<DOC>
[109th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:20182.wais]
ENVIRONMENTAL NGOs IN CHINA: ENCOURAGING ACTION AND ADDRESSING PUBLIC
GRIEVANCES
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 7, 2005
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
20-182 WASHINGTON : 2005
_____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512ÿ091800
Fax: (202) 512ÿ092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402ÿ090001
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate House
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman MEMBERS TO BE APPOINTED
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas
GORDON SMITH, Oregon
JIM DeMINT, South Carolina
MEL MARTINEZ, Florida
MAX BAUCUS, Montana
CARL LEVIN, Michigan
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
STEPHEN J. LAW, Department of Labor
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
David Dorman, Staff Director (Chairman)
John Foarde, Staff Director (Co-Chairman)
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
STATEMENTS
Economy, Elizabeth, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia
Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY............ 2
Ru, Jiang, expert on environmental management and planning in
China, Washington, DC.......................................... 6
Adams, Patricia, Executive Director, Probe International,
Toronto, Canada................................................ 8
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Economy, Elizabeth............................................... 28
Ru, Jiang........................................................ 31
Adams, Patricia.................................................. 33
ENVIRONMENTAL NGOs IN CHINA: ENCOURAGING ACTION AND ADDRESSING PUBLIC
GRIEVANCES
----------
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2005
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m.,
in room 2255, Rayburn House Office Building, John Foarde (staff
director) presiding.
Also present: Carl Minzner, senior counsel; Adam Bobrow,
senior counsel; Susan Weld, general counsel; Katherine Kaup,
special advisor; and Laura Mitchell, research assistant.
Mr. Foarde. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this
Issues Roundtable of the Congressional-Executive Commission on
China.
As I was telling our panelists a moment ago, the members of
the CECC for the 109th Congress have not been appointed yet,
but we expect appointments in the next few days. We wanted no
more time to go by before we got busy with this continuing
series of public events that enable us to learn more about
specific issues relating to the mandate of the CECC. So today
we are happy to welcome, on behalf of our future chairs and
members, three very distinguished panelists to talk to us about
environmental NGOs in China.
Rapid economic growth in China has resulted in massive
degradation of China's rivers, marshes, forests, and waterways,
prompting the rise of a new generation of citizen activists who
challenge government policies. The victims of environmental
pollution, farmers displaced by huge hydro-electric power
projects, and citizens concerned with the loss of China's
natural wildlife are joining an increasing number of Chinese
environmental NGOs to make their voices heard on issues that
affect them.
We want, this afternoon, to examine the role of Chinese
non-governmental organizations [NGOs] and their role in
allowing Chinese citizens a voice on national environmental
policy and their ability to serve as a channel for the
grievances of individual victims who are harmed by specific
projects.
We have three distinguished panelists this afternoon, and I
will introduce each in more detail before they speak. Each will
have the chance to present for about 10 minutes. After about
eight minutes or so I will remind you that you have two minutes
left.
Inevitably, you do not have the time to cover everything
that you would like to cover, so we will return during the
question and answer period to some of those themes.
So, let us begin. We are pleased to welcome back Dr.
Elizabeth Economy, the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of
Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York
City. Dr. Economy is an expert on a variety of topics on U.S.-
China relations, and particularly on Chinese domestic and
foreign policy. But her particular focus for some time has been
on the environment. She is a member of many academic and non-
governmental organizations
focused on U.S.-China relations, and on environmental issues,
including the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development,
the Scholars Environmental Change and Security Project of the
Woodrow Wilson International Center, and the National Committee
on U.S.-China relations. She is the author of ``The River Runs
Black,'' a book on the environmental challenges to China's
future.
Welcome, Liz Economy, please go ahead.
STATEMENT OF ELIZABETH ECONOMY, C.V. STARR SENIOR FELLOW AND
DIRECTOR OF ASIA STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, NEW
YORK, NY
Ms. Economy. Thank you, John, and thank you, Carl, for
inviting me. It is my great pleasure to have this opportunity
to share with you some of my experience, interactions, and
understandings of China's environmental NGO community. I have
been looking at issues related to China and the environment for
almost 15 years now, and as far as I am concerned, there is no
area that is more dynamic or exciting than the non-governmental
sector.
I would like just to touch briefly on four points during my
presentation. First, what is the nature of the NGO movement?
Second, how has it evolved? Third, what is the relationship
between the State and the NGOs? And fourth, what are some of
the challenges that I see confronting NGOs in the future?
Just as a note, my remarks are going to focus exclusively
on the NGOs that have not been initiated in any way by a
government body. These are not government-organized NGOs.
First, the nature of the NGO movement. Again, I have
interacted with NGO activists for many years now and have found
them, overall, to be highly educated, articulate, and
oftentimes quite charismatic people. Many of them have
backgrounds as journalists or otherwise have been engaged in
media activities.
I think this is important because it has made them very
adept at getting their message across to the Chinese people and
to the Chinese Government. Many NGO activists in China have
also spent time abroad, particularly in the United States,
either at universities or training with U.S.-based NGOs.
Most of China's renowned NGOs, such as Liang Congjie of
Friends of Nature, and Liao Xiaoyi of Global Village Beijing,
are based in Beijing. But they are also very actively engaged
in helping to develop smaller NGOs throughout the country. They
direct activities that engage a wide number of NGOs. For
example, Liao Xiaoyi will bring together NGOs from outside of
Beijing for Earth Day activities in Beijing; she also arranged
for 12 NGOs to attend the Johannesburg Summit and put together
a video depicting Chinese NGOs and their activities.
There are also green camps that were founded by the
environmental activist, Tang Xiyang, who is one of the great
environmental thinkers in China. These green camps serve as a
training ground for young Chinese environmental activists. You
also find that, within the environmental community, many NGO
activists hold positions on each other's boards. Hu Kanping,
for example, who is the editor of China Green Times, serves on
the board of Friends of Nature, as well as Global Green Grants
China.
Finally, some members of Beijing-based NGOs leave and start
their own NGOs in other parts of China. They may go to Yunnan
or Sichuan to establish new NGOs. Through this mechanism, there
is really a cross-fertilization or pollination process by which
NGO activism has become an environmental movement.
The second issue I want to raise is how has this movement
evolved. The first formally registered NGO was Friends of
Nature, which was founded in 1994 by Liang Congjie. This was
quickly followed by Global Village Beijing in 1995, which
registered as a private business entity under the Bureau of
Industry and Commerce. Since that time, officially, more than
2,000 NGOs have formally registered. I think there are perhaps
as many NGOs that are either registered as private business
entities, such as Global Village Beijing, or simply not
registered at all. You can find some very prominent NGOs in
China that have absolutely no affiliation, tie, or registration
with the Chinese Government.
But as striking as the increase in the number of NGOs may
be, I think far more telling has been the dramatic evolution in
the nature of NGO activity over the past decade. Initially, I
think there was a very conscious decision made to focus on
issues that were considered relatively politically safe, such
as environmental education or bio-diversity protection. By the
late 1990s, NGO leaders became more assertive. For example,
there was the ``Go West'' campaign in 1999 that was initiated
by Jiang Zemin. This was an effort to develop the western part
of China and bring living standards closer to those of the
coastal region. The government set out ecological construction
or environmental protection as one of the five major tenets of
this campaign, but there was some concern within the NGO
community that in reality, it would simply turn out to be
business as usual and you would have very rapid development and
exploitation of the environment with minimal environmental
protection.
In response, Liang Congjie and other environmental
activists, for example, agitated within the top echelons of the
Chinese Government to get the State Environmental Protection
Administration [SEPA] included among the 22-agency leading
group that was going to oversee the campaign. This eventually
proved to be successful.
Liao Xiaoyi also stepped forward to voice her concerns
quite publicly in the Chinese media that funds were going to be
siphoned off for environment protection because of corruption.
She called for NGO oversight of the distribution of these
funds. So you had new, more aggressive approaches being taken
by these NGO leaders.
It was also at this time that you had the founding of Wang
Canfa's Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. As
some of you may know, he is just an amazingly energetic,
enthusiastic, and accomplished lawyer who has single-handedly
been prosecuting environmental pollution cases on behalf of
``pollution victims.'' I think he has prosecuted 60 cases
against polluting enterprises in China, and prosecuted many of
them successfully. So, again, this represented a bit of a
ratcheting up of Chinese environmental NGO activity.
Today, of course, you see Chinese NGOs engaged in virtually
every sector of environmental protection in China. Again, many
are still focused on biodiversity issues, and many of the
smaller NGOs that spring up in China's west focus on the
protection of one particular species or a particular region of
biodiversity, but you see many more now branching into air and
water pollution.
For example, the Huai River Guardians, or Protectors, a
group founded by a photographer, Huo Daishan, now has 1,000
volunteers going through villages all along the Huai River and
its tributaries, trying to educate villagers about how polluted
water is
affecting their health, trying to get them to see doctors, and
trying to raise money to dig deep-water wells to bring them
access to clean water.
This past summer, Chinese NGOs engaged directly in an
energy-conservation campaign, which is an issue on which NGOs
had not been particularly focused, except for the more
technical/think-tank oriented NGOs. So this past summer there
was a ``26 degrees Celsius'' campaign that started in Beijing
and was designed to get the hotels and other public spaces to
keep their thermostats at 26 degrees Celsius for energy
conservation at a time when China was facing serious energy
shortages.
This campaign was then picked up by 30 NGOs nationwide. In
China today, there are also two different environmental NGOs
that run journalist forums to engage journalists on a weekly or
monthly basis about environmental issues. This is an enormously
important and effective means of bringing environmental
education to the people. Fifty or sixty journalists will come
to hear an expert on wind power, and then go off and write
articles on wind power. So, I think this is a really important
mechanism by which NGOs are getting their message to the
broader public.
One of the newest NGOs, and I just read about it, frankly,
over the past week, is the Global Environment Institute. This
NGO is based in Yunnan and has very strong international
support. In fact, I think it was actually spurred by
international actors rather than necessarily coming up from
grassroots. Nonetheless, this institute is working on
everything from bio-gas for farmers in Yunnan to bus rapid
transit in Beijing and other cities. I think this will be an
interesting NGO to watch.
Obviously, one of the most high profile and exciting things
that have transpired in the past two years or so has been the
NGO activity that has dealt with the dam construction and
large-scale hydropower plants. This development would have been
my favorite thing to talk about, but I know that we have a real
expert here to talk about that subject. So I am going to steer
clear of it and just make one point, which is that I think
nothing shows you how far the environmental movement has come
in the past 15 years or so than the fact that Dai Qing was
arrested for her book on the Three Gorges Dam, ``Yangtze!
Yangtze!,'' and today we have environmental NGOs launching
campaign after campaign against these dams. So, I really think
there has been a sea change.
I know that Jiang Ru is going to discuss the ways in which
NGOs define their space in terms of the government, but let me
just say a couple of words about that. I think it is important
to understand that, by and large, NGOs in China work hand-in-
glove with the State Environmental Protection Administration
[SEPA]. There is a lot of cooperation, both behind the scenes
and in public. The ``26 degrees'' campaign, the ``Go West''
campaign, even on these dams, and certainly on the recent
infrastructure projects are all conducted with at least the
tacit approval of SEPA.
I think that with all these initiatives, NGOs know that at
this particular point in time, because of Pan Yue within the
State Environmental Protection Administration, because of
Premier Wen Jiabao, and because of new leadership priorities
having to do with the rule of law and a slow-down in
investment, they have the ear of very senior people within the
government. There is a confluence of interests coming together.
The decision to halt 30 major infrastructure projects after
just a few weeks on the grounds that proper environmental
impact assessments were not completed has to be understood in a
broader context of priorities such as enforcing the rule of law
and slowing down massive infrastructure investment.
If we put aside SEPA, however, relations between
environmental NGOs and local governments and local
environmental protection bureaus, are far less clear cut.
I will finish by saying that, in October, the Ministry of
Civil Affairs apparently let fly some rumor, or at least
suggested, that it was considering lifting the requirement that
NGOs register with a government agency or body. This would be a
truly profound change, not only for environmental NGOs, but for
the entire nature of civil society in China. We will have to
wait to see, however, whether that comes to pass.
I will just stop there and welcome your questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Economy appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Good. Thank you. We will come back to some of
those very interesting topics in the Q&A session.
Let me then recognize Dr. Jiang Ru, who is an expert in
environmental management and planning, with a Ph.D. in those
topics from Stanford University. He is an expert on
environmental planning and management and environmental NGOs in
China. His Ph.D. dissertation examined how the Chinese state
implemented its NGO regulations and policies and how
environmental NGOs acted under such state controls at the end
of the 1990s, and in the first few years of the 21st century.
Dr. Ru is working with the Natural Resources Defense Council
here in Washington, and consulting for the World Bank on
environmental issues in China.
Welcome. Thank you very much for coming.
STATEMENT OF JIANG RU, EXPERT ON ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND
PLANNING IN CHINA, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Ru. Thank you, John, and thank you, Carl. Thanks to the
rest of the Commission staff for inviting me to speak here
today as a part of this panel.
Before I start, I want to say ``Happy Chinese New Year, Xin
Nian Hao.''
As an independent scholar, I hope my statement can
introduce you and other policymakers in this country to a new
perspective on the dynamics of state controls of the
environmental NGOs in China. This statement is based on my
Ph.D. dissertation, ``Environmental NGOs in China: The
Interplay of State Controls, Agency Interests and NGO
Strategies,'' completed in August 2004 at Stanford University.
The statement I make today represents my personal opinions only
and does not reflect the views of any organizations with which
I was previously, or am currently, affiliated.
In my 10 minutes, I will introduce the design and
implementation, and then four of the main findings of my
dissertation.
My findings indicate that, despite onerous state control
measures, environmental activists were able to create NGOs and
operate with a fair amount of freedom by self-censoring the
activities of their NGOs. Understanding the growing autonomy
and self-censorship of Chinese NGOs provides a considerable
opening for international organizations to assist Chinese
environmental NGOs.
The goal of my research was to understand how the Chinese
state has officially described its control of NGOs, how the
state has controlled environmental NGOs in practice, and how
environmental NGOs have interacted with the state to conduct
their activities. To achieve my research goals, I analyzed
China's NGO policies and regulations to identify measures the
state has employed to control NGOs, surveyed a group of 11
national and 11 local Beijing environmental NGOs to understand
how NGO control measures were enforced in reality based on
these NGOs' experience. I conducted three case studies to
further examine how different environmental NGOs had interacted
with government agencies at the national and local levels to
save three endangered wildlife species.
The NGOs I studied included both formally registered
government-organized NGOs, or GONGOs, with over 10 full-time
staff members, and unregistered citizen-organized NGOs with
only a few volunteers. From 1999 to 2003, I made four trips to
China and stayed in China for a total of 21 months. During
these trips, I interviewed governmental officials, NGO staff
members, NGO researchers, environmental volunteers, and
environmental experts. In addition, I collected multiple
sources of evidence, such as governmental documents and NGOs'
internal documents.
My research has four main findings. The first finding is,
the Chinese state has developed a vigorous set of NGO
regulations to control the development and activities of NGOs
in China. Three key control measures of these regulations are:
that an NGO has to be registered at a civil affairs office,
according to its geographic scope of activities; second, that
an NGO has to find a supervisory organization to sponsor its
registration with a civil affairs office.
Here, a supervisory organization, referred to as a
``mother-in-law organization'' by some scholars, is a state-
authorized organization that sponsors an NGO's registration
application to a civil affairs office, and then supervises the
NGO's activities after the NGO registers with the civil affairs
office. The third measure I identified, is that civil affairs
offices will force NGOs to correct any violations of above-
noted and other NGO control measures.
My second finding shows some of the 22 environmental NGOs I
surveyed experienced no strict state control declared in NGO
regulations, as I just described. Based on the experience of
the 22 NGOs, I found that some of those NGOs violated the above
control measures without being punished by civil affairs
offices. For example, five citizen-organized NGOs were not
registered with any civil affairs offices as independent NGOs,
but conducted their activities openly without experiencing any
explicit control exerted by any government agencies. For those
NGOs registered with civil affairs offices, civil affairs
offices had only controlled the registration of those NGOs. A
common statement made by my NGO interviewees was that civil
affairs offices had barely interfered with their NGO's
operations.
In contrast to civil affairs offices, supervisory
organizations of those GONGOs included in my study not only
supervised the operations of those NGOs, but also exerted
financial and personnel control over those NGOs.
The third finding of my study is that state control has
been
implemented in the ways described above because of the state's
decreasing administrative capacity, the interests of
supervisory organizations that control NGOs for their own ends,
and the ability of the NGOs to censor themselves to the degree
that their activities do not lead to repressive actions by the
state.
Civil affairs officials I interviewed stated that their
offices had limited resources to track and correct every NGO
violation. In addition, because civil affairs offices had no
resources to register all prospective NGOs and the Chinese
Government had a policy to encourage voluntary activities as a
way to advance the well-being of society, civil affairs offices
allowed the existence of unregistered NGOs as long as these
NGOs had not committed any financial misdeeds or posed any
political threat.
This strategy of civil affairs offices was well
acknowledged by the 22 environmental NGOs I studied. According
to my interviewees, self-censorship of these NGOs helped them
avoid any unwanted attention of civil affairs offices. Although
some of the 22 NGOs violated formal control measures, leaders
of these NGOs were aware of the limits of how far they could go
in violating controls without attracting negative attention
from the state.
In terms of government agencies acting as supervisory
organizations of the GONGOs included in my study, I found that
self-interest motivated these supervisory organizations to
exert financial and/or personnel control over the GONGOs they
supervised. In practice, supervisory organizations use the
GONGOs to engage in international cooperation projects, to
raise funds, to provide services, and to place excess employees
when their agencies are downsized.
The last finding of my research is that GONGOs are
generally effective in performing tasks related to official
responsibilities of their supervisory organizations, such as
policy consultation and
information exchange. In contrast, citizen-organized NGOs were
engaged mainly in three types of activities: public education,
environmental advocacy, and grassroots environment activities.
This finding is based on the daily activities of the 22
environmental NGOs I studied and their efforts in the three
wildlife conservation cases. Citizen-organized environmental
NGOs included in my study were especially effective in
mobilizing resources to challenge local development decisions
that were detrimental to the natural environment. However, I
found that no NGOs took any confrontational approaches to
conduct their activities. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ru appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much. Again, a very useful and
thought-provoking review of the structure of how environmental
NGOs work in China. We appreciate it very much. Very
interesting dissertation, which we must read now. I assume it
is published, correct?
Mr. Ru. Yes, thank you.
Mr. Foarde. Good. I would like to go on to recognize
Patricia Adams, the Executive Director of Probe International,
an independent think-tank that examines the environment
consequences of Canadian Government and corporate activities
around the world. Her books include: ``In the Name of Progress:
The Underside of Foreign Aid,'' and ``Odious Debts: Loose
Lending, Corruption and the Third World's Environmental
Legacy.'' She also edited the English language translation of
``Yangtze! Yangtze!,'' the critique of the Three Gorges dam by
Chinese experts that was banned after its publication resulted
in the postponement of construction on the dam.
We have had a great many experts come from a good, long
distance to talk to us over the last three years, but you have
come a longer way than most, and we appreciate it very much.
STATEMENT OF PATRICIA ADAMS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PROBE
INTERNATIONAL, TORONTO, CANADA
Ms. Adams. Thank you, John. All the way from Toronto. Thank
you, Carl. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak before
this Commission staff panel. It is a great honor.
As John has said, I am the Executive Director of a Toronto-
based organization, an environmental group called Probe
International. For 25 years, we have worked with citizens in
Third World countries to help them fight development projects
that undermine the environments that they depend on. Since the
early 1980s, Probe International has monitored the world's
largest and most controversial dam project, the Three Gorges
dam, on China's Yangtze River. We have done so by working with
academics, researchers, and press in China, including Dai Qing,
the celebrated Chinese journalist who spent 10 months in jail
for publishing ``Yangtze! Yangtze!,'' a book that was authored
by China's most eminent scientists and scholars. Probe
International translated and published it, and a subsequent
book also edited by Dai Qing called ``The River Dragon Has
Come.'' Both books are banned in China today.
We also published our own damning critique of the dam's
official feasibility study, which was financed by the Canadian
Government and conducted by Canadian engineers, and has been
used to justify building the Three Gorges dam. I am also the
publisher of Three Gorges Probe, which is an Internet news
service that Probe International began in 1998 to report on
Three Gorges and other dams in China. Our goal has been to
circumvent the ban on criticism of the Three Gorges dam. We
believe that projects such as Three Gorges can be built only in
the absence of good information about their real costs and
benefits, and in the absence of an informed public debate. Our
goal has been to let the facts for and against dams speak for
themselves and to help inform the public by providing the
Chinese press, scholars, and activists with a safe forum in
which to publish their views.
But perhaps our news service's most important goal has been
to record and publish details of the harm done by Three Gorges
and other dams in the hope that future generations will be
protected from more of the same. Three Gorges Probe is
published in both English and Chinese. The two sites together
have close to a quarter of a million page views per month and
their readership has consistently grown over the years, last
year by 150 percent.
Three Gorges Probe is relied upon by scholars, grassroots
activities, environmentalists, and the press. Our stories have
ended up on the front pages of the international media and on
Chinese Internet sites, and on the chatrooms of, for example,
China Youth Daily, Sina.com, and even the Changjiang Water
Resources Commission.
Sometimes within days of our stories exposing a scandal or
a threat at the dam, dam authorities would announce either that
the problem does not exist, or is being solved. Through our
sources in China and our scrutiny of Chinese publications, we
have succeeded in obtaining a good deal of information about
events surrounding the Three Gorges dam.
In my written submission to you, you will find a number of
examples of the level of detail that shows what we have been
able to provide, on everything from energy analysis, to
environmental analysis, to safety concerns, and to human rights
abuses. Where do we get our information? Until recently, I
would say that details of citizen protests or criticism of dams
in China have not come not from the formally recognized
government-approved NGOs. Until recently also, lawyers have not
come forward to help aggrieved citizens. With the exception of
a few aggressive newspapers, very little information beyond
propaganda has come from the mainland media.
Instead, over the past 20 years, critical information about
Chinese dams has come in an ad hoc way from journalists,
activists, site research, the Internet, and dam authorities.
Much of the expert opinion we rely on has come from Chinese
scholars, many of whom are elderly and, having survived years
of abuse for voicing their opinions, have become even firmer in
their resolve to speak out for the sake of future generations.
Over the years, many of those academics who dared to criticize
dam plans were deprived of their teaching posts, their research
funds, and shunned in their professional lives. This has been a
tragic reality for dam critics.
Other critics have lost their right to publish, some have
been demoted, still others have been visited in the middle of
the night by the police and warned not to talk to foreign
journalists. Average citizens, dam-affected citizens such as He
Kechang, whom I have described in my written submission to you,
and his compatriots from Yunyang county, have been jailed on
trumped up charges because they sought justice for the losses
they suffered because of the Three Gorges dam.
The few mainland newspapers that dared to disclose negative
details about Three Gorges or other planned dams have had their
top editors fired and their management charged with corruption.
In our own work to publish critical information about the
environmental, economic, and technical problems with Chinese
dams, we have also had to take precautions. Most of our Chinese
contributors use pseudonyms, and we are always circumspect in
our communication.
I believe that this oppressive atmosphere is going to
change. The recent protests against the proposed construction
of dams in western China are a sign of the changing times.
Chinese citizens affected by dams are becoming acutely aware of
their rights and are prepared to fight for them. Academics and
environmentalists are able to help them, the press is very
interested in covering their stories, and the Internet
facilitates all parties' communication. These protests have
been so effective that, by the end of 2004, work on over a
dozen dams had been suspended.
Then on January 18 of this year, the State Environmental
Protection Administration [SEPA], China's top environmental
agency, accused the proponents of 30 infrastructure projects,
26 of which were energy schemes, in 13 provinces and
municipalities involving billions of dollars, of starting
construction before the projects' environmental impact
assessment reports were approved. SEPA then ordered them to
suspend construction. This is an extraordinary and
unprecedented move by the central government. The Chinese
Government enforcement authorities sent state enterprises,
local governments, and the private sector a message they had
never heard before: ``We have a law that requires you to submit
an environmental assessment for your project in order to get
approval to
proceed, and if you do not abide by the law, we will suspend
your construction until you do so.''
Now, the Three Gorges Project Corporation was among the
companies forced to comply. This is believed to have come as a
result of direct pressure from the central government. Not only
has Premier Wen Jiaobao backed SEPA, but according to news
reports, SEPA enlisted the support of the powerful National
Development and Reform Commission, the country's top planning
authority, to enforce its order.
While academics are encouraged by this cooperation between
SEPA and NDRC, they remain cautious because SEPA has not dealt
with the fundamental environmental issues such as whether these
projects should be built in the first place, and whether
meeting the environment impact assessment law will just be a
paper process. This caution is very well placed. SEPA's
environmental assessment law is not going to save China's
environment.
My organization has a 20-year history of reviewing
feasibility studies for large development projects, starting
with the massive feasibility study for the Three Gorges dam,
which included an environmental assessment. It was so rife with
errors, omissions, and bias, that we filed formal complaints of
professional negligence against the engineering firms that
conducted it.
Environmental assessments are usually conducted by the
proponents, they are paid for by proponents, or they are
controlled by the proponents. Because the proponents are not
held legally
accountable to those they harm or put at risk, proponents can
discount the costs they inflict on others. Their environmental
cost assessments need not accurately or comprehensively match
reality. Their assessments routinely over-estimate benefits
without substantiation. In the end, environmental assessments
become nothing more than public relations exercises to
whitewash bad projects.
Now, I doubt that SEPA's unprecedented actions of the past
two weeks will permanently stop any of these 30 projects, but
SEPA's enforcement of China's new environmental impact
assessment law could have a profound effect in a different way.
By upholding the law, SEPA would force proponents to carry out
environmental
assessments and to consult with local communities before giving
approval for infrastructure projects. In so doing, the central
authorities would uphold and enforce the rights of Chinese
citizens and NGOs to know, to debate, and to participate in the
decisions that affect their environment.
In a country where citizens have been jailed, fired,
demoted, threatened, and even physically attacked for
attempting to exercise these basic rights, this is a
fundamental step toward enshrining the rights of citizens to
protect their environment.
Many commentators look at China's 1.3 billion citizens and
see them as the world's largest threat to the global
environment. I do not see them that way. Instead, I see the
Chinese Government as the largest threat and the citizenry as
the world's largest group of front-line defenders of the
environment.
Give Chinese citizens the right to know, the legal and
political tools and the security to exercise their rights, and
to hold accountable those who would destroy their environment,
and the world will see a dramatic turn-around in the dismal
state of China's environment. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Adams appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Pat, thank you very much for an impassioned and
interesting presentation. We will come back to some of the
themes.
I would like to let our panelists rest their voices for a
minute while I make an announcement or two. The transcript of
today's roundtable will be available publicly in a few weeks.
Keep checking the CECC Web site, which is www.cecc.gov, for not
only the papers from today's presentations, but also the full
transcript. Please, if you have not done so already, sign up on
the Web site for our mailing list and you will get e-mail
notification of our hearings and roundtables, and other
announcements.
Let us go now to the question and answer session. What we
normally do is for the next 50 minutes or so, the staff panel
up here will ask you questions and listen to the answers for
about five minutes each, and we will do as many rounds as we
have time for, or until the topic is exhausted.
I will begin, in exercise of the prerogative of the chair,
by addressing a question to anyone who wants to pick it up.
The next couple of years are going to be particularly acute
in this regard, but everyone who works on China in Washington
is very interested in the impact of the Olympic Games in 2008
on lots of things in China. Do any of you think that there is a
tie-in for Chinese environmental NGOs with the Olympic Games,
and does anyone have the slightest factual idea of what
commitments the Chinese Government may have made to the IOC
about the environment?
Ms. Economy. I do not have any information about the
commitments that the Chinese Government made with regard to the
Olympics, short of saying they were going to have ``green
games.'' But I do know that initially the Chinese Government
recruited the environmental NGO community in Beijing to sign a
petition signaling their support for Beijing's Olympics bid.
There was some reservation initially among some of the NGOs
that signed on, but they decided that, in any event, it would
help to spur environmental protection in China. They realized
that they were being used to some extent, but they decided that
it was worth it for the long-term benefit that might accrue to
environmental protection.
One thing I have heard recently is that the NGOs have since
been relatively cut out of this process, and that as the
Beijing Government has moved forward, they are not engaging the
NGOs in thinking through and the planning for these green
Olympics. Rather, they are relying on outside consultants and
multinationals to do much of this work. There is some concern
among the NGO community about this trend. This is not to say
that in the next four years they will not get re-engaged, but
at this point in time they do not seem to be part of the
planning process, per se.
In terms of where I see the green Olympics actually making
a difference, I would say just primarily in Beijing, although
there has been an effort now looking outside at some of the
surrounding provinces because they realize that air quality,
for example, is not simply a function of Beijing's efforts to
improve air quality.
Mr. Foarde. Does anybody else have a comment? Please, go
ahead.
Mr. Ru. When I was in the field in 2001, I attended one of
these meetings organized by Beijing Environmental Protection
Bureau [EPB]. Basically, they invited most of the NGOs and
volunteer groups in Beijing to attend a consultative meeting.
At that meeting, Beijing EPB's deputy director actually
came into the meeting and introduced Beijing's environmental
protection plan for the following years. In that meeting, there
was not enough time for those EPB officials to get feedback or
responses from the NGO community.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much. I want to make sure that
everybody gets a chance to ask questions, so I am going to move
on and recognize Susan Roosevelt Weld, who is the general
counsel of the Commission, for questions. Susan, please.
Ms. Weld. Thank you very much, John. I am wondering about
the issue of media supervision of environmental pollution.
Elizabeth, you said that media was a large factor in the
current growth of NGOs and activists. And certainly as far as
corruption goes, the media are supposed to be a big part of
fighting against corruption, too, this process called yulun
jiandu, which means ``public opinion expressed through the
press to criticize what the government is doing.'' Do you see
that as an effective way of controlling abuses having to do
with the environment in different levels of the government? I
would like to ask this question to anybody who has a thought on
this. The question is really about yulun jiandu, supervision of
the government through public opinion. Will that be effective
or not effective in helping to control environmental abuse?
Ms. Economy. Are you talking broadly about the press using
its investigative powers, or are you talking about drawing in
public criticism, specifically public criticism? I guess I am
not quite clear.
Ms. Weld. It is really an interesting term. It means
mobilizing. It initially meant mobilizing public opinion
against government abuses, against government corruption, in
the last regulations.
Ms. Economy. What I have seen certainly a lot in the
Chinese press have been investigations. For example, in the
case of the Huai River, a number of Chinese media went to
villages all along the Huai and talked to villagers to find out
what has changed in the last decade. The Huai River had a huge
pollution disaster in 1994 and the media did a type of 10-year
retrospective in 2004, because there had been these government
campaigns to clean it up. The government had announced that the
Huai River clean-up campaign was a success, and it really was
not. So, all these media representatives farmed out to villages
along the Huai and discovered that the villagers believed that
not much had changed or even that the situation had
deteriorated further. A local EPB official said, ``What do you
expect? You do not have clean officials, you are not going to
have clean water.'' Certainly in the case in Yunnan where Yu
Xiaoguang, the head of Green Watershed, almost came under
arrest because he was talking about the corruption involved.
China Youth Daily went and did an expose on this, too.
I am not quite sure whether this response is getting at
what you are asking, but I certainly see the media as an
incredibly important part of exposing what is going on on the
ground. They do talk to people on the ground, although perhaps
they are not really mobilizing them.
Ms. Adams. If I could just add to that. We have certainly
noticed the media becoming freer in its discussion of technical
problems of, in our case, hydroelectric dams, economic
problems, resettlement problems, and also corruption. But these
changes have been quite recent, I would say, in the last year,
year and a half.
Before that, there is, of course, the Southern Daily group
of newspapers which--I am trying to remember the dates of some
of the early stories that they did certainly around 2001--
exposed issues of corruption and irregularities in bidding
processes involving the Three Gorges dam. As you know, they
have been harassed, with some of the staff, senior editors,
being fired, and then more recently being accused of
corruption. As I understand it, these are, in all likelihood,
trumped up charges.
So I think there is obviously a clear role. I think that in
the case of the cancellation of proposed dams, the media
campaign that contributed to the cancellation of the Yangliuhu
dam was extremely powerful. As I understand it, there are about
180 media sources--newspapers, radios, television--that jumped
into the debate. It was unprecedented. We have not seen that
kind of thing before. We have seen sporadic elements of it here
and there, but it has been very risky for the press to cover
sensitive issues like this. It has been as risky for them as it
has been for NGOs.
So, I think you can see a change going forward at the same
time, both among environmentalists and the press as well. It is
a terrific support to the citizens when the media try to expose
this sort of thing.
When He Kechang and his three compatriots went to Beijing
to try to report on corruption associated with the Yunyang
resettlement program, Dai Qing tried to assist them in getting
the Beijing media interested. The Beijing media was not the
least bit interested in hearing the migrants' stories. The
government was not interested either. Eventually, she took them
to meet with CNN, but I think her first goal was to get this
information to the Chinese press--this was in 2001, I believe--
and they were not interested. So, things have changed since
then.
Mr. Ru. In my study, I observed that environmental NGOs
have teamed up with journalists. Some journalists list
themselves as leaders of environmental NGOs. Some environmental
NGOs have a larger group of members from the news media. I
think that the national media are very effective in monitoring
local development
activities. Local news media may have limitations to act
against local pollution issues because of their close
affiliation with local governments.
Mr. Foarde. Very useful. Thank you. It is our practice to
involve and recognize the people on the staff who are primarily
responsible for organizing each of our issues roundtables, so
it is my pleasure to introduce two of our colleagues. First,
Carl Minzner, who is senior counsel. Carl.
Mr. Minzner. Thank you very much. Thanks to all the
participants for coming. As you know, one of the areas I cover
for the Commission is civil society issues, and I am
particularly interested to listen to what you have to say about
NGOs. I quite appreciate all of you making the trip down here
to speak at our roundtable. Let me turn the focus to
international cooperation. As you know, there is much
international cooperation with Chinese environmental NGOs.
There are a number of issues that I have observed sometimes
with this cooperation. For one, many local Chinese NGOs become
overly dependent on foreign funding, and you could list several
other issues as well.
Mr. Ru. As I mentioned, GONGOs are very active in different
issue areas. GONGOs, because they have close relationships with
government agencies, they have been introduced by their
supervisory organizations to foreign agencies and NGOs. Their
connection with government agencies might help foreign NGOs to
get
access to those agencies, and thus to influence the
decisionmaking process of those agencies. For grassroots
citizen-organized NGOs, they have helped foreign NGOs to get
direct access to local communities and to conduct grassroots
activities. So I think that is going to depend on what foreign
organizations want to achieve with the cooperative relationship
with Chinese NGOs.
Ms. Economy. Let me just add a couple of points to that.
One of the things I have noticed taking place in the Chinese
NGO community has been a degree of dissatisfaction within some
quarters concerning its interactions with the international
community. Some Chinese NGOs, I think, are concerned that
international agencies or NGOs try to dictate the programs they
undertake or the timeframe in which something ought to be
accomplished. This suggests that if you are going to work with
a Chinese NGO, you have to listen closely to what it wants to
do and look closely at its particular area of expertise.
On the flip side, one complaint from international NGOs has
been that Chinese NGOs occasionally take on too much and that
they are not really technically proficient enough to get the
job done.
At the same time, international NGOs have had some striking
success. For example, one NGO that works on energy-related
issues has really advanced the nature of the debate and pushed
its particular approach quite far up the ladder. To achieve
this, however, the U.S. NGO experts spend an enormous amount of
time in China; the American who is spearheading the project,
for example, travels to China every six weeks to keep pushing
his project. Thus, there still has to be a very deep level of
engagement by the U.S. side. More recently, this NGO has hired
a Chinese expert who was trained in the United States, who is
used to working with a U.S. frame of mind, but who is based in
Beijing. I think this has been an incredibly powerful
cooperative effort. So, if you are working on a technical
issue, it would probably be useful to find people who were
trained here and have spent time here, but who were raised in
China.
Finally, I think anybody who is dealing with NGOs--and I
think by now most international non-governmental organizations
know this--has to approach the effort with a multi-tiered
strategy. It is simply not enough to work with NGOs. You have
to work with the local governments and you have to work with
Beijing.
Every level has to be engaged in this project because,
fundamentally, you are working on changing some kind of policy,
the implementation of that policy, a standard, a technology, or
something. You have to have the support of Beijing and the
local governments; it is not enough to just work with the NGO.
Ms. Adams. I would reiterate that and say that, certainly
the individuals with whom we have worked in China have taught
us that you have to take your lead from them. The situation
they face is very complex and sometimes dangerous, and you have
to listen to them about the way they want to handle it.
I would say one of the most important things is just to
make sure they have the information that is useful in making
sound judgments and understanding what the costs and benefits
are of various investments.
I would make one very specific recommendation, which was
called for recently by a coalition of environmental groups in
China, and that is for better monitoring for seismic activity
around dams.
At the time of the filling of the reservoir of Three
Gorges, we ran an article--we have several on our Web site--
which described the difficulties that the dam monitoring
institution in Beijing, which is called the Dam Safety
Monitoring Center, has in inspecting the 86,000 dams in the
country that have a higher incidence of collapsing. More dams
have collapsed in China than perhaps anywhere else.
Now we have the Three Gorges, which is the biggest, and is
in an area where there are major fault lines, where there is
geological instability, riverbank collapses, and landslides.
God forbid, if there were ever catastrophic dam failure, we
would be talking about the loss of millions of lives. So I
would strongly urge--now, this is not so much a recommendation
for an NGO, I think, but more for the U.S. Government--to make
available resources for--and specifically what this
organization in Beijing has asked for is--better laws to back
up their inspection process, and early warning systems. This
would include both geological/seismic warning systems,
emergency evacuation plans, and emergency preparedness plans to
warn people downstream in the event of a catastrophic dam
failure.
Of course, Three Gorges is the biggest and would be
certainly the most devastating, but there are 22,000 large dams
in China. The institution that is charged with the
responsibility of monitoring them does so on a budget of about
$100,000 a year.
Mr. Foarde. I would like, now, to recognize the other staff
member who really did a lot of heavy lifting to organize
today's roundtable, and she is principally responsible for our
environmental issues monitoring this year. Laura Mitchell is
our research associate at the end of the dais. Over to you,
Laura.
Ms. Mitchell. These questions are for all of you. I
wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the ways
environmental NGOs help victims of pollution take legal action
against polluters, and have courts generally ruled in favor of
polluters or victims of pollution? Do you foresee changes to
the current situation?
Ms. Economy. The one lawyer who I know well that works on
this issue is the one who most people know well, and that is
Wang Canfa in Beijing. He has a team. It is not just one man at
this point. From my perspective, he has had an extraordinary
degree of success. He is enormously persistent, and that
accounts for a lot of it. When he has lost at a lower-level
court, he will pursue the case up and up the ladder, as he has
done several times. I think he has had about 60 cases that he
has prosecuted over the past five years or so since he first
founded the center, and I know 20 of them have been fully
resolved. I do not know how many of them were resolved in his
favor, but I certainly know he has had successes.
There is still a sense that it is a very difficult process,
and part of it has to do with the nature of the courts, their
understanding of the environment, their understanding of
environmental law, et cetera. But I think that the general
trend is a very positive one.
I suppose my concern is that I am not aware of many other
legal centers like this one. I am sure they exist in other
cities, and maybe Jiang Ru, you know of some. But I have not
encountered them. So if I have one concern about the direction,
it is just how many people are engaged in all of this, how many
environmental lawyers China actually has. I think a few years
back, China had only 100 environmental lawyers, although I am
sure the number is far greater now than then. I think the
trend, in any case, is generally a positive one. In addition,
Wang Canfa does not operate alone. He will draw on other NGOs,
bringing in scientists to help him test water quality or the
media to publicize his efforts. He is part of a much larger
network, so he does not operate alone in that sense.
Mr. Ru. I think Elizabeth is correct. Until now, I have
only seen the Center for Legal Assistance for Pollution Victims
[CLAPV] to bring pollution cases to the court on behalf of
pollution victims.
I talked with Professor Wang Canfa several times and he
mentioned that his organization faced difficulties in finding
evidence to support their cases, especially when there was not
a clear causal relationship between the pollution activities
and the damage caused by the pollution. He had a problem with
the local courts, they were not independent. He mentioned that
local courts were directly under the control of local
governments and local governments had interests in local
industries.
Elizabeth also mentioned that Wang Canfa used the news
media very effectively. Professor Wang mentioned that when
there was a lot of media exposure, the case might be resolved
in favor of the victims. In cases where no media attention is
put on the case, it is difficult for his NGO to help the
victims.
Professor Wang also mentioned the importance of
international support to his organization. He has been
conducting training for environmental lawyers in China. He did
two or three training sessions last fall, I think, in Xi'an and
in Chongqing. I do not have the exact number, but he has
already trained more than 50 environmental lawyers in China.
I actually read one news piece that reported that one
environmental lawyer in Chongqing who was trained by the CLAPV
had brought a pollution case to the court. Thanks.
Ms. Adams. Thank you, again. These are not pollution cases,
but cases where people have lost their land because of two
dams, one is Three Gorges, and the other is the Taolinkou
reservoir in Hebei province.
In the case of He Kechang, who represents people displaced
by Three Gorges, it turns out he was arrested with three
colleagues who had been sent off as delegates to Beijing to try
to appeal to Communist Party officials for their compensation
funds that had been corruptly taken by local officials. He was
detained, along with his colleagues, for eight months,
incommunicado. He eventually was tried and he was sentenced to
a three year jail term, and his colleagues to two years.
Essentially, we followed up on it but nobody else did in China.
No NGOs. No formally recognized NGOs. I think this is a role
for human rights organizations outside of the country. I think
it is a sign of the sensitivity of Three Gorges, and of dam
projects in particular, that environmental NGOs inside the
country do not really want, or so far have not been able, to
pursue it or felt it was just too risky for them.
There is also another case, a very interesting case that
emerged last year, of a community displaced by the Taolinkou
reservoir in Hebei province. That community collected a
petition with 11,000 signatures, found themselves a lawyer in
Beijing, and attempted to deliver their petition to the
National People's Congress last year. When the local officials
found out about it, the officials chased the petitioners to
Beijing, and arrested seven of them. Two of the representatives
and the lawyer were not caught, and off they went on a chase
around Beijing, where they went from one hiding spot to
another, and one computer to another, where the lawyer sent out
online updates of what was happening. At the same time, he was
using the computers to do Google searches for the Constitution
of the PRC and various other administrative laws in China so
that he could use those to defend himself and his clients.
In cases like that, I think we need outside organizations.
Of course, if there are some within China who can follow up on
it and help defend them, that is wonderful, but so far we have
not actually seen that happen. I think it is an indication of
how sensitive some of these dam projects are.
Mr. Foarde. Not only are you giving extraordinarily good
answers, but I noticed that your technique in passing the
microphone is exemplary. [Laughter.]
I now would like to introduce our friend and colleague,
Katherine Palmer Kaup, who is a special advisor to the
Commission this year, and joining us on her sabbatical year
from her associate professorship at Furman University in
Greenville, SC. Kate.
Ms. Kaup. Thank you. We have talked some about foreign NGOs
cooperating with Chinese NGOs. I was hoping you might speak a
little bit more about domestic Chinese NGOs' cooperation with
one another. Particularly, to what extent are they cooperating
and are there formal restrictions on their doing so. Would
their lack of cooperation be more a sign of self censorship, or
some other obstacle?
Ms. Economy. I am not aware of any prohibition on NGOs
cooperating with one another. Environmental NGOs are not
supposed to have branches of their own organization in other
provinces, so you cannot have Friends of Nature in Sichuan,
although, in any case, Liang Congjie has said that he does not
want to have branches because it would be too much
responsibility for him to manage.
Certainly, though, I have never seen any prohibition on
NGOs interacting and working together. On virtually any of the
major issues, whether it be the kind of campaigns that Jiang Ru
was talking about having to do with species protection, the
Tibetan antelope, golden snub-nosed monkey, or petitions
against dams, you will have multiple NGOs engaged. Some will be
locally based NGOs, and several will usually be Beijing-based
NGOs. The Beijing NGOs are like national NGOs and have a very
far reach. They are typically the best funded, the best
staffed, they have the most members, and they are everywhere.
They permeate all aspects of environmental protection
throughout the country. As I mentioned, they will also start
campaigns--like the ``26 degrees Celsius'' campaign--and then
the campaign will be picked up by 30 more NGOs nationwide in
different places.
So, there is really an enormous amount of cooperation that
goes on. It can be as small as the journalist forums that I was
mentioning. Two of them will work together to put on one event
or, for example, there might be a photography exhibit sponsored
by several NGOs.
In fact, you rarely see one NGO hosting an event or
launching a campaign. Even when they are writing letters to the
central government, they are doing it together with a number of
signatures on the letter. So, I think there is an extraordinary
amount of cooperation that goes on.
Mr. Ru. From my experience in my research, I found many
citizen-organized NGOs were created based on the first NGO,
Friends of Nature or Green Camps, and they have close, personal
relationships with each other. So when they have an
environmental campaign, they often work together.
Also, I found some national-level GONGOs, like one NGO
affiliated with SEPA, has invited some citizen-organized NGOs,
like Friends of Nature or Global Village Beijing, to
participate in some international events organized by the GONGO
or by SEPA. I did not see much cooperation between GONGOs.
There is some cooperation, but less substantive. Thanks.
Ms. Economy. I just want to make one last little point on
that topic that I think is important. Some of the Beijing-based
NGOs really do take the smaller NGOs under their wing.
You will find, for example, activists such as Wen Bo, who
spend an enormous amount of time trying to help smaller NGOs
learn how to write grant proposals or develop programs. There
really is a kind of nurturing quality to the way that these
larger NGOs look upon the smaller, regionally based NGOs.
Ms. Adams. That is certainly our impression as well. I
should just say, there was always a lot of cooperation among
scholars who wanted to get views across to the government, for
example, the cautioning by 53 expert scholars in China to the
government against raising the reservoir level of the Three
Gorges dam, so that it could be monitored over time to make
sure that the sediment did not accumulate too quickly and
essentially cause the same hazard that happened at the
Sanmenxia dam. So, that certainly has happened, that there was
cooperation. Our experience has always been as well, if it is
safe, then there is lots of cooperation. There is an awful lot
of communication and sharing of expertise. Then, of course, in
the last year or two we have seen an explosion of that sort of
cooperation, with the groups sending off joint letters to the
government.
One of the other very important ones, to my mind, is
calling on the government to start doing these geological
surveys around existing dams.
Mr. Foarde. Really useful. Let me go on and recognize our
colleague, Adam Bobrow, who is a senior counsel on the
Commission staff. Adam.
Mr. Bobrow. Thanks, John. I am the senior counsel for
commercial rule of law. Typically, I think commercial
development is thought of as being opposed to or contrary to
environmental protection. Perhaps that is a false choice. But I
guess I am interested in how--the WTO commitments that China
has made obviously have little or nothing to do with the
environment directly, but at the same time, contain a large
measure of increased transparency,
increased requirements for governance of organizations and
government. I am wondering whether you have uncovered any sort
of anecdotal evidence of what I guess I want to call the folk
influence of the WTO, where you see somebody saying, ``well, we
have joined the WTO so we have instituted this measure.'' You
think to yourself--you usually do not express it--but it has
nothing to do with trade, so I do not know how it may be
directly related. Have you found any sort of anecdotal linkage
or relationship?
Mr. Ru. At least from my study, I did not see that link. My
personal view is that the Chinese state is striving to address
all social and environmental issues, and it is a challenge for
the country. Especially the central government, I think,
undercounts a physical regimen. They have fewer resources to
influence local governments' decisions, to monitor local
governments' activities. So, promoting transparent and open
administration is the goal of the government. They are pushing
in that direction.
Ms. Economy. I have not heard anything. I actually saw, not
that long ago, maybe in October or November, one of the
participants in the environmental working group that the
Chinese Government has for the WTO. All he said to me was that
he was very disappointed that the EU had stopped pushing for
environmental regulations within the WTO, because he and his
colleagues were very much looking forward to that as an
opportunity to sort of strengthen their hand domestically.
Ms. Adams. I am not a WTO expert, but in the energy sector,
anything that forces greater transparency, that attempts to
eliminate subsidies, subsidies that can come in the form of the
right to pollute, is going to help the Chinese environment. So,
I would say, generally, that these trade relationships will
force a higher environment standard. We certainly found it in
the case of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, that it
improved the environmental standards in Canada because the
United States has higher environmental standards than we have.
So I think that often you find, under these trade agreements,
that the bar goes up and that there are pressures on the
country with the lower environmental standards to raise them.
Of course, NGOs have to be vigilant and watch that and
monitor it, and generate the information and get it through to
the various governing bodies, but I think it can certainly be a
force for good.
Mr. Bobrow. Thank you. I would like to hear any sort of
elaboration, just looking at Liz's book. You do not have to go
any further than the first chapter to see that it has been a
choice between economic growth and environmental protection,
and that has sort of have been the way that the government has
viewed it. You see the Huai River, the enormous amount of
degradation has come because of a lot of economic development.
To what extent does the panel believe that this choice is a
false choice, that this is something that was not necessary in
the first place, and may not be necessary going forward, and
that there are possibilities for continued economic
development, but with environmental protection built in?
Ms. Economy. We are a little off the topic of the NGOs, but
I will take this question. I think that you are beginning to
see the development of a new environmental consciousness in
China, some of which is emanating from Pan Yue and SEPA. What
you have in China today are two positive trends when it comes
to the choice between economic development and the environment.
On the one hand, you do have cities like Dalian, Xiamen,
Zhongshan, and Shanghai that are getting relatively wealthier,
and you see them beginning to invest more of their own
resources into environmental protection, in some cases
beginning to turn the corner. Sometimes they cannot quite stay
ahead of the game, but they are trying. There is definitely
interest in environmental protection and a belief that economic
development and environmental protection need to go hand in
hand, and ``we want to clean up our city.'' China has a model
environmental city and province program. These places are
striving to achieve that model status. They want to be listed
on the Web site. They want to be able to say, ``Hangzhou, a
beautiful city for foreign investment,'' like the Hangzhou
advertisement says. So I think on the one hand you see that
kind of trend, as cities and regions are getting wealthier they
are making better choices. The other thing that is happening is
that you are really beginning to see the environment impinge on
economic development. I think for the first time, really, this
past year, I have seen in the Chinese media a lot of attention
being paid to the economic costs of environmental degradation
and pollution. All of a sudden, in the Chinese press you are
getting all these numbers generated: $6 billion lost because of
desertification, $28 billion lost in industrial output
because of water scarcity. You see these impacts reported in
the Chinese press.
Companies near Shenzhen or Guangzhou are reporting that
they could only fulfill a quarter of their Christmas orders
because they did not have enough water to run their factories.
You are having a real impact on local economies of resource
scarcities. So I think you have these twin processes taking
place. Then you have someone like Pan Yue ready to capitalize
on that and saying, ``We need to do green GDP. We need to take
into account environmental degradation and pollution into our
GDP accounting.''
You have Shanxi province coming out ahead of all of the
training, ahead of everything that was supposed to be done, and
saying, ``We have already done our own green GDP and we have
determined that, over 10 years, if we account for all
environment degradation and pollution, it negates virtually all
GDP growth.''
We have no way of knowing, of course, how this Green GDP
was actually calculated, but the real point is that I think you
are getting the development of a new consciousness. It is going
to take time, but you are seeing the seeds of it.
Ms. Adams. Yes, I think the tradeoff between protecting the
environment and economic development is a false dichotomy. I
think dams are actually a good example to use to try to
describe why this is so. Millions of Chinese citizens are worse
off today than they were before they were displaced from their
land, from their farms, from their homes by hydroelectric dams.
Of course, the argument is made, ``Well, we needed the
power. We needed the economic development.'' But, if the
creators of harm are forced to internalize the costs that they
are inflicting on other members of society, then you start to
get good accounting. You really start to get good cost/benefit
analyses. But you cannot get that when the rights of citizens
are being violated systematically, when they do not have the
right to defend themselves in courts of law, really resorting
to the rule of law.
So, you have an economic fiction that a certain investment
is good for the economy, when you really do not know what the
real costs are because they have been inflicted on people who
are voiceless. So, you have got to find a way to internalize
the real costs. How do you do it? I think, through the rule of
law. You have got to empower individuals with the power to
force a polluter to compensate them, because that is when you
can actually convert costs into monetary value, and that is how
investors figure out whether they want to proceed with an
investment. Are the benefits really greater than the costs? As
long as proponents can hide the social costs, well, they can
justify any investment.
I think, also, we tend to discuss China's environmental
problems in global terms, whether it is air pollution, the loss
of forests, or loss of a fresh water supply. But the thing to
remember is that although these are macro problems, there are
always micro victims. There are individuals who feel the effect
of the pollution first, before the rest of us even begin to get
a sense of what they are. If those individuals had the right
from the beginning to stop the polluter from putting whatever
the toxin is in that water supply, for example, then you have
got environmental protection. You have got very effective
environmental protection. If people who rely on a forest, for
example, can protect that forest, then you have got
environmental protection. The people who are trying to protect
their
environment want electricity. They want a more comfortable
lifestyle. They are the ones who are best able to make the
decisions, to make those tradeoffs to force the investors and
the proponents of projects to come up with better alternatives.
For example, high-efficiency gas turbines might be better
than a hydroelectric dam. Forcing energy providers to
internalize all the costs of their project forces
accountability within an economic system, and ultimately
protects the environment at the same time. So, I think they go
hand in hand.
Mr. Bobrow. Thanks.
Mr. Foarde. Let me pick up the questioning now by picking
up on the theme, Patricia, that you had in your original
presentation. That is, the largest threat to the global
environment not being the Chinese people, but rather the
Chinese Government. Has your organization done any studies on
the environmental impact on the rest of the region, or indeed
the world, of, say, the Three Gorges project, or the types of
environmental problems that we are seeing in China generally?
If you have not, do you know anybody who has?
Ms. Adams. There is a terrific network of groups working on
the Mekong issues, the damming of the various rivers that come
out of western China. They are now making links with Chinese
environmental groups. In fact, a colleague of mine who was at a
meeting recently said, ``You know, there is no difference.''
They are making the same arguments. I think there is a huge
opportunity for them to work together. However, my
understanding is, there is an awful lot of caution. It is
still, I would say, more dangerous for the Chinese
environmental groups to speak out than it is for the groups in
the other countries.
That is the most trans-border work that we have done. We,
of course, are concerned about the downstream effects, and also
ultimately on the ocean, in particular, of the Three Gorges
dam. But most of our trans-border work has actually been on the
issue of the various rivers that are originating in western
China.
Last year when the Dalai Lama was in Canada for a major
religious event, a number of us met with him and talked about
the Three Gorges dam. He was very concerned about that, and
very concerned, obviously, about dams in Tibet and various
other development projects that are proposed for Tibet. He felt
that this was a wonderful opportunity for environmental groups,
certainly from Canada, from China, and from the Tibetan areas,
as well as the Mekong region, to work together. As he said,
``It is not just good for Tibetan people. This is good for
Chinese people. This is good for everybody.'' This is the head
of many watersheds, and ultimately everybody is going to be
well served by sound decisionmaking.
Mr. Foarde. Good. Useful. Let me go on. Our time is getting
short, but I know we have time for a couple more people to ask
questions. Let me ask Susan Weld to pick up the questioning, if
you would.
Ms. Weld. Thank you very much. I am interested in the
process of consultation. Many of the environmental rules in
China require consultation. But is there any sense in which
there can be more than mere consultation, where there can be
real participation and forcing of government officials to go
back to the planning board and rethink their plans?
So, there is also a legal question in that. Is there
anything like--I think not--the writ of mandamus in China that
could be developed? Would that be an area in which legal
development could help?
Mr. Ru. As far as I know, public participation is a very
new topic in China. Before that, I think most of the
consultation was conducted among concerned ministries or
concerned local governments. The newest development will be the
2003 Environmental Impact Assessment law issued by China. This
law specifically requires development plans or construction
projects to conduct public participation in their environmental
impact assessment [EIA] process. But as of today, this law has
yet to develop any concrete or detailed procedures on how to
implement the public participation process in EIA.
I know that the American Bar Association has done some
experimental work in Shenyang to promote public participation
there. But the fundamental issues related to public
participation have yet to be addressed.
For example, who is the public, according to the
environmental impact assessment law? There is no answer. Other
questions include: How should the public be informed about the
development projects or development plans? How should the
public comments or public feedback be included and considered
in the decisionmaking process? How can the public go against a
decision made by the local government? So I think that might be
a very promising area for international organizations or for
foreign governments to help the Chinese Government figure out
the process, figure out how to include the public in the EIA
process.
One recent event is that the American Bar Association
organized a conference last December. I learned from one
participant of the conference that some officials from local
EPBs said that they knew there is an EIA law that required
public participation, but they did not know how they should do
it. So that would be really helpful if international assistance
can help the Chinese Government at all levels to develop such
capacity.
Ms. Adams. We have not seen any formal--I guess that is the
best way to describe it--method that citizens have used in
order to get the authorities to go back to the drawing board.
It has not been orderly. Often there are demonstrations or
petitioning. But, of course, the rights of the citizens are
irregular and vague, and so we have not seen anything formal
yet. This may change with the new law.
Although on the one hand, I think it is very good that
citizens will now have the right to participate--to hear, to
know, etc.--I do fear that they will just become part of what I
would call ``a World Bank consultation process.'' That is one
in which you get consulted, and consulted, and consulted, and
consulted, and at the end of the day, the agencies that are
making the decision do whatever they want, because the citizens
who were consulted do not have any legal right to challenge a
decision to proceed with, for example, a hydroelectric dam, or
whatever the project happens to be.
So we have not seen any formal legal process yet. Apart
from attempts to encourage public debate and monitor public
opposition through demonstrations and publish books that have
recorded some of the opposition to various projects, none of it
has been a formal legal process. What we have seen is really
sort of a backlash against these decisions.
Ms. Weld. It seems to me one basis would be the property
right, so it could be actually a constitutional question.
Ms. Adams. I would certainly agree with that. And the
property rights can be enshrined in the form of customary
property rights. Sometimes those rights are communal customary
property rights, riparian rights, the right to land, the right
to air, the right to be able to stop trespass of pollutants in
your air, and so on. I agree completely. I think property
rights is what it boils down to. So it amounts to some really
fundamental laws and legal changes, and perhaps constitutional
changes as well.
Mr. Ru. I just want to add one more point. As I observed
during the last two or three years, there are more and more
homeowners in China who have stood up to fight against
developers or government agencies to protect their property, to
protect their rights.
Another thing I observed is in the field of urban planning.
More and more public participation activities have been
conducted in many Chinese cities. For example, most local city
planning bureaus have organized information disclosure
activities, and some even organized public hearings. I do not
know whether the hearings will influence the final city
planning decisions made by local governments, but I believe it
is definitely a promising progress.
Mr. Foarde. As our time is just about up, I would like to
recognize, for the final round of questions this afternoon,
Carl Minzner. Carl.
Mr. Minzner. Thank you very much. It has been a real
delight to get to listen to you all. Let me just return to the
question of Chinese environmental NGOs at the very end here.
Both of you, in your different fields, have had an interaction
with a wide range of environmental activities. Dr. Jiang Ru,
you have interacted with formally registered organizations, and
Patricia, you have interacted with people who have contact with
more informal networks of people. First, who are the people who
belong to these organizations? I have this impression that
there is a disparity. I have an impression that maybe students,
urban residents, and members of the intelligentsia belong to
these organizations in the cities and these more informal
networks of activities may be more rural-based. Correct me if I
am wrong. I am interested in knowing that.
The second part of the question is what is it that
ultimately gets these environmental groups, both the formally
organized ones and the more informal, loose networks, what they
want, be it the creation of a wildlife reserve or the halting
of a dam project? What is their action that ultimately succeeds
in getting them what they want?
Mr. Ru. My observation is that those GONGOs often have
members with professional backgrounds in a specific field. For
example, academic societies will often have professors or
scholars as their members. For citizen-organized NGOs, their
membership will be very diverse with many college student
volunteers. Those people are not necessarily working in one
field.
In terms of the effectiveness of NGOs, my observation is
that in the two case studies of my dissertation, they can only
succeed if they can mobilize high-ranking State Council
officials to intervene in the cases. If they cannot, they have
limited leverage to influence local government's development
decisions. Thanks.
Ms. Adams. Carl, to answer your question about, ``who are
these people? '' I do not see a disparity. We have worked with
really everybody, from famous journalists like Dai Qing, to
eminent scientists, many of them very elderly, who have seen a
lot, know a lot, and are very skilled, to a lot of young
scholars who are starting to emerge now and are speaking out as
I think it is becoming a little bit safer to do so.
More and more details about human rights abuses are
becoming public, and we are hearing more and more about the
individuals in the rural areas who are affected by the dams.
They really are on the front line. They feel it first and they
feel it for a long, long time. They are suffering terrific
losses.
I know that Dai Qing has warned about this problem, that we
have a tendency, when we are concerned about, for example,
human rights abuses, to worry about the more high-profile
people who are often well known and can communicate outside of
the country. But, in fact, the preponderance of these abuses
are really happening in the rural areas to the people who do
not have the same means of communication, and their numbers are
really much larger.
Mr. Foarde. Thanks to each of our panelists, all three of
you, for giving us a very rich conversation this afternoon. We
have gotten into a lot of topics in great depth, and it is very
useful for us and for our Commission members to take advantage
of your expertise.
I want to pick up a theme of Dr. Jiang Ru's and wish each
of you a happy and prosperous Year of the Rooster, and the same
to everyone in the audience. Thanks to the panelists, again,
and to everyone who attended this afternoon.
Please keep your eye on our Web site and sign up for our e-
mail list service to get announcements about upcoming CECC
hearings and roundtables.
Thank you all very much. For this afternoon, we will call
this roundtable adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:35 p.m. the issues roundtable was
concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Elizabeth Economy
FEBRUARY 7, 2005
Environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are at the
forefront of strengthening civil society in China, drawing hundreds of
thousands of Chinese citizens into environmental activities, forging
non-state linkages across provincial boundaries, and establishing the
Chinese people as political actors independent of state-directed
policies. Environmental NGOs also play a critical role in advancing
transparency, rule of law, and official accountability within the
Chinese political system. Through this process, they have become a
significant force for political
reform.
There are approximately 2000 environmental groups officially
registered as NGOs, with perhaps as many registered as for-profit
business entities or not registered at all. Over the past decade, since
the establishment of China's first environmental NGO, Friends of
Nature, there has been a transformation in the nature of environmental
activism in China. Initially concerned primarily with the relatively
politically ``safe'' issues of environmental education and biodiversity
protection, environmental NGOs in China today are engaged in dam
protests, filing lawsuits against polluting factories, and pursuing
multinationals engaged in illegal activities. Most environmental NGOs
in China exist as part of a much wider community of environmental
activism involving China's scientific community, the media,
multinationals, international non-governmental organizations, and
elements of the Chinese government.
The Chinese government has generally adopted a positive attitude
toward environmental NGOs, recognizing that they fill a critical gap in
the state's capacity to protect the environment effectively. Still,
Beijing continues to exercise control over NGOs through a range of
regulations and restrictions, remaining wary of the potential of
environmental activism in China to transform into a force for much
broader political change. China's State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA) has emerged as a strong supporter of NGO
activity, and works very closely with NGOs--both publicly and behind
the scenes--to achieve common goals. At the local level, however, some
environmental protection bureaus remain wary of NGO activity, fearing
the NGOs will expose their lackluster performance.
I. WHO ARE CHINA'S ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS?
China's environmental activists tend to be educated, articulate and
in many cases quite charismatic. Their background is varied: Liang
Congjie is an historian and Wang Canfa is a lawyer, but the vast
majority brings a media background to the table. Liao Xiaoyi, Dai Qing,
Wang Yongchen, Hu Kanping, Shi Lihong, Wen Bo, Huo Daishan, and Xi
Zhinong, among others were all journalists, photographers, or radio/
television personalities. This media background has proved invaluable
in
raising the profile of environmental issues within the Chinese
government and throughout the country. Most of China's environmental
NGO leaders have also spent significant time abroad, particularly in
the United States either at universities or training with various U.S.-
based environmental NGOs. Several, including Liang Congjie, Liao
Xiaoyi, and Wang Yongchen, have won major international environmental
awards for their work.
Many of the most renowned of China's environmental activists/NGOs
are based in Beijing. However, they undertake activities throughout the
entire country, including significant efforts in Tibet, Yunnan, and
Sichuan. Many smaller, locally based NGOs have also sprung up to
address local concerns, such as biodiversity protection, dam
construction, and water pollution. While many of these smaller NGOs
struggle with the government-mandated registration process and funding
and membership requirements, the Beijing-based NGOs often try to
nurture and develop these NGOs, providing them with training on grant
writing, developing materials and programs, and even providing
financial support.
Universities have also become hotbeds of environmental activism
with many of the larger universities boasting more than one
environmental club. (University environmental groups may or may not go
through the process of registration, which can be quite burdensome.) In
2004, on Earth Day, a reported 100,000 Chinese college students in 22
provinces participated in environmental activities organized by
university groups.
Through the internet, environmental websites such as Green Web,
newspapers such as China Environmental News, China Green Times,
Southern Weekend and 21st Century Business Herald, as well as
television programs such as The Time for Environment, Chinese
environmental activists reach millions of Chinese daily. One
potentially harmful change to environmental outreach is the decision by
the Chinese government that government bureaus are not required to
purchase newspapers such as China Green Times. This has sharply limited
the income and circulation of such environmental papers.
II. THE NATURE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
Environmental NGOs in China address an increasingly wide range of
environmental challenges. Some focus very specifically on one
particular issue, such as
environment-related public health problems, while others tackle a broad
range of concerns from dam construction to tree planting to energy
conservation.
<bullet> Environmental education remain a mainstay of Chinese NGO
activity: Friends of Nature supports environmental education vans
that travel throughout the country to provide environmental
education that is specifically targeted to the region at hand, for
example, overgrazing and desertification in Inner Mongolia. Green
Earth Volunteers and Global Village Beijing both organize
journalist salons to educate journalists on a wide range of
environmental challenges. More recently, the Institute of
Environment and Development has been developing a curriculum on
renewable energy education.
<bullet> Biodiversity protection also continues to drive significant
environmental activism in China. Many NGOs, such as Friends of
Nature, Green Earth Volunteers, Wild China, and Green River launch
campaigns and develop educational material including videos or
photographic exhibits to promote biodiversity protection. In 2004,
for example, a movie ``Kekexili'' was produced that discussed the
plight of the Tibetan Antelope. Recently some NGO activists have
been calling for greater emphasis to be placed on the protection of
plant as well as animal life. This focus on biodiversity protection
is supported by the strong presence in China of numerous
international non-governmental environmental organizations with
similar interests, such as WWF, Conservation International, the
Nature Conservancy, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
WWF, for one, has served as a training ground for many of China's
younger environmentalists.
<bullet> Energy Conservation and Efficiency is a relatively new focus
for China's environmental NGOs. The nuts and bolts issues of
developing energy efficiency codes for buildings or promoting
tradable permits for SO2 generally remain the purview of
International NGOs such as NRDC and ED along with their Chinese
think tank or government partners. However, Chinese NGOs have begun
to develop their own programs in the energy arena. During summer
2004, for example, Beijing-based NGOs launched a campaign to
persuade hotels and other large public buildings to keep their
thermostats at 26 degrees Celsius in an effort to conserve
energy. Thirty NGOs nationwide joined the campaign. In addition,
with the support of the Energy Foundation, Liao Xiaoyi of Global
Village Beijing, established the Sustainable Energy Journalist
Forum; there is an associated award given by the Energy Foundation,
WWF, and ON Semiconductor. Global Village Beijing also organized
journalists from Beijing to participate in a symposium sponsored by
Michelin on clean energy vehicles. One of the most interesting
initiatives is the effort by the Global Environment Institute,
directed by Jin Jiaman, to promote projects as wide-ranging as Bus
Rapid Transit, biogas in Yunnan, and assisting farmers in
developing renewable energy enterprises. This Institute is heavily
supported by the international community, including the Energy
Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, and the International Network for
Bamboo and Rattan.
<bullet> Air and water pollution is yet another area of growing
interest and concern for China's environmental NGOs. Wang Canfa,
the director of the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution
Victims, is a highly energetic and engaging man who has taken as
his mission getting redress for pollution victims through the legal
system. He has put forth about 60 cases, 20 of which have been
resolved successfully. His center is funded primarily by the Dutch
government. A different approach is taken by the Huai River
Protectors (Guardians), which was founded by Huo Daishan. It is a
grass roots organization that is committed to educating villagers
about the impact of the polluted water of the Huai River on their
health. This issue has been receiving significant attention in the
Chinese media, and CCTV recently completed a documentary film, ``A
Village and a River,'' that explores this problem. Huo is also
trying to assist villagers in digging deep water wells to gain
access to clean water.
<bullet> Large Scale Dams and Hydropower projects have also engaged a
number of Chinese NGOs both in Beijing and in the regions where the
dams are slated for construction. Over time, there has also been a
``radicalization'' of the rhetoric of NGOs engaged in dam protests,
possibly due to the support of INGOs such as International Rivers
Network, such that Chinese NGOs now talk extensively about social
justice and displaced peoples rather than focus exclusively on
consequences for the environment or ancient cultural sites. The
NGOs have achieved some significant success in Sichuan and Yunnan
but not without fierce political battles and some personal risk.
Green Watershed of Yunnan, Wild China, Green Earth Volunteers,
Friends of Nature, and China Rivers Network have all taken up the
fight to slow dam construction on China's rivers. They have
undertaken a wide range of activities in this effort. Wang
Yongchen, for example, participated in the World Commission on Dams
in Thailand and gathered signatures from 61 countries against the
dam construction on the Nu River in Yunnan. In a separate fight to
prevent a dam, Chinese activists garnered 15,000 signatures via the
internet. At great personal risk, Yu Xiaogang of Green Watershed
organized trips for villagers slated for relocation at one dam site
in Yunnan to speak with villagers from other dam sites, whose
relocation had been far from successful. His damming report to the
Central Disciplinary Committee in Beijing as well as the Yunnan
Provincial government almost caused the NGO to be closed and Yu to
be arrested. The Civil Affairs Bureau, the Academy of Social
Science, and Green Watershed's sponsor, the Yunnan Association of
Science and Technology, however, declared that Yu's work was well
within the scope of his NGO's charter. The issue of relocation for
dams is a highly politically sensitive one. In October as many as
100,000 farmers from seven townships in Sichuan Province reportedly
gathered to protest their proposed compensation and relocation as a
result of the Pubugou Dam construction. They had witnessed what had
happened to other villagers who had been relocated a few years
earlier: they received substandard housing on poor land. Thousands
of People's Armed Police were brought in to keep the peace. China
Youth Daily did its own investigation questioning the project and
the relocation plan and found that local officials had budgeted one
billion less in relocation compensation than had been promised. In
the end, several local officials were fired.
III. NGO RELATIONS WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT
China's State Environmental Protection Administration generally
works very closely with environmental NGOs. Environmental NGOs agitated
for SEPA to be included in the Go West campaign leading group,
supported the call for a green Olympics, worked with SEPA on an energy
efficiency campaign, and serve as SEPA's eyes and ears at the local
level. Even on the most sensitive political issues such as dam
construction, there is a strong alliance between NGOs and SEPA. The
decision in late January 2005 by SEPA Vice-Director Pan Yue (with the
support of Premier Wen Jiabao and the State Council) to bring to a halt
30 large infrastructure projects including 26 power-related projects on
the grounds that environmental impact assessments were not properly
completed suggests strong support within the top reaches of Beijing for
NGO activity in this realm. These projects however, also speak to other
central government priorities such as enforcing the rule of law and
slowing large-scale investment.
Still SEPA support for NGOs is very strong. It is common now for
high ranking SEPA officials, such as Pan Yue, to articulate the
necessity of environmental NGOs for safeguarding the environment. Pan
has also said that within the next two years, SEPA will help to
establish an NGO cooperation network and to provide professional
training for small grassroots groups. He believes that it is critical
to have the Chinese people engaged in environmental protection and to
open the decision making process for environmental issues to make it
``democratic.''
More generally, however, the government keeps a watchful eye on
environmental NGOs, as well as on all registered NGOs. Officially, NGOs
must have a government-sponsor to whom they report their membership,
funding sources and activities. NGOs are not permitted to have branch
organizations in various provinces, and no person who has been labeled
a political dissident may be a member of an NGO. NGO leaders say that
the degree to which all of these strictures are enforced varies
according to the sponsor. There remains a concern in some parts of the
Chinese government that NGOs are subversive entities. In 2002, Friends
of Nature was forced to remove one of its founding board members, Wang
Lixiong, because of his support for two Tibetan monks who were about to
be executed, or face closure. There are also periodic crackdowns in
which NGOs are shut down for violations as innocuous as not having
sufficient funding or sufficient number of members. Nonetheless, during
fall 2004, the Ministry of Civil Affairs suggested that discussions
were underway to lift the requirement that NGOs become affiliated with
a government sponsor.
IV. WHERE TO FROM HERE?
Chinese environmental NGO activists are a politically skilled and
sensitive group. Over the past decade, they have moved into areas of
greater technical challenge and political sensitivity with notable
success. Still, as the environmental movement in China continues to
evolve, several challenges remain:
First, some Chinese and outside observers have argued that Chinese
NGOs are more effective at identifying problems rather than at
proposing answers and shy away from addressing technically oriented
challenges. The State Environmental Protection Administration, for
example, was disappointed that NGOs did not participate in a SEPA-
advertised public hearing in August for comments on its draft rule on
emission permit license management. Four individuals and 12 companies
participated, but no NGOs.
Second, China's NGOs remain heavily reliant on international
funding for their work. International Foundations, multinationals, and
other governments provide an overwhelming portion of Chinese NGO
financial wherewithal. Some challenges arise from this situation.
<bullet> Chinese NGOs remain open to political criticism down the line
that they are actually foreign-directed enterprises. While some
smaller NGOs and websites exist primarily on Chinese contributions,
there has yet to develop a real strategy on the part of Chinese
NGOs to attract funding from Chinese sources. (One positive trend,
in this regard, is the establishment of an association of Chinese
businesses committed to supporting environmental protection.)
<bullet> There are signs of some resentment on both sides due to
differing strategies and capabilities. Some sectors of the Chinese
NGO community are articulating a desire for greater independence
from international donors. They complain that international donors
don't appreciate how difficult it is to make progress and are too
short-sighted; and that international supporters try to direct some
of the projects, thereby distracting Chinese NGOs from pursuing the
projects they are most suited to tackle. From the international
perspective, some donors have likewise voiced the opinion that some
Chinese NGOs have taken money and not delivered on what was
promised and are not technically proficient enough to do the work
that needs to be done properly.
<bullet> Third, until the Chinese government removes its restrictions
on NGO registration and otherwise supports the development of civil
society, the environmental movement may remain limited in size, as
well as forced to operate under the shadow of knowledge that
political caprice or shifting political winds could force them to
pull back from their efforts or risk being shut down entirely.
______
Prepared Statement of Jiang Ru
FEBRUARY 7, 2005
As an independent scholar, I hope my statement can introduce you
and other
policymakers in this country a new perspective on the dynamics of state
controls of environmental NGOs in China. This statement is based on my
Ph.D. dissertation, Environmental NGOs in China: The Interplay of State
Controls, Agency Interests and NGO Strategies, completed in August 2004
at Stanford University. The statement I make today represents my
personal opinions only and does not reflect the views of any
organizations I was previously or am currently affiliated with. In my
ten minutes I will introduce the design and implementation, and then
four of the main findings of my research. My findings indicate that
despite onerous state control measures, environmental activists were
able to create NGOs and operate with a fair amount of freedom by
censoring activities of their NGOs. Understanding the growing autonomy
and self-censorship of Chinese NGOs provides considerable opening for
international organizations to assist Chinese environmental NGOs.
STUDY DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
The goals of my research is to understand how the Chinese state has
officially described its control of NGOs, how the state has controlled
environmental NGOs in practice, and how environmental NGOs have
interacted with the state to conduct their activities. To achieve my
research goals, I analyzed China's NGO policies and regulations to
identify measures the state has employed to control NGOs, surveyed a
group of 11 national and 11 Beijing environmental NGOs to understand
how NGO control measures were enforced in reality based on these NGOs'
experience, and conducted three case studies to further examine how
different environmental NGOs had interacted with government agencies at
national and local levels to save three endangered wildlife species.
The NGOs I studied included both formally registered government-
organized NGOs (Bongos) with over ten full-time staff members and
unregistered citizen-organized NGOs with only few volunteers. From 1999
to 2003, I made four trips to China and stayed in China for a total of
21 months. During these trips, I interviewed governmental officials,
NGO staff members, NGO researchers, environmental volunteers, and
environmental experts. In addition, I collected multiple sources of
evidence such as governmental documents and NGOs' internal documents.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Four main findings of my dissertation are:
1. The Chinese State has developed a vigorous set of NGO regulations to
control the development and activities of NGOs. Three key
control measures of these regulations are:
<bullet> An NGO has to be registered at a civil affairs office
according to its geographic scope of activities;
<bullet> An NGO has to find a supervisory organization to sponsor its
registration with a civil affairs office. Here, a supervisory
organization, referred to as a ``mother-in-law organization'' by
some scholars, is a state-authorized organization that sponsors an
NGO's registration application to a civil affair office, and then
supervises the NGO's activities after the NGO registers with the
civil affairs office; and
<bullet> Civil affairs offices will force NGOs to correct any
violations of above-noted and other NGO control measures.
2. Some of the 22 environmental NGOs I surveyed experienced no strict
state control declared in NGO regulations.
Based on experience of the 22 NGOs, I found that some of these NGOs
violated above control measures without being punished by civil affairs
offices. For example, five citizen-organized NGOs were not registered
with any civil affairs offices as independent NGOs but conducted their
activities openly without experiencing any explicit control exerted by
any government agencies. For those NGOs registered with civil affairs
offices, civil affairs offices had only controlled the registration of
these NGOs. A common statement made by my NGO interviewees was that
civil affairs offices had barely interfered with their NGOs'
operations. In contrast to civil affairs offices, supervisory
organizations of those GONGOs included in my study did not only
supervise the operations of these NGOs, but indeed exerted financial
and/or personnel control over those NGOs.
3. The state's control has been implemented in the ways described above
because of the state's decreasing administrative capacity, the
interests of supervisory organizations that control NGOs for
their own ends, and ability of the NGOs to censor themselves to
the degree that their activities does not lead to repressive
actions by the state.
Civil affairs officials I interviewed stated that their offices had
limited resources to track and correct every NGO violation. In
addition, because civil affairs offices had no resources to register
all prospective NGOs and the Chinese government had a policy to
encourage voluntary activities as a way to advance the well-being of
society, civil affairs offices allowed the existence of unregistered
NGOs as long as these NGOs had not committed any financial misdeeds or
posed any political threats. This strategy of civil affairs offices was
well acknowledged by the 22 environmental NGOs I studied. According to
my interviewees, self-censorship of these NGOs helped them avoid any
unwanted attention of civil affairs offices. Although some of the 22
NGOs violated formal control measures, leaders of these NGOs were aware
of the limits on how far they could go in violating controls without
attracting negative attention from the state.
In terms of government agencies acting as supervisory organizations
of the GONGOs included in my study, I found that self-interests
motivated these supervisory organizations to exert financial and/or
personnel control over the GONGOs they supervised. In practice,
supervisory organizations used the GONGOs to engage in international
cooperation projects, to raise funds, to provide services, and to place
excess employees when their agencies are downsized.
4. GONGOs are generally effective in performing tasks related to
official responsibilities of their supervisory organizations,
such as policy consultation and information exchange. In
contrast, citizen-organized NGOs were engaged mainly in three
types of activities: public education, environmental advocacy,
and grassroots environmental activities.
This finding is based on the daily activities of the 22 NGOs and
their efforts in the three wildlife conservation cases. Citizen-
organized environmental NGOs included in my study were especially
effective in mobilizing resources to challenge local development
decisions that were detrimental to the natural environment. However, I
found no NGOs took any confrontational approaches to conduct their
activities.
______
Prepared Statement of Patricia Adams
FEBRUARY 7, 2005
Thank you very much for the opportunity to participate in this
Congressional-
Executive Commission on China Roundtable. I am the Executive Director
of Probe International, a Canadian-based environmental NGO. For 25
years, we have worked with citizens in Third World countries to help
them fight development projects that undermine the environments they
depend on.
Since the early 1980s, Probe International has monitored the
world's largest and most controversial dam project, the Three Gorges
dam on China's Yangtze river. We have done so by working with
academics, researchers, and press in China, including Dai Qing, the
celebrated Chinese journalist who spent 10 months in jail for
publishing ``Yangtze! Yangtze!,'' a book authored by China's most
eminent scientists and scholars. Probe International translated and
published ``Yangtze! Yangtze!'' and a subsequent book edited by Dai
Qing, called The River Dragon Has Come!. Both books are banned in
China. We also published our own damning critique of the dam's official
feasibility study, which was financed by the Canadian government,
conducted by Canadian engineers, and used to justify building the Three
Gorges dam.
I am also the publisher of Three Gorges Probe, an Internet news
service that Probe International began in 1998 to report on Three
Gorges and other dams in China. Our goal has been to circumvent the ban
on criticism of the Three Gorges dam. We believe that projects like
Three Gorges can be built only in the absence of good information about
their real costs and benefits, and in the absence of an informed public
debate. Our goal is to let the facts, for and against dams, speak for
themselves, and to help inform the public by providing the Chinese
press, scholars, and activists with a safe forum in which to publish
their views. But perhaps our news service's most important goal is to
record and publish details of the harm done by Three Gorges and other
dams, in the hope that future generations will be protected from more
of the same.
Three Gorges Probe is published in both English and Chinese. The
two sites together have close to a quarter of a million page views per
month and their readership grew at a rate of almost 150 percent last
year.
Despite the fact that we often publish censored information, our
site has generally not been blocked in China and our readers from the
mainland have described Three Gorges Probe as the ``best,'' ``most
accurate,'' and the only ``truthful'' source of information about the
dam. Three Gorges Probe is relied upon by the press, scholars,
environmentalists, and grassroots activists. Dam officials also read
it: Sometimes, within days of our stories exposing a scandal or a
threat to the dam, dam authorities would announce either that the
problem doesn't exist or is being solved. Our stories have ended up on
the front pages of the international media, including the New York
Times and the UK's Guardian, on Chinese Internet sites around the
world, in the chatrooms of China Youth Daily, Sina.com and even the
Changjiang Water Resources Commission.
Here's a sample of the stories we've covered:
1. An exclusive report revealing endemic corruption,
debauchery and an underworld that now robs and terrorizes dam
evacuees who are being resettled by the Three Gorges dam;
2. The arrest, detention, trial and conviction of four
representatives of dam evacuees from Yunyang county who
attempted to recover their community's compensation funds from
corrupt local officials by appealing to the Communist Party in
Beijing. They were sentenced to two and three year jail terms
for ``maintaining an illicit relationship with a foreign
country'' and for ``disturbing the public order;''
3. An energy analysis showing that Three Gorges power is more
expensive than power from high efficiency gas turbines and
cogeneration, and ineffective at displacing coal-fired power;
4. Leaked correspondence between China's top leadership
admitting that Qinghua University research shows that the dam's
flood control benefits are inadequate and ``smaller than
declared by us.'' But, warn the correspondents, ``never, ever
let the public know this;''
5. Warnings by two senior members of the Chinese Academy of
Engineering that incidents of earthquakes and landslides
indicate that the Three Gorges region is geologically unstable,
that lives are at risk, and that geological-safety inspections
of resettlement zones must be carried out immediately and
checked and double-checked;
6. A report on cracks in the dam which are more than a meter
deep and run all the way up the huge concrete structure,
leading to emergency repair work and promises by dam
authorities to take greater care in future;
7. A surprise announcement by dam operators that it would
raise the reservoir level from 135 to 139 meters 3 years ahead
of schedule, forcing the emergency evacuation of 1,300
residents from their homes. Independent experts think the
reason was to protect electricity output which is threatened by
an unexpected rise in the accumulation of silt behind the dam;
8. During the news blackout of the surging anti-dam protests
at the Pubugou dam site in Sichuan province last October and
November, we reported on the violent clashes with police
resulting in several deaths, hundreds of villagers detained,
several dozen farmers hospitalized and the emergence of the
``dare-to-die brigade''--elderly men and women who taunted the
police with shouts of, ``Kill us, kill us! We will no longer
have to move if you kill us!'' (This period was one of the few
in which our Web site was blocked.)
9. A report on farmers in Hebei province who risked life and
liberty in 2004 to dodge police and gather more than 11,000
signatures on a petition calling for the removal of Zhang He,
the former mayor of Tangshan and the city's Communist Party
boss. The petition accused Zhang He of stealing compensation
funds intended for people who were forced to move in the 1990s
to make way for the Taolinkou reservoir on the Qinglong River.
Seven of the farmers were arrested by local police as they
attempted to deliver their petition to the National People's
Congress. Their lawyer escaped, however, and was chased by
Tangshan police around Beijing, from one hiding spot to
another, and one computer to another, from which he gave online
updates of the unfolding drama and with which he did Google
searches to get more information on the ``assembly and
demonstration law,'' ``the Constitution of the PRC'' and ``the
representative law of the National People's Congress and
people's congresses at local levels'' to assist his clients.
10. We have posted the Chinese, and now the English version,
of a remarkable book by a Chinese social scientist, Ying Xing,
about the ruinous impacts of the Dahe dam built on a Yangtze
tributary 30 years ago and the determination of ordinary
citizens who fought for their rights in a 20-year struggle.
Many of the 20,000 people affected by that dam are now being
forced to move for Three Gorges. The book, The Story of the
Dahe Dam, was published in China to great acclaim in 2001, and
was banned 6 months later. It remains banned today.
WHERE DO WE GET OUR INFORMATION?
Until recently, details of citizen protests or criticism of dams in
China have not come from formally recognized, government approved NGOs
that are able to hang up a shingle advertising their existence. And,
until recently, lawyers have not come forward to help aggrieved
citizens. With the exception of a few aggressive newspapers, very
little information beyond propaganda has come from the mainland media.
Instead, over the past 20 years, critical information about Chinese
dams has come in an ad hoc way from journalists, activists, site
research, the Internet, and dam authorities. Much of the expert opinion
we rely on has come from Chinese scholars, many of whom are elderly
and, having survived years of abuse for voicing their opinions, have
become even firmer in their resolve to speak out for the sake of future
generations. Over the years, academics who dared to criticize dam plans
such as Huang Wanli, China's most eminent hydrologist, were made to do
hard labour building the dams. They were deprived of their teaching
posts and shunned in their professional lives. This has been a tragic
reality for dam critics. Some have been deprived of research funds,
others have lost their right to work and to publish. Others have been
demoted. Still others have been visited in the middle of the night by
the police and warned not to talk to foreign journalists.
Academics aside, average citizens such as He Kechang and his
compatriots in Yunyang county have been jailed on trumped up charges
because they sought justice for the losses they suffered because of the
Three Gorges dam. The few mainland newspapers that have dared to
disclose damming details about Three Gorges or other planned dams have
had their top editors fired and their management charged with
corruption. In our own work to publish critical information about the
environmental, economic and technical problems with Chinese dams, we
have had to take precautions. Most of our Chinese contributors use
pseudonyms. We are always circumspect in our communication.
I believe this oppressive atmosphere is going to change.
The recent protests against the proposed construction of dams in
Western China along the Nu and Jinsha (upper Yangtze) rivers in Yunnan
and the Min River and Pubugou dam in Sichuan are a sign of the changing
times: Chinese citizens affected by dams are becoming acutely aware of
their rights and are prepared to fight for them; academics and
environmentalists are able to help them, the press is very interested
in covering their stories, and the Internet facilitates all parties'
communication. These protests have been so effective that, by the end
of 2004, work on over a dozen dams had been suspended.
While environmentalists, NGOs, and the affected communities in
China have made great gains in their struggles against these big dams,
people such as Dai Qing report that everybody knows these victories are
temporary. And, she adds, it is likely that the vested interest
groups--powerful forces including officials of the dam enterprises and
the ministries that sponsor them--will do everything possible to stage
a comeback, cracking down on the environmental organizations and
attacking the leaders.
But there is at least one reason to hope that the ``benefit
groups,'' as Dai Qing calls the beneficiaries of the current system,
won't resort to their old methods of repression to build their dams. It
is this.
On January 18 of this year, the State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA), China's top environment watchdog, accused 30
infrastructure projects (26 of which are energy schemes) in 13
provinces and municipalities, involving billions of dollars, of
starting construction before their environmental impact assessment
reports were approved. It then ordered them to suspend construction.
This is an extraordinary and unprecedented move by the central
government. The Chinese environmental enforcement authorities sent
state enterprises and the private sector a message they have never
heard before: We have a law that requires you to submit an
environmental assessment for your project in order to get approval to
proceed and if you don't abide by the law, we'll suspend your
construction until you do so.
According to China's Law on Environmental Impact Assessment, which
took effect on September 1, 2003, construction projects should not be
started before their environmental impact assessment documents are
approved by environment authorities. Furthermore, the law is supposed
to oblige project developers to consult with local communities before
decisions are made. Indeed, Pan Yue, the vice-director of SEPA,
announced that in future public hearings will be held on
environmentally sensitive projects to allow residents and other parties
into the decisionmaking process.
By January 24, construction on 22 out of the 30 projects had
stopped.
Construction on the remaining eight of those projects continued,
including three hydropower plants of the China Three Gorges Project
Corporation. Two of the plants are part of the Three Gorges Dam complex
(the Three Gorges Underground Power Plant and the Three Gorges Project
Electrical Power Supply Plant) and the third is the Xiluodu Hydropower
Plant along the Jinsha River, a section of the upper reaches of the
Yangtze River, a $5.3 billion project and is the biggest among the 30.
SEPA threatened the China Three Gorges Project Corporation with
legal action and the drama of the stand-off between SEPA, heretofore
considered a toothless environmental regulator, and the China Three
Gorges Project Corporation, one of the nations' most powerful and
China's largest hydro-electric power company, mounted. The domestic
media dubbed the actions as an ``environmental impact assessment
storm.''
Then, on February 2, the developer of the Three Gorges Project
Corporation backed down, agreeing to file environmental impact
statements for two power plants and to hold up construction on a third.
The compliance of the Three Gorges company, which had refused to
obey the order for a fortnight, was believed to come about as a result
of direct pressure from the central government. Not only has China's
Premier, Wen Jiabao, backed SEPA but, according to news reports, SEPA
enlisted the support of the powerful National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC), the country's top planning authority, to enforce its
order.
Furthermore, during the stand-off, SEPA and the National
Development and Reform Commission issued a notice about the need for
environmental protection during the building of hydropower plants.
According to the notice, some projects start construction without
environmental protection facilities, causing soil erosion, while others
cause negative impact on the ecology of the lower reaches due to
defects in design and operation. Great importance should be attached to
the environmental impact assessment of hydropower development plans,
the notice said. Hydropower projects should also take concrete
environmental protection measures.
Li Dun, of Tsinghua University's Centre for the Study of
Contemporary China, said the cooperation between SEPA and NDRC was
encouraging, but he remained cautious. SEPA has not dealt with
fundamental environmental issues such as whether those projects should
be built in the first place. ``It remains to be seen whether the
Environmental Impact Assessment Law is just a process,'' he said.
Professor Li is absolutely correct.
SEPA's environmental assessment law is not going to save China's
environment. My organization has a 20-year history of reviewing
feasibility studies for large development projects, starting with the
massive feasibility study for the Three Gorges dam, which included an
environmental assessment. It was so rife with errors, omissions, and
bias that we filed formal complaints of professional negligence against
the engineering firms that conducted it.
Environmental assessments are usually conducted by the proponents,
paid for by the proponents, or controlled by the proponents. Because
the proponents are not held legally accountable to those they harm or
put at risk, proponents can discount the costs they inflict on others.
Their environmental cost assessments need not accurately or
comprehensively match reality. Their assessments routinely overestimate
benefits without substantiation, but with hyperbole. In the end,
environmental assessments become nothing more than public relations
exercises to whitewash bad projects.
I doubt that the environmental NGOs, legal commentators, and
scholars who have followed SEPA's unprecedented actions over the past
few weeks expect the agency's move to permanently stop any of these 30
projects. But SEPA's enforcement of China's new Environmental Impact
Assessment Law could have a profound effect in a different way. By
upholding the law, SEPA would force proponents to carry out
environmental assessments and to consult with local communities before
giving approval for infrastructure projects. In so doing, the central
authorities would uphold and enforce the rights of Chinese citizens and
NGOs to know, to debate, and to participate in the decisions that
effect their environment. In a country where citizens have been jailed,
fired, demoted, threatened and even physically attacked for attempting
to exercise these basic rights, this is a fundamental step toward
enshrining the right of citizens to protect their environment.
Many commentators look at China's 1.3 billion citizens and see them
as the world's largest threat to the global environment. I don't see
them that way. Instead, I see the Chinese government as the largest
threat and the citizenry as the world's largest group of front-line
defenders of the environment. Give Chinese citizens the right to know,
the legal and political tools, and the security to exercise their
rights and to hold accountable those who would destroy their
environment, and the world will see a dramatic turnaround in the dismal
state of China's environment.
Thank you.
<all>