Running Into 2018

Environment Tax

On January 1, the government began collecting a tax to better protect the environment and cut pollutant discharge as the country’s Environmental Protection Tax Law took effect.

The introduction of the tax signaled the end of the pollutant discharge fee which the authorities had been collecting for nearly 40 years.

This is China’s fi rst tax specifi - cally designed with environmental protection in mind, which will help establish a green fi nancial and taxation system and promote pollution control and the appropri- ate treatment of pollutants, said Wang Jinnan, head of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning under the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

China had been collecting a pollutant discharge fee since 1979, however, some local governments exploited loopholes and exempted enterprises that were otherwise big contributors to fi scal revenue. For years, regulators had suggested replacing the fee system with a law which could be more effectively enforced.

Under the Environmental Protection Tax Law, which targets en- terprises and public institutions that discharge listed pollutants directly into the environment, companies will pay taxes for producing noise, air and water pollutants as well as solid waste.

Tackling pollution has been described as one of the three tough battles facing China over the next three years, according to the Central Economic Work Conference in December 2017.

Ivory Trade Ban

The doors to the ivory trade in China closed on December 31, 2017.

China honors its commitment to cease the commercial processing and sale of ivory by the end of 2017, the State Forestry Administration has said.

The move affects 34 processing enterprises and 143 designated trad- ing venues, with all of them to close, in the world’s once largest ivory market.

The Chinese authorities will continue to clamp down on ivory collection as well as the processing, sales, transportation and smuggling of elephant tusks,” the administra- tion said.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the population of African elephants declined by 111,000 over the past 10 years. The overall trends in the poaching of African elephants show a decline from the 2011 peak, but are still at unacceptable levels when viewed continent-wide.

In 2015, China joined global efforts to announce it would phase out the ivory trade and ban imports of ivory and ivory products.

The Chinese clampdown on the ivory trade has pushed the prices of ivory down, and the number of el- ephants killed in the last three years down by 65 percent, according to a report by Save the Elephants.

Save the Elephants researchers said the price of ivory dropped dras- tically from its peak of $2,100 per kg in 2014 to $730 per kg in February 2017.

The trading ban will put ivory carving craftsmen out of business. The Chinese Government shut down 67 ivory-carving workshops and retail outlets in March 2017, and the remaining 105 were closed by the end of the year.

Ivory carving in China traces its origins to the Ming and Qing dynasties, from the 14th to the early 20th centuries, when the craft’s main consumers came from the imperial court and elite scholar-offi cials.

Water Conservation

According to a senior water resources offi cial on January 2, China began construction on 16 major water conservation projects in 2017, outper- forming the annual target of 15.

In 2014, the State Council, China’s cabinet, decided to build 172 major water conservation projects in seven years and so far 122 of them are either in operation or under con- struction, Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei said at a meeting.

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