China has written its environment into law

I remember the Beijing air of a decade ago. I would never go running and inhale that bad air. Now the air is fresh, the sky is blue and the sun is shining. China has been similarly successful in cleaning up rivers and waterways. It follows the idea that green is gold, that ecology and economy can thrive together. This August, all of this was enshrined in the most comprehensive Ecological and Environmental Code any nation has ever written.

Ten years ago the Chishui River in Guizhou, China, a tributary to the mighty Yangtze, was heavily polluted and fish species had gone extinct. I stood on its banks this July. The water runs clear, the fish are bigger and more plentiful, and the river flows like a strand of pearls through the wonderful mountains. What was done there was not complicated, but it was demanding. The sources of pollution were cut off. A ten-year fishing ban was imposed. 342 small hydropower stations were dismantled, plants that generated very little electricity but broke the flow the fish depend on. Then, in April 2025, twenty adult Yangtze sturgeon were released into the restored river. The species had been declared extinct in the wild in 2022 and had not bred naturally since 2000. That spring it spawned and hatched in the Chishui, the first wild reproduction in more than two decades.

In most river restorations the technology is well understood and the money can usually be found. What decides success is the factor most often left out of the plan: sustained political will, across every authority whose cooperation is required. Retiring those dams meant three Chinese provincial governments – Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou – and dozens of counties accepting a loss for the sake of a river none of them owns. Such coordination is hard to achieve in most nations and even harder to sustain. Ministers move on, budgets are cut, priorities shift with the next election or the next crisis. The central problem of environmental governance is often not finding the will to act once. It is making that will outlast the officials who found it. On August 15, China offered its answer. The Ecological and Environmental Code came into force.

The answer takes the most durable form a state possesses. The Code is only the second statutory code China has ever adopted, after the Civil Code of 2020, and it stands directly below the constitution. The Civil Code governs relations between people. This one governs relations between people and nature. A country reserves the form of a code for what it considers most fundamental. Its 1,242 articles consolidate more than 30 laws, over 100 administrative regulations and more than a thousand local rules into one system, and ten pollution laws are absorbed and repealed outright. It is also China’s first climate legislation, giving the national carbon market and the country’s treaty obligations the force of law. Just as important, it locks in the practices that worked. The river chief system, which assigns a named official to every stretch of water, and the central inspections that audit provinces on their environmental record are now national law. What three provinces did on the Chishui is no longer a local initiative that a future leader could quietly drop.

Other countries have codified environmental law, and it is right to acknowledge them. Sweden merged fifteen statutes into an Environmental Code in 1998, and France, Italy and Colombia each have codes shaped by their own traditions. None, however, attempted a restructuring on this scale, across the entire environmental field of the world’s largest industrial economy. And one feature has no precedent anywhere. China’s Code devotes an entire part, one of five, to green and low-carbon development, regulating the circular economy, the energy transition and carbon markets inside the environmental law itself. The design carries a message. This law does not treat the environment as a brake on the economy to be loosened when growth slows. It treats the greening of the economy as the purpose of the exercise.

Seen from the long history of environmental governance, the significance is clearer still. That history has moved through two ages. The age of declarations opened at Stockholm in 1972, the first world conference on the environment, and it changed how the world talked. The age of treaties followed and was crowned in Paris in 2015. Treaties bind states to one another, but they stop at the border and they bind only governments. A code is a different instrument. It binds a country to itself, from the State Council to the smallest county, reaching every factory, every official and every court. Declarations were promises to the world. Treaties were contracts between states. A code is a promise a nation writes to its own future.

A promise of this kind is credible only if it rests on delivered results, and this Code follows the evidence rather than running ahead of it. In 2025, average PM2.5 in China’s major cities fell to 28 micrograms per cubic metre and 89.3 per cent of days had good air quality, the best figures since monitoring began. No major country has cleaned its air as fast as China. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen 200 per cent since the fishing ban, and about 1,400 finless porpoises now live in a river that was losing them for decades. At the headwaters in Qinghai, Sanjiangyuan National Park covers 190,000 square kilometres, the size of England, guarding the sources of the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the Mekong. Coal supplied less than half of electricity for the first time this year, while renewables reached 41.2 per cent. Forest cover has passed 25 per cent, and roughly a quarter of the green area added on Earth this century has been added in China. The Code did not create this transformation. It guarantees that it cannot be undone.

That guarantee matters most to those who must finance what comes next. A solar factory or a battery plant is a fifteen to twenty year bet, and what investors fear is not cost but reversal: the subsidy withdrawn, the standard relaxed, the strategy rewritten after an election. Businesses in several Western markets have lived exactly that in recent years. The Code applies to every company operating in China, domestic and foreign alike, and it converts the greening of the economy from a policy preference into a legal fact. What that certainty has already built is visible: more than 8,000 national-level green factories, the world’s largest clean power system, the world’s largest carbon market.

For developing countries the Code addresses a problem of sequence. Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan industrialised first and cleaned up decades later, when they were already wealthy. Countries industrialising today are expected to meet European standards while their industries are still forming. China’s experience is relevant precisely because China was poor within living memory, and built its environmental architecture while it was still industrialising rather than after. It is now sharing what it built. Since 2016, China has mobilised more than 177 billion yuan for climate action in developing countries, and its wind and solar exports cut around 4.1 billion tonnes of emissions abroad between 2021 and 2025. Chinese solar technology is turning desert sun into power in Saudi Arabia, and a Chinese water-saving terrace model is greening the mountains of Sinai. The question in front of Indonesia, Nigeria or Brazil is not whether to protect or to grow. It is which industries to build, and China has shown that one answer can serve both – green is gold.

What of this can be used elsewhere? Not the text itself. Legal systems differ, ecologies differ, needs differ. What travels is the principle behind it: problems that are connected, air, water, climate, energy, must be governed together, and commitments that must last should be written into law. Very little of what saved the Chishui was mysterious. Stop the pollution. Remove what blocks the flow. Give the fish time. Then write it into law, so that it outlives the officials who began it. The Chishui will still be running long after everyone who rescued it is gone. From August 15, so will the obligation to keep it clean.

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