With one of the worst environmental records of the world, Chinese citizens are realizing their land is worth protecting. This illustrates once again how as nations develop economically the perception of the environment changes to make it a superior good, in contrast with many NGO’s which try to protect the environment sometimes at the cost of growth.
Green Groups Move To Clean Up China
New Generation of Activists Emerges as Country Faces Strains of Economic Growth
By PETER WONACOTT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 14, 2004; Page A13
HEFEI, China — When Wen Bo was a college student, he put up a handmade poster on his college campus warning that the “Earth is in Crisis.” He then spent the rest of a June afternoon trying to raise environmental awareness at a local police station.
“They had never heard of Earth Day,” Mr. Wen says of the plainclothes police who detained him. The police grilled the student toting a poster with the suspicious-sounding slogan on the anniversary of the government’s June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown, but the interrogation had an upside: “It was a great opportunity to publicize our cause,” he says.
By PETER WONACOTT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 14, 2004; Page A13
HEFEI, China — When Wen Bo was a college student, he put up a handmade poster on his college campus warning that the “Earth is in Crisis.” He then spent the rest of a June afternoon trying to raise environmental awareness at a local police station.
“They had never heard of Earth Day,” Mr. Wen says of the plainclothes police who detained him. The police grilled the student toting a poster with the suspicious-sounding slogan on the anniversary of the government’s June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown, but the interrogation had an upside: “It was a great opportunity to publicize our cause,” he says.
Mr. Wen hasn’t missed many opportunities since that encounter back in 1991. An energetic evangelist for the environment, the 32-year-old is at the forefront of a new generation attempting to clean up China. Mr. Wen, who dresses in T-shirts and baggy hiking pants, dashes around the country helping to organize and fund fledgling groups — from farmers in China’s far west seeking to stop the desert sands encroaching on their land to Chinese sailors trying to protect sea life.
“Ordinary citizens have outlets that we didn’t before,” Mr. Wen says. “You can be a bird watcher and an environmentalist.”
The swelling number of groups speaks both to the country’s problems and to how the political system gradually is opening to new voices. Some see these activists as helping to shape China’s future, as the government seeks to respond to the strains of economic growth.
“They are pushing the envelope slowly but surely,” says Elizabeth C. Economy at the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington, the author of a new book on China’s environmental challenges called “The River Runs Black.” She adds: “It is an extraordinary transformation.”
It arrives at a critical time not only for China but for the world. Thanks to booming demand for energy and a burgeoning car population, China is the world’s second-biggest producer of so-called greenhouse gases — the emissions widely believed to speed global warming by trapping the sun’s rays in the Earth’s atmosphere. Experts expect China to surpass the U.S. as the No. 1 producer by 2030. Some of China’s proposed dam projects threaten the flow of rivers into Southeast Asia. Wealthy urbanites fixing up their homes are fueling a timber trade that China’s environmentalists claim is destroying forests in Siberia, Indonesia and Myanmar.
By official count, China has more than 2,000 nongovernmental environmental groups, up from virtually zero a decade ago. Many have registered as companies to avoid heavy-handed government control, and some skirt registration, operating beneath official radar.
The government’s more accommodating stance is a big shift from the experiences of China’s earlier environmentalists. Journalist Dai Qing spent the late 1980s speaking out against the proposed Three Gorges Dam, and then was jailed when the government clamped down on its critics following the 1989 massacre of democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. The completed project attracts contention from a new generation of China’s environmentalists. One problem: long belts of garbage float along the reservoir, interfering with ship navigation, according to the government-run Xinhua news agency.
“We used to be tools of the state — no independent thought,” says Ms. Dai, who still is tailed occasionally by state security agents. “People are more open now and, increasingly, they want more out of life than fashionable clothes and fancy cars.”
China’s new green groups inhabit a wide spectrum. Green Student Organizations, or Green SOS, is a nationwide network of students established in 2001 that offers environmental information and training via the Internet. Snowland Great Rivers and Environmental Protection Association, founded by two Tibetans, seeks to protect the mountain origins of many of China’s biggest rivers. And in a sign of how notions of social consciousness can spread beyond environmental causes, young lawyers in Shanghai recently started a volunteer network called Grassroots Community. It offers legal assistance not only to environmental victims but also to workers and those with medical issues.
This new generation of activists has showed a willingness to heed prescribed boundaries. Zhang Jianyu, program manager in China for U.S.-based group Environmental Defense, has polished his lobbying skills trying to solve pollution problems. He works with central and local governments promoting emissions trading — a system that has local governments set pollution quotas for factories. Companies can sell credits if they generate less than their allotted share of pollutants, or buy them if they want to expand. Mr. Zhang, who recently returned to China after attending graduate school at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, sometimes obliges requests of officials to write recommendations for sons and daughters who want to study in the U.S.
“If you have to solve a problem in China, you need to work with the government,” he says.
To some, China’s rising wealth and widening liberties mean environmental issues carry less of a political edge than in the past. Last year, several Chinese environmental groups organized an Internet campaign opposing a government plan to build 13 hydropower projects on the Salween River, which flows into Myanmar and Thailand. Top leaders thus far have withheld final approval, according to Water Ministry officials. Zhong Min of Greenroots Power says the petition wasn’t about politics.
“This is a beautiful river,” says Ms. Zhong, sipping an iced coffee at Starbucks in Shanghai. “We didn’t want to see it destroyed.”
Mr. Wen’s brand of environmentalism also has taken a less confrontational approach. The son of two machine-tool workers in the northeast city of Dalian, Mr. Wen grew up fascinated with the high-profile brand of environmental activism practiced by Greenpeace. After watching news clips of the group’s Rainbow Warrior ship plying the open seas, Mr. Wen and his schoolmates christened a rubber raft of the same name and paddled down a dirty canal. As a college student in the early 1990s, Mr. Wen wrote to Greenpeace headquarters — and then several offices in Europe — offering to set up a branch in China.
“He was obsessed with Greenpeace,” says Wu Changhua, a reporter for China Environmental News at the time who helped Mr. Wen find the group’s address.
Greenpeace wouldn’t arrive in mainland China until nearly a decade later in 2000, at which time Mr. Wen would help set up the office. In the meantime, he began to realize that what China really lacked were homegrown groups. In 1996, he founded Green Student Volunteers, a network of 100 or so student environmental groups that would hold meetings and share information. Mr. Wen went on to study in India and South Korea, and worked in the U.S. at several environmental organizations.
Mr. Wen now works through a Colorado-based organization called Global Greengrants Fund. Because he is a master networker but no policy wonk, the job plays to his strengths, those who know him say. As Chinese coordinator, Mr. Wen visits private environmental groups and often awards them small donations of cash, helping them surmount obstacles to survival in China.
On a recent trip to Anhui, Mr. Wen attended a forum for student groups across the province, one of the least developed in eastern China. As he walked into a classroom at the Water Conservancy and Hydraulics Institute, 60 pairs of eyes adjusted to the sight of the clean-cut activist with a shy grin.
Mr. Wen, wearing a blue Greenpeace T-shirt emblazoned with a fish bone, blinked under the fluorescent lights. Then, without notes, he began a 90-minute rundown of China’s environmental problems, from dams to illegal wildlife trade to its anything-goes economic growth. “The Western media likes to refer to China as the ‘world’s factory,’ but really we have become the world’s kitchen,” Mr. Wen said. “We make the goods and send them overseas, and all the chicken bones and grape pits are left with us.”
That model of development is visible in Anhui. Like cities across China, the province capital, Hefei, is scarred by half-completed buildings and a mostly empty industrial zone on the city’s outskirts. Factory haze shrouds the city. At Anhui’s premier tourist site, one of China’s most famous mountains, Huangshan, fabled pine trees are drying up and dying. They have been replaced by plastic replicas. Environmentalists blame the many hotels on the mountain that are sucking up the ground water. (See related article.)
After the talk that evening, students flocked around Mr. Wen — including some who appeared smitten. “I didn’t realize Professor Wen was so … young,” one female student said. “We worship him,” her friend added.
At dinner that night, some students complained that school authorities were holding them back. They have organized across universities via the Internet. Some groups are eager to investigate river pollution; others want to organize citywide recycling campaigns. But university officials ask students to keep close to campus.
Officials’ nervousness about losing control of the groups became apparent when the students had to move their environmental forum off campus. The reason echoes Mr. Wen’s early brushes with politically sensitive police: big student gatherings were banned ahead of the June 4 Tiananmen anniversary. But the forum took place anyway at a nearby hotel, and even some local environmental officials attended the opening ceremony.
In between his tips on fund raising — “coffee mugs sell well … music concerts draw big crowds … be transparent with your finances” — Mr. Wen delivered his own green gospel to the young crowd. “This generation has a huge responsibility,” he told the students. “This is our time for a major contribution.”
Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com