This article is an edited excerpt from In Search of Green China, published in February 2025 by Polity.
On the morning of June 5, 2007, World Environment Day, hundreds of protesters gathered at the gate to China’s Environment ministry – the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).
The peaceful crowd, consisting of silver-haired elders and well-dressed young professionals, were residents from a northwestern Beijing neighborhood called Liulitun who lived near a proposed waste-to-energy incineration facility. They carried slogans printed on A4-sized office paper, including “Love Our Lives, Away from Cancer” and “For the Health of Beijing Citizens, Stop Liulitun Waste Incinerator.” Some of them pushed young children in baby strollers under the watchful eyes of uniformed guards and curious SEPA officials, who were taking pictures of this unusual scene.
The demonstration must have alarmed Pan Yue – then SEPA’s spokesperson and an outspoken environmentalist – as it took place right after a much larger demonstration against a planned petrochemical plant in the southern city of Xiamen just four days earlier. Thousands took a “peaceful stroll” on the main streets of the seaside city in demonstration against a PX chemical plant, making international headlines as a rare show of public frustration over government-sanctioned industrial development. Pan had previously warned that massive petrochemical developments were placing ticking time-bombs all over the country, and this appeared extremely prescient in the light of the new situation.
With the demonstration in central Beijing, what would otherwise look like isolated, local outbursts of frustration took on the appearance of an impending wave of environmental contentions. Pan took the cue. Two days after protesters showed up at SEPA’s gate, Pan held a press conference announcing that SEPA would require further deliberation over the Liulitun waste incineration project and a Planning Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the whole of Xiamen City. Before these steps were taken, neither project was to be constructed.
Pan used the two cases to emphasise that environmental limiting factors should be prioritised in economic planning. Specifically, SEPA ordered the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau to enlarge the scope of public consultation for the Liulitun project to facilitate “democratic decision making.”
The street protests provided legitimacy to Pan’s environmental reforms. In return, SEPA’s public stance empowered citizens struggling to control their communities’ environmental fate. However, as Pan became politically marginalised in the latter half of 2008, it fell to the community leaders and environmental activists to challenge the dominant developmental path at a time when the country’s top environmental watchdog chose to take the back seat as events unfolded.
Both protests can be seen as the eruption of anger caused by an expansionist developmental model that continued to reproduce center–periphery structures across the country. While the increasingly affluent urban centers enjoyed the material abundance and convenience of a “modern” lifestyle (polyester clothing that could be readily discarded to make way for a newly stocked wardrobe, for example), the risks and wastes associated with producing this lifestyle were being pushed to the “periphery,” a rural village farther downstream or the edge of the city. SEPA’s 2005 safety checks on the petrochemical industry drew some attention to the sector’s remarkable growth and the associated risks. The quietly expanding incineration sector, however, only gained national recognition after the Liulitun residents took to the streets.
SEPA had demonstrated a degree of foresight on this issue. In the middle of 2006, in anticipation of waste incineration that was on the cusp of taking off and the risks associated with that, the agency issued a notification on the EIA of waste-to-energy projects to centralise the authority to approve such projects. The policy required that any waste-to-energy incinerator in the country should obtain environmental clearance from the central government, thereby depriving provincial governments and lower-level environmental bureaus of the authority to make such decisions. This was a precautionary measure intended to prevent local governments from haphazardly distributing a controversial type of infrastructure throughout the country. In an appendix to the notification, SEPA further instructed that waste incinerators should not be located in established urban areas or upwind of residential areas.
Chinese cities have been grappling with a ballooning urban waste problem since the economic reform of the late 1970s fundamentally transformed production, consumption, and their material flows. Conventional landfilling was hitting a roadblock, as it occupied increasingly larger swaths of valuable urban land and created a severe groundwater pollution problem due to leaching. Incineration appeared increasingly attractive to waste management technocrats at that time. Burning the garbage visibly reduces its volume by up to 85%, converting it into ashes that require less space in landfill sites (even though with condensed toxicity). It also recovers energy from the process, given that the heat content of the waste is sufficient to make it autogenic.
Beijing City was a forerunner in the deployment of this “modern sanitation technology.” Prior to SEPA’s decision to centralise approvals, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau approved the EIA for the Liulitun waste-to-energy incineration project in 2005, despite its proximity to residential and public facilities. This followed the Beijing government’s publication of its target to build three waste incinerators by 2008, which could convert thousands of tons of garbage into ashes per day.
There was just one complication to this plan: the supposed “periphery” designated to handle the city’s unwanted wastes was rapidly urbanising. Multiple real-estate projects in the vicinity of the planned Liulitun project, which had attracted well-educated white-collar residents, had come into being thanks to the same government, creating a situation ripe for future clashes.
The PX controversy followed a similar trajectory, as the Xiamen municipal government put major property development and petrochemical industry plans in each other’s way. “Only a Planning EIA for the entire Xiamen City that takes into consideration its total environmental carrying capacity, spatial distribution and urban development strategies could resolve this conflict,” Pan said at the press conference on June 7, 2007, where he also ordered a do-over of the Liulitun EIA.
Half a year later, the completed Planning EIA for Xiamen City resulted in a decision to relocate the PX plant elsewhere, to a more peripheral part of the province, to resolve the conflict. Beijing’s reevaluation of the Liulitun incinerator, however, underwent a more convoluted process, as the authority would not easily let it go. As the conflict dragged on, Pan’s sidelining at the renamed Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) took a toll on the agency’s cautious stance on waste incineration.
In a surprising policy reversal in September 2008, the ministry returned the power to approve incinerator EIAs to the provinces and municipalities. This reversal was a result of intensive lobbying by local governments, which argued that the MEP’s centralisation of the approval process had hindered the implementation of incineration projects. Furthermore, the new policy also, for the first time, established an officially sanctioned “safety distance” of 300 meters between incinerators and public facilities. This was immediately criticised by scientists and community members as too lenient and seemingly tailored to the Liulitun incinerator.
The MEP’s easing of its position on incineration put the waste incineration sector into supercharge mode. The 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package that was announced only days later also contained an estimated 210 billion yuan allocated for environmental infrastructure, including waste treatment facilities. New projects favored by local governments lined up in the approval pipeline as economy-boosting “green” investments.
The floodgate was opened. Beijing City quickly followed suit with a new plan to triple the number of waste incinerators in the capital city: nine would be built before 2015 that could collectively consume as much as 8,200 tons of urban waste per day. Across the country, local governments eagerly readied their own pipelines for a slew of new projects. There were 42 operational waste incinerators in China at the end of 2005. The new plan was to build another 82 by 2010. By one estimation, 2009 saw a whopping 200 percent year-on-year increase in new waste incineration capacities added in China, mostly in the economically advanced eastern provinces.
The developmental apparatus also played a role in accelerating the adoption of waste-to-energy as a technical solution to the municipal waste problems of Chinese cities. In 2004, a policy of the Ministry of Construction facilitated private sector investment in waste treatment facilities through a bidding process for operational rights, thereby introducing the Build–Operate–Transfer model into the waste treatment sector.
In 2006, in an attempt to boost the uptake of all forms of renewable energy, the National Development and Reform Commission issued a subsidy scheme that made waste-to-energy incinerators eligible for a surcharge when selling their electricity to the grid. In that same spirit, the taxation authorities followed with a tax rebate policy that offered immediate value-added-tax rebate for the electricity sold by waste incinerators.
China’s economic planners and urban managers, in their efforts to address the municipal waste crisis, have once again turned to a “developmental fix.” This approach goes beyond merely finding a solution to the garbage piling up in the alleys of major cities and instead elevates the growth of the waste-to-energy incineration sector to an end in itself. The potential of this sector to generate revenue, energy, and technological advancement has made it a highly attractive option.
For its critics though, the technology is but an instrument for perpetuating an unsustainable and wasteful way of development. They picked up key themes from earlier critiques of developmentalism, as seen in the anti-dam movement, and further introduced a thermodynamic component to their argument. Professor Zhao Zhangyuan, a renowned environmental scientist and a pivotal figure in the incineration debate, has characterised incineration as “simply tossing garbage up into the sky.”
The wastes do not vanish in this out-of-sight, out-of-mind process. Instead, they are merely transformed into even more dispersed pieces, with increased toxicity in some cases. The main beneficiary of this process, as the critics point out, is the growth-oriented economy that pursues incessant capital accumulation and inflated throughputs. It generates wastes that require speedy disposal, ideally at the periphery, lest they clog up the economic circulation.
Mao Da, an activist and a long-time researcher of China’s waste management system, contextualises the shifting metabolism of Chinese cities historically. Before 1990, the prevailing mindset among the country’s sanitation experts was to return as much of China’s urban organic waste as possible as nutrients to agricultural land in the countryside. A considerable amount of resources were invested in developing pilot composting sites in big cities and devising ways to separate and reduce the waste streams destined for landfills. However, the changing agricultural practices (such as the advent of chemical fertilisers) and, more fundamentally, the sheer volume of the urban waste accumulating rendered the approach increasingly impractical, leading to the momentum of a one-size-fits-all, quick-turnover solution.
This account serves as a reminder of how China’s sanitation system once internalised the Marxist ecological insight that recognises the “metabolic rift” caused by the division of labour in capitalist societies. The increased separation of town and country depleted soil of its nutrient stock while generating pollution in cities that could not absorb it. When China’s urban managers decisively pivoted away from that institutional wisdom, residents across the country rose up in resistance.
This article is an edited extract from ‘In Search of Green China’ by Ma Tianjie, published by Polity in February 2025. Click here to buy a copy.
Ma Tianjie is a freelance writer and environmental activist based in Beijing. He formerly worked as Greenpeace’s Program Director for Mainland China until 2015, and then as Director of China Dialogue Beijing until 2022.
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