China Insight:: Google Maps, Environmental Pollution and Online Activism

One of the trend anyone can come to grip with when observing the evolution of social and political landscapes in China is the exponential rise of the Internet (338 millions users in June 09)… and with it, the rise of Internet activism as fast as the controls are tightened.

Few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Chinese netizen, Guo Baofeng, put together an open-source Google map that locates major pollution sites around china. As it went publicly-launched, the map attracted a lot of interest on Chinese Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and forums: the number of views more than doubled to about 5,000 compared to a week earlier, when it first came online.

This is a very interesting case for many reasons:

• This is not China’s first pollution map. For example, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based environmental NGO, published a “name-and-shame” corporate water pollution map in 2007. The web has been used as a tool to publicly denounce corporate misbehaviors early on by, in this case, naming thousands of alleged pollution makers, including many multinational companies.

• However, Gua Baofeng’s Google map is the first one that enables other users to contribute themselves: netizens can mark spots associated with high levels of pollution or incidents of contamination, based on publicly available information (often media reports). Here, bloggers can now re-expose the polluters publicly, and their misbehaviors might potentially live forever in search and be accessible to a much larger audience, etc…

• When looking at the map as it is now, many ‘pollution spots’ are around the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta – China’s highly industrialized manufacturing hubs. But some other pollutions sites on the map show much more sensitive areas, i.e. locations where multiple lead contaminations cases got highly controversial, etc… Bloggers’s interest in this map is likely to grow (if the map remains accessible in the future) as public awareness of such pollution issues is high: such issues are extremely local and linked to what people care the most about, i.e. their health, safety and their families’ welfare.

• Given that peer-to-peer conversations or conversations with a “person like me” are among the most trusted sources of information, this Google map can have significant ramifications for corporate reputation as Internet users are able to scrutinize corporate activities to an unprecedented degree, while providing to companies an important barometer of the issues that matter to the public at a very local level.

To be followed then, if the map is allowed to last online in China…