Wen Bo: Environmentalism growing in China

By Tiffany Wong For CNN

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- Wen Bo says he was inspired to enter the environmental movement in high school when he watched the televised tactics of the international pressure group, Greenpeace.

Wen Bo is seen here in 2005, investigating sea turtle trade in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, China.

After graduating from the China School of Journalism in Beijing and earning a Master's in International Relations from the KDI School of International Policy and Management in Seoul, South Korea, Wen embarked on an environmental crusade that involved web-based activism, grant sponsorship and awareness-raising programs.

Wen set up Greenpeace's office in Beijing in 2000, then moved farther into the international arena of environmental work, operating outside strict governmental regulations.

Today the 36-year-old Wen uses his media and environmental savvy to support local NGOs in China. Wen has drawn the international media spotlight, featured as TIME Magazine's 2006 "Eco-Hero" and in a story by the Asian Wall Street Journal in 2004. He's also harnessing the funding power of international environmental groups, such as the U.S.-based Global Greengrants Fund and Pacific Environment.

From his base in Beijing, Wen recently discussed by telephone his projects in China and elsewhere around the world.

CNN: You were heralded in the press a few years ago for being part of a new generation of activists in China. Do you see yet another generation appearing?

Wen: Yes, I've become an old generation (activist). And there are lots of younger people more engaged in environmental issues. They have started to graduate and some of them have already recently graduated and they have started (taking jobs with) environmental organizations.

We do see the emergence of a new generation of young people that I equip with skills such as the Internet, building Web sites and also language skills. These are people who are open-minded and also do not live in the shadow of the student demonstrations of Tiananmen Square in 1989. So, they start to open their eyes to environmental fields. We do say they have become an important force in shaping the environmental movement in China.

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CNN: How important are young people in the grassroots movement in China?

Wen: Young people are idealistic and they are energetic. They are new blood to the existing environmental movement because, in the past, most of the effort has been taken by (retired) people or people who are middle aged. So, they are different than the people who take environmental work as a hobby. They really start to take it as a cause and as a 'real job.'

CNN: What is the role of technology (Internet, e-mail, blogs, Web sites, and the media) in aiding the grassroots movement?

Wen: [Young people] use this new media to publicize, to network, to get connected with people who are not in the same region. So, they can share ideas, share information instantly over the Internet, through email, and blogs.

So, they are able to effectively (use) this technology and new means of communication to get information from the outside world. They not only get information from regular Chinese media, but they can instantly, easily get information from environmental groups, from other international bodies. All the information, obviously happening in other countries, can instantly be transferred to the Chinese young generation and they are able to use that.

Of course, they have to overcome language barriers. And I see fewer problems with this younger generation using English and other languages. I do see that they have been very much empowered and they have been very effective.

CNN: Which environmental groups and activists are doing cutting-edge work right now?

Wen: If you're looking at environmental problems, for example, there's one group based in Gansu province, called Green Camel Bell. They are on the frontline of the environmental fight because desertification is encroaching and they are located in a very heavy [industrial], polluted city of Lanzhou and also they are located on the site of the Yellow River.

Another example is GSEAN. This is a Chinese Web site which networks or consults young people.

CNN: Philanthropy and financial grants, then, are at the center of much of your work. Why?

Wen: It's because I do see there's one resource needed in China: funding. Of course, it's not the only resource you need, the group will also need training, will also need experience, and also need leadership. [We can also offer to] support the basic necessities: for example, the infrastructure, the computers, the office space -- lots of these people, no matter young or old, are dedicated. They want to contribute their time and effort to an environmental cause, but they cannot do so without the proper infrastructure.

CNN: How would you describe China's environmental grassroots movement?

Wen: I think ... we have come about over 10 years and, you know, during this period of time, there were lots of obstacles, for example, the government has never been, never really been supportive to grass-roots and non-governmental efforts.

But, many organizations are able to win the sympathy and support from many government officials; from the central government, from the local government, as well. The very... existence of these environmental organizations alone proves that they have managed to survive and accumulate the manpower and the resources for them to perform better, and they have also been able to recruit a large number of volunteers.

Many organizations, they are not membership-based but they are able to have a large number of volunteers. So, a lot of people check the Web site; write to these groups and some simply to report to these organizations of a local environment problem.

They no longer blindly just go to the environmental protection agency or go to the government in seek of answers. But, they now turn to the environmental organizations to find solutions, to find the opportunities for them to get involved. And also actively participate in some of the efforts.

It's a sign of that there is a channel; there is a way for ordinary citizens to participate in the efforts to change the environmental problems in China.

CNN: Should more environmental groups register officially with the Chinese government as these "official non-government organizations"?

Wen: Chinese [citizens] are interested in supporting these charitable efforts, but they lack the proper channels, so they don't know where to donate their funding, to donate their actual money to support a charitable cause. So often these types of resources are mostly channeled into government-organized NGOs.

I don't think real independent NGOs should have to register because there are so many barriers. Of course, if they can get that legal status that's the best, but they should not sacrifice their independence for the legitimacy within the Chinese system, because the system itself is not designed to support independent groups.

CNN: Which specific environmental issue are you most passionate about, or is most pressing for China or the world?

Wen: We know there are areas that have been neglected. There is this area, for example, marine pollution and marine issues. We know that it has been ignored by other organizations and also definitely ignored by the government. So we take that as our own cause in China.

So we identify the issues that are critical, but haven't been properly addressed. But it doesn't mean we aren't interested in many other issues. We are interested in climate change; we are interested in desertification. All of these problems are also very important issues, but we are obviously limited by our own resources. If we have a large number of staff or if we have enough funding, we definitely want to take on as many issues as possible.

CNN: You work with many internationally based environmental groups with some branches in China. Is there a reason you chose to work with such groups?

Wen: These organizations are well-established, they have the expertise. I work with these international environmental organizations, because I don't have to spend effort to raise the profile of these organizations. They are already a known group, so when you work with Chinese government officials or work with the general public, they know what these groups are doing. Otherwise you have to create an organization that has to let people know what you are doing and that takes time. It takes time for people to understand what your group actually is.

Although I am working with these types of international organizations, they are largely able to offer the freedom and offer enough room for me to develop our own program in China. They are able to allow me to develop the program that I personally feel is important...it's like I am working with a Chinese local group.

CNN: What can the rest of the world learn from China's environmental solutions? What can other countries learn from China's grass-roots environmental movement?

Wen: I think China could have been a leader to shape the future of our planet. Unfortunately, the Chinese government didn't realize the potential for such a role. China has been following the American step (of) becoming the next "super country" which continues to consume the natural resources without considering the limits of our planet. I think the people wouldn't necessarily share the vision as the national government.

We do not want to be a superpower that's damaging the global environment. The people know that they want the kind of development that is both good for themselves, for the community, for the country as well as for the rest of the world. Sometimes, I think the public is much more visionary than our government.

And, I think the rest of the world can learn (from) the dedication of the Chinese groups working in very difficult situations. They do not have the resources that they should have in dealing (with) such dramatic environmental problems. We are facing so many problems in China, but the society itself is not really designed to support the civil society development in China.

So, I feel that by supporting the environmental movement in China, you are actually helping to support the efforts that are saving the whole planet.

CNN: What are your predictions for the future of China's environment or China's grassroots movement?

Wen: I think we will continue to have the political obstacles, but over the years, I would say there will be more dedicated, skillful and talented young people who start to engage in the environmental movement. I would say that there will be grassroots organizations in many provinces in China and they are able to get a lot of sympathy from the public and added support from the international community.

There will be more and more people, even from the government, who [will] start to support this effort, because when they start to look closer, when they learn more about these environmental organizations, they will know that they are very caring, and bright and visionary people that they should support.

So, I think that I am very optimistic about the future of the environmental movement in China.

Where Poor Is A Poor Excuse

Beijing's brass lags behind leaders of nations with similar incomes.

Melinda Liu and Jonathan Ansfield

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:03 PM ET Jun 28, 2008

China ranks 113th among all countries, with poor scores in air pollution and other ills of industrialization.

Ask Chinese officials why their nation's environment is so toxic; you'll get a list of scientific-sounding explanations. The population is huge and dense. Arable land per capita is alarmingly sparse. Despite stunning rates of economic growth, many Chinese remain poor and rural, prone to ungreen behaviors such as tossing pollutants and trash into the rivers. But the real question is why China fares poorly in Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index (it ranks 101st overall, but dead last in its income category). Its weaknesses are legion: air pollution, stifling levels of industrial ozone, poor fishing practices, bad water quality and other ills.

The problem is not a lack of good intentions. For years President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have been reciting the mantra of sustainable development (and, for good measure, "Green Olympics"). They've set serious goals but have yet to institute the tough regulatory reforms needed to achieve them. Enforcement lags and market mechanisms aren't in place to give industry incentives to adopt green practices. Groundbreaking initiatives—most recently an effort to establish a "Green GDP" to measure the environmental progressiveness of each province—have languished due to lack of cooperation within the government.

China's environmental headaches run the gamut, but most can be linked to the scorching pace of economic growth. Factories that emit copious amounts of smog, soot and carbon have sprouted quickly and cheaply. Polluting, unsafe coal mines are so busy (and lucrative) that coal czars are loath to curb China's overriding dependence on coal as an energy source. As a result, China scores poorly on key categories such as water pollution, industrial CO2 emissions and indoor air pollution (which in some cases is linked to the prevalent use of burning coal bricks for warmth during winter). One third of China's rivers and three quarters of its major lakes are "highly polluted," according to the OECD, which late last year reported that up to 300 million people drink contaminated water.

Hu Jintao and other leaders have exhorted the masses to create a "resource-saving, environment-friendly society." But compelling local apparatchiks to follow this slogan is a huge conundrum because for decades the biggest factor in their promotions has been their localities' economic-growth rate. This has come at a huge cost to the environment. According to the World Bank, pollution and other environmental damage costs the Chinese economy as much as 12 percent of GDP annually (including medical expenses and damage to crops and fish). The Green GDP was supposed to incorporate those costs.

Pan Yue, a reformist vice minister in Beijing, was an early champion of the notion of using a Green GDP to rank officials by their greenness and punishing those found wanting. Pan managed to win the tacit support of his bosses in Beijing, but the project was a nonstarter in the provinces. Authorities in hardscrabble regions with a lot of polluting industries—such as Ningxia, Hebei, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia—opposed the Green GDP idea from the get-go and refused to invest in improving the impact of their operations on the environment. "One has to pay a big price" to realize Green GDP, says Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Li Shi.

The first report on the nation's Green GDP was issued in 2006 by what was then the State Environmental Protection Agency and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). It quantified the economic losses resulting from environmental abuses in 2004 at 3 percent of GDP, but due to a lack of data the actual damage was thought to be higher. Almost as soon as the report came out, the two agencies began bickering over methodology, funding and, of course, political frictions—especially as top Communist Party officials vied for promotion ahead of the 17th Party Congress that autumn. Green GDP team leader Wang Jinnan blamed foot-dragging local governments. Shortly thereafter, representatives of the National Bureau of Statistics, notorious for underreporting growth figures to undercut fears of economic overheating, stopped attending Green GDP meetings. Without any numbers to crunch, the initiative languished. The next year's report was postponed indefinitely.

The Green GDP fiasco put the bureaucratic resistance to reforms and the need for coordination among government ministries into focus. Currently there's a ministry-level unit handling climate change; another for oceans; yet another tackling sandstorms and deforestation, and three ministries responsible for soil and groundwater, villages and farmland, and lakes and rivers, respectively. When the toxic-algae crisis erupted in 2007, devastating fish farms in eastern China's Taihu Lake, provincial authorities wanted to release water upstream to clear out the algae clogging the lake, but first had to navigate a bureaucratic maze. They appealed to the Agriculture Ministry, which is in charge of fish farms; the Construction Ministry, which controls water-treatment plants; the Science and Technology Ministry, and the State Development and Reform Commission, before pleading with the Ministry of Water Resources, which opened the floodgates.

In an effort at streamlining, in March Beijing elevated the former State Environmental Protection Agency to full ministry status, giving Vice Minister Pan more clout to coordinate environmental policy. The new Ministry of Environmental Protection is now lobbying other ministries to share pollution data, a key to enforcement. It has hopes of a breakthrough in lakes, rivers and streams. Pan is also sponsoring ambitious surveillance projects such as a nationwide "Water Pollution Map" and taking a high profile in battling pollution emergencies such as the Taihu algae crisis. His latest initiative is a "green economics" program that would provide preferential access to insurance, credit and IPOs for businesses that meet certain green criteria. Later this year the MEP expects to co-launch trials, together with banking, insurance and securities regulators.

The MEP still has to compete with other chunks of China's vast bureaucracy. For instance, so far the ministry is having a tough time persuading China's business ministries—such as Commerce, Finance and the Tax Bureau—to push forward emission taxes for car buyers and pollution taxes for enterprises. But Pan is regarded as a charismatic leader and skillful lobbyist. "He can do things others can't," says a source who requested anonymity because he isn't cleared to talk with foreign media.

The Green GDP project did succeed in galvanizing some like-minded provincial leaders, particularly mayors of modest-size cities where green industries have been taking root. In Changshu, for instance, local plants have recently launched recycling projects and a carbon-credit scheme. Green advocates also took heart that the final political work report at last autumn's Party Congress placed greater emphasis on sustainable development and environmental protection than ever before. But China is a victim of its own success. One reason it ranks last in its income decile—sabotaging its "we're too poor to be green" argument—is its addiction to rapid growth. Party leaders fear that going too green too fast will hurt their business partners and their people, who are already feeling the pain of inflation and rising production costs. Beijing must forge incentives within its own bureaucracy before it can convince the rest of the country that the price of going green is worth paying.

David Harrison on China: victims of the boom

Telegraph.co.uk Last Updated: 12:01am BST 29/06/2008

The cities may be thriving but in the countryside 800m peasants struggle to survive. As pollution, migration and 'land grabs' threaten to destroy rural China, protests are growing. How much longer, asks David Harrison, can the people be ignored? Photograph by Ian Teh

Read part one and part two of David Harrison's letter from China A one-sided economic boom In the hills north of Beijing there is a long banner at the roadside. It bellows out a slogan in huge Chinese characters: 'Everyone get involved to build a civilised society.' It is a very Communist message: don't think about yourself; work for the collective good. But 15 minutes after passing the banner, I am sitting in the two-room village home of a struggling peasant farmer who tells me how local Communist Party officials had been involved in building something else: their own bank balances. Water shortage: Chen Zhen Lu at his home in Hei Wo, where a village leader appropriated money allocated for a pump for the well 'The last village leader was very corrupt,' says Chen Zhen Lu, 53, puffing on a cigarette and topping up his tea with hot water from a vacuum flask. 'The leader stole the money he was supposed to use to pay for the electric pump that brings water up from the well for us.' Lu needs all the water he can get. Like many Chinese farmers he has been allocated just one mu (one-sixth of an acre) of land. He grows beans, corn and potatoes to eke out a living for himself, his wife, Qi, his 19-year-old daughter and his son, 15, in the village of Hei Wo, which lies in a picturesque valley. He works long days, 10 hours and more, but has little money. 'The leader kept the money for himself and his friends,' he says with resignation, leaning on a Formica-topped table in the living-room, which is also the family bedroom. Live wires hang from unpainted walls, white tape covers cracks in the ceiling and the dark, grim kitchen, visible through a doorway, looks like something from a Dickens novel. 'Two farmers went to the administration's offices and complained,' he continues. 'But they were just brushed away and nothing was done about it. It was terrible for our crops.' Lu gazes towards a jagged piece of broken mirror stuck on the wall. Below the mirror is a battered old television, a gift from his father. He has no phone and no running water and the lavatory is a shallow ditch shielded from the house by a crumbling wall. 'The authorities give us water from the well once every 10 days in winter and once a week in summer,' he says. 'Without that we have to rely even more on the rain for the crops. We catch it and keep it in containers, but it's really hard when you have a family and livestock.' With enough water, he says, a five-member family can make 5,000 to 6,000 yuan (£357 to £428) a year from one mu. Without enough water, they will make just 2,000 yuan (£142). advertisement The paltry figures illustrate how one-sided China's dazzling economic boom has been: it has taken place largely in the cities. Hei Wo is only 60 miles from Beijing's shiny skyscrapers, shopping malls and luxury cars, but it feels like another world. It is typical of millions of Chinese villages. Two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion population - more than 800 million people - live in the countryside, but increasingly they feel left behind. The growing gap between the rich and poor is causing deep resentment. Millions are voting with their feet. In recent years, the Chinese government has relaxed laws that allowed urban residents to travel but forced country people to stay where they were, a discrimination described as 'China's apartheid' and which many peasants defied. The result has been the greatest exodus of migrant workers ever seen. An estimated 200 million peasants have moved to the cities to seek their fortune, working in cafés, on building sites, anywhere they can find work. Their conditions are tough: they work long hours and sleep in dormitories or on camp sites. Fathers leave their wives and children behind; couples leave children in the care of grandparents, seeing them only once a year. Others leave their offspring to be looked after by a teenage sibling. You see them arriving at Beijing and other city stations, their ruddy complexions betraying their rural roots, carrying huge holdalls and coloured plastic bags Once in the city, they find themselves treated like second-class citizens, looked down upon, and almost always denied urban residency, housing and schooling for their children. Many send money home to improve their rural houses and pay for their children's education. But millions who leave their villages to embark on this latter-day Long March never return. The result is that all over China there are villages with hardly anyone left: they are known as the 'ghost villages'. 'Who will grow our crops when we are gone?' Hei Wo is not a ghost village yet, but it is well on the way to becoming one. House after house lies empty, abandoned and going to ruin. The village population has fallen from 160 to less than 100 in recent years and more are planning to leave. Most of those who remain are the old, infirm and the very young. Two-thirds are aged over 60. The able-bodied, the ambitious and those who believe there is no future in the Chinese countryside have almost all gone. As Lu lights another cigarette, his son, Ying, a polite, gangly teenager, returns from his school in the next village, two miles away. I ask him what he wants to do when he is older. He replies without a second's hesitation: 'I want to go to college to study and then I want to go to Beijing and make money.' ?Would he be interested in taking over his father's small plot of land and growing vegetables? 'No, never,' he says. His father chips in: 'We have a television now. My son can see what is happening in the cities and he wants to go there. Life is much harder in the countryside. I am the third generation of my family to farm here, but I don't think there will be a fourth. If the young people keep leaving, then the village will die.' Farther up the hill, in a small, well-kept house, Wang Ru Lian, a diminutive, silver-haired 69-year-old, is sitting under a photograph of China's President Hu Jintao. Lian got married in the village in 1957 and has lived there ever since. But her five children left years ago and her six grandchildren, she accepts, will never want to live there. Lian and her 76-year-old husband, Tai Lian Qing, survive by growing corn and fruit, with help from family members who, at least, are regular visitors. 'At our age, we are lucky that they are,' she says. Life in the village has improved in recent years, she says. The changes have been significant, but they cannot compare to the phenomenal transformation taking place in China's cities. The best recent improvement was two years ago, when the mud track that ran through the village was turned into a concrete road. It was part of a huge government programme that has seen more roads paved in the past few years than in the previous 50. The road made a big difference but it still takes Lian and Qing half a day on their donkey cart - and a whole day in winter - to reach the nearest shop, 10 miles away, and more than two hours to reach the hospital, five miles away. 'It is hard living out here, but it's better than it used to be,' says Lian. 'When I first moved to the village, our houses were made of mud, sticks and grass. At least now we have bricks. I can remember people dying of starvation in the 1960s and others eating grass to survive.' Lian lists more recent milestones in the village: the year of the television, the year of the phone, the year of the road?… like a modern zodiac replacing the year of the pig, the rat and the dog. She admits, however, that she is worried that so many young people are leaving the village. 'Who will grow our crops when we are gone?' she asks. 'There are so many opportunities in the cities these days. It wasn't like that when I was young. It's easy to see why young people want to leave. But if it carries on like this there will be nobody left.' On the other side of the village I meet a farmer who is doing better than most of his neighbours. Chen Zhen Quan, aged 64, and his wife, Rong, 59, breed pigs and have more than 40 chickens and hundreds of fruit trees. He says proudly that he makes in one month what 20 years ago he made in a year. 'Poor today is not the same as poor back then,' he says. 'Today, most people in China have enough to eat. We are a long way behind the cities, but we have managed OK, because my family is still here and we work hard.' Quan is also concerned about the number of people leaving the village. But he has another, bigger fear - that corrupt local officials will seize the farmers' land, sell it to property developers and pocket the proceeds, offering risible, if any, compensation. 'I have heard rumours that this is being planned,' he says. 'It would be a disaster for me and many others. We saw what happened with the water-pump money, so we do not feel very secure about our future.' His daughter-in-law, Diao Hon Mei, 29, a mother of two toddlers, says the local government officials should keep the developers away. She wants to stay in the village and help it to prosper. 'This is a beautiful area and the village has great potential,' she says. 'We can make much better use of it. We could produce more food. And there are plants in the hills that could be used to make medicine. Plus it's a great place for children. We just need to be left alone to get on with it.' But her father-in-law's fears are not fanciful. 'Land grabs' have been taking place on an enormous scale all over China and especially in rural areas near big cities where land is more highly prized. The arable land is increasingly being used to build houses for China's growing, affluent and powerful middle class, who want to escape the cities and settle down in big houses with garages. Others want a place to go with their families at weekends. In Shanghai, China's most densely populated city, it is estimated that five million people will go on the 'Short March' to the suburbs, known as 'satellite cities', in the next 10 years. It is ironic that while rural residents are fleeing for the cities, city people are taking over swathes of the countryside. Nearly 20 million acres have been taken for houses, factories and roads in the past 20 years. Local officials are seizing the land because, in a one-party state with little scrutiny, accountability or transparency, they can. The Chinese Communist Party has fewer than 75 million members today, about five per cent of the population. But in rural areas party members are still a powerful elite. Some officials do pay proper compensation for land they seize, but many do not, and they are getting rich at the farmers' expense. In January, a government directive reminded city-dwellers that they were not allowed to buy village properties. But little action has been taken to stop them or the corrupt local officials. The country's leaders face a dilemma: they are reluctant to frustrate the emerging urban middle classes' desire for new homes, because their entrepreneurial skills are fuelling China's rapid growth. But they are also concerned that the drift from the countryside and the loss of agricultural land will threaten China's ability to produce enough food to feed its population. This is a serious concern in a country where memories of starvation are still fresh in the minds of millions of older people such as Lian. Myth of the 'rich peasant' At the heart of the problem is the question of ownership. China's economic reforms have favoured city residents: they can buy and sell homes and companies, and start businesses with minimal state involvement. But farmers cannot buy and sell their land because it belongs to 'the collective', which effectively means local officials. This gives the officials enormous power, which many of them are prepared to abuse, appropriating land, selling it to developers, and pocketing huge sums. Some argue that they are making money for the villages, the 'collective', but farmers given meagre compensation for their land are furious. Some are in despair. The suicide rate among rural women is three times the urban rate and one of the world's highest. Those who kill themselves are mostly young, uneducated, poor women who drink readily available pesticides for a quick death. It will be a brave leader who tampers with land ownership in China, yet many experts believe it holds the key to a thriving rural economy and is necessary to stop rising discontent. Some academics have called openly for farmers to be allowed to buy and sell land. But so far, despite the Government's headlong rush to embrace 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' - what the rest of the world calls capitalism - there is no sign that that change is imminent. The current system is a legacy of the communes established by Mao in the 1950s, after he came to power in the 1949 Communist Revolution. In those heady days the peasant was king. Mao's Workers' and Peasants' Red Army of China - the name was later shortened to Red Army - was made up mostly of impoverished country-dwellers. Mao himself came from a peasant family, in Hunan province, albeit a relatively prosperous one. One of the Great Helmsman's favourite slogans was 'Land to the Tiller', though he never actually gave land to the farmers. What he did was to carve up the countryside into huge areas that would be worked by thousands of families, or communes, to fulfil state quotas of basic foods - and provide a network of social support - in an attempt to eradicate starvation. The system enjoyed some success, but in the late 1950s the Great Leap Forward, a disastrously over-ambitious attempt at rapid industrialisation, saw starvation return with a vengeance. No one knows how many millions died. The primacy of the peasant was further underlined by Mao during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, when Mao's Red Guards ordered 'intellectuals' and 'counter-revolutionaries' to the countryside to work. Mao had decreed that it was only by living and working with the peasants that 'bourgeois' people and 'capitalist roaders' could rediscover their revolutionary zeal. The peasant farmers remained desperately poor until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping introduced the Household Responsibility System. Inspired by rebellious villagers in Anhui province in 1978, the system allowed individual households to contract a plot of land and sell any surplus they made, after reaching state quotas, in 'free markets' in towns and cities. It was a good time for farmers. When I lived in Beijing in 1983-4, I saw farmers streaming into the city with horses and carts, hand-held carts and even bicycles piled implausibly high with cabbages, apples, lettuce and other produce. The state-controlled media was full of stories about peasants who were 'getting rich', building new houses or adding floors to existing ones. There was even the odd story about a farmer so successful that he had bought a car. But the economic growth slowed dramatically in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, when the reforms were concentrated on the cities, sparking the biggest construction boom the world has ever known and prompting the exodus from the countryside. Today, farmers sign 30-year leases for the right to farm a plot. In March, the government gave them the right to renew their leases automatically, but they are still banned from owning land. Ignore the peasant farmers at your peril With land grabs continuing apace the peasants' anger is growing. In 2006, Zhang Xinbao, the Land Ministry's director of law enforcement, said there had been more than a million cases of illegal land use in the previous six years. The exact scale of the problem is unclear, but that figure is much higher today. Protests have been staged in many parts of the country as farmers fight to stop the bulldozers churning up their land. Hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested and some have been killed in clashes with both police and gangs of thugs brought in by developers. In April, Chinese police killed two and wounded more than 20 protesters during a conflict over land between villagers and employees of a gold mine in Yunnan province. In December farmers' leaders representing 40,000 peasants in 72 villages called for a 'fight to the death' to stop corrupt officials seizing their land, and they demanded the right to negotiate their own price for land taken from them. Chen Sizhong, who farms cotton and corn on one-and-a-half acres of leased land and who circulated the letter in Huayin village, was arrested and charged with 'attempting to overthrow state power', a crime that carries a life sentence. 'We are peasants,' he said. 'All we want is to get our land back.' The growing demonstrations have made the authorities nervous and many of the farmers' leaders have been arrested. Two protesters in Heilongjiang province were sent to labour camps in January. The injustices have prompted hundreds of farmers to resort to an ancient Chinese practice: travelling to Beijing to appeal directly to the government as 'petitioners'. Mostly their appeals for justice have been ignored. The villagers of Hei Wo have so far not been affected by another huge problem causing fear and resentment in the Chinese countryside: pollution. The Chinese government's legitimacy is based primarily on China's growing economy. For years, pollution has been a secondary consideration and environmental concerns have not been allowed to halt China's development. But many peasant farmers are angry that factories, as with houses and roads, are spreading into the countryside and polluting their fields, rivers and lungs. Political protests have been muted in China since the crushing of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when hundreds of demonstrators were killed as Chinese soldiers opened fire on their own people. But environmental campaigners have emerged as the new dissidents, and today just as the pro-democracy activists had been, they are arrested and jailed, kept under house arrest and followed by plain-clothes police. One campaigner, Wu Lihong, was jailed for three years last year for fraud and blackmail. His wife, Xu Jiehua, says his only 'crime' was to campaign against pollution at Tai Lake, in the Yangtze delta, on the border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, China's third largest freshwater lake. Soon after his arrest, toxic algae produced by the human and industrial waste that had poured into the lake led to two million people having their water supplies cut off. Such environmental disasters are adding to the simmering discontent in rural areas. The government, fearing the fall-out from factory closures and job losses, continues to put economic prosperity before the environment, and there is little pressure on companies to 'go green' in the immediate future. 'The peasants feel neglected,' a Chinese lawyer told me. 'They want to be part of the boom, but instead their land is being stolen or polluted. In China, you ignore the peasant farmers at your peril. There are a lot of them and they have a history of taking action. The situation is volatile. It may not be long before it explodes.'

Scandal of the cancer villages lurks behind China's 'green' makeover

Activists have been gagged and lawsuits buried until after the Olympics

• Jason Burke in Hou Wang Ge Zhung
• The Observer,
• Sunday June 22, 2008
• Article history

Beijing is shrouded with smog on May 20, 2008 in Beijing, China. Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images

The walls of the village have recently been repainted with trees, waterfalls and the uplifting slogan: 'I will contribute to the success of the Olympics and help establish a civilised new community.'

The people of Hou Wang Ge Zhung, however, have other matters on their mind. Sitting in front of his traditional brick house a few yards away, Kong Qingyu, 77, a farmer, spoke about his brother's recent death from throat cancer. 'Everything was OK until the factory came and then people started to die. You can't see the pollution. But it is there. The factory pumps out waste after midnight.'

In a side street, Kong Xiang We, 57, described her husband's illness - stomach cancer, according to doctors from Beijing University. 'He's getting weaker and weaker,' she said. 'In the past two months there have been two new cases.'

The people of Hou Wang Ge Zhung believe that their small community, hidden among fields and birch trees an hour's drive from Beijing, has joined the ranks of China's 'cancer villages'. They blame the chemical factory built in the area five years ago for 25 villagers having had the disease diagnosed and 19 having died since 2002. Like the vast majority of the scores of such communities where 'cancer clusters' have been detected, they have little hard evidence to back their claim - which is denied by the factory owners. Nevertheless, they have launched a legal case for compensation, inspired by the success of other communities which have won money from polluters.

Now, because of the Olympic Games, the villagers of Hou Wang Ge Zhung will have to wait until the autumn for a decision. 'We have been told nothing will be settled either way until after the Olympics,' said one villager. 'Otherwise it could be bad for the image of Beijing and the country.'

With the Games six weeks away, authorities in China are going to extreme lengths to ensure that nothing mars the opportunity to flaunt the nation's new economic, political and cultural power - and its new green credentials - to the world. A vast programme of 'beautification' has seen 40 million flowers and tens of thousands of trees planted in Beijing alone.

Lu Haijun, director of the Beijing 2008 Environmental Construction Office, said that more 'aesthetically pleasing' curving roofs had been fitted to 2,615 old blocks of flats and 20,000 more repainted. Other infrastructure projects, such as a vastly expanded and heavily subsidised metro system, will also help to 'green' the capital, it is hoped.

During the two weeks of the Games, to ensure a semblance of clean air for the athletes, the dirtiest power stations, construction sites and industries around the city will be shut down, Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau, said.

More controversially, public opinion is being buffed and polished by the authorities as well. A crackdown has begun on negative press and potentially 'destabilising' environmental activism, even that as apparently unthreatening as the legal action of the villagers of Hou Wang Ge Zhung.

The stories that regularly expose pollution and corruption - the two are often interlinked - have disappeared from the wires of the state Xinhua news agency. Normally vocal environmental activists now avoid talking. One said last week that she had been told by the government not to speak to the foreign press. Some experts have been warned off making public statements.

Within 30 minutes of arriving in Hou Wang Ge Zhung, The Observer was firmly escorted to the local Communist party office, lectured, shown government reports on tests on the local water that revealed 'no problem', detained while more senior officials arrived and then escorted from the village by police.

'Until the Olympics are over, things have to be regulated. This is the order we have had from the government,' said Wang Hue, village chairman and local Communist party chief. 'There is no point in interviewing the villagers. I am their representative and I know they agree with the government. Those who launched the lawsuit are troublemakers.'

China has long been sensitive to its reputation as a major polluter - both internally and in terms of global carbon emissions. The World Health Organisation recently estimated that diseases triggered by air pollution kill 656,000 Chinese citizens a year and polluted drinking water kills another 95,600. One Chinese government report attributed a 40 per cent rise in birth defects since 2001 to pollution.

The government has taken major steps in recent years to improve the situation, with a series of laws passed to punish offenders and to force disclosure by industries of discharges of hazardous chemicals. 'China has really made progress in the last five years, especially in disclosure and environmental information, and is strengthening enforcement,' said Mah Jongg, a high-profile environmental campaigner. However, enforcement of the new laws is variable and problems persist at a local level where officials often collude with polluting businesses. 'The Olympics has helped focus attention on environmental protection, but it is a one-off event and environmental protection is long-term,' said Mah.

In Hou Wang Ge Zhung, the villagers are resigned. 'If it is bad for the image of the city to have a decision on our court case before the Olympics, we will wait,' said one farmer playing cards in the street. 'We can't do anything else. We are just poor villagers.'

Wind Energy Takes off in China

Businessweek.com The wind is free and almost limitless in this huge, coal-dependent country, but harnessing its power for energy is more expensive

When glimpsed from afar, the huge wind turbines look impossibly silent. Eleven machines, with 34-meter-long rotor blades, have been erected on the fringe of a large recreational park in Shanghai’s Nanhui district, about 34 kilometers from the international airport in Pudong.

Each of the General Electric-made units can generate 1.5 megawatts (MW) of power an hour. Standing 65m above ground, these giants dwarf the Shanghai Wind Power Museum. It was built to commemorate the facility that surrounds it, one of the city’s first wind farms.

Inside the museum you are treated to a short video presentation detailing the imminent disasters facing the world unless renewable energy is embraced. Wind power, naturally, is presented as an ideal choice. The World Bank was suitably convinced by such arguments, investing US$13 million in the Nanhui project, which was set up in 2006.

Wind energy is China’s renewable-energy poster-child. The country has wind to spare along its coast and arid western and northeastern regions. It also has the world’s fifth-largest amount of installed wind power capacity.

“China is working very hard to reduce its dependence on coal,” said Richard Spencer of the World Bank, who worked on the Nanhui project. “And it looks to nuclear, hydro and wind, particularly, to replace coal. Wind is very important.”

Wind energy produces a kilowatt-hour of electricity at about twice the cost of a coal-fired power plant, according to one analyst’s estimate. By comparison, the same output from a photovoltaic cell is about five times more expensive.

Growing pains

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the agency effectively responsible for national energy policy, recently doubled China’s installed wind capacity target to 10GW by 2010. Chinese wind turbine manufacturers are reporting booming business, and wind farms are mushrooming across the country.

But the industry appears to be facing growing pains. The wind farm/grid operator relationship is beset by technical and policy problems, which are an obstacle to getting wind farms online and adding to the electricity supply. As a result, only 4GW of China’s 6GW installed capacity actually finds its way into the power grid.

A major reason for the gap is the industry’s rapid recent expansion, triggered by the enactment of the Renewable Energy Law in 2005, which mandated grid companies to buy renewable energy. Installed wind power capacity that year was about 1.3GW. New installed capacity increased exponentially in the next two years, leaving China with 3.3GW of total installed capacity at the end of 2007.

While remote, windy areas are the ideal location for wind farms, these regions are often poorly served by transmission lines. This creates a mismatch between the grid’s reach and the wind-farm studded landscape of northern and western China, to the chagrin of developers.

“We do meet some technical problems in connecting to the grid in some of our projects,” said Xie Chang Jun, general manager of Longyuan Electric Power Group Corp, China’s largest wind power developer. “We feel integrating wind power to the grid is critical for the commercial development of large-scale wind energy [in China].”

Problems abound even if transmission lines are available. Because China’s grid was designed to work with coal-fired plants, which produce a steady stream of power, it has trouble accepting the intermittent power produced by wind farms.

“[Wind energy] is coming like shockwaves,” said Frank Haugwitz, a renewable energy researcher in Beijing. “Sometimes it is less, sometimes more. This makes it difficult for the grid to absorb.”

The smart way

What’s needed are “smart grids,” a collection of technologies and standards that would allow grids to allocate intermittent power effectively. For example, these grids would manage supply based on hourly power-generation forecasts from wind farms, said Caitlin Pollock, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research in Washington DC.

According to industry observers, the technology for these “smart grids” this already exists. It’s a matter of execution.

The market is dominated by developers who are linked to the big five state-owned power producers. Longyuan, for example, is a subsidiary of China Guodian Group. Analysts say that Beijing’s policy goals often override the profit motive at these companies. For example, firms may find it easier to secure large wind projects and grid connections, but paradoxically, they may have to do so at a loss.

“Financials are not the main reason for them,” said Qin Haiyan, secretary general of the China Wind Energy Association. “Policy is the main reason. The conditions here are different from in Europe.”

Geographical disparities Wind-power developers are regulated in two major ways in China: an NDRC-led concession program or approvals by provincial governments.

As the concession program is dominated by state-linked companies, foreign developers typically have to deal with provincial governments, which isn’t easy. Some provinces offer favorable policies, like a fixed price for wind power. Pricing policies are murkier elsewhere, which makes participation difficult for smaller foreign players in particular.

“It’s not like other countries where you’re developing wind [and] you go through the same type of checklist,” said Gerald Page, CEO of Han Wind Energy. His firm’s 50MW farm in Inner Mongolia, the first stage of a larger project, is waiting for approval by local authorities.

For all the problems facing wind energy development in China, the industry remains sanguine. They point out that obstacles will crop up in any young industry, particularly one that has grown as quickly as wind energy has in the last two years.

According to Sebastian Meyer, director of research firm Azure International, the gap between installed and grid-connected capacity could just be a matter of timing. He says grid companies typically start connecting power plants between January and April, so wind turbines installed in the preceding months may have to wait their turn to be connected.

“Anything that’s installed will also usually be commissioned,” he said. “It’s just a time thing.”

Indeed, Qin, of the China Wind Energy Association, says the longest he has heard a wind farm wait to get connected is six months. However, even Meyer admits that a lack of centralized data makes it difficult to tell exactly which wind farms are getting connected and which aren’t.

Despite the wind energy industry’s explosive recent growth, it satisfies less than 1% of China’s power needs. Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, says that China could get 10% of its electricity from wind power by 2020. This isn’t inconceivable. Denmark currently gets about 20% of its electricity from wind turbines, while Spain gets around 10%. Of course, China’s electricity consumption, which came to 3.24 trillion kWh in 2007, is the equivalent of about 100 Denmarks.

But if government policy and the burgeoning wind power industry have their way, the figure will grow.

“At this point, there’s enormous demand, so the pie is big enough for everybody,” Sawyer said.

China Reports Some Progress on Pollution

Agence France-Presse — Getty Image

Chao Lake, above, in Anhui Province, has an algae bloom linked to pollution. In Jiangsu Province, China raised penalties for fouling Lake Tai after an outbreak.

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — After rising steeply for many years, emissions of three important pollutants began to decline last year, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection announced Thursday as part of an annual report.

Total levels of pollution in China’s lakes, rivers and coastal waters still rose, however, as more pollutants continued to flow into them, the ministry said. And the air in many Chinese cities remained severely polluted.

The ministry said that emissions of sulfur dioxide, mainly from coal-fired power plants and the primary cause of acid rain, declined 4.66 percent last year. The Chinese government has pursued a stringent program that requires power plants to cleanse most of the sulfur dioxide from their flue gases before they are released into the atmosphere. Environmentalists had expected the program to show success.

Emissions of organic pollutants into waterways, as measured by tests of chemical oxygen demand, declined by 3.14 percent last year, the ministry said. Industries reduced their discharges of solid waste into the air and water by 8.1 percent.

Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist in Beijing, said that while the calculations may be accurate, the overall levels of pollutants are still far higher than the environment can tolerate, particularly in China’s waters.

“We need to have the understanding this is just the turning point in pollution discharges, this isn’t the turning point in the environment,” he said.

The Chinese government is trying hard to convince the world that the severe air pollution in Beijing is improving and that it will not imperil the health of athletes in the Olympics there in August. Atmospheric scientists have questioned whether local governments in Beijing, Guangzhou and other big Chinese cities are placing air pollution sensors where pollution is below average.

The Environmental Ministry said the percentage of China’s coastal waters rated at the worst possible level of pollution rose to 25.4 percent last year, from 24.3 percent a year earlier. Coastal waters in good condition dropped to 62.8 percent from 67.7 percent.

The proportion of Chinese cities with fairly good air quality was practically unchanged last year, while the number of extremely polluted cities declined.

Air quality tends to improve faster than water quality in China when pollution is reduced. Fresh air typically flows in from Siberia and Central Asia, while China’s polluted air is wafted east across the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and Japan, with some pollution reaching the United States.

The pollutants identified in the report as showing improvement, particularly sulfur dioxide, tended to be those emitted by relatively few factories and power plants, many of them owned or controlled by the state. That makes it easier to limit pollution.

Air quality experts calculate that up to 90 percent of deaths from air pollution are caused by tiny particles of soot. The biggest contributors in cities are trucks. The ministry provided no figures on Thursday for emissions of such particles.

China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, separately reported that factories around Lake Tai, China’s third largest body of fresh water, will now be subject to penalties five times what they had been for polluting, under rules adopted last year by Jiangsu Province and taking effect on Thursday. The lake had a severe outbreak of blue-green algae in May 2007 that was linked to pollution.

China’s Emerging Environmental Movement

Quietly and somewhat surprisingly, green groups are cropping up throughout China and are starting to have an impact. In the first in a series on Chinese environmentalists, journalist Christina Larson visits with Zhao Zhong, who is leading the fight to save the Yellow River.

by christina larson

The northern route of the old Silk Road winds through a golden desert region of western China once renowned for its rugged beauty. But in many cities and villages along the route today, the view is far less picturesque: black plumes rising from smokestacks, mountains of trash massed along streambeds, and drainage pipes seeping untreated sewage into canals and rivers. In some areas, the streams are too badly polluted “even for cows to drink,” as one villager in western Gansu province told me, and so clean water must be brought in by truck.

China today is struggling with unprecedented environmental challenges. Ninety percent of the country’s cities have contaminated groundwater. An estimated 750,000 people die prematurely each year from diseases triggered by air and water pollution. The United Nations predicts that by 2010, degraded water and soil in China will create 50 million “environmental refugees,” who will be forced to move from their homelands in search of potable water and arable farmland. The country’s current environmental crisis is looming as a humanitarian one.

The Silk Road crosses the Yellow River, the northern of China’s two great rivers, at Lanzhou, a city that recent decades have transformed from a remote trading post into a hub for petrochemical plants in northwest China. In the past two years, three industrial accidents at local factories have turned the great river an ominous red, and a recent report found that in some places the river is now 10 percent sewage.

This disquieting reality is why, one snowy morning last winter, I drove along the course of the Yellow River with Zhao Zhong, an energetic 26-year-old grassroots environmentalist from Lanzhou. Four years ago, he founded the city’s first citizen environmental group, “Green Camel Bell”; for the past two years, he has been using GPS equipment (borrowed from a local university) to map the locations of factories that dump waste into the Yellow River.

Enlarge image

Christina Larson

Zhao Zhong, 26, founded Green Camel Bell when he moved to Lanzhou four years ago.

Green Camel Bell is one of approximately 3,000 grassroots environmental groups active in China today. These groups occupy a relatively unique, and fragile, place in the country’s political landscape. Even as China’s authoritarian government jails activists advocating such causes as human rights and Tibetan independence, the authorities have tolerated, albeit with troubling restrictions, the development of grassroots environmental organizations across China.

The country’s first legal nonprofit group, founded in 1994, was the environmental organization Friends of Nature. Today green groups constitute the largest and most developed sector of the country’s nascent civil society. Activists like Zhao Zhong are on the leading edge of both environmental campaigns and a remarkable evolution in how people in China think about watchdogs, the public sphere, and government accountability.

Zhao, like most Chinese environmentalists I met, tends to focus on the practical, not the philosophical. When I asked him what he thought about living in Lanzhou — and transformations across China today — he seemed surprised by the question. “I do not like it or not like it. It is where I live,” he said. Then he added, “I will do what I can.”

I first met Zhao after an epic plane flight from northeastern China to Lanzhou. During a nine-hour plane ride, with a transfer in Inner Mongolia, I had watched snow-covered mountains turn to green valleys, and finally to golden sand dunes. The staggering vastness and variety of China’s geography defies comparison with most national landscapes.

It was long past sunset when I called him from the Lanzhou airport. But Zhao, no stranger to late nights, insisted it wasn’t too late to show me his new office. Around 11 p. m. he greeted me at the door of Green Camel Bell’s headquarters: a humble two-room apartment on the rundown western side of town. The group had purchased it the previous year with a start-up grant, for about $20,000. The room had bare light bulbs and austere concrete floors, but as Zhao pointed out, it was a hearty advance from the days when his staffers had to work from their bedrooms. It wasn’t fancy, but it was theirs.

A giant hand-drawn map of Lanzhou showing the Yellow River and nearby factories hung on one wall; a whiteboard with names and assigned tasks was mounted on another. The office’s few bookcases were crammed with volumes on environmental science, geology, and the history of the region. Around one table, over a late take-out dinner, a group of 20-something staffers and volunteers was discussing the environmental curriculum they were teaching in local primary schools.

Zhao Zhong and his colleagues represent a new breed in China: idealistic young people. Control over one’s personal future is a new concept in China. “Ten or twenty years ago, students would graduate and simply be allocated to a job,” explains Jane Pierini, executive director of PeopleLink, a group in Beijing that helps domestic nonprofits build organizational capacity. Factories would determine where you worked, when you could travel, and even whether you were allocated to single or married housing. “Everything was set, even the time when one could marry.”

But in recent decades, with the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s “Open Door” policy and the gradual dismantling of the state-controlled economy, new choices exist for young Chinese with adequate education. Each of Green Camel Bell’s members share in a dream their parents could not have imagined: They can purchase an office, hold meetings, distribute informational pamphlets, and organize public activities, albeit confined by certain legal restrictions. “Civil society is now a phrase people in China are beginning to understand,” Pierini says.

Many civic-minded young people in China gravitate toward environmentalism — in part because the country’s environmental problems are so severe, and in part because the government has over the last decade passed laws that afford green groups a relatively unique degree of autonomy to operate. Some green NGO leaders are even consulted by government officials and praised by the state-controlled media. Almost unheard of two decades ago, student environmental groups are today multiplying quickly on college campuses, with several hundred now operating nationwide.

Green Camel Bell grew out of a group Zhao founded in college called Green Anhui. An avid hiker who frequently sports a well-worn Northface knockoff jacket, Zhao told me that he had become worried that “the mountains were dying” in his native province because of polluted rivers and clear-cut forests.

After college, he took a job as a nuclear engineer and researcher in Lanzhou, a city the World Resources Institute once named the most polluted in the world. In addition to the sludge in the Yellow River, factory smoke makes lung disease a leading cause of death in Lanzhou (just breathing the city air is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day).

Enlarge image

Christina Larson

Zhao's group marks the locations of waste pipes such as these using GPS.

In 2004, Zhao founded Green Camel Bell; “camel bell” refers to the Silk Road caravans that once traversed the region. With a series of small start-up grants from San Francisco-based Global Greengrants Fund, he was later able to hire a skeleton staff and purchase office space. To date, the group’s activities have included organizing trash clean-up campaigns, teaching environmental seminars in local schools, and now, somewhat more controversially, monitoring local factories’ pollution records.

What all these undertakings share in common is the task of collecting and disseminating information. “China needs public participation to solve its environmental problems,” says Ma Jun, a leading environmentalist in Beijing and the author of China’s Water Crisis, a book many have likened to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in its impact on the nation’s environmental consciousness. “The first step is access to environmental information. Without information, there can be no meaningful public involvement.”

Three years ago, Ma founded a Beijing-based nonprofit called the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and today he is working with grassroots groups across China, including Green Camel Bell, to track down data on regional air and water pollution. Recent laws in China have made more environmental data available to the public than ever before, though a broad exception exists for anything deemed a “state secret.”

In 2006, Ma launched China’s first online public database of water-quality information, followed by a similar online database for air pollution. These sets of data revealed, not surprisingly, that polluting factories are often in blatant violation of Chinese law. Ma says he hopes to generate new forms of citizen pressure to ensure greater compliance with China’s environmental regulations.

In many Chinese cities, public attitudes towards the environment are evolving as rapidly as new skyscrapers are rising. In a 2007 poll by the Pew Forum’s Global Attitudes Project, 70 percent of Chinese respondents named “environmental problems” as the “top global threat” in the world today. (That represents the highest percentage for any country surveyed except South Korea, which happens to get most of its air pollution from China.)

This is a transitional moment for China. For three decades, its government has passed increasingly strict environmental laws, but the expectation that these regulations would be upheld is still novel. It remains an open question to what degree the Chinese government, wary of having its record challenged, will continue to expand the political space afforded to green civil society. And although the authorities condone citizen environmental education campaigns, tensions flare when independent researchers question plans in which the government has already invested resources and political capital, such as massive dam and water-diversion projects.

Wary of nationwide campaigns, Beijing forbids green groups from establishing branch chapters and collecting dues from a national membership. This means most groups scrape by on limited grant money, borrowed equipment, and the goodwill of volunteers. Only recently did Zhao draw any salary for his work at Green Camel Bell, which enabled him to quit his day job as a nuclear researcher and devote himself to the group full-time.

Yet Zhao and other pioneering activists may play an important role in determining whether China meets the environmental targets it sets for itself in the future. That’s not just China’s concern; it’s also the rest of the world’s.

Today many outside observers wonder whether Beijing will at some point commit to capping greenhouse gas emissions. But even if China’s government accepts emission targets, that won’t mean much unless there is also the political will and the capacity to convert those goals into reality. That’s why our collective fate rests at least in part on the future success of Zhao Zhong and his scrappy colleagues.

Readers Respond to China’s Pollution

Nytimes.com

By Flora Zhang

In a recent column, Nick describes the links between China’s brutal environmental tolls and its economic boom. While the government is working to curb pollution, dirty air and tainted water persist. Readers responded by sharing stories about brown air, smog clouds and bronchial issues, as well as suggesting that the situation calls for international cooperation. In the Chinese media, environmental news of the moment includes the ban (”限塑令”) prohibiting shops from giving out free plastic shopping bags that went into effect on June 1. Reactions have been warm, with one report from Xinhua news agency finding that most people are feeling confident about environmental protection (”大部分市民表现出的态度让人对 ‘环保’ 充满信心”).

Some readers who have visited China wrote about their pollution experiences. On recent trips, Judy Opsahl “rarely saw the sun,” munsongs, saw “no birds, no green,” Dr. John Koroloff said that based on statistics, Chinese are in effect “growing cancers faster than their economy.” Dale Lewis compared his stay in China to “the end of the world”:

I lived in China 1992-93. During winter the windstorms from the Gobi drove clouds of yellow dust into Xian where they merged with the black fog from everyone burning coal to stay warm and heat their wok and kettle. Going out in the streets exceeded any imagination I ever had of what the end of the world would be. Often I couldn’t see more than a few steps in front of me. When I blew my nose what came out was black, as were the Q-tips from cleaning my ears. Routinely government officials knocked on my classroom door and ordered all the students out. Later I would learn they were taken to the hospital to get injections to immunize against hepatitis. Food workers in night markets and fruit and vegetable sellers in the streets had limited access to running water. Even when there was access–as from my kitchen sink–the water frequently was contaminated by human waste, solid waste. In the less developed parts of China pollution is the way life is. When I returned to the US, my primary care physician was startled when a routine blood panel disclosed I was immune to Hepatitis A, B, and C. (So that’s why I became so ill!) Keep reporting about China. Not everyone realizes that Guanzhou, Shanghai, and the Beijing Olympics are not the China where most people live. Resources devoted to skyscrapers, airports, hotels, superhighways, and shopping malls mean Chinese children drink the toxic rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds. And the schools that collapsed from the earthquake? The parents are right. An apartment house went up next to mine, and every day I watched what went on from my kitchen window. Truckloads of illiterate peasants rounded up in the countryside were dumped out at the building site to do the construction.

David R wondered about the effect of China’s pollution on the West Coast:

Reading this column, and living in San Francisco, where there has been a marked increase in Autistic children, I have to find myself wondering if pollution floating across the ocean has something to do with it. Maybe instead of mercury in vaccines, we should be looking for mercury in the air coming across the Pacific.

yanglu sounded miffed about China getting blamed:

“just as Californians can find Chinese-made shoes in their stores, they can now find Chinese-made haze in their skies.”

Can you show us with statistics and scientific attitude what percentage of haze in Californian skies is Chinese-made, and what percentage of haze in Shanghai is American-made?? It is easy to make accusations. Yes, just blame China on everything you are unhappy with, including your polluted air!

China bans disposable plastic shopping bags this June, what the US has done to show us you as the richest country are more responsibe to our mother earth, thus affords you the position to direct us on what we should do??

Several readers, including M. L., Crystal and Howard Xue viewed the Chinese government as taking action on pollution. Haoru Chen said it will take time for things to improve. BR added that the Chinese mindset isn’t green yet:

Great Column Nick! I’m especially interested in the environmental situation in China as I have been living there for the last couple of years. Despite the fact that there is growing resentment against heavy industry and the government for creating (or allowing) massive amounts of pollution, the Chinese mindset is not what we would “green” yet. I still see behavior here that baffles me at times. Simple things such as recycling and even throwing rubbish into a bin are ignored. How bad do things have to get for people to change their behavior? My theory is that things here have to get worse before they get better. Damage to the environment hasn’t really hit a critical level yet. When the thick haze of smog blots out the sun and even kindergarten kids are running around with a smoker’s cough, maybe they’ll take drastic measures. Until then, we’ll all keep dreaming of buying a new car.

Cheers!

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• 1.
  June 2nd, 2008 9:57 pm

  The hazy and smoggy AIR pollutions are causes by money-making heavy-industry, gas-guzzling vehicles, luxurious and extravagant lifestyle…All in all it boils down to the facts that people give rise to the brutal environmental toll. I don’t wanna say it’s the Karma the nature is taking toll on mankind. But definitely we’re something to do with this vicious cycle. We should not go on a blame-China-for-anything spree to make easy accusations but attach real great importance to what we can do to make progresses on environmenatal protections. There’s one thing for sure Chinese people should be more green-minded catching on the global trend with green-consciousness. (So to speak no moren littering garbages around,vomitting randomly,wasting water resources etc.) We live on the same planet sharing the identical arable lands, potable water,edible foods and breathable air.People need to be educated,to be instilled with knowledges about know-how regarding environmenatal issues. I’m not fully for the theory of “things here have to get worse before they can get better” on the grounds there’re some losses when we’re disinherited, we can’t even possibly redeem. The ban on plastic shopping bags is the action measure Chinese Government is taking against the Environmental pollution. We’d love to see more and more focuses and heightenned interests could be placed on this spotlight issue. We get every reason to be sanguine and upbeat about the future.

  — Posted by Robert

• 2.
  June 3rd, 2008 1:52 am

  I hope China’s new approach to environmental protection will pay off soon — they are investing heavily in alternative energy source such as solar and wind energy, and their efforts to limit the usage of plastic bags are also encouraging. I think they are on the right track, but it takes time, and more and people in China are becoming more aware of the importance of a healthy environment……. so please be patient.

  — Posted by Matt