Environmental activism is flourishing in China. In the space of a few short years, numerous, largely autonomous, research institutes, campaigning groups and individual activists have emerged to play an increasingly prominent role in policy and public debate. This is an important development not just for China's environment, but for China's civil society generally; for in few other sectors are private actors so vocal and visible. In different ways, these groups are therefore exploring - and, perhaps, extending - the boundaries of what kind of advocacy is possible in China. Some important strategic choices lie ahead.

On the policy and research side, groups such as the Beijing Environment and Development Institute (BEDI) (See article linked above.) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Centre of Ecological and Environmental Economics are doing important work to develop a community of independent thinkers, able to bring new analytical tools to bear on government policy making. Like the China Council for International Environment and Development - a multi-national, virtual think-tank linking Chinese policymakers to overseas expertise - these agencies also provide China with an important window on international approaches and experience.

The Institute for Environment and Development (not to be confused with BEDI), established as a social organisation in 1995, concentrates on information services, largely aimed at environmental professionals and those in the pollution abatement and green technology industries.

More in the public eye are the campaigning groups and volunteer associations that have blossomed over the last five years. Student societies such as Beijing Normal University's 'People, Environment, Resources and Development' began to form in the early 1990s as discussion groups that also engaged in volunteer activities like tree planting and litter clearance. Virtually every major university now has a similar group; they are significant players both in environmental 'awareness raising' among the country's academic elite, and as a training ground for young activists who may enter government service, or join NGOs, or even form their own.

Best known of the non-student NGOs are Friends of Nature (established in 1994) and Global Village of Beijing (established in 1996). Also established in 1996 was Green Earth Volunteers, which claims to have mobilised more than 10,000 volunteers in anti-desertification projects. While these three groups are all based in Beijing, several provincial counterparts have also emerged - the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing; Guizhou Friends of the Earth; Friends of Green in Hebei; the Baiji Dolphin Conservation Foundation in Hunan; the Yanbian Green Foundation in Jilin; Green Dalian in Liaoning; Green World and the Volunteer Mothers' Association for Environmental Protection in Shaanxi; Green River in Sichuan; Green Friends in Tianjin; and half a dozen similar groups in Yunnan (See separate article:Green NGOs proliferate in China's most biodiverse province).

Across the field of established organisations flit a number of hyperactively networking individual activists: people such as Wen Bo, a former correspondent with China Environment News, and the prolific Hu Jia, whose activities include the single handed production of a newsletter on protection of Tibetan Antelopes. Whatever else they do, Chinese Greens don't sleep much.

Most of these groups articulate their mission in terms of 'environmental education' and 'consciousness raising', with high profile given in many cases to endangered animal species: -- notably, black necked cranes, the Golden Monkey, Tibetan Antelope and Siberian Tigers.

Many of the groups devote much of their energy to maximising Chinese media coverage of their concerns. This is a sensible strategy, given the huge scale of the task of educating the Chinese public. With due deference to the 'four basic principles' of socialist doctrine and Communist Party rule, many Chinese media are increasingly adventurous in their reporting and quite willing to give space to critical environmental coverage. The Green groups themselves include many journalists in their ranks and seek in various ways to cultivate and raise media awareness. Several organisations award prizes for outstanding environmental coverage. Friends of Nature publishes annual surveys on the state of environmental reporting. Green Earth Volunteers co-hosts, with the World Wide Fund for Nature, monthly briefings ('salons') for reporters on different topics including, recently, reforestation, food safety and chemical-intensive agriculture, and climate change. Global Village largely grew out of a weekly television slot run by the group's founder, Liao Xiaoyi.

Attempts to green the media are likely to continue, and will probably become more sophisticated as the activists further hone their lobbying and communication skills. Opportunities for international exchange and training are also likely to grow, given the great international interest in fostering environmentalism in China. April of this year, for example, saw a two day conference on 'Green NGOs and Environmental Journalism', jointly convened in Hong Kong, by the US Woodrow Wilson Centre Environ-mental Change and Security Project, Hong Kong University's Geography Department and Journalism and Media Studies Centre. This brought together some of the mainland's most active environmentalists with counterparts from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As well as greening the media, China's environmental NGOs are often bent on greening schoolchildren and youth, through summer camps, 'exchanges' between urban and rural youth, activities based out of semi-rural environmental education centres, and in-school programmes. Friends of Nature maintains a travelling 'Antelope Car' that visits schools highlighting the plight of the endangered Tibetan animal. Global Village has a 'Green Angel' programme that encourages Beijing schoolchildren to pledge themselves to green civic virtues and pester their parents to do likewise.

All of these activities - and others aimed more generally at public 'conscientisation' -- lie comfortably within the parameters of central government policy. No one in the senior leadership can seriously doubt that China needs to deepen the process of ecological modernisation. This will mean not just technical fixes and 'market based instruments' to induce industry to clean up its act. It will also involve policies, such as water and energy price hikes, that will hit ordinary people. Every bit of green conscientisation will help to smooth the way; and dedicated, self-selecting green activists are rather more convincing advocates of environmental restraint than state-appointed propagandists.

This reveals a profound difference between the development of the environmental movement in the West and its younger, Chinese counterpart. Pioneer Greens in Europe and the North America in the 1960s and 70s, significantly influenced by the peace and anti-nuclear weapons movements, were, at first, regarded as eccentrics by the governments and corporations they so roundly berated. By the time China's green NGOs began to emerge, however, governments and corporations world-wide had woken up to ecological imperatives and developed bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks to address them. (Whether adequately or no is a separate question.) In a developing country such as China, there is bound to be tension between demand for economic growth and demand for environmental protection; but central government is far from innocent of the costs and dangers of environmental degradation, and has good reason to embrace partnership with fledgling non-government greens.

This helps to explain the comparatively long leash given to environmental NGOs: for they certainly enjoy more room to manoeuvre than interest groups advocating for other objectives officially endorsed by the state, such as the protection of workers' rights. In some quite sensitive areas, such as labour migration, progressive social scientists have done a considerable amount of painstaking advocacy work by researching and highlighting issues to which government should 'pay attention'; and some groups have started to provide services to constituencies such as migrant workers (see article). But green activism is unusual for the extent to which it directly engages with and advocates to the general public.

Other factors, apart from their own determination, also contribute to the relative outspokenness of the Greens. Professor Liang Congjie, founder of Friends of Nature, (which of all the groups has the highest profile), is the grandson of Liang Qichao, a famous and highly regarded Qing dynasty political reformer; and the son of Liang Sicheng, a respected intellectual and conservation-minded architect. (Liang Sicheng was asked by the early Mao administration to come up with a plan for modernising Beijing. He suggested leaving the ancient city intact and developing a modern, satellite city on the outskirts. Regrettably, his advice was ignored.) Liang Congjie's distinguished family background undoubtedly helped him venture into the - in 1994, quite new - terrain of green activism, and Friends of Nature beat a more or less clear path for others to follow.

Professor Liang, Liao Xiaoyi and several other prominent activists have also received considerable attention, and plaudits, from international media. Many major publications have profiled their organisations. Last year, Professor Liang was awarded a prize by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (in the Philippines). Liao Xiaoyi was similarly honoured by the Sophie Foundation (Norway) and, more recently, by the Bansia Environment Foundation. (Australia). This inter-national celebrity status may, on balance, also have enhanced the standing of green activism in China (although in some official minds it may also be regarded as a cause for concern).

With a non-government green lobby now fairly well established, it becomes relevant to ask where it may go.

One issue is factionalism. Can the groups work together towards common goals? At this stage, it may be healthy for a variety of organisations to emerge and, in some sense, compete. But it would also be encouraging to believe that the NGOs could avoid the kind of personal and institutional rivalries that fracture Chinese government bureaucracies (and, indeed, that beset the world wide socialist movement throughout its one and half century history). Present signs are mixed: links appear quite strong between some of the growing constellation of green organisations but in some cases personal rivalries also appear pronounced.

These do not seem to be based in disagreements on principles. There are some differences between the groups in emphasis and approach, but it is hard to distinguish between them in terms of beliefs and values that, on the whole, are presented in highly general terms.

This marks another significant difference with the early history of environmentalism in the West. Many early Western Greens drew radical, political conclusions from ecological principles, insisting that capitalism was incompatible with survival of the planet, that new forms of social organisation were essential, or that, in West German Green, Petra Kelly's phrase, an 'evolutionary leap' in human attitudes was required. Chinese Greens are very much lighter on ideology. It is possible that some smouldering radicalism is pragmatically concealed in deference to official, state ideology; but it is more probable that most Chinese Greens are in fact rather moderate people, who just want a better deal for nature.

Is the lack of ideological baggage an asset in a post-modern where nearly all governments now accept the primacy of market forces? Or, as China's fledgling environmental movement matures, will it need to develop a more comprehensive politics of the environment? Appeals for protection of habitats and forests are fair enough; but how much thinking is going on about livelihood and equity issues in the distribution of environmental assets and amenities? Would the green groups, for example, favour resource transfers from eastern cities to upstream western provinces, in recognition of their role as custodians of the upstream environment? More generally, do they tend to see people as the basic threat to nature, and therefore conceive theirs as a civilising mission to educate the ignorant masses (which would be a familiar enough posture for Chinese urban intellectuals); or do they see the real problem as being bad policies (in which case, public awareness raising assumes more an aspect of leveraging support for policy change)?

These are deep and uncharted waters into which Chinese Greens as yet appear reluctant to sail. But some are paddling at the edges, with specific critiques of local government authorities. For, although the Politburo and the State Environment Protection Agency may be officially committed to better environ-mental protection and standards, local governments are often bent on stimulating local economic growth without counting the environmental cost. Indeed, this mirrors many other areas where central policy is quietly ignored or sidestepped at lower levels. For green NGOs to take on local governments, therefore, often in alliance with local Environment Protection Bureau officials, can still be consistent with supporting state policy as a whole.

One early example of such local engagement (for which several green NGOs now claim credit), was lobbying to prevent the destruction by county government logging companies of Golden Monkey habitats in Yunnan. A more recent example, reported in our last issue, is the campaign by the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing to prevent illegal development within the core zone of Jinfoshan Nature Reserve. In Beijing, a recent issue of the quarterly Friends of Nature newsletter carried an article criticising the development of suburban golf courses in the municipality, not only on the grounds that they are highly water intensive and occupy prime, agricultural land, but also because they are amenities that serve only a small, privileged elite.

Also in Beijing, the three largest green NGOs have campaigned against a project to reconstruct a channel bringing water from the Miyun reservoir to the capital city. This culminated in a March 16 meeting between Beijing City government and non-government Greens that the latter described as of 'historic' significance.

Two aspects of the meeting support this claim. Firstly, it was convened by the NGOs themselves in order to express their concerns over the Miyun project. This is the first time that high-level government officials have agreed to meet NGOs in such a forum. Secondly, the meeting was a concerted initiative of Friends of Nature, Global Village of Beijing and Green Earth Volunteers, in an almost unprecedented effort to work together.

The CNY 1.1 billion (USD 134 million) Miyun project, completed last autumn, straightened out and lined with concrete a 102 kilometre, thirty five year old canal, in order to prevent water losses. The green groups claim that no environmental impact assessment had been carried out, in contravention of State Environment Protection Agency rules. They argue that the old canal had become a living system supporting diverse wildlife, and that seepage from the canal helped restore the water table.

A media campaign against the project was initiated last year by Haidian People's Congress deputy, Li Xiaoxi and taken up by radio journalist Wang Yongchen, who heads Green Earth Volunteers.

When the city government agreed to attend the meeting, in the Beijing Broadcasting Station, the green groups also invited journalists, water resource and planning experts sympathetic to their case. Vice Mayor Wang Guangtao and officials from the Beijing Water Conservation Bureau were visibly surprised on arriving at the meeting to find the array of opponents. Mr. Wang complained that there were also many experts who favoured the scheme, but who had not been invited. He defended the project on the grounds of water scarcity, stressing that it was important to view Beijing's water resources as a whole, and to understand competing demands from industry, agriculture and domestic users. He said the city had followed its own environment impact assessment procedure, and denied that the project would serve as a model for the rehabilitation of other Beijing waterways in the Olympicisation of the city. (This seemed to be the main fear of the Greens, and to explain their convening a meeting over this lost cause: they hope to prevent repetition of the same approach).

The five hour meeting developed into a wide ranging and in the main good humoured discussion of water resource management, touching on projected water transfer schemes from the south of the country.

However, as the meeting concluded, Vice-Mayor Wang cautioned journalists to be careful in their coverage of the event, and to make sure their reports were authorised before publication. National and local media later received an official circular forbidding any mention of the event, which the circular described as an attempt to 'surround and attack' the Vice-Mayor.

This shows how very carefully Chinese Greens have to tread in their advocacy efforts. It also highlights another major difference between Western and Chinese environmental movements. In the West, groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have mass memberships, in many countries far outstripping the member-ship of established political parties. It is this, in a Western context, that gives them legitimacy, and the ability to knock loudly on government doors and demand a hearing. A Chinese group such as Friends of Nature could very likely develop a mass membership base if it chose to do so. But this would, of course, place the organisation in a very different, and a very much more challenging, relationship to government.

There is no sign that Friends of Nature has ambitions of this kind. Professor Liang has repeatedly said that he prefers the organisation to remain small, and he advises people outside of Beijing to form their own groups rather than joining his.

For future generations of Green activists, the question will be whether more can be achieved by this softly softly approach, or by becoming more assertive. These are tricky waters to navigate, and Western environmentalism offers no relevant charts.