A critical evaluation of the current governance model for heavy metal pollution in China

China is a developing country that has experienced rapid industrial growth over the last 30 years. However, due to limited environmental legislation and enforcement, many industrial companies have directly released wastewater into waterways without proper treatment, leading to the problem of heavy metal pollution. As a result, chronic exposure to heavy metals is considered the main threat to human health in China. To solve the issue of heavy metal pollution, China’s government used top-down centralised state-centric governance. However, state-centric governance is limited in that it requires a long response time. In this paper, the theory of network governance is instead applied to analyse the heavy metal pollution problem, and a new model, the voluntary governance model, is introduced. With the voluntary governance, the China government will be better able to improve the efficiency of the governance process and provide a healthier environment to the citizens.