How well local officials have cared for environment must also be evaluated

THE SECOND INSPECTION TEAM sent by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to Luoyang in Central China’s Henan province this month found a State-owned coal mining company had not stopped its polluting behavior as instructed after the first inspection. Instead, it has continued to discharge waste water directly into local rivers as before. Guangming Daily comments:

Local residents reported to the inspection team of the then Ministry of Environment in 2016 about the company’s reckless polluting behavior, and the environmental watchdogs of various levels have ordered it to suspend production to treat its waste water properly 33 times over the past two years.

However, as the ministry says, because of the local government’s protection, the company has paid no attention to the warnings and instructions. Let alone local people’s complaints.

The local government has acted as a protective umbrella for the company, which is a big taxpayer, an important job creator and an engine for the local economy. This is a typical example showing that the struggle against pollution is, in the first place, a fight with local governments’ old mentality and shortsightedness, if not the outdated system for evaluating the performance of local officials.

Most local officials adopt a short-term perspective because their promotions are directly related to the economic performance of their jurisdictions. Although environmental protection has been declared one of the three key tasks for the country, there are still no indexes with which to judge how well local officials perform in protecting the environment.

It can be seen that the real reason for the lack of real progress in environmental protection in some localities lies in the collusion between local governments and polluting enterprises. And many people attribute the resistance of local governments to environmental protection to a contaminated political ecology, saying the local officialdoms also need cleaning up. Which is easier said than done.

The central authorities must work out a series of pragmatic indexes to better reflect the environmental protection performance of local officials, so as to use institutional tools to persuade them to make the environment a priority.