Environmental protection requires effective governmental intervention. However, China is not a democracy and has not established the sound rule of law. Experiences from developed countries suggest that environmental crises in China are to be expected, while the solutions will be hard to reach. So, what has happened in China over the past fifteen years has been surprising, as the environmental trajectory has deviated from projections. Since peaking in the mid-2000s, sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions in China have been declining, and the downward pace has accelerated in the past few years, reaching an emission level not seen for more than four decades. Furthermore, a large environmental industry has appeared that aims to install and operate SO2 scrubbers. However, many problems persist. Policy making continues to lack transparency and public consultation, and policy stumbles are not rare. Policy implementation still has considerable problems, and is often selective. It is not unusual to hear about abuse by governmental authorities.

This study provides a theoretical framework to explain how China achieved deep and sustained pollution mitigation without democracy or sound rule of law. In doing so, causal relationships are explored between the favourable outcome and unfavourable path. The major puzzle regards why China frequently witnesses both sides at the same time, alternatively, we need to consider whether conventional insights have missed something important in reading China. To this end, China’s environmental strategy is theorized as goal-centred governance. China is both highly centralized – in goal setting – and highly decentralized – in goal attainment, policy making and implementation. Unlike the rule-based governance of developed countries, as indicated in their well-established rule of law, China places goals in the first place. Meanwhile, deficiencies in policy making and implementation are much more tolerated as long as the goals are attained. The mitigation trajectory was not centrally planned, but gradually evolved through decentralized path-finding under centralized goals.