cars

Car Curbing in Beijing Not Curbing Traffic

Monday, April 13th, 2009 | posts | 2 Comments

This report from Xinhua says that Beijing’s Monday morning rush was just as traffic-jammed as any other day, despite new rules kicking in today that should result in 20 % less vehicles on the road.

Car curbing in Beijing is slated to last a year, until April 2010.

The “new” rules are a water-downed version of Olympic car controls. Previously, certain cars were banned from the roads starting at 6 a.m. and included the Fifth Ring Road, one of six that encircle the capital.

This one-year experiment post Olympics clearly isn’t going to have any kind of lasting impact. Curbing cars is one very small way to help improve Beijing’s green scene. And it’s an initiative that I think will only prove to annoy many Chinese drivers who have caught onto the American car-loving culture.

A paper I recently wrote about Beijing’s Olympic and post-Olympic environmental initiatives, talks about the steps Beijing took to green the city and the players involved with the environmental movement in China.

It started, with a 2008 makeover:

In preparation for the 2008 Olympic games, Beijing had a make over. The capital was nipped and tucked, as major transformations took place by order of the government.

Thousands of new trees were planted throughout the city and it became cool to sling a reusable shopping bag over your shoulder. Half of the city’s 3.3 million cars were pulled off the road during the Games, while rockets equipped with silver iodide were launched into clouds over the city to induce rainfall. Meanwhile, construction sites and factories were closed down temporarily.

A major media campaign lauding the government’s efforts gave voice to NGOs in China, non-governmental organizations that work hand-in-hand with the Chinese government and whose policies must be consistent with the state’s policies. And many Chinese citizens, from Beijing and beyond, seemed swept up in Olympic and green fervor.

But these environmental efforts were only temporary; part of a massive (and very expensive, state agencies quoted nearly 100 billion RMB dedicated to Beijing’s green initiatives) campaign in which the role of the NGO in China and the voice of the Chinese citizen remained just as hazy as the smog that continues to plague Beijing skies today.

During the Games last year in August and immediately afterward, Beijingers reported more blue skies, and seemingly cleaner air. But the haze and smog returned to the city as soon as anti-pollution regulations were lifted at the end of the Paralympics Games in September.

“Some of those efforts clearly have long-term implications for the environmental health of Beijing but by and large, what we saw in the immediate run up to the Olympics were short-term stop gap measures,” said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 “It seems to me pretty clear that they haven’t had any significant up take in environmental quality in air quality in Beijing since the Olympics. They’ve had good days, they’ve had bad days. The pattern has been pretty much the same as it has been in the past,” she said.

Michael Zhao, once a university student in Beijing and now a multimedia producer at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, agreed. 

“Sometimes there are pretty blue sky days and I have seen that there were a lot more blue sky days over the Olympic period,” he said. But “we’re still going to see a lot of really smoggy days, and by smoggy I mean you can’t see much out of your apartment window if you’re say 10 stories or higher. There’s this soupy, filthy air hanging over the whole city.”

Despite the inescapable smog hanging literally in front of citizens’ noses, it is one of the environmental concerns they might feel powerless to change. In a survey conducted in January by the China Environmental Culture Promotion Association, a non-profit organization funded by the Ministry of Environment Protection, 80 percent of the respondents felt China’s environment was in bad shape and more than half of the respondents were dissatisfied with government attempts to solve environmental problems. The respondents, nearly 10,000 residents in 31 major cities, reported their top environmental concerns not to be smog, but to be garbage, noise and pets.

Smog is formless, ambiguous, intangible, and therefore, seemingly unsolvable. You can’t pick up with your hands, and put it away in a landfill. And while there is a desire from Beijingers to have improved air quality, they also might not be willing to make the necessary trade offs to do so, such as limiting driving or having mandatory factory closures.

“On the one hand they want more clean air days but on the other, they’re not really giving up the urban conveniences that are, quite frankly, a large portion of the contribution to the problem,” said Zhao.

But, he admitted, the fault does not lie entirely with the citizens.

“The government hasn’t done a good enough job creating enough infrastructure like subway lines or bus lines to provide a really convenient public transportation system. It’s just a catch up game to provide a certain level of infrastructure for cities, while still you’re having people buying cars.”

Steven Andrews, an independent environmental consultant who spent several years in China, said blaming drivers was one way the government dodges responsibility for failing to enforce strict standards on factories and power plants.

“One of the things that was discouraging was environmental officials putting blame on the growing middle class for air pollution problems,” he said. “People can have an impact on air quality … but the vast majority of air pollution comes from the heavy trucks, the unregulated coal fire power plants, factories, and construction sites. Banning and putting blame on one group is not the solution.” …

The essay goes on to talk about the status of NGOs in China, which aren’t non-governmental at all. They should be called GNGOs – governmental-non-governmental organziations. Legal and institutional constraints have stifled growth of advocacy groups, civic organizations and foundations. The state acts as the (G)NGO’s supervisor and officiates, approves and oversees its operations. GNGOs also have a hard time starting up without access to a lot of funding.

Foundations, for example, are required to have millions of RMB to establish themselves in China. Large international NGOs can front the money, but small grassroots groups can’t.

GNGOs are also not allowed to raise funds from the Chinese public. And, when many GNGOs have trouble finding a sponsor, they often resort to registering as a company instead and are then subject in higher taxes.

“I think most grassroots organization, particularity those that signed on to be the advisors to the Olympics in 2001 were disappointed with what transpired,” said environmental expert Elizabeth Economy. “I think it was really a missed opportunity. They promised a green Olympics and they had seven, eight years to deliver on one. It was a real opportunity for Beijing to set itself up as model environmental city, as a showcase of environmental protection, thereby at least beginning the process of turning the country in a new direction. And they just didn’t. They waited for the last minute.”

Today, some of these last-minute initiatives were revived in Beijing, starting with limiting cars on the road.

Let’s see how far this initiative goes. I’m all for more blue skies in Beijing and less smog for all the 老百姓.

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