Radio Drama · 2026-08-07
A new law? In China a state radio drama promotes it
In China the state promotes its laws through radio drama. The significance of the new environmental law is illustrated through the life of a judge who handles environmental cases. The piece shows neatly how audio drama and state campaigning intertwine in the Chinese media system.
The three-part radio drama 'Watching over the Green' (守望青绿) was launched on 7 August in Chongqing, south-west China — at a symbolic venue: the Dazhou township courtroom of the Wanzhou district court. According to the report by People's Daily Online, the launch featured the premiere of the title song, live performances of scenes, and an appearance by the judge on whom the drama is based.
The protagonist is a real person still in office: Wang Xiang, deputy head of the environmental and natural-resources division of the Wanzhou district people's court. He has received the 'Touching Chongqing Top 10 People' honour — the city's role-model award, given since 2005, in which public voting carries seventy per cent of the weight. He has been a grassroots judge for twenty-eight years, was among the city's first environmental judges, and in 2014 issued Chongqing's first environmental injunction; a Chinese profile of him says he has handled more than one thousand seven hundred environmental cases.
In China such cases have their own branch of the judiciary. The first 'ecological' bench was set up in 2007 in Qingzhen, Guizhou, and in 2014 the Supreme People's Court established its own environmental and resources division; today some two and a half thousand specialised bodies operate, typically with the same bench hearing the criminal, civil and administrative aspects of a case. By the court's own count, 229,000 first-instance environmental cases were concluded in 2025. A distinctive feature is the 'restorative' judgment: the offender does not merely pay a fine but makes good the damage by planting trees, releasing fish fry or performing labour.
This is what explains the 'water forest' that forms the drama's backdrop. The Three Gorges reservoir is drawn down to 145 metres for the summer flood season and filled to 175 metres in winter, so the thirty-metre riparian belt between the two spends roughly half of every year under water — ordinary vegetation cannot survive there. Wanzhou has the largest stretch of this zone, some 350 kilometres of shoreline. The answer was a bald-cypress hybrid bred in China that survives months of complete submersion: the trial began in 2009 with two hundred and eight saplings, which stood under water for three months at the next filling, yet only four died. Today some two hundred and thirteen hectares of plantation protect seventy kilometres of bank; the name 'water forest' comes from the canopy turning red in winter. This is where the court comes in: the trees are planted from ecological restoration fees collected from environmental offenders — by a 2022 tally, more than five hundred convicted offenders had paid in 3.6 million yuan, which put over thirty thousand trees in the ground; a profile from autumn 2024 already speaks of more than fifty thousand trees planted.
The production was commissioned by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party's Chongqing committee; its co-producers were the municipal ecological-environmental education centre, the court itself and the Three Gorges convergent media centre. Production was awarded by public tender to a Beijing studio, Beijing Yinshi Hongda.
The piece airs on 15 August simultaneously on the national Voice of China channel, on the party's study app, and on the Ximalaya and Yunting audio platforms — across more than two hundred outlets and online platforms, according to China News Service. That same day China's new Ecological and Environmental Code, adopted by the National People's Congress in March, comes into force, and the same day is National Ecology Day. The People's Daily report says so outright: the launch is an 'important instrument' for the in-depth study and promotion of the code.
The code itself runs to five books and 1,242 articles, merging ten previously separate laws — among them the framework environmental protection act and the air, water and soil pollution laws. After the Civil Code, this is China's second statute to be called a 'code'. Its novelties include a standalone climate chapter and a statutory basis for the carbon market, along with rules on waste from solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.
The system, however, also draws serious scholarly criticism. Rachel E. Stern, a researcher at Berkeley Law, argues that environmental courts serve partly to let local leaderships signal commitment while handling cases flexibly: a court may take a case when pressure rises, and turn it away when powerful local interests are involved. Wang Yueduan and Xia Ying, researchers at Peking University and the University of Hong Kong, write of 'state-controlled judicialisation' on the basis of interviews with procurators: fewer than one per cent of public-interest investigations against public authorities ever reach a court. And an analysis by the LSE Grantham Institute in London finds that the new code lacks time-bound climate targets and contains no provisions for independent expert oversight. By Dialogue Earth's tally, 92 per cent of environmental public-interest suits in 2023 were brought by procurators and only 4.8 per cent by non-governmental organisations.
None of the accessible sources names the work's creators — the scriptwriter, the director or the voice actors.
Cast & Crew
- Real-life model of the protagonist Wang Xiang (bíró, wanzhoui kerületi népbíróság)
Sources: China News Service (中国新闻网) — He Ying (2026-08-07) · Baidu Baike — entry on 守望青绿 (2026-08-07) · Chinese government gazette — establishing National Ecology Day (2023-06-28) · China News Service — the “Ten Years of the Yangtze” series (2026) · Supreme People’s Court — on the Wanzhou “water forest” programme (2020-11-30) · Chongqing municipal government — data on the riparian zone (消落带) and the plantation (2022-05-09) · Supreme People’s Court (English) — a decade of environmental justice (2025-06-12) · NPC Observer (Changhao Wei) — the structure of the Ecological and Environmental Code (2026-03) · Rachel E. Stern (UC Berkeley) — The Political Logic of China’s New Environmental Courts (2014) · Wang Yueduan – Xia Ying, The China Quarterly — “state-controlled judicialisation” (2023) · LSE Grantham Institute — a critical analysis of the Code (2026-05-27) · Dialogue Earth (Lin Zi) — Chinese experts on the Code (2026-04-22)
AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in Chinese.