When a Billion Chinese Jump (50 page)

Chen focused his efforts on education, but this was not easy in such a sparsely populated expanse. In Wuzhumuqin County, there was just one elementary school for an area twice the size of Switzerland. Using his fine-art training, in 2008, Chen illustrated a book that encouraged the 300,000 former nomads to assert their legal rights over the land. It told the story of Qiqige, a young Mongolian girl who dreamed of a lost idyll of beautiful open scenery, rich wildlife, and horseback rides, then woke up and looked out of her window on a degraded, polluted land divided up into barbed-wire pens for cashmere herds. The book’s message was reinforced by a copy of the relevant laws and regulations printed in Chinese and Mongolian that reminded herders of their rights to use the land. Local authorities were so worried by these materials that they ordered police to seize copies and threaten locals who distributed them with arrest.

Chen has always tried to keep the law on his side, turning to the courts when necessary. In 2006, he helped a nomad community to mount a legal challenge against the East Wuzhumuqin Paper Mill, a polluter that had been relocated to Inner Mongolia after an earlier “cleanup” at its original location in Hebei. The nomads won compensation, and the factory was moved on, although the land it had contaminated remained a blight on the area.

Though small in scale, such victories were encouraging. The space for civil society was growing, particularly with regard to environmental issues. Premier Wen Jiabao recognized the need for NGOs and journalists to expose violations of regulations that might otherwise be covered up by local authorities. Pan Yue, the deputy environment minister, championed their cause, noting that the public were the “biggest stakeholders in the environment.” The number of NGOs surged.
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Major international conservation groups established operations in China. Foreign funds provided seed money to domestic groups.

In Inner Mongolia, Chen worked with nomads, Korean charities, and China’s oldest legal environmental NGO, Friends of Nature.
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Its cofounder Liang Congjie, a professor at the Academy of Chinese Culture, was inspired to work on the grassland issues after seeing Chen’s Echoing Steppe website of drawings and photographs of a disappearing lifestyle and ecosystem. Liang had built a reputation as the “soul of China’s green movement” after establishing Friends of Nature in 1994.
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Like many of the other groups that followed, it became an outlet for social activists who
were unable to press for political changes in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown five years earlier.
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His message was essentially one of thrift: everyone in China needed to use resources more wisely. People were listening, though not yet in the numbers needed to make a difference.

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.”
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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.
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In 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.
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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.
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Activists 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.
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At 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.
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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.
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Another 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:

I am Queen of Lohas, rich in gold and silver
I love this world, may it never be destroyed
I am Queen of Lohas, protecting everyone’s dreams
I want my life to be forever sparkling
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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.
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For 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.
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A different approach is needed.

The person who comes closest to providing that is probably Yu Dan, a pop philosopher whose commentary on the Analects of Confucius achieved the rare publishing feat of outselling Harry Potter. Yu, a media studies professor at Beijing Normal University, is one of the country’s hottest commentators with a pithy and approachable modern interpretation of the 2,500-year-old classics. She believes her popularity reflects a nationwide questioning of beliefs.

“We in China are trying to reset our entire value system,” she told me. “In the 1980s and 1990s, people became lost because they based their lives on money. They became greedy, destroyed the environment, plundered natural resources without restraint, and opened heavily polluting factories.”

The environment is a central concern for Yu, who considers herself more Taoist than Confucian. “To develop harmoniously, we need to follow the laws of nature. Of all the traditional Chinese beliefs, Taoism is the most reverent toward nature. Following nature is the ultimate principle.”

Yu’s eco-evangelism takes second place to her advocacy of stability and respect for order.
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In this regard, she is a model of modern Chinese political correctness. While the ancients boldly advocated “speaking truth to power,” Yu has always stuck to the party line.

The masses, she said, would only be ready for Taoism if they first understood Confucian social values: “After China develops for several more decades and becomes more materially and spiritually aware, then
Taoism can become more popular, but at the moment this philosophy is too advanced.”

The idea of Taoism as a philosophy for an upwardly mobile elite is hard to reconcile with the beliefs of Yu’s professed inspiration, Zhuangzi, who idealized water because it found a way to the “low places that others disdain.” But it is very much in keeping with the plutocratic views of the modern Chinese Communist Party. Replace the word “Taoism” with “democracy” and the lines could have been scripted by President Hu Jintao. Replace it with “environmentally concerned” and the argument becomes a restatement of the canard that China will pollute first and leave the cleanup until after it is rich.

According to Yu, we had to wait patiently until a little more education and a lot more money turned today’s socially concerned Confucians into tomorrow’s eco-friendly Taoists. But it was not a case of either one or the other. One of the biggest reasons for China’s enduring success as a civilization has been the coexistence of different philosophies. It has rarely been either completely Taoist or completely Confucian. The two are emphasized to different degrees during different eras or, indeed, different times of the day. The ancient mandarins were said to be Confucian during working hours and Taoists when they went home. This flexible way of thinking allowed a constant rebalancing of ideas, like having both a governing and opposition party in the national mind.

That balance may well have been jettisoned in the modern effort to overcome national humiliation at the hands of Western industrial powers. China learned the lessons, first of Marxism and now capitalism, the hard way. Its application of both foreign ways of thinking tends to be destructively dogmatic.

This was the view of professor E Yunlong at Peking University’s new Ecocivilization Research Center.
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“Our primary focus is on establishing a new set of values,” he said. “We must globalize our value systems … During thirty years of opening up and reform, we learned a great deal from the West. Some things, like technology, have been good, but we also picked up bad habits, such as high consumption and winner-takes-all competition. We must not let these bad habits grow, because if Chinese people want to live luxuriously, then not only China but the whole world will be unable to afford it.”