SUN
WUKONG Cloud of scandal over
environment By Wu Zhong, China
Editor
HONG KONG - A whiff of scandal, and
possibly an intriguing power play, is gathering
over the proposed restructuring of China's State
Council, or cabinet, a topic that will be high on
the agenda of the first annual session of the new
five-year term of parliament, the National
People’s Congress, when it gets underway on March
5.
The shake-up will establish
mega-ministries to take over functions of some
existing departments. The State Environmental
Protection Administration (SEPA) is likely to be
upgraded into a more powerful Ministry of
Environment, which will take over all relevant
functions of existing departments to oversee policy
making and implement
environment protection measures.
In
China’s administrative hierarchy, a ministry is
more powerful than an administration as ministers
sit in on cabinet meetings, unlike directors of
administration. The upgrading of the environment
body highlights the importance Beijing attaches to
environmental protection as part of its efforts to
implement President Hu Jintao’s call for
"scientific development".
Zhou Shengxian,
the present SEPA director, is tipped to be
appointed the first minister of environmental
protection. This would be considered a promotion,
although he is already a ministerial-level
official. Yet ahead of this move up in the
hierarchy, Zhou is under the cloud of a scandal
concerning possible plagiarism in a book he wrote,
Opportunity and Choice - Deep Thought on the
Songhuajiang Incident, that was published in
December 2007 by Xinhua Press, a publishing house
run by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
The "incident" concerns an explosion on
November 13, 2005, in the city of Jilin, in the
northeast province of that name. The blast at the
No 101 Factory of PetroChina Jilin Petrochemical
Company caused more than 100 tonnes of benzene to
be spilt into the Songhuajiang River, with the
subsequent severe pollution of the supplies of
drinking water in downstream cities in China and
Russia’s Far East catching worldwide attention.
On December 2, the State Council appointed
Zhou, then director of the State Forestry
Administration, to replace then SEPA director Xie
Chenhua, who was held accountable for the failure
to deal with the pollution in a timely and
effective manner. Zhou thus personally oversaw the
handling of the accident's aftermath.
Zhou
recalls in his book the whole process of dealing
with the Songhuajiang accident - how various
government departments coordinated, how relevant
policies and measures were worked out, and how
leaders including President Hu Jintao and Premier
Wen Jiabao were deeply concerned with the
accident. Through his book, one can have a better
understanding of the strategic thinking of Chinese
leaders on environment issues.
Zhou is
also one of the senior officials who take part in
the Sino-US Strategic Economic Dialogue, and he
has first-hand experience of how China’s
environmental problems affect its relations with
advanced countries. In the book, he deals at
length with the serious challenges China is facing
in environmental protection. He advocates the
"strictest" controls on emission of pollutants,
saying the country’s future would become worrisome
if it continues to chase a one-sided growth of
gross domestic product while ignoring environment
problems.
It is rare in China for a senior
official to publish a book while still in office,
though quite a few have published books after they
have retired. Zhou’s book therefore aroused
immediate and wide attention, particularly after
some Internet websites uploaded parts or the whole
of the book for the public to read for free.
Commentaries in China’s official media
have called it a "heart-shaking work on
environmental protection". Singapore’s
Chinese-language Lianhe Zhaobao newspaper said the
book opened a window for outsiders to see what
measures China will take to implement "scientific
development", since environmental protection is an
important part of this.
Quoting an unnamed
senior official with an international investment
bank, the Lianhe Zhaobao newspaper said anyone who
wants to do business in China with support of the
Chinese government must seriously study the book
as it provides clues about the orientation of
government policies and the trend of industrial
development in China.
Some China watchers
say the book could be regarded as Zhou’s policy
platform for running the environment ministry for
the next five years.
However, along with
sometime flattering appraisals has come criticism,
and growing amounts of it. Some Internet comments
fault Zhou, a relatively new figure in
environmental protection, for trying to take all
the credit in China’s progress in the field
without mentioning contributions by his
predecessors, such as Xie Zhenhua and especially
Qu Geping, the first SEPA director who is
respected as the pioneer of the country's efforts
to clean up its environmental act.
Perhaps
worse, and emerging as a bigger issue, is that
increasing numbers of Internet commentators are
accusing Zhou of plagiarism, saying that he copied
paragraph by paragraph from theses by others
without acknowledgements or attributions. The
accusations are escalating even as this article is
being written, with claims that more evidence of
plagiarism is being discovered.
And rare
as it is for officials to publish a book while in
office, it is even rarer for such authors to be
accused of plagiarism. Zhou may be the first - and
there's an ironic twist, for he publicly vowed in
a mid-2006 public address to environment
scientists to crack down on plagiarism among
academics.
Intriguingly, the country's
Internet police don’t seem to be making any effort
to stop the accusations. Even in forums on
official websites such as those of the Xinhua News
Agency, the People’s Daily newspaper and,
curiously, the State Forestry Administration, one
can easily find posts accusing Zhou of plagiarism.
Some even list texts from his book alongside other
theses for comparison.
It cannot be ruled
out that the scandal is being exposed by Zhou’s
political rivals to stop him from being appointed
as the new minister of environment, some analysts
in Beijing say. If the plagiarism is found to be
very serious it may cast doubt over the
appointment.
That may explain in part why
Internet users are not being prevented from
discussing the matter, as authorities may also
want to see how things will develop.
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