Activist groups on rise in China

It was 1995, during one of President Bill Clinton’s diplomatic trips to China that a member… It was 1995, during one of President Bill Clinton’s diplomatic trips to China that a member of a homegrown environmental group, translated as Friends of Nature, gave the president a picture of the endangered Golden Monkey. The Chinese government had been planning to allow the forest that remained the major habitat of this species to be leveled. But after the Environmental Protection Agency voiced agreement with Friends of Nature, a campaign ensued that eventually succeeded at protecting the Golden Monkeys’ habitat. This watershed moment christened the beginning of the Chinese environmental movement.

After the success of the Golden Monkey campaign, many other environmental organizations began forming. Soon enough the environmental movement in China established further campaigns, such as the campaign for “refusing to use disposable chopsticks” in 1997 and the adoption of Earth Day. Guest speaker Guobin Yang of Barnard College of Columbia University inaugurated Pitt’s Chinese Film Festival yesterday at a lecture in Posvar Hall titled “The Rise of Environmentalism in China.”

In his lecture, Yang emphasized the great strides that China has made in such a short period of time. ?

“Among developing nations, China probably has the most complete set of [environmental laws],” Yang said.

Yang said that according to a government survey, there were nearly 2,700 environmental organizations now in operation. Many of these organizations had been a product of the environment’s degradation, Yang argued, pointing to the flood of 1998, the international embarrassment of the SARS crisis and the problem of China’s rising pollution.

Although the government has more recently mandated registration for all non-governmental organizations, Yang suggested that the good aspect of this ruling was the legal protection that registration entails.

Yang also disagreed with the assumption among some scholars that China is entirely incognizant of the environment’s degradation, which is mainly a result of the nation’s rising industrialization.

“To those scholars of Chinese political movements, it doesn’t appear that an environmental movement exists,” Yang said, “[but] it is different than the traditional kind of social movements that we’ve seen.”

In Yang’s opinion, the famous student movements and protests like Tiananmen Square seared the heart of the international public through television with their violent images. However, the environmental movement is allowing civil society a new sense of power.

The reason the Chinese government has given so much freedom in the arena of environmentalism is that the movement “does not directly affect the government,” Yang said.

Also, he contended that the media and the environmental movement share many of the same members, and that both sides work in collusion to further each other’s control.

Yang has been working on several projects in the field of Chinese civil society with a focus on the use of Internet and film. He will be giving a second lecture, titled “Can the Internet be a Collective Organizer?” at 10 a.m. today in room 2431 of Posvar Hall. The film festival, which coincides with the Chinese lunar new year, will be running Thursday through Saturday at Pitt and all screenings will begin at 7:15 p.m. in the 7th floor auditorium of Alumni Hall. All screenings are free and open to the public and are sponsored by the Asian Studies Center in conjunction with the departments of East Asian languages and literatures, sociology and film studies.