Because there are numerous environmental disputes reported in
China, we employed the following three principles for selecting
cases in the study: (1) public initiated, (2) scopes of public participation
are at three different levels, community, regional, and
national, and (3) occurred in places where levels of economic
development are different. Thus, we selected three nationally well
known cases of environmental activism for the study. The public
participation in the Liu Li Tun case mostly occurred at a community
level, that of the Xiamen PX project at the city/regional level, and the
Nu River Dams project at the national and international level. The
comprehensive coverage of the geographic scopes and administrative
levels allows a good understanding of why different groups of
people are concerned about different environmental issues and what