China cracks down on environment-damaging behavior

China has taken stern measures to crack down on illegal environment-damaging behaviors, and these measures are of great importance to the continuous improvement of the nation's ecological environment in the past ten years.

Zhai Qing, vice-minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said at a news conference in Beijing on Friday that Xi Jinping has stressed that the government bodies should protect the environment with the most strict mechanisms and legal system and crack down on behaviors damaging the environment.

"We've made great efforts in regulating the pollution. In past five years (from 2017), we carried out 105 supervision campaigns with nearly 50,000 administrative members joining the fight against air pollution in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and surrounding areas," he said. "Over that time period, we checked over 2.1 million places and dealt with over 280,000 cases on air pollution".

"Also, we started to inspect rivers' drainage outlets to oceans in 2018. We first used drones 2,300 times to check the drainage outlets along nine main branches of the Yangtze River and Minjiang River with an area of around 46,000 square kilometers covered," he added. "Then over 4,600 of our administrative members checked about 60,292 drainage outlets after traveling for 180,000 km along these rivers".

According to him, the ministry has continued to enforce the law on ecological protection. "We've dealt with over 170,000 cases after the new environmental law took effect in 2015. Then we've improved the connection between administrative punishment and criminal penalty on environment-related matters. For example, 23 suspects were prosecuted for their criminal liability by falsifying data on environmental monitoring, which is the first time in the history of environmental protection," he said.

These regulation campaigns have not only offered sound foundation for the nation's sustainable development, but also helped protect the public's environmental rights. "Over 80,000 environmental law enforcement staffers have fought on the front line of environmental protection campaigns in past years, contributing their own efforts to improve the environment".

According to him, the nation's ecological protection has made great progress in past decade with about 25 laws on air, water, soil and noise pollution management, also wetlands and Yangtze River protection is being revised.

He said that the nation now has more innovative and strict mechanisms for supervising the environment including approvals on pollution discharge, carbon emissions trading and banning the imports of foreign garbage.