BEIJING — From a public relations standpoint, it didn't look good. In the space of less than a month, China had quashed two potentially embarrassing environmental reports that would have said what most people already know: This is a country facing a costly and increasingly deadly environmental crisis.
First, in early July, reports surfaced that China had successfully lobbied the World Bank to redact portions of an environmental assessment that calculated how many people were likely to die prematurely as a result of air pollution.
Then, late last week, the government announced that it was canceling plans to publish a "green GDP" report that would have calculated the cost of pollution to China's rapidly growing economy, as measured by its gross domestic product.
The decisions, on their face, appeared to suggest reluctance at the top of China's government to acknowledge the seriousness of environmental degradation that has caused the worst air pollution in the world, and water pollution that has left millions of people without local sources of potable water.
Chinese and Western experts, however, said Monday that authorities might have acted for reasons not readily apparent to casual observers. They said the reluctance to publicize the country's environmental woes might have had more to do with political relations between the central government and provincial leaders than with a fear of airing dirty laundry.
"As soon as you develop a system like this, then you can do a ranking of environmental performance of local governments," said Andres Liebenthal, the environmental coordinator for the World Bank office in Beijing, who worked with China's environmental protection agency on both of the reports. "And so the ones that are highly ranked are fine, and the ones that are ranked low are not happy with it, so there's a pushback."
On paper, many environmentalists agree, China has some of the strongest pollution control policies in the world. Its effort to calculate the environmental toll on its GDP was bold by international standards. Environmentalists have failed to persuade many developed nations, including the United States, to undertake such an accounting.
China released a "green GDP" report for the first time in September and was preparing a second annual report when the decision was made to spike it. The report last year calculated the cost of pollution at $67.7 billion, or just over 3% of China's gross domestic product
