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| China's booming economy has carried a heavy penalty for the environment [EPA] |
As Wen Jiabao, China's premier, heads to Copenhagen for the United Nations climate summit, he will be braced for a raft of criticism levelled at the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
But over the past decade, what was once known as "red" China has in many ways turned different shades of "green", with the emergence of thousands of grassroots groups that have been campaigning against global warming for years.
According to the All China Environment Federation, by October 2008 there were 3,539 environmental organisations across China, up from 2,768 groups at the end of 2005 when it first started counting.
The numbers sound impressive but sceptics wonder whether China's green movement has any teeth when it comes to saving the environment.
Growing sophistication
Scholars and those in the business say there is no doubt that over the past decade or so, environmental NGOs have not only grown in number but also in sophistication.
"Local groups have become more established … and they have learnt how to work effectively with little resources," says Wen Bo, co-director of Pacific Environment's China Programme which allocates grant money from the US to grassroots green groups in China.
Many started from zero with just a few volunteers, he says.
China's green movement is also very young. The government only started allowing environmental NGOs to legally operate here in 1994.
"Considering where we were 10, 15 years ago, it's developed quite a bit," says Richard Edmonds, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
"The fact that these organisations exist and they do have a certain amount of wiggle room," is certainly positive, he says.
But their impact is still modest and mostly on the grassroots level, with activities such as public education and cleaning up trash, says Wen.
He singles out Green Anhui, an NGO formed by students and journalists, which focuses on protecting the Huai River in central Anhui province.
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| After decades of rampant pollution, environmental awareness is growing [EPA] |
Green Anhui runs public education campaigns and weekend trips to clean up the river and teach river ecology.
Part of the problem is that many of the groups simply do not have the technical or professional know-how.
"Many are still quite small," says Dr Yiyi Lu, an associate fellow at British think tank Chatham House.
"They were started by people who just have an interest in environmental issues but they are not professionals – they are not trained in environmental sciences, they don't have the technical expertise to investigate environmental problems."
Many other groups are simply student study groups and are often linked to the Communist Youth League, says Edmonds.
Few victories
And when it comes to significant or large-scale victories by environmental organisations, examples are few and far between.
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| China's rivers are among the most polluted in the world [GALLO/GETTY] |
The one that is most often cited is a campaign five years ago, spearheaded by a local group called Green Watershed, to block a series of dams along the Nu River in China's southern province of Yunnan.
The plans were eventually shelved.
But even that victory may turn out to be a failure, says Lu. The dams were not cancelled, they were postponed, she says.
"Without much public fanfare, they may modify the plan, but the dams may still be built eventually."
Indeed, building work on one of the hydroelectric power stations began earlier this year despite the 2004 ban, but the central government intervened, demanding an impact assessment study first.
Lu says perhaps more substantial is the work by former journalist turned environmentalist, Ma Jun.
Ma is the creator of two pollution maps on China, both of which are available online – one on water pollution and one on air pollution (see box at right).
In a country where environmental information is not easily available and where data is hardly ever transparent, these pollution maps promote the idea that the public has a right to know and that civil society has a role, albeit controlled, in monitoring the activities of the government.
"These got a lot of coverage and although it wasn't directly reversing any policy, it achieved a high profile nationally," Lu says of the maps.
Embedded environmentalists
In order to assess whether environmental groups are having an impact in China, it helps to look at how they operate here.
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Mountains of rubbish have built up
across the country [EPA] |
In many ways it is civil society with Chinese characteristics: groups tune their campaigns to fit in with the political climate and they need to build strong contacts in the media and within government to operate.
Government contacts are crucial, giving them political support and access to information, such as new dam constructions.
"NGOs are simply not powerful enough to act on their own," says Lu.
Chicago University's Richard Edmonds describes it as "embedded activism", the subject of a book he co-edited in 2007.
"It's a bit like the US military embedding journalists – you are with them for your safety but you are also somewhat under their control," he says.
He singles out Liang Congjie, president of Friends of Nature (FON), a well-known green group that runs public education campaigns and tree planting events.
"[Liang] has political connections so he is able to move things along much better than others… He is the kind of NGO leader the government is happy to haul out, or at least let go to conferences and things, because they can trust him."
FON, China's first legal environmental NGO, has become very well established, partly because of Liang's connections.
"[FON] have been very effective," says Wen. "Their newsletter is read by many people, including government officials. Officials now trust this magazine more than they trust public newspapers."
As a one-party state, the Chinese government does not tolerate threats to its power, so green organisations have little scope to openly challenge authority.
Constant pressure
Aside from non-threatening activities such as public education or rubbish clean ups, general campaigns on issues such as pollution are also tolerated - provided they do not single out culprits.
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| A national ban on free plastic shopping bags is one sign of changing attitudes [GALLO/GETTY] |
"A general campaign - say on climate change or air pollution, without marking out a specific enemy - then that's quite safe," says Wen.
"Everyone knows that we need clean air and clean water. Even the worst government official has to agree. But if a group creates a specific enemy, if they target a specific factory… then that may cause problems."
When NGOs get into this grey area, it is very simple for the authorities or some local power holder to shut them up, says Chatham House's Yiyi Lu.
The easiest way is to simply order the media not to cover the story.
Chinese NGOs, like all NGOs across the world, rely heavily on the media to get their message out and push their campaign.
But in China, domestic media is controlled by the state. If the orders come, editors will censor.
Organisations are also easily intimidated. They can be given warnings, investigated, and even shut down, adds Lu.
"It could be a warning that you are jeopardising local economic development or they could apply pressure to individual members.
"They may start investigating the organisation, checking its taxes, seeing if it's broken any rules."
Often psychological pressure is enough to get the green group to back off.
For example, the Yunnan government, which badly wanted the dams on the Nu River to go ahead for economic reasons, tried to intimidate Green Watershed by investigating the group's accounts, restricting its activities and barring the director from going overseas several times, says Lu.
In extreme cases, the police may make arrests, although this usually only happens with individual environmental activists, adds Pacific Environment's Wen.
Wu Lihong is a prime example.
After 10 years of protesting against the pollution of Tai Lake, pollution so intense it turned the lake green with a thick foul-smelling scum, Wu was sentenced to three years in prison in 2007.
He was found guilty of fraud and blackmail.
"With pollution cases, there's always some kind of corruption with local government," Wen says.
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