QEPRIZEResearcher Chen Jining: likely to head China’s environmental protection ministryQEPRIZE
The president of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Chen Jining, has been appointed to the top Communist Party post within China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. This move means he is likely to take over as minister in March 2015, when Zhou Shengxian, now at the helm, will retire. If his appointment is confirmed, Jining can apply his environmental research experience to one of China’s biggest challenges, which is to drastically reduce its air, water, and soil pollution, aggravated in recent decades by the country’s heavy industrialization. As a professor at the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at Tsinghua, Jining focuses his research on environmental policy, river basin management, and sustainable cities. China has made questionable moves in the realm of the environment. It reorganized its environmental protection agency as a ministry in 2008 and has been enacting stricter pollution control standards. But industry often ignores these regulations. In the opinion of Ma Tianjie, program director for Mainland China at Greenpeace East Asia, Jining is a good choice for the ministry. “The Chinese public [is] eager to breathe freely,” he says. According to Tianjie, Jining is a reasoned scientist and can be expected to get things done.
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