Ma Jun’s environmental focus developed primarily through his work as a journalist in the 1990s. As an environmental reporter for the South China Morning Post after graduating in 1992, he traveled extensively across China, exposing himself to environmental degradation in different regions. His journalism took place during a period when environmental challenges were becoming increasingly severe. By the late 1990s, more than 60% of China’s freshwater sources were contaminated, over 320 million people lacked access to safe drinking water, and industrial sectors such as textile manufacturing were major contributors to water pollution.
As Ma traveled across the country, he witnessed their effects firsthand. At the Three Gorges Dam in 1994, he found barren forests and polluted rivers, where construction had stripped the landscape bare. At Dongting Lake in 1996—described in classical Chinese poetry as vast and beautiful—he found the lake reduced to a series of thin rivers during the dry season. On the Fen River in Shanxi, he watched streams of copper green, iron red, and chemical yellow pour out of different factory towns, each color representing a different industry, all draining into the Yellow River. He later met the chief engineer of the Yellow River Commission, who described the dam projects as a triumph of Chinese development, while the river itself ran dry for months of the year.
This contrast between the engineer’s narrative of triumph and the real environmental degradation Ma observed became central to shaping his environmental philosophy, convincing him that the official reports of development success regularly concealed the environmental costs that came with it. Through his journalism, he observed significant pollution, ecosystem decline, and water management problems across the country. These experiences gave him first-hand insight into the environmental consequences of rapid industrialisation and how local economic incentives often undermined environmental protection.
They also reinforced his view that environmental information was often inaccessible to the public. Because this information was scattered across local websites, it was hard for ordinary citizens, journalists, or investors to find or compare. Therefore, the public was unable to identify which factories were polluting, how severely, or whether anything was being done about it. As Ma Jun later described it, the barrier was not that the pollution was invisible—it was that the information about it was.
One of the things that came from his time as a journalist was the publication of his book China’s Water Crisis in 1999, which gathered his findings across years of field research and documented environmental conditions across China’s major rivers. The book established Ma Jun as an important voice in environmental policy discussions globally.
His publication marked the beginning of a bigger journey in environmental advocacy. Following the book, he undertook a fellowship at Yale University in 2004—the Yale World Fellows Program, a program that brings together a small group of accomplished mid-career professionals from around the world for a semester of study and exchange at Yale University, with the goal of building a global network of emerging leaders. As part of this fellowship, he carried out comparative research on Western environmental governance systems—including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and toxic release inventories—which convinced him that the missing element in China’s environmental governance was public access to information, sharpening this tenet into an institutional blueprint.
Overall, the development of his book, the fellowship, and the creation of the IPE can all be linked back to the same origin: his work as a journalist, documenting environmental conditions in China in the 1990s.
IE x RAIA Summer Research Programme
This article is an excerpt from a report on Ma Jun produced as part of a RAIA research programme on climate leaders. For a full picture of Ma Jun’s climate leadership, including the sources, read the full report. This project was fully financed by IE University’s School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs and School of Science and Technology.
Authors: Sami Kayani Mahmood Kausar, Viktoria Vekova & Daniela Bermudez Bolivar
Editor: Réka Baranyai
Project Lead: Dario Hasenstab
