The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pur

The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pure racist nonsense. It gets spouted and accepted uncritically on HN because but it has no basis in reality. In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing. HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model. [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-on-the-rise-in-china/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...