Watchdog with teeth

The national environmental watchdog's latest upgrade into a full-fledged ministry is an overdue response to environment protection departments' well-touted sense of feebleness.

Implementation of the increasingly harsh environmental policies, which almost always contradict with local governments' aspirations for higher growth, entails coercive authority, which was exactly what the previous State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) wanted the most.

We fully understood the SEPA's complaints about being powerless in the face of wrongdoing by "same-level" government offices. The SEPA itself had fought relentlessly against local governments' rampant disregard of environmental consequences. We saw all that. But it is a matter of common sense that a government agency ranked slightly lower than its siblings has little, if not no, authority over a more powerful government office.