Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

In difficult circumstances, NGOs had carved out a space for civil society that had not existed before. While traditional folklore was diminishing, new groups were trying to create a modern culture of sustainability. Over the years, I had seen them campaigning on many fronts: in courtrooms, through the media, on websites, sometimes in negotiations alongside the authorities, and sometimes on the streets against them. It was an uphill battle.

The country’s most successful environment lawyer, Wang Canfa, told me there were more conservation and anti-pollution laws than ever, but the environment was still deteriorating. “China needs to be ruled by law. At the moment this is not the case. Personal connections often overrule the law. Some environmental laws are useless. We need to educate people, particularly those in power. We need more public oversight. We need to improve information disclosure.” 22

Transparency was the focus of Ma Jun, whose Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs published an online pollution map of China, naming and shaming the worst companies and municipalities. Ma worked with sympathetic government officials and used official data to expose offenders. Yet even after the introduction of a public disclosure law in 2008, the vast majority of local governments failed to respond to his requests for information, despite being legally obliged to do so. 23In a supportive but depressing note, the environment ministry admitted polluters were able to operate in a “black box” that showed the public interest was not being effectively protected. 24

Elsewhere in the government, there was evident unease about the growth of civil society. Communist cadres were suspicious of potential rivals, particularly after NGOs played a prominent role in the “Color Revolutions” that swept through the former Soviet Union in 2004 and 2005. Groups were forbidden to set up nationwide networks. Their staff were often interrogated by state security officers. There was an invisible line that bordered their permissible activities. Nobody knew where it was until they stepped over it. Those that became too influential were broken up or their representatives declared persona non grata. 25Activists who challenged the authorities risked violent retribution and arrest.

I met lawyers who were beaten and threatened with closure, writers who were censored, and journalists who were frustrated that their scoops were spiked by editors either because of self-censorship or on the orders of the propaganda department. I visited three women, the wives of imprisoned activists, who were being harassed and followed by plainclothes police or thugs employed by the authorities. 26At least seven of my interviewees were later jailed. In many cases, they were at least partly involved in environmental issues but were clearly deemed to have strayed too far toward politics. Hu Jia, the winner of the Sakharov Prize, started out as an environmentalist. He joined student groups doing conservation work in Yunnan and worked with the Kekexili veterans on an eco-tourism program on the Tibetan Plateau. But after he dared to criticize the government’s record on human rights in an open letter ahead of the Olympics, he was sentenced to three years in prison. 27

Others were imprisoned even though they remained focused on green issues. Wu Lihong was declared an “Environmental Warrior” by the National People’s Congress in 2005 for his work in trying to clear up the pollution in Lake Tai in Jiangsu Province. He was later accused of blackmail and jailed for three years.

At times, the government seems frightened of its own people. Arrests of activists, Internet restrictions, and the massive domestic security operations around the Beijing Olympics and the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic suggest that the Communist Party is unlikely to ever view civil society as a trusted ally. It will certainly not allow it to grow unchecked. Yet grassroots activism is flourishing.

At one level, this is due to a collapse of ideology. There is a widespread yearning for a new set of values. I have seen it among several young Chinese friends who converted to Christianity, and in older associates who started practicing Buddhism. It is evident in the growing popularity of trips to Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, and other minority regions where many Han tourists go in search of a lost spirituality.

People are looking to monks, priests, gurus, idealists, charismatic celebrities, and persuasive bloggers for something more than postmodern, globalized materialism. The environment is not as popular as online nationalism or entrepreneurism, but groups such as Roots & Shoots, Friends of Nature, and Global Village have a growing following.

Many domestic journalists—who are often closest to the problems and the cover-ups—have become environmental activists. Prominent among them is Feng Yongfeng, who runs what he calls a University of Nature that takes people on hikes into the countryside and encourages them to submit research papers for peer review. Many other prominent environmentalists are journalists or former journalists, including Pan Yue and Ma Jun.

Another is Wang Yongchen, a radio broadcaster and founder of one of China’s earliest NGOs, the Green Volunteers League. Wang actively proselytizes among media organizations, setting up monthly environmental salons for journalists and field trips to areas affected by pollution, desertification, or dam building. Every year she takes a group to Inner Mongolia to help with tree-planting campaigns. She believes the media fill a gap in the nation’s governance structure: “In China, we have law, but sometimes it doesn’t work. When that happens, articles, documentaries, and pictures can help to solve the problems.”

Despite the hardships facing many activists, she is upbeat. The NGO movement is growing and becoming more ambitious, she feels, as it shifts its approach from public education to influencing business and policymakers.

There are small signs of a pickup in popular culture too. Xiao Wei, the lead singer of the band Catcher in the Rye, wrote the eco-anthem “Green” on his return from a trip sponsored by Greenpeace to see the devastation caused by logging in Papua New Guinea. The single reached number one on the Amazon chart of Chinese music. 28Another green pop evangelist, Long Kuan, hit the top spot in the Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt music chart (one of the most influential in China despite its odd name) with a song that attempts to marry wealth and conservation in its syrupy lyrics:

The song captures the two contradictory elements of a new middle-class Chinese dream: rich and green. Environmental sustainability is marketed as a stylish new form of consumerism. It sells, especially to the urban young. This marketing demographic has its own dedicated magazine, Lohas (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability).

Long Kuan is a passionate vegetarian who is trying to save the planet by encouraging people to eat less meat. 30For a while, she even arranged regular gatherings of celebrities to try to encourage them into similar habits (until such meetings were prohibited by the authorities).

Yet such small green cultural buds are subsumed by the far bigger and wider trend among consumers to buy larger houses, more furniture, new cars, and electricity-gobbling home appliances. Management guides and fashion magazines far outsell any environment-related publication. Moreover, the pop-culture approach that helped to spread the green gospel in the West is nowhere near so effective in China. Most celebrities are uninterested in conservation. 31A different approach is needed.