Put China's tough new law to protect the environment to the test

Beijing's notorious smog can be depressing. That's why, in this city, the most watched sign of good air quality is the wind forecast: a strong wind from the north often disperses pollution and returns the much treasured blue sky to the anxious capital. This year, another good wind arrived on January 1, the revised Environment Protection Law.

The new law represents a once-in-a-generation overhaul. Its predecessor was passed in 1989, setting up China's initial legal framework under which its vast areas of land, water and ambient air got some basic protection.

Since then, the world's most populous country has witnessed unprecedented economic growth. A combination of unbridled industrialisation and a get-rich-fast-and-forget-everything-else mentality has quickly rendered China's rivers toxic cocktails and its air unbreathable.

Under such pressure, the legal framework set up 25 years ago looks like a house of cards. There are fundamental flaws in a framework that encourages violation: penalties were so low that businesses set aside pollution fines as a matter-of-fact operational cost.

Local environmental enforcers had no meaningful legal authority to deter polluting activities, many of which were accepted by local cadres who value revenue generation more than environmental quality. Moreover, the general public and civil society groups had few legal channels to hold businesses and governments accountable for environmental damage.

The new measures are no window dressing. A new "killer clause" of an accumulative fine, borrowed from Western environmental laws, is now in place. Businesses that pollute for a sustained period of time face fines based on the number of days they are in violation of the law, without a ceiling. The days of one-off, low fines are probably gone forever.