Another 5-10% care enough about the environment to make daily conscious choices for it, but most of those choices amount to lip service or marketing-driven "greenwashing". Most of these people live in cities.
The rest just don't care, and will continue driving their cars and eating >300g of meat per day until they die or become incapable of deciding for themselves.
Some of my favorite places as a child are still my favorite today - the CA Academy of Sciences and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Those two institutions alone probably have changed Bay Area perceptions of the environment.
China should set up institutions like that, both for research and public awareness. There is so much biodiversity in China that we rarely hear about [0]
(I will also mention that of course this is mere anecdote, I was in China from 2011 to 2012 and don't have firsthand knowledge of how much spitting there was before the Olympics, and I was generally in a "third-tier" city in Guangxi province, rather than in Beijing.)
Also realize that most of the population that matters lives in a narrow band near the ocean and sometimes in terrible geography where screwing up water or air is easy. One thing might help in the long run, bad water and air affects everyone including the politicians who might someday realize they have to do something. You can ignore a river of dead pigs if you live elsewhere but choking on air is fairly universal.
The laws didn't come from nowhere, but they certainly had an impact on the majority's way of thinking. Why else would the Religious Right be so absolutely set against laws allowing same-sex marriage? If laws didn't change social values, they'd have nothing to fear from them.