Go south to Guangdong province, where the main tributary of the Pearl River has been popularly renamed the Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, because pollution has turned it the color of night. Go north to the petrochemical center of Lanzhou in Gansu province, No. 1 on the World Resources Institute's report. Local officials have concocted a last-gasp plan to level a mountain close to the city in hopes of allowing winds to blow through and disperse the pollution. Go west to Sichuan's Min River valley where every few kilometers hillsides denuded by logging are collapsing into the river, the beginning of an erosion process similar to what caused last summer's disastrous floods. Go east to the Yellow River, whose waters no longer reach the sea for most of the year, so silted-up has that once-mighty waterway become.
China is physically exhausted. And yet every day 1.2 billion people further dig, burn, cut, mine, pollute and process what is left in their frenetic drive to create and consume new wealth. And with the very survival of the Communist Party dependent, no doubt, on continued high growth rates, officials at all levels are slow to criticize the depredations of industry.
Confronting centuries of environmental neglect, as well as the inertia and indifference of a state whose own factories are creating much of the pollution, is no easy task. But growing numbers of committed individuals are prepared to try, and gradually their efforts are being noticed across the nation. Unlike the established and influential pro-ecology movements of the West, environmentalism in China has been promoted mostly by individuals. The Communist Party does not allow organizations to be established outside its control, and therefore, the concept of a non-governmental organization, or NGO, is anathema to it.
Still, some people are pushing the limits, and Liang Congjie is at the forefront. A 66-year-old Beijing professor of history and the editor of a Chinese encyclopedia, Liang decided in 1993 that he would try to set up China's first NGO. Told he had to apply to a government department, he went to the National Environment Protection Agency (NEPA) but was turned down.
Then he tried the Ministry of Culture, explaining that he wanted to set up an Academy of Green Culture. "The Ministry did not know what it was, so I gave them a long explanation and said everything was about being 'green,' so they approved," says Liang with a chuckle. It helped that Liang comes from a prominent family: his grandfather, Liang Qichao, was a leading reformer at the end of the Qing Dynasty and his father was a renowned architect who returned from the U.S. in the 1930s and subsequently founded Qinghua University's school of architecture in the capital. The government "has to be a little polite to me," says Liang. "And they know I am not a political dissident or anything."
Liang's group, now called Friends of Nature, has more than 500 members, many of them from the Chinese press. "We have the greenest media in the world," he says. "You never see as many reports on the environment in U.S. papers." His first big success was in getting the government to curb logging in Deqing county in the southwestern province of Yunnan--an area that is home to the golden monkey. Only about 200 of the primates were thought to be alive in 1996 when Liang coordinated an aggressive letter-writing campaign that forced the government to ban further logging in Deqing. But in a follow-up visit some months later, Friends of Nature members found that illegal logging was continuing. Liang managed to persuade China Central Television's influential news magazine Focus to run a story on the endangered monkey. Premier Zhu Rongji reportedly saw the program and issued one of his thunderous edicts; the logging was halted.
PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
|
|
|
