In an interview on China's Environmental Crisis

Do you think there’s any hope that the Chinese government might make some form of U-turn? I read a rather inspiring 2005 interview with Pan Yue, deputy minister for the environment – can he make a difference?

Yes, he’s a great guy. Unfortunately he’s been having a bit of a difficult time. You can find a lot more from Pan Yue on China Dialogue, which contains many of his essays. He’s a very interesting thinker, one of the very progressive voices. But it is significant that you don’t really hear from him any more.

Is he part of a group in China, or very much a lone voice?

Well, he’s one of a group in the sense that he has a big following, and he’s certainly done a great deal to help the environmental movement grow, but he’s not a politically powerful figure. He’s been passed over for promotion. The ministry for the environment – at one point at least, and it may still be true – had fewer personnel to look after the whole of China than there were working in Mao’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. You can’t have an effective environment ministry with 400 people looking after 1.3 billion. In the US, with its much smaller population, the ministry for the environment has in the thousands. Tens of thousands.

So you can tell how much priority the government gives to environmental issues just by looking at the institutions that they’ve set up. Unfortunately they’re not very convincing.

There isn’t any one authority powerful enough to do things like fine people properly for discharging effluent. It’s cheaper still to pay the fine than it is to install a water treatment plant in your factory. And so, of course, they simply pay the fines and they carry on.

So it’s very tough actually, and it’s very tough because you’ve got a very pernicious combination of political and economic power, and you have very few checks and balances because rule of law is very weak. If you look at what happens to environmental activists when they come up against economic interests – well, they don’t win. Very rarely do they win. Lawyers can be threatened, have their licences taken away, and there isn’t a free press.

So if you think about the mechanisms for environmental clean-up in the West, in the end public outrage plays a part. People are concerned for their health, their children’s health; they feel that polluters ought to pay, that people shouldn’t dump their effluents into the public realm for the sake of private profit.

In order to remedy these abuses you need a state that is very determined. And if you have a state in which the servants of the state, the power-holders in the state, have the same interest as the industrialists and the economic power-holders – which you have in China – then it takes a long time to bring any pressure to bear.

It’s not that no Chinese care about this; there are a lot of Chinese who care about this. It just takes a while. And to balance this, China has made progress in terms of the laws that have been passed, and there are a lot of people doing very serious work on how to change things.

There is even now a public right to know and transparency and so on, so the mechanisms are beginning to be built, it’s just a matter of how to make them work effectively and slightly more rapidly.

So there’s still hope?

Yes. It’s just hard work.

In an interview on Communist China

Let’s start with Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker.

This is all about the famine in China from 1958-1962. It was very much part of Mao’s plan, ‘The Great Leap Forward’. So the book is a historical record of how many people died, maybe 35 to 40 million, although the Chinese authorities still refuse to release all the information. The author, Jasper Becker, had lived in China for many years as a correspondent.

There’s this idea that the peasants were ill-trained and just didn’t have the technology to achieve the Communists’ ambitious farming revolution.

Yes, everyone was supposed to work for the people’s commune and increase their output, but they couldn’t cope with the changes, trying to expand farming output and centralise industry. It all led to this terrible famine.

Considering it’s so hard to find proper information on this, how did Becker manage?

He went on two treks into the Chinese provinces where he spoke to the people living there about what had happened and he hunted down documents about that period. I know that throughout history there have been many famines, in Europe and the Soviet Union. But, I don’t think many people realise just how many people died during those years of famine in China. Communist China refused to tell the people the truth and the propaganda machine kicked in. They said that Chinese output was outstripping the US. Today China is still controlled by the Communists, but I think people need to know about what went on and books like this tell us the truth.