October 6, 2020

Air Quality Monitoring in China – by Zhaowen Guo

INTRODUCTION

 

Why do citizens voice complaints about the provision of public goods in authoritarian regimes where it’s risky to do so? Using the quasi-natural experiment of China’s real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, I find that information about pollution can increase civic engagement. This complements some recent studies that find that said type of information stokes avoidance by residents intended to reduce exposure to pollution (Barwick et al., 2020; Greenstrone, He, Jia, andLiu, 2020). While such behavioral changes may take this form at the individual level, they may also take on a more proactive and interactive form.

 

My findings also carry important implications for understanding authoritarian durability. The provision of information about environmental health by unelected governments may enable their citizens to better engage with them and even recognize their legitimacy.

 

THE STUDY

 

China’s air quality monitoring and disclosure program allows air pollution to be tracked by automated, real-time monitoring devices; in turn, the data can be shared with multiple stakeholders via a parallel data streaming system. This program was implemented across China in a staggered fashion between 2013 and 2015. This provided me with a good opportunity to compare civic engagement across different city cohorts. The nationwide rollout’s sequence is visualized below.

 

To obtain a consistent and reliable measure of ambient air quality, I gathered daily Aerosol OpticalDepth (AOD) data from 2012 through 2016 from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for the Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) dataset released by NASA (I aggregated the data by month and mapped it onto each city).

 

In order to measure civic engagement around environmental issues, I used petitions filed on the Message Board for Leaders (MBL), a nationwide petition platform operated by China’s central media people.cn. I scraped a total of 551,820 online petitions from 2012 to 2016, each of which contains the date and time of filing, the agency to which the petition was directed, the full petition content, the issue area of petition, and the full response content. I also used the petition’s text to discern the geographical information for over 95% of petitioners, and applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to the full text of each petition to extract the relevant issue area.

 

I first drew a random sample of 500 petitions for discourse analysis—100 for each year in 2012-2016, and closely read each petition to identify the underlying rhetoric petitioners used to voice their concerns. Two changes are noted in the discourse associated with environmental issues. First, citizens started to use “environmental terminology”—including technical jargon—beyond just describing their personal experiences. Second, more petitioners demonstrated an acknowledgement of and appreciation for the central government’s environmental stewardship.

 

Consider environmental petitions filed after 2012; this is a typical example of a petition demanding improvements in air quality:

 

PM2.5 hit nearly 200 in Chengdu City today while it even reached 334 in Chengxiangzhen.  What happened here?  Why were the pollution readings in Chengxiangzhen much higher than others? This is absolutely bad for our health and we felt hazed all day long. Please help improve the air quality and have the blue sky return.

 

The term “PM2.5” signals issue awareness about air pollution. The comparisons made between pollution readings denote the wide availability of information. Equipped with this information, citizens are able to gain greater awareness of pollution levels and voice their concerns with more solid evidence.

 

Consider, also, petitioners who started to give credit to the central government for increased environmental protection:

 

Smog and air pollution have received a great deal of attention from the central government and Chinese people. The government has started a reform to pay local manufacturers and owners subsidies for electric vehicles in order to resolve the problem of extensive emissions of automotive exhaust. As the only city in Shandong Province whose subsidy policy has been approved, Qingdao does not perform well where relevant officials did not well enforce the policy for owners of electric vehicles and the light of the Party cannot shine on its people. Please have this issue fixed.

 

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

 

I relied on a regression discontinuity (RD) design and an event-study design to delineate the effect of the real-time air quality monitoring program on civic engagement. Here are the baseline findings. First, the estimated discontinuity (intercept shift) is around 6.2 and the overall post-treatment mean is 20.6; on average, introducing the real-time air quality monitoring program is estimated to increase the level of civic engagement by about 30% across Chinese cities. Moreover, this positive effect is sustained over time. As displayed in the figure below, the estimates are virtually flat and almost indistinguishable from zero prior to the transparency treatment, which suggests a lack of civic engagement regarding environmental issues when citizens have limited access to pollution information. The strongly positive post-treatment bump implies that informed citizens are more likely to engage with environmental issues.