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27-09-2014, 09:54 AM
Ma Jun: How to shake up China and get away with it
PUBLISHED: 6 HOURS 15 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 5 HOURS 26 MINUTES AGO
Ma Jun: How to shake up China and get away with it
Ma Jun . . . bosses whose companies he exposed were incredulous he didn’t want money. Photo: Qilai Shen
LISA MURRAY
XIAO WANG FU
Ritan Park, Chaoyang district, Beijing
Steamed rice rolls with leek and shrimp; steamed pork dumplings with crab roe; steamed barbecued pork buns; poached green vegetables; dry-fried rice noodles and sliced beef,
2 soda waters
Total: 181 yuan ($33)
Ma Jun has chosen a restaurant surrounded by trees. Not a surprising choice for China’s most prominent environmental activist. But as the sun shines down on the Xiao Wang Fu restaurant terrace in the middle of Beijing’s Ritan Park, it feels as though we are in the wrong setting.
The sky is blue, the air is clear and the trees are a healthy green. The pollution reading is an acceptable 106, more than four times the level considered safe by the World Health Organisation but well down on the hazardous readings that have become a feature of life in the capital.
The next hour-and-a-half’s conversation is dominated by the immense environmental challenges facing China, which now accounts for 28 per cent of global emissions – more than Europe and the United States combined, according to data released this week. However, far from showcasing its chronic air pollution problems, Beijing this day seems a picture of health.
Ma, a slender 46-year-old dressed simply and neatly in a white shirt and black pants, is clearly a man with time constraints. He has a natural warmth and an easy manner, but he efficiently dispenses with any small talk and moves straight on to the big issues.
We have barely shaken hands and settled into our slightly uncomfortable brown wicker chairs before he starts talking about his infamous online blacklist – a public ranking of the country’s worst polluters. It is feared and revered in equal measure by state-owned enterprises and big global corporations alike. It prompted Apple to overhaul its entire supply chain.
Despite boasting a Yale fellowship and being named one of the top 100 global thinkers by both Time and Foreign Policy magazines, there is no ego in Ma’s explanation. Rather, there is an urgency to make clear why the list exists and how it works.
COLLECTION OF GOVERNMENT DATA
Ma started developing it eight years ago, when he set up the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and launched the country’s first water pollution map. IPE collects data from city, state and central governments to highlight companies that repeatedly violate pollution regulations.
It was the first time anyone in China had bothered, or been brave enough, to collect the information and make it easily accessible to the public. The impact was immediate. Within weeks, a large American consumer products company, which Ma declines to name, came to IPE asking how to get its name off the list.
As he talks, Ma has to compete with three hungry budgerigars squawking over their food in a nearby cage, a toddler banging on the window and two loud neighbouring diners who are comparing recent purchases from the fashion store H&M. He perseveres, telling me that, at first, the American company sent only its head of public relations.
“The concern is always about branding and consumer perceptions,” Ma says. “If they can’t deny the record exists, to have it published and easily accessible is a big risk.”
When he told the company that supporting an environmental project was not enough and management needed to fix their own problem, they sent their head of environment, health and safety. Shortly afterwards, a proper recycling system was installed and Ma clocked up his first win. There have been many more.
“One by one they started coming to us,” he tells me. “They all have vast networks of suppliers in China but there was always an excuse that they didn’t know who was polluting. Our compilation and our database gave them this information.”
Just as I start to worry about whether the tape recorder is picking up anything from my softly spoken lunch date, the birds quieten down, the toddler is ferried away from the window and the women from the adjacent table decide to move across the terrace.
I can now relax and focus on Ma, the man who many credit as responsible for China’s dramatic about-turn on pollution management. Two years ago, pollution readings – which measure the level of fine particulates in the air – were a national secret. Now they are published hourly for most major cities. China is also closer than it has ever been to committing to a global framework for emissions reductions, pledging this week at the UN summit on Climate Change to ensuring emissions peak “as soon as possible”.
And next year, it will introduce a new environment protection law which will allow steeper fines and penalties.
NETIZENS DISCOVER SOCIAL MEDIA
Ma says 2011 marked a significant shift as Chinese netizens discovered social media and used it to express their own concerns. “That was a turning point and then the government came up with a 10-point action plan and, in that plan, they included [reductions in] coal consumption, previously a taboo topic, for the first time.”
It is almost half an hour in and we still haven’t ordered, but I don’t want to disrupt the flow. Ma is explaining a decision he made when he set up IPE.
In China, non-government organisations are few and far between and social activists are regularly detained but Ma, one of the most vocal and active environmentalists in the country, has managed to thrive.
The secret?
“We made a crucial decision to use the government data that was available. It wasn’t just a technical decision. It was a way that we could work within the system.”
Ma says his organisation was also set up when a consensus was forming within the government on the environment and need for action.
At this rate we may never eat, so I insist that he, the Beijinger at the table, take the lead on ordering. He suggests dumplings and dishes that are easy to eat so we can keep talking, but edges the menu politely back to me. I signal to one of the three waiters nearby and ask for steamed rice rolls with leek and shrimp, steamed barbecued pork buns, poached Guangdong green vegetables and steamed pork dumplings with crab roe.
Worried it’s not enough, I then order dry-fried rice noodles with sliced beef. Ma interjects to ask if they have any sweet dumplings but the waiter says they have run out. We both opt for soda water. Ma continues, “In China, the data issue is very sensitive. It was important to build up trust and credibility.”
In the beginning, this was difficult. Chinese company executives would come and sit in Ma’s office for hours, incredulous that he wasn’t asking them for money.
“They were very puzzled,” he says with a smile. “They would ask: ‘If you don’t want money from us, why do you do this? Why do you spend all of the time and effort to put us on the blacklist?’ ”
I want to know more about Ma himself. He is immediately less comfortable but allows me to pry. He was born in his mother’s hometown of Qingdao, a coastal city between Beijing and Shanghai, but was raised in the capital. Both parents worked as part of China’s aerospace program. His mother was an administrator and his father an engineer but they talked little about it.
MOTHER SENT TO LABOUR CAMP
His mother was sent to a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution and both parents attended night school then, so he and his sister remember their absence. But the 1980s was an “amazingly open era”, he says. “It was a time for us to rethink and rebuild.”
He was at boarding school and stayed up late with his classmates locked in heated discussions about China’s past and “the different roads we should take to move forward”.
After school, he opted to study international journalism and then he was hired by Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to work in its Beijing office.
It was 1993, a year after the controversial Three Gorges Dam project had been approved, and Ma began visiting the area and writing about its environmental impact.
Pork ribs, which we didn’t order, arrive so we send them back. But the pork buns and shrimp rice rolls are delicious, although the latter prove a little slippery and require some deft manoeuvring of chopsticks.
Not that Ma is eating much. I feel guilty every time I ask a question because it deprives him of the next bite but I want to hear about his book. China’s Water Crisis, published in 1999, was compared to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking environmental book Silent Spring.
Ma plays down this comparison: “The initial impact was quite different. Silent Spring had an instant impact in America. My book got put side by side with technical books.”
But he concedes it gave him a profile both with the public and government agencies. He gave talks on water pollution and was offered his next job at Sinosphere Corporation, a consultancy group that advises firms on their environmental policies.
By now, all the food has arrived and I have clearly over-ordered. Ma is concerned about the waste but agrees to take some food home. The green vegetables are tasty with just the right amount of crunch. Ma talks about studying in the United States in 2004 after being singled out for the Yale World Fellows program.
“In America, you have all of the laws, the market approach, transparency and public participation, so I was thinking about which of those we can use in China to tackle environmental issues.
“In America, 80 per cent of the problems have been resolved in court, but we can’t really do much with that because the judicial system is different. I realised we can do something with transparency. We can use public participation, public pressure.”
I point out that transparency and public participation aren’t usually associated with China but Ma is adamant: the environment has been a bright spot for the country.
“We love this land, we want it to be cleaned up and remain prosperous. What options do we have but to remain hopeful?”
It’s time to go. While Ma is waiting for his food parcel, he shows me IPE’s new mobile phone app that allows people to compare the pollution readings for 190 cities in China on a map. It also highlights where the polluting factories are with big red dots. The bigger the dot, the more violations.
The food is here, neatly packed in a brown paper bag. We skip the small talk again as Ma hurries off to a meeting that has already started.
The Australian Financial Review
BY LISA MURRAY
Lisa Murray
Lisa is a China correspondent, based in Shanghai.
Stories by Lisa Murray
PUBLISHED: 6 HOURS 15 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 5 HOURS 26 MINUTES AGO
Ma Jun: How to shake up China and get away with it
Ma Jun . . . bosses whose companies he exposed were incredulous he didn’t want money. Photo: Qilai Shen
LISA MURRAY
XIAO WANG FU
Ritan Park, Chaoyang district, Beijing
Steamed rice rolls with leek and shrimp; steamed pork dumplings with crab roe; steamed barbecued pork buns; poached green vegetables; dry-fried rice noodles and sliced beef,
2 soda waters
Total: 181 yuan ($33)
Ma Jun has chosen a restaurant surrounded by trees. Not a surprising choice for China’s most prominent environmental activist. But as the sun shines down on the Xiao Wang Fu restaurant terrace in the middle of Beijing’s Ritan Park, it feels as though we are in the wrong setting.
The sky is blue, the air is clear and the trees are a healthy green. The pollution reading is an acceptable 106, more than four times the level considered safe by the World Health Organisation but well down on the hazardous readings that have become a feature of life in the capital.
The next hour-and-a-half’s conversation is dominated by the immense environmental challenges facing China, which now accounts for 28 per cent of global emissions – more than Europe and the United States combined, according to data released this week. However, far from showcasing its chronic air pollution problems, Beijing this day seems a picture of health.
Ma, a slender 46-year-old dressed simply and neatly in a white shirt and black pants, is clearly a man with time constraints. He has a natural warmth and an easy manner, but he efficiently dispenses with any small talk and moves straight on to the big issues.
We have barely shaken hands and settled into our slightly uncomfortable brown wicker chairs before he starts talking about his infamous online blacklist – a public ranking of the country’s worst polluters. It is feared and revered in equal measure by state-owned enterprises and big global corporations alike. It prompted Apple to overhaul its entire supply chain.
Despite boasting a Yale fellowship and being named one of the top 100 global thinkers by both Time and Foreign Policy magazines, there is no ego in Ma’s explanation. Rather, there is an urgency to make clear why the list exists and how it works.
COLLECTION OF GOVERNMENT DATA
Ma started developing it eight years ago, when he set up the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and launched the country’s first water pollution map. IPE collects data from city, state and central governments to highlight companies that repeatedly violate pollution regulations.
It was the first time anyone in China had bothered, or been brave enough, to collect the information and make it easily accessible to the public. The impact was immediate. Within weeks, a large American consumer products company, which Ma declines to name, came to IPE asking how to get its name off the list.
As he talks, Ma has to compete with three hungry budgerigars squawking over their food in a nearby cage, a toddler banging on the window and two loud neighbouring diners who are comparing recent purchases from the fashion store H&M. He perseveres, telling me that, at first, the American company sent only its head of public relations.
“The concern is always about branding and consumer perceptions,” Ma says. “If they can’t deny the record exists, to have it published and easily accessible is a big risk.”
When he told the company that supporting an environmental project was not enough and management needed to fix their own problem, they sent their head of environment, health and safety. Shortly afterwards, a proper recycling system was installed and Ma clocked up his first win. There have been many more.
“One by one they started coming to us,” he tells me. “They all have vast networks of suppliers in China but there was always an excuse that they didn’t know who was polluting. Our compilation and our database gave them this information.”
Just as I start to worry about whether the tape recorder is picking up anything from my softly spoken lunch date, the birds quieten down, the toddler is ferried away from the window and the women from the adjacent table decide to move across the terrace.
I can now relax and focus on Ma, the man who many credit as responsible for China’s dramatic about-turn on pollution management. Two years ago, pollution readings – which measure the level of fine particulates in the air – were a national secret. Now they are published hourly for most major cities. China is also closer than it has ever been to committing to a global framework for emissions reductions, pledging this week at the UN summit on Climate Change to ensuring emissions peak “as soon as possible”.
And next year, it will introduce a new environment protection law which will allow steeper fines and penalties.
NETIZENS DISCOVER SOCIAL MEDIA
Ma says 2011 marked a significant shift as Chinese netizens discovered social media and used it to express their own concerns. “That was a turning point and then the government came up with a 10-point action plan and, in that plan, they included [reductions in] coal consumption, previously a taboo topic, for the first time.”
It is almost half an hour in and we still haven’t ordered, but I don’t want to disrupt the flow. Ma is explaining a decision he made when he set up IPE.
In China, non-government organisations are few and far between and social activists are regularly detained but Ma, one of the most vocal and active environmentalists in the country, has managed to thrive.
The secret?
“We made a crucial decision to use the government data that was available. It wasn’t just a technical decision. It was a way that we could work within the system.”
Ma says his organisation was also set up when a consensus was forming within the government on the environment and need for action.
At this rate we may never eat, so I insist that he, the Beijinger at the table, take the lead on ordering. He suggests dumplings and dishes that are easy to eat so we can keep talking, but edges the menu politely back to me. I signal to one of the three waiters nearby and ask for steamed rice rolls with leek and shrimp, steamed barbecued pork buns, poached Guangdong green vegetables and steamed pork dumplings with crab roe.
Worried it’s not enough, I then order dry-fried rice noodles with sliced beef. Ma interjects to ask if they have any sweet dumplings but the waiter says they have run out. We both opt for soda water. Ma continues, “In China, the data issue is very sensitive. It was important to build up trust and credibility.”
In the beginning, this was difficult. Chinese company executives would come and sit in Ma’s office for hours, incredulous that he wasn’t asking them for money.
“They were very puzzled,” he says with a smile. “They would ask: ‘If you don’t want money from us, why do you do this? Why do you spend all of the time and effort to put us on the blacklist?’ ”
I want to know more about Ma himself. He is immediately less comfortable but allows me to pry. He was born in his mother’s hometown of Qingdao, a coastal city between Beijing and Shanghai, but was raised in the capital. Both parents worked as part of China’s aerospace program. His mother was an administrator and his father an engineer but they talked little about it.
MOTHER SENT TO LABOUR CAMP
His mother was sent to a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution and both parents attended night school then, so he and his sister remember their absence. But the 1980s was an “amazingly open era”, he says. “It was a time for us to rethink and rebuild.”
He was at boarding school and stayed up late with his classmates locked in heated discussions about China’s past and “the different roads we should take to move forward”.
After school, he opted to study international journalism and then he was hired by Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to work in its Beijing office.
It was 1993, a year after the controversial Three Gorges Dam project had been approved, and Ma began visiting the area and writing about its environmental impact.
Pork ribs, which we didn’t order, arrive so we send them back. But the pork buns and shrimp rice rolls are delicious, although the latter prove a little slippery and require some deft manoeuvring of chopsticks.
Not that Ma is eating much. I feel guilty every time I ask a question because it deprives him of the next bite but I want to hear about his book. China’s Water Crisis, published in 1999, was compared to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking environmental book Silent Spring.
Ma plays down this comparison: “The initial impact was quite different. Silent Spring had an instant impact in America. My book got put side by side with technical books.”
But he concedes it gave him a profile both with the public and government agencies. He gave talks on water pollution and was offered his next job at Sinosphere Corporation, a consultancy group that advises firms on their environmental policies.
By now, all the food has arrived and I have clearly over-ordered. Ma is concerned about the waste but agrees to take some food home. The green vegetables are tasty with just the right amount of crunch. Ma talks about studying in the United States in 2004 after being singled out for the Yale World Fellows program.
“In America, you have all of the laws, the market approach, transparency and public participation, so I was thinking about which of those we can use in China to tackle environmental issues.
“In America, 80 per cent of the problems have been resolved in court, but we can’t really do much with that because the judicial system is different. I realised we can do something with transparency. We can use public participation, public pressure.”
I point out that transparency and public participation aren’t usually associated with China but Ma is adamant: the environment has been a bright spot for the country.
“We love this land, we want it to be cleaned up and remain prosperous. What options do we have but to remain hopeful?”
It’s time to go. While Ma is waiting for his food parcel, he shows me IPE’s new mobile phone app that allows people to compare the pollution readings for 190 cities in China on a map. It also highlights where the polluting factories are with big red dots. The bigger the dot, the more violations.
The food is here, neatly packed in a brown paper bag. We skip the small talk again as Ma hurries off to a meeting that has already started.
The Australian Financial Review
BY LISA MURRAY
Lisa Murray
Lisa is a China correspondent, based in Shanghai.
Stories by Lisa Murray