A paper published last year in The China Quarterly concludes, on the basis of interviews with Chinese university students, that “There is little likelihood of environmentalism among students transforming into an independent grassroots movement or becoming a source of pressure for political change.” The most revealing aspect of this study is not the finding but the fact that the researchers chose to pursue such a line of enquiry.

Why are watchers of China’s civil society so preoccupied with looking for signs of nascent, oppositional movements? The prevailing paradigm for social and political change, it seems, sees a necessary role at some point for barricades (or, at least, a “non-violent” variant.) Such a view is not only anathema to the Chinese authorities, inviting the kind of heightened security surveillance that we have seen over the last 18 months, it also implicitly discards—as naïvely idealistic, no doubt—the hope that rational debate and enlightened self-interest may deliver meaningful progress. Yet in a world that is melting at the seams that may be our best hope.

Scholars and journalists may protest that their role is not to hope for or to change the world, but simply to describe it. But even so they risk missing the whole by concentrating on the apparently “juiciest” parts and most “interesting” questions.

For a key fact about China’s growing environmentalist community is its diversity.

Certainly, it includes a few turbulent individuals. Well known to this publication is an activist who started out campaigning to save the Tibetan Antelope but then went on to AIDS activism and also diversified along the way into “anti-Japanese” protests. During the 2003 SARS outbreak we received, from another “environmental activist” source, emails robustly denouncing government human rights abuses. And we have encountered people from rural areas fouled by the mess of industrialisation who, after the scholars and journalists and NGOs have visited and filed their reports and gone away, are left frustrated and angry (but no closer to having a safe environment).

Other Chinese environmentalists approach the issues in a more temperate way that is still clearly informed by a sense of distributional justice. Many so-called “anti-dam” campaigners fall into this camp, and some of them have latterly begun to think and talk more generally about the role of local and international capital. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they wish to “take on the system,” although they evidently do want the system to take on their concerns.

They are, besides, almost certainly heavily outnumbered by green activists with no obvious penchant for protest. Regular readers may remember our September 2006 editorial, which ventured to suggest that the Ford Motor Company might not be the best source of funding for Chinese NGOs, given that company’s dismal record on energy efficiency. Staff on our Chinese language sister publication translated and shared that article with NGOs in the running for the Ford Motor awards, and asked for their reaction. All ten groups thus consulted, as reported in a feature article in our sister publication, favoured accepting the company’s money. This may be a pragmatic rather than principled response, but it nonetheless suggests a relative dearth of social and political radicalism. Rather, the fact is, as our Special Report on NGO Advocacy underlined, that many green NGOs articulate their role mainly in terms of educating a largely ignorant public and urging them to adopt greener lifestyles and values. And this aligns comfortably with state approaches and objectives.

Other groups have been drawn increasingly towards specialisation on “technical” issues related to specific sectors: energy, urban transport, grasslands, forestry certification, etc.

Sectoral differentiation is perhaps a sign of the growing maturity of environmental NGOs, but it is essential also to emphasise that it is not only NGOs who genuinely care about the environment and want to “save” it. On the contrary, the environmentalist community includes many people within government, within media, within research academies and within businesses. Indeed, without a broad, multi-sectoral groundswell of concern, there would be little prospect of achieving a significant shift towards more sustainable development.

The common denominators in this community are doubtless rather low: it includes people who do not all think in the same way, or even necessarily share the same values and vision. For that reason, ongoing debate, dialogue and exchange within the community is as important as drawing more people into it. But it is almost certainly more conceptually accurate, as well as more politically constructive, to see this as a broad community engaged in ongoing debate rather than as a movement of those who are “for” the environment pitted against the rest; and advances towards sustainability are more likely to come from some form of negotiated, community-wide concensus than from the triumph of any one tendency.

Perhaps, in the end, the community will prove to have little capacity for cohesion, but fragment instead into squabbling factions. But that, of course, is a danger faced not just by China but also by the rest of the world’s citizens.

An Emerging Environmental Movement in China? by Phillip Stalley and Dongning Yang appears in The China Quarterly, July 2006, Volume 1, No. 186

China Development Brief’s own contribution to China’s environmentalist community is the greengo website (www.greengo.cn), built and currently operated with funding support from the Ford Foundation. This profiles around 100 environmental NGOs (in Chinese, with English language summaries), and is now adding an online calendar of events.