The Chinese government is working to combat an environmental crisis largely caused by its own policies. The answers so far: dramatic speeches, jargon-laden white papers, and of course, more policy.
The more tangible moves include closing factories, limiting car travel, and even swatting flies. From a regulatory standpoint, however, China has changed its tax and foreign investment laws to steer capital from overseas toward projects that improve the environment—or at least, ones that don’t make it any worse.
Central to that strategy is the Catalogue for Guidance of Foreign Investment in Industry, a government-published tome that classifies industries as encouraged, permitted, restricted, ...