Abstract
With the change in China’s social structure and the emergence of the middle class, severe environmental pollution is stimulating the demand for social environmental justice in China. Facing the absence of environmental justice theory and related empirical research in China, this article introduces a general equilibrium theory model of environmental justice. It proves that under Pareto efficiency, environmental justice is difficult to achieve in a competitive market, and environmental inequality is the normal state. An econometric model is established based on demographic and socioeconomic factors, comparison with the US principle of environmental justice, and characteristic perspectives in the Chinese context. The study takes 444 counties in China’s four major economic zones, the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, and Chengdu–Chongqing, as the units for empirical analysis of the regional distribution of environmental inequality. The results indicate that rural residents bear higher environmental risks than urban residents. There are different environmentally vulnerable groups and environmental disparities among the four economic zones; notably, minorities in the Pearl River Delta, poor residents in Chengdu–Chongqing, and rural residents in the Yangtze River Delta bear the environmental inequality caused by industrial gas pollution. However, migrants, including rural migrants, do not disproportionately suffer environmental risks caused by industrial pollution at the county level. This paper provides theoretical support and a systematic analytical framework for the study of China’s environmental justice issues. We describe China’s environmental inequality status and provide a reference for the design of environmental justice interventions.
Highlights
From a historical perspective, the environmental issues of contemporary China are rooted in the process of industrialization over the past hundred years
This section takes the counties in the four economic zones as geographic units to answer the key question of whether environmental inequality occurs in the distribution of state-controlled industrial pollution sources
This finding indicates that in the four major economic zones, men are more exposed to environmental risks caused by industrial pollution than women, and every doubling of the male population compared with the female population corresponds to an additional 1 to 2 countries controlling industrial pollution sources
Summary
The environmental issues of contemporary China are rooted in the process of industrialization over the past hundred years. Environmental protection institutions at all levels across the country received 121,000 letters and 1.647 million telephone and internet complaints from people, according to the China Environmental Statistics Annual Report 2015 (http://www.cnemc.cn/jcbg/zghjtjnb/ (in Chinese)) This implicates that, with the awareness awakening of environmental rights, the tolerance of Chinese residents towards environmental pollution and destruction is tending to shrink Nowadays they would like to express their appeals via diverse channels rather than remaining silent as in the past. He et al [25] set up a socioeconomic model specific to China and discussed environmental justice in China in a comprehensive way According to their empirical study at the prefecture level, they found that minority areas and western regions may suffer from disproportionate industrial pollution sources. We may assume that environmental pollution is homogeneous and that the unified price is –w (w > 0)
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