Very critical editorial in today’s Washington Post by Elizabeth Economy, currently head of the Asia desk at the Council on Foreign Relations. She discusses Beijing’s PR campaign against critics of China’s environmental record, essentially laying a lot of the blame on multinational companies (MNCs).

While still in its initial stages, the campaign has gained steam over the past month. Senior Chinese officials, the media and even some environmental activists have charged multinational firms and other countries with exporting pollution, lowering their environmental manufacturing standards and willfully ignoring China’s environmental regulations. Faced with growing international and popular discontent over the country’s environmental crisis, China’s leaders are tapping into anti-foreign and nationalist sentiments to deflect attention from their own failures.

Some are accusing foreign governments of practicing an "eco-colonialist" policy of exporting pollution-intensive industries to China.

Well, before I get to my main point, I will say that although blaming foreigners for the current state of China’s environment is an astoundingly weak argument, I am not surprised. Nationalistic arguments just plain work in a lot of countries, China definitely being one of them. Moreover, if there is one thing that is guaranteed to piss off Beijing and make them lash outward, it’s criticism of domestic policy. Lots of reasons for this (e.g. the past hundred years or so of Chinese history) that will continue for a number of years into the future no matter whether China’s relations with other countries are cordial or not.

Anyway, my main point is about MNCs and corporate environmental policies. I think a majority of MNCs have been practicing good environmental policies in China, and these have been getting better as time goes on. One reason for this trend is that information flows around the world are constant and immediate. Before the Internet, you could open a factory in a developing country and do pretty much whatever you wanted – no one would know what went on there. However, with BBS systems, blogs and NGO web sites, there is no place to hide. You do something wrong, everybody is going to know about it.

If Beijing’s current policy of blaming MNCs for a disproportionate amount of environmental damage continues, MNCs better take heed and make sure that their processes are legally compliant. I don’t mean, by the way, that they should follow industry trends. Because of the political climate, MNCs may have to adopt policies that are much more stringent than their domestic competitors just to escape criticism. Many foreign-invested enterprises are already doing this, many more may have to do so in the future.