In a move that the Peoples’ Daily is describing as “a milestone in China's environmental protection history,” Premier Wen Jiabao told a high-level government meeting on April 17 that environmental protection efforts will in future be factored into the performance assessment of government officials.

A combination of technical innovation, institutional reform and price and tax mechanisms, backed up by greater public consultation and participation, could enable China to become a “resource-efficient and environment-friendly society” by 2020, according to a group of Chinese Academy of Science scholars who published a 400-page “China 2006 Sustainable Development Strategy” at the end of February.

The Global Greengrants Fund (GGF), a US-based organisation that disburses small grants to environmental NGOs, is helping local groups to buy modest, low-priced apartments in several Chinese cities to serve as regional resource centres that grassroots groups can share.

A new forest protection agreement between China and Burma could end the flow of illegal timber into Yunnan, according to Global Witness investigators operating in Burma, but the UK-based NGO is continuing to stress the need for action to ensure effective implementation of the agreement.

Three months ago, we asked whether the toxic spill in the Songhua River might prove a defining moment in the creation of a citizens’ environmental movement in China. A preliminary survey of the evidence suggests that the answer is no—but perhaps that’s for the best, for the challenges ahead will require a more nuanced relationship with the state.

In order to protect ecologically vulnerable areas of Western China, the nation should establish a comprehensive ecological compensation system, including strengthened regulations, expanded fiscal transfers, and innovative market mechanisms, the State Environment Protection Agency’s Academy for Environment Planning suggests in a research report released in December 2005.

China ranks 94th out of 133 countries listed in an Environmental Performance Index put together by research centres at Yale and Columbia universities, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the European Commission Joint Research Centre, and published at the end of January.

Electronic waste recycling, a boom industry in Guangdong and Zhejiang since the mid-1990s, poses a serious threat to the health and safety of migrant workers from poorer parts of China, according to the latest issue of the China Labor Research Newsletter, whose article on the subject follows up on a recent Greenpeace International report.

State of the World 2006, the Washington DC-based Worldwatch Institute's latest assessment of the world's environment, concludes that the future well-being of humanity rests on the shoulders of policymakers in the new 'ecological superpower' states of China and India.

Scheming businessmen in Eastern China’s Zhejiang Province routinely submit bogus paperwork, use false labeling techniques and tip-off customs officers to grow China’s booming illegal trade in ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) who caught traders red-handed during recent investigations.