Environment vs growth debate heats up in China

But just a month later Pan Yue, SEPA's outspoken deputy chief, lost a key ally when then statistics chief Qiu Xiaohua was sacked for involvement in a big Shanghai pension fund scandal.

"Pan from the environment agency has always been enthusiastic about green GDP, but there has been a change in the statistics bureau," said a researcher who is close to the matter.

He said the two agencies also disagreed over who would pay for compiling the green GDP data.

Wang Jinnan with the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, who was technical head of the project, acknowledged that the silence that has fallen over green GDP was partly due to "coordination problems" between the two bodies.

Another headwind is that officials are still largely judged by their ability to deliver high economic growth, despite official pledges to take their environmental record into account.

Wang Dongjing, an official at the ruling Communists' Central Party School, said some local governments in western China would be only too happy if polluting industries relocated there from the seaboard.

"As long as GDP is still a measure to appraise officials, local governments won't stop their impulse to speed up growth," Wang was quoted on Friday as saying by the Shanghai Securities News.

LOCAL DIFFICULTIES

Parallel to the inaugural attempt to calculate a nationwide green GDP, 10 provinces took part in a pilot program to come up with their own figures under state guidance.

But officials said that project had died, even if some provinces have chosen to press on by themselves.