An Emerging Green Market • - in China. Myth or Reality. Ricky Y,K. Chan A n awareness of environmental degrada- tion has been a long time coming in China. Since declaring its open-door policy in late 1978, China has been paying a high ecological price for its rapid economic growth in terms of worsening pollution and an accelerating depletion of many critical resources. Compared to other ecologically advanced countries, China's apathy toward the environment is evident. On average, the country spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on environmental protection, whereas the corresponding spending ratios for the U.S. and Australia are 2.5 percent and 5 percent, re- spectively. Indeed, China's spending ratio is even lower than Hong Kong's 1.5 percent--a territory, say Martinsons, So, Tin, and Wong (1997), that is notoriously known as "the most ecologically un- sound place in the world." As the environment continues to worsen, the Chinese government has begun to reckon the severity of the problem. Measures such as the recent enactment of various antipollution laws and the preparation of new criminal codes for environmental offenses have shown the country's determination to tackle the problems. On the consumer side, incidental commentaries also suggest that increasingly affluent and educated Chinese citizens are more inclined to purchase eco-friendly products than before. This develop- ment gives both international and domestic mar- keters a promising opportunity to cultivate a lucrative green market in the world's most popu- lous country (1.2 billion people). Nevertheless, as systematic empirical investi- gation of green consumers in China is virtually nonexistent, how far the anecdotal evidence re- ally reflects reality is yet to be verified. As such, marketers who plan to invest aggressively in China's green market based solely on this limited information may do so at great peril. How "green" are Chinese consumers? To attempt to provide businesses with more informa- tion on assessing the potential of China's en- vironmental market, a survey was conducted in two of the most devel- oped yet polluted cities of China--Beijing and Guangzhou. It is hoped that the findings can also help the Chinese government fine-tune its nationwide environmen- tal strategies. The Survey With the assistance of a research agency, 300 households from each of the two cities were randomly selected based on a self-compiled sampling frame. Within each se- lected household, an adult member (aged 18 or above) was interviewed, answering questions about his or her general environmental attitudes, green consumption behaviors, and demographic backgrounds. Researchers collected 549 usable questionnaires for the survey: 279 from Beijing and 270 from Guangzhou. Overall, the major demographic characteristics (gender, marital sta- tus, age, education, and income) of the respon- dents were comparable to those of the entire Chinese population. General Environmental Attitudes The respondents were asked to answer 12 seven- point attitude statements (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree) adopted and modified from Berberoglu and Tosunoglu's (1995) environmen- tal attitude scale, which was specifically devel- oped to study inhabitants of a developing coun- try on its way to industrialization. Responses were then factor-analyzed and five meaningful An Emerging Green Market in China: Myth or Reality? 55