Quotes from Ma Jun

We firmly believe the environmental issues cannot be addressed without extensive public participation, but people need to be informed before they can get involved.

Beijing was such a different city. There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles. I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.

We want to use the environment to shift the way our society works.

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers.

At the end of the day, the government, local government all bow to public pressure.

I think its time to change and balance the environment and growth. If we don't do that, we're going to suffer a hard landing one day very soon.

Brands who come to China, often they just care about price - so they actually drive the suppliers to cut corners on environmental standards to win a contract.

If major companies sourcing in developing countries care only about price and quality, local suppliers will be lured to cut corners on environmental standards to win contracts.

Apple has made this commitment that it's a green company. So how do you fulfill your commitment if you don't consider you have responsibility in your suppliers' pollution?

It has been shown that public participation can limit powerful interest groups, while competing interests can help find a reasonable balance between development and environmental protection.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

The motivation should come from regulatory enforcement, but enforcement is weak, and environmental litigation is near to impossible. So there's an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of motivation.

In the future, officials will feel more pressure to protect the environment. But how to assess the officials' efforts to protect the environment is still a pivotal issue.

Some of the areas in China have been under very grave water scarcity: for example, the north China plain; they are facing a very serious water shortage. Per capita levels have dropped to very serious levels, including in Beijing.

We can't go to courts in China, so we have to find alternate ways, like working with brands to try and create a level playing field by identifying the most obvious polluters.

In China we need to do our own part to try to combat global climate change.

To deal with local pollution, China has put on the agenda the capping of coal, which has long been a sensitive issue.

Greening the globalised manufacturing and sourcing will be the single biggest help multinationals could make to the tough pollution control in China and other developing countries.

In America, you complain about job losses because of China, but here, we carry all of the environmental costs.

In some cases, it's not just about cleaning up the factories. It's about cleaning up the nearby rivers and lakes that have been tainted with heavy metals.

We copied laws and regulations from western countries, but enforcement remains weak, and environmental litigation is still quite near impossible.

We're manufacturing to meet the demands of our own people but, in the meantime, for the entire world as well, and that definitely put a lot of extra pressure on our environment.

China should cut heavy industries' share in gross domestic output by 9 percentage points between 2013 and 2030 to meet its pollution cuts target.

It's true that hydropower exploitation can bring economic development, but not necessarily to the benefit of local people.