Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

What are the factors that pushes forward environmental legislation in China? A large and growing body of literature has been written on China’s law-making process. As an authoritarian regime, Chinese legislation has always been accused for its lack of transparency and justice, that law makers typically place the leadership’s will above the mass public’s benefit. However, social scientists, particularly political scientists, do acknowledge that legislation needs to aggregate the mass opinion to some extents as even authoritarian leaders do also need to establish their legitimacy of its regime in the domestic level. Applying this theorem to the Chinese environmental legislation process, the Communist Party’s leadership shall aggregate public opinion to some extent and reflect this aggregation in its environmental legislation process. Whereas, from little to no studies have been done to probe how Chinese law makers ponder to the public in their environmental legislation process. In this paper, using an original dataset on Chinese legislation as well as shocks in both China’s domestic and international level, I consider this question with rigorous quantitative methods. My analysis yields strong evidence that the outbreaks of domestic environmental incidents is the main factor that urges the Chinese environmental legislature to improve itself by including in more civilian protection regulations at the cost of sacrificing economic benefits. My study has important contributions to China’s environmental law studies and environmental politics studies.