Whats the state of the environmental movement in China?
Right now there are nearly 3,000 environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in China. But the movement is very young, the groups are small and they don’t have much funding. Most groups are just a few people who get together because they want to do something like plant trees, or because they notice a river is polluted and want to raise awareness. You do have a smaller number of more sophisticated groups. The oldest officially registered environmental NGO, Friends of Nature, was established in 1994. They put out China’s first public-initiated annual report on the state of the environment in 2006. There are groups like the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which has been around since 1998, engaged in extremely complex public interest legal work. And you also have leading environmentalists like Ma Jun, who’s put together a very sophisticated website mapping water pollution across China. Professor Xu Kezhu LEGAL AID “I like new things. I like doing things that peopl
