Professor Liu Hongyan, the head of Environmental Law Department of CASS Law Institute and a member of the Executive Council of China Environmental and Resource Law Society, was recently interviewed by the newspaper The Beijing News on the role played by environmental inspection in environmental protection in China. In the interview, Professor Liu pointed out that environmental inspection has solved some prominent problems in the current work of environmental protection in the country. The Central Environmental Protection Inspection Team, which was established in January 2016, has played an important role in implementing the Environmental Protection Law, further strengthening the subject responsibility of local government, timely discovering the problems faced by local governments in environmental protection, and pointing out the right direction in adjusting the relationship between environmental protection and economic development. Environmental inspection has effectively contained the phenomenon of violating laws, disobeying orders and defying prohibitions by local governments in the field of environmental protection. The environmental governance mode has already been transformed from “a campaign-style governance mode” to a “normalized governance mode”, and a linkage mechanism between environmental inspection and the existing legal systems has been established.