Environmental inspections show their effectiveness

More officials have been held to account for violations found in central environmental inspections, raising the total number of punished officials to more than 12,000, according to the country's top environmental watchdog.

Most recently, 1,035 officials from eight provincial regions, including Jilin, Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces, were called to account for their involvement in 89 environmental violations uncovered in the fourth round of inspections from August to September 2017, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said in a news release on Monday.

Among the officials, 218 are in positions at the prefecture level, which is just below ministerial level, and 320 hold posts equivalent to county head, the ministry said.

While 296 of the officials were summoned, 773 were punished by administrative or Party disciplinary agencies, including receiving demerits or warnings that will bar them from promotion for a period of time.

Two officials were transferred to judicial authorities.

In addition to being members of local committees of the Communist Party of China and local governments, the punished officials also come from State-owned enterprises and public institutes, it said.

Jilin outnumbers the other seven provincial regions, with 177 punished officials. In one of the cases there, 22 officials were punished because of the continuous deterioration of the Liaoyuan River and the slow progress in remediation of the water body in the city of Liaoyuan.

In the first half of 2017, the water quality of the river was found below Grade V, the lowest level in the country's five-tier water quality system, in eight of the nine monitoring stations along the stream. The city was also found to have only completed 28 of 67 projects that were listed in its 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15).

Wang Liping, Party chief of Liaoyuan, for example, was removed from his post, and four officials were given severe warnings within the Party.

Previously, about 3,100 officials have been held accountable for environmental violations in the first three rounds of inspections, which were launched in late 2015.

Meanwhile, more than 8,000 officials were punished after inspectors' revisits to ensure rectification of violations they had found earlier.

Liu Changgen, director of the central environmental inspection office, said the fourth round of inspections is the first to have more punished officials from land resources departments than from the ecological and environmental departments, which topped the list in the earlier rounds.

"Many may think the ecological and environment departments should top the list, as they shoulder more of the responsibilities in environmental protection. But officials at various levels of the ecological and environmental departments have had their awareness in environmental protection strengthened in the past few years, which has helped them better assume their responsibilities," Liu said.

He said he expects to see increasingly strengthened awareness of protection in other departments, too.

Li Ganjie, minister of ecology and environment, told a conference in March that a new round of central environmental inspections would be rolled out across the country in the next three years, starting this year, after the approach proved successful in addressing environmental violations.

He said the new round will also cover central government bodies and State-owned enterprises, and inspectors will spend another year revisiting all areas to see whether or not the violations they found have been rectified.