The research and analysis contained in the volume depicts the broader patterns of an emerging environmental politics in China - a more assertive and restive citizenry in environmental affairs, the rise of interest groups, and international influences on domestic policy debates. The China Environment Yearbook, Volume 3 is an indispensable source for scholars and policy makers concerned about how China's environmental policies and practices will affect its own future and the future of the earth.

This new volume of Chinese Research Perspectives on the Environment (formerly the China Environment Yearbook) includes selected articles from the 2013 annual environmental report compiled by Friends of Nature, a leading environmental protection NGO in China, with contributions from academics, environmental protection activists, public service activists, and the media. In this volume, readers are brought up to date on the main environmental issues and events of 2012, including environmental health, dams and cross-border water issues, a rise in environmental awareness and public action in China, sustainable consumption, and heavy metal pollution. Air pollution control has continued to attract attention from the public, media, academics, and government. This volume also discusses the controversy of the revision of the Environmental Protection Law. Like other volumes in the Chinese Research Perspectives on the Environment series, this one aims to record, evaluate, and reflect on China’s current environmental conditions.

The fourth volume of the China Environment Yearbook is essential for studying issues affecting China’s environment from the viewpoint of civil society, policy, and analysis in 2008, including: the Sichuan Earthquake, a worsening global economic crisis, and public interest litigation.

With the annual publication of the China Environment Yearbook by Friends of Nature, China’s environmental situation is revealed through the eyes of civil society. In this fifth volume, key issues affecting China’s environment in the year 2009 are explored through five main themes: Public Policy, Litigation, Pollution and Health, Consumption, and Ecological Protection.

This 2008 yearbook reviews major legal developments in 2007, including law reform priorities, major legal policy debates and newly enacted legislation. It provides valuable insight into contemporary debates in China about the substance, direction and priorities of legal reform.

China is an integral actor in any movement that will stabilize the global climate at conditions suited to sustainable development for its own population and for people living around the world. Assessments of China’s climatic-system consequences, impact, and responsibilities need to take into account the strengths, weaknesses, and potential of subnational governments, non-governmental organizations, transnational non-state connections, and the urban populace in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. A multitude of recent local initiatives that have engaged subnational China in actions that mitigate emissions can be enhanced by powerful framings that appeal to citizen concerns about air pollution and health conditions. China Confronts Climate Change offers the first fully comprehensive account of China’s response to climate change, based on engagement with the global climate governance literature and current debates over responsibility along with specific insights into the Chinese context. Responsible implementation of any overarching climate agreement depends on expanding China’s subnational contributions. To remain fully informed about GHG-emissions mitigation, China watchers and climate-change monitors need to pay close attention to bottom-up developments. The book provides a valuable contemporary resource for students, scholars, and policy leaders at all levels of governance who are concerned with climate change, environmental politics, and sustainable urban development.

This volume of The China Environment Yearbook is the second in a series of annual records written, commissioned, produced, and edited by Friends of Nature, China’s premier environmental non-governmental organization. This book provides a window on debates and events as they have affected China’s struggles toward a more just and sustainable model of development during the year 2006. Courageous essays question policies of fencing Inner Mongolian grasslands in a way that contradicts local culture and ecology; probe the wisdom of the South-to-North water transfer scheme in the upper Yangzi (and of a potentially even more ecologically intrusive mega-project called the Shuotian Grand Canal Project); and analyze shortcomings in government efforts to clean up some of China’s most heavily polluted waterways. There are candid accounts of new levels of environmental degradation in rural areas and of the difficulties encountered in China’s effort to produce a “green GDP” that would accurately reflect the costs of natural resource extraction and pollution. Other hard-hitting articles describe China’s role in the global trade in illegal logging, analyze the problem of “cancer villages,” and make clear the seriousness of problems with widespread groundwater contamination and lack of access to safe drinking water.

In this book, Katrin Buchmann offers a fascinating and insightful account of the efforts of several European embassies to create alliances in the United States and in China to support the UN climate negotiations leading up to COP15.

The apparent contradiction between China's rapid economic reforms and political authoritarianism is much debated by scholars of comparative political economy. This is the first examination of this issue through the impact of a series of administrative reforms intended to promote government transparency and increase public participation in China.

The 2008 volume of The China Society Yearbook, the third volume in the annual China Society Blue Book series to be translated into English, contains important statistics and analysis from Chinese scholars on a wide array of social issues in China. Topics explored in this volume include employment, social security, national health insurance, labor security, political participation, the internet, food safety, corruption, and quality of life. Along with analysis, this volume offers recommendations and insight into the daunting issues and opportunities facing China as it transitions into a free-market system.