Splashed across the cover of the April 6th edition of the Chinese-language weekly Yazhou Zhoukan (published in Hong Kong under the auspices of the Ming Pao Group) is the provocative caption “Another Kind of Color Revolution.” The reference is not to a political movement along the lines of Rose Revolution or Orange Revolution, but to a grassroots campaign on a larger scale and of perhaps even greater significance: China’s Green Revolution. The issue’s feature article, titled “Environmental Crises Have Given Birth to a New Democratic Movement in China,” details the concerted effort by the general public, NGO volunteers, lawyers, journalists, and a few “enlightened” government officials to bring about democratic initiatives through the cultivation of environmental consciousness. Pan Yue, vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), is one of those “enlightened” officials. It was under Pan’s stewardship that SEPA launched three “environmental protection storms” in an effort to curb rampant pollution. The most recent, initiated in January, saw SEPA hit four cities with “regional permit restrictions” and threaten to close scores of power plants–some operated by the country’s four major power companies–unless they complied with pollution guidelines.
Yue, 47, is the son of a military engineer, and his ex-wife is the daughter of Liu Huaqing, a veteran of both the Long March and the Korean War and the former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. Pan’s maverick flair is often attributed to this “princeling” background. In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2005, the year SEPA launched its first “environmental protection storm,” Pan declared that “the faster the economy grows, the more quickly we will run the risk of a political crisis if the political reforms cannot keep pace.” In the same interview, Pan bemoaned the fact that “five of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China.” A long time proponent of environmental activism, since 2004 Pan has also been a vocal supporter of the concept of a Green GDP, a measure which deducts the cost of resource depletion and other environmental damage from China’s current GDP. In September 2006, China issued its first Green GDP. But last month the country’s National Statistics Bureau postponed plans to publicize a second Green GDP report because, it said, the method that had been used was both “theoretically and methodologically immature.” This is not the first, and probably won’t be the last, setback for “Hurricane Pan.” In a January 15th interview with the Economic Observer, republished on the website of People’s Daily, Pan railed against what he called a “protectionist regional mentality” and conceded that each subsequent “environmental protection storm” would require ever more strenuous effort. With his various initiatives, Pan Yue is said to have ruffled the feathers of many, including those of former premier Li Peng, whose son, fellow “princeling” Li Xiaopeng, heads Huaneng Power International, China’s largest power producer and one of the targets of Pan Yue’s “storms.” For the past 13 years, Pan Yue has been unable to rise above the vice-ministerial level. Given the powerful enemies he’s making as vice minister of SEPA, some observers view his prospects for further advancement as slim.
