Chinese Eco-Activists Defend the Earth

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Dialogue Online, published by the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights advocacy group centered in San Francisco and Hong Kong. (Editor's note: the links were inserted by Peaceworkin the Spring of 2011.)

Problems of polluted water, land, and air are crucial to China’s leaders and environmental rights defenders alike. President Hu Jintao’s address at the party congress in October 2007 was peppered with references to “sustainable development” and the environment.

Meanwhile, Chinese who strive to protect the environment are observing with alarm their country’s ecological decline. And like activists elsewhere, they are motivated by universal values — that individuals have the right to drink clean water, breathe unpolluted air, and live and work on land that is being protected.

But nature and public health are still readily sacrificed in favor of blistering economic development. At the party congress, Hu also laid out ambitions to quadruple per capita GDP goals (set in 2000) by the year 2020, which will take a huge ecological toll even under the most protective conditions. While China’s economy booms, the numbers of protests in defense of the environment swell right alongside it. The government’s own statistics show that water or air pollution factors into as many as half of the country’s “mass incidents,” a gauge of popular dissent. Weighing the costs of ecological damage and, no doubt, greater social unrest, the Ministry of Public Security ranks pollution among the top threats to China’s peace and stability.

A sad picture of some of China's air, 2007. (Image not in magazine, online only). Photo by robertg6n1 via Flickr and China Digital Times.

What They Fight For

China’s path of development makes environmental rights advocacy a life-and-death issue. Modern industrialization has been fueled by burning coal, the use and discharge of dangerous chemicals, and massive development projects that leave toxic fallout in their wake. The resultant pollution has taken the lives of countless numbers of Chinese. Environmental rights defenders are engaged in a dual battle for the environment and public health.

Plans for dam construction and dam sites themselves have become magnets for rights activism. More than half of the world’s large-scale dam projects are in China, reflecting the ambitious quest to power the country’s economy. Often led by some of the poorest and most vulnerable Chinese citizens, extended and occasionally violent protests have broken out over the erection of dams.

Bridge over the Daning River, at its confluence with the Changjiang (Yangtze), 1991. To help stop destructive dams, see http://internationalrivers.org. photo: Kurt Groetsch

Among China’s development projects, the massive Three Gorges Dam, which is slated for completion in 2009, has been the main target of citizen unrest. But plans for a series of dams along the Nu River in Yunnan Province were scrapped in 2004 after a vast contingent of local community members and environmental activists, including several Chinese and foreign NGOs, fought the project on environmental grounds.

Burmese Children Protest Proposed Dams on the Nu River in China, 2008. The dams were canceled. (Image not in magazine, online only). Photo: International Rivers.

The Legal Obstacle Course

Disputes over environmental rights in China will only become more serious, and they are increasingly being settled by legal and criminal justice institutions. Common criminal charges for defending such rights are “disrupting social order,” usually by gathering a crowd for a protest, and “disrupting official business” through hindering a development project or commercial enterprise.

With the public blessing of national leaders, Chinese environmental rights defenders can enjoy some freedom to write opinion pieces, hold forums, and organize groups. This kind of open activism is unheard of for Chinese activists involved with overtly (or obliquely) political or religious causes.

Chinese authorities may be more accepting of environmental rights work because they do not perceive the field’s activists to be “democracy seekers” with political goals. Despite a degree of free rein, there are limits to public expression for environmental rights defenders.

Compared to risks assumed by common citizen activists, who tend to lack political leverage and legal knowledge, some Chinese lawyers have had better luck defending victims of environmental damage. Lawyers have plenty of raw materials to work with. China has ample environmental laws on the books, and criminal penalties for polluters were enacted in 1997.

The Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) is the only registered organization in China that specifically provides legal services for those seeking justice from the effects of pollution. The center mostly assists farmers whose livelihoods have been lost. One of the Center’s associates recently won a lawsuit against a company in Fujian Province which contaminated a village’s water supply and land. The suit won compensation for over 1,600 villagers. But such a system often only placates environmental victims, many of whom receive woefully inadequate compensation.

Imprisoned Environmentalists

Dui Hua’s prisoner database includes 38 individuals from 2001 through 2007 who were detained or arrested for environmental protests. For example, Sun Xiaodi, a former uranium miner in Gansu, has sought to expose nuclear contamination for 20 years. Sun, the winner of the Nuclear Free Future Award for his nuclear whistleblowing, was sentenced in July 2009 to two years of Reeducation Through Labor “for criminal acts that endangered state security.” Sun’s daughter, Sun Dunbai, was sentenced to one-and-a-half years for the same “crime.”

For more information (again, this section is in this online version only) see “The Warriors of Qiugang” a video co-produced by Yale Environment 360 with filmmakers Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon. The video documents the struggles of the village of Quigang, where, according to the filmmakers, "chemicals, pesticides, and dyes, turn[ed] the local river black, kill[ed] fish and wildlife, and fill[ed] the air with foul fumes that burned residents’ eyes and throats and sickened children." The video was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 in the Documentary Short Subject catergory.

See also China Digital Times' coverage of environmental protests.

Editor's Note: For 37 years, Peacework was published by, but did not necessarily represent the views of, the American Friends Service Committee. Peacework's final printed issue (September 2009) focused on human rights violations and nonviolent activism in China. This issue was never posted to Peacework's previous AFSC-sponsored website. Since the print magazine was being closed down as part of budget cuts resulting from the financial meltdown, AFSC decided to spin Peacework off into a fully independent blogging platform, one not sponsored by AFSC. It was agreed that the contents of Peacework's archives, including the final issue, could be posted online by the newly independent Peacework. We are working to create that blog platform, and this article is one of those from that last issue.