoter of renewable energy (Mathews 2014a). Yet the development of
renewable energy is driven less by the debate on climate change than it is motivated
by the search for energy and resource security, with a view to achieving energy self-
sufficiency and expanding capacity for manufacturing and building supply chains
of renewable energy generation equipment (Mathews 2014b).
So, facing these constraints, how do the state media cover environmental issues?
One key approach is the calendar-driven media campaign style of reporting. The
commemoration of the China Environment Centennial Journey each year since
1993 is the most prominent example (Yang and Calhoun 2007). In this annual
campaign, 14 governmental departments, in coordination with 28 national state
media outlets, engage in a spate of environmentally themed reporting. Another
approach is often referred to as “event-driven environmentalism”, taking the
form of media campaigns that often adopt a combination of military parlance (for
example, metaphors of battle) and business-speak (“meeting the quota”, “deficit”).
This was clearly the style of media campaign for Beijing’s Blue Sky Project,
launched in 2008 in anticipation of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 (Xu 2012).
Finally, and perhaps most important, one must remember that censorship, the
state media’s oldest “trick of the trade”, is still very much in place, especially when
coverage of environmental issues threatens to reveal the complicity between the
government and big businesses. In April 2014, Ma Tianjie, Greenpeace’s program
director in China, had this to say on Q&A, a current affairs panel discussion on
Australian television, when he was asked about how to live with censorship: