Commentary

China Watch

Forum Digests

Columnists

Letters

Let the law bite

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-30 07:21

The collective study sessions of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China are reliable wind vanes of China's policy orientations, because the central leaders always take advantage of such gatherings to showcase accents on specific issues.

The latest, on the afternoon of last Friday, was on global climate changes and China's responses to them. Which illustrates a consistent focus on the need to reduce the nation's ecological footprints on its way toward prosperity.

If that sounds too abstract and far-fetched to individuals and their families, President Hu Jintao brought it a step closer by calling for a proposal to build a resource-saving and environment-friendly society to find its foothold in every household.

That actually touches upon an embarrassment in the implementation of some policies. We have many well-thought-out policies and measures in place, if not actually at work, providing rules of the game for every aspect of daily life.

But they do not always bear the cherished fruit in real life. On the contrary, quite a few of the otherwise effective rules ended up being toothless owing to inadequate attention to feasibility in the real-life scenario.

The most up-to-date example is the ban on free-of-charge disposable plastic shopping bags.

Four weeks have passed since the ban was enforced nationwide. Judging from reports from across the country, there is no way to not consider the outcome embarrassing. Major shopping venues have indeed stopped offering free disposable plastic shopping bags. But even in Beijing, people continue to get free plastic bags, most of which are subject to an outright ban according to new standards, from street vendors and grocery stores and stalls. The situation is worse in many other places. Besides the weakness of the order itself, which allows too much room for manoeuvre, a more important cause seems to be poor awareness at the individual and household levels.

Since such a ban is an urgent necessity in protecting the environment, a widely shared consensus on public welfare, there has to be ways to make it truly work. If the current rules are too weak to yield the results we want, there is no choice but to make them bite.

This is not an impossible mission. Many places, like Lhasa, Tibet autonomous region, have adopted tougher bans. Disposable plastic shopping bags have simply disappeared altogether from shopping venues in Lhasa. And the quality of life has not worsened because of such a ban.

(China Daily 06/30/2008 page4)