Two people, one office, and the pollution records nobody was reading
In May 2006, Ma Jun — a former investigative journalist whose 1999 book China’s Water Crisis had mapped the country’s rivers in crisis — founded the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (公众环境研究中心) in Beijing with a staff of two. His wager was simple: the Chinese government was publishing pollution data, dispersed across environmental protection bureaus and buried in formats nobody used. Collect it, map it, and make it public, and transparency itself could do the enforcing. Twenty years later, that wager is the Blue Map.
What it does
IPE’s stated mission is to use information transparency to drive reductions in industrial pollution and greenhouse gases. Its advocacy rests on what it calls three pillars — “the power of law, the power of the purse, and the power of people.” In practice, IPE aggregates publicly available but scattered pollution records — environmental quality indicators, emissions data, environmental supervision records — into interactive online maps, then presses companies through supply-chain transparency. Its campaigns have included screening Walmart’s supplier factories (2008), the Apple supply-chain reports including The Other Side of Apple (2011), and a heavy-metals campaign aimed at technology companies (2010). By 2014, its Green Choice Alliance work with brand customers was formalized around the Blue Map data.
The three tools
- Blue Map database (蔚蓝地图) — the cornerstone: 3.05 million+ environmental noncompliance records covering 1.64 million+ factories, with hourly or bihourly air and water monitoring data from 72,000+ “key monitoring facilities” (IPE’s self-reported figures; no independent audit located). Open via the Blue Map app and ipe.org.cn. The full dataset record sits in the Dataset Directory.
- PITI — Pollution Information Transparency Index — an annual index scoring Chinese cities on environmental-information disclosure (launched 2009).
- CITI — Corporate Information Transparency Index — the supply-chain transparency counterpart.
A note on names — two people, one romanization
IPE’s founder is Ma Jun the environmentalist (马军) — journalist, author of China’s Water Crisis, TIME 100 (2006), Goldman Environmental Prize (2012). He is a different person from Ma Jun the economist (马骏), the PBOC research-bureau chief economist and green-finance architect who appears elsewhere in this directory. The two names share a romanization and nothing else. This page, and every link from it, keeps them separate.
Limits on the record
- IPE aggregates government-published data; completeness is bounded by what PRC environmental authorities choose to disclose. That constraint is structural, not a criticism of IPE’s methods.
- IPE operates as a Beijing-based NGO in a tightly constrained civic space; independence is not inferred here beyond attributed facts.
- Secondary sources place the Water Pollution Map launch in September 2006 or 2007 — the discrepancy is noted, not resolved.
- The alternate English rendering “Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs” is a stylistic variant in some secondary sources, not a rename.