Budding Environmental Movement Is Planting Seeds of a ‘Green’ China

Li Hao rarely forgoes a chance to disparage disposable chopsticks. Lunch or dinner, she’ll whip out her reusable pair and cajole fellow diners into giving up the throwaway kind.

“I say, ‘Let’s use fewer disposable chopsticks, and chop down fewer trees.’ Everyone usually replies: ‘Oh yes, yes, you’re right,’ ” said Li, who abandoned a career in immunology to become an environmental campaigner. “I use every possible opportunity.”

For China’s battered environment, seeds of salvation could lie in such talk. Li and other ecologists are building the beginnings of China’s first environmental movement. Their challenge: educating the masses to think “green.”

China’s green crusaders don’t chain themselves to trees or protest on streets. That would identify them as troublemakers in the eyes of China’s authoritarian government and risk a crackdown.

But short of attacking government policies, a small band of activists--some who awoke to China’s environmental problems while studying abroad--have been allowed to form groups and campaign publicly.

Although limited in size and scope, this citizens’ movement is a sign of a nascent civil society in China.

Just two decades ago, the government controlled nearly all aspects of people’s lives, from jobs and housing to their children’s schooling. But two decades of economic reforms and liberalization have done much to loosen the government’s stifling grip, allowing people to begin organizing for themselves.

Women’s groups offer counseling to abused or divorced wives. Public health campaigners use telephone hotlines to advise people on the threat of AIDS.

In Beijing, one environmental group helped organize a small neighborhood into dividing its trash for recycling and encouraged state-run news media to give the project widespread coverage. The same group also is urging the legislature to curb the dumping of trash in landfills and recycle it instead.

A larger group, Friends of Nature, successfully lobbied Beijing leaders to stop officials in southwestern China from clear-cutting an old-growth forest, saving a rare monkey’s habitat. The 1735552885poaching each of year of thousands of Tibetan antelope for their wool.

It and other groups, including green clubs that have sprung up in universities, also organize tree-planting trips to deforested areas.

Li Hao works for a European-financed project that provides educational videotapes on environmental issues to schools, state media, government departments and even a prison. She also visits schools and writes to newspapers to promote green issues and teach people how to protect natural resources.

“If one person in a family changes their point of view, then the whole household will be influenced,” she said in an interview. “Just a few sparks on a big prairie can set the whole thing aflame.”

Authorities still regularly detain and harass dissidents who try to organize political or human rights groups. But where green groups are concerned, the sheer scale of China’s environmental problems appears to have swayed officials into adopting a more lenient approach.

Advocating Recycling, Waste Reduction

Five of the 10 cities with the world’s worst air pollution are in China. All of China’s major freshwater lakes are polluted. In Beijing, the skies are often a smoky, cough-inducing gray. In the suburbs, trash rots in heaps and discarded plastic bags hang from trees like dead skin.

By advocating recycling and railing against waste, green groups dovetail with government efforts to make people, including its own officials, more environmentally aware and to promote sustainable development.

By keeping a watchful eye on environmental concerns, ecologists also help national leaders keep tabs on officials out in the provinces, such as those in the southwest who had planned to log the old forest that is home to the golden-haired monkey.

Government leaders have realized that “we help them achieve many things,” said Liang Congjie, head of the Friends of Nature group that brought the logging plan to the central government’s attention in 1995.

However, some issues, like the controversial Three Gorges Dam, remain out of bounds. Communist leaders have staked much prestige on the project--which foreign ecologists fear will be a disaster--and have stifled domestic criticism.

“We know where the limitations are,” Liang said. “We try to avoid the politics as much as we can, just focus on environmental issues.”

The government keeps the movement in check by requiring citizens’ groups to undergo strict official registration procedures and by reviewing registrations once a year. New regulations tightening the registration procedures were introduced in October. One Beijing group has circumvented the rules by setting itself up as a business, although that means it must pay taxes.

Swimming Against Public Tide

Dai Qing, a fierce government critic and author of a banned book attacking the Three Gorges Dam, said official restrictions limit the effectiveness of the fledgling movement.

“Without them, the hopes of changing the environmental consciousness of the Chinese people would be even smaller than they are now, but they have not yet played the big role we would like,” Dai said.

The groups also are swimming against the public tide. China’s shops, which were sparsely stocked during the lean years before economic reforms, now bulge with goods. Many people are too busy consuming--often as conspicuously as possible--to worry about environmental problems.

“We Chinese used to be very frugal. We didn’t like to throw anything away and reused things over and over,” Li Hao said. “Now the trend in society is to think: ‘Now we have money. I can throw things away.’ I think this is a very bad state of mind.”