Death wafts from the White River, which no longer has anything in common with its name. The surface is covered with brown scum, black streaks coat the sand, and fish long ago died out. But the toxic river is also contaminating the ground water along its banks.
When women in the village of Zhaiwan boil water from the White River, the acid eats through their metal cooking pots. Of the village's estimated 3,000 inhabitants, 125 have died of cancer in the last five years. "They were all young people, none of them older than 45," says Zhai Jinghan, the mayor.
Workers are drilling a new well on the outskirts of Zhaiwan, at a good distance from the river. "We're now at a depth of 120 meters (394 feet)," says the mayor, a stocky man with bristly hair. "The water was still undrinkable at 80 meters."
The residents of this village in China's central Hubei Province owe their new well to the efforts of an energetic woman from the nearby provincial city, Xiangfan. When Yun Jianli, 62, heard about Zhaiwan's environmental tragedy, which both the provincial government and the party leadership chose to ignore, she raised the money for the well.
Yun, a former Communist Party official in charge of contacts with the "overseas Chinese," is now retired and the founder of and driving force behind "Green Han River," an environmental organization. The Han River, which snakes through Hubei Province for about 600 kilometers (373 miles), "is our mother of rivers, and that's why it must be clean," she says.
For the past three years, Yun and the more than 100 members of her organization have been fighting paper mills and other businesses that dump pollutants into the Han and its tributaries. They travel to villages, take water samples, talk to local officials, place articles in newspapers and visit schools to teach children about the dangers of destroying the environment. "The authorities have already closed a few factories," Yun says proudly. "In one case they even demolished the machines so that they couldn't be used anymore."
Large numbers of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been popping up throughout much of China in recent years. Retirees, teachers, engineers and even police officers are getting involved in groups dedicated to protecting the environment, improving the legal system and fighting for better working conditions. Their numbers also include so-called barefoot attorneys, like Beijing resident Gao Zhisheng, who has made it his business to represent farmers who are treated unfairly and underpaid taxi drivers. Another is Chen Guangcheng, a blind civil rights activist who has protested against forced abortions in Shandong Province.
What they all have in common is that they are driving a tiny sliver of grassroots democracy into the Communist Party dictatorship. They represent the first droplets of civil society in a country that is fast becoming a global power and still tries to stifle democratic participation as much as possible.
Defending workers' rights
Liu Kaiming, 41, devotes his efforts to defending the rights of migrant workers in the Pearl River delta, southern China's huge, bustling industrial zone. In 2001, the former journalist founded a group with the unusual name "Institute for Contemporary Observation" in Shenzhen, an economic hub and one of China's most affluent cities. The organization is a sort of community college for women and men from the poor provinces who migrate to the region to work long hours at low-paying jobs. Its building is in a factory district of worker dormitories whose windows look out on row after row of laundry hanging out to dry. Wu Zhaoyu, an instructor, stands in a computer room and teaches young women how to use the keyboard and surf the Internet. One of her students is Wu Fengming, a thin 20-year-old women wearing a brown corduroy jacket and an orange sweater. She comes from neighboring Guangxi Province and works in an American electronics factory in Shenzhen, where she assembles parts. She earns about 1,100 Yuan (roughly €110) a month for working eight hours a day, six days a week. "We all hope for an office job," she says, and she expects that learning how to use a computer will help her achieve that goal.
The local spring festival is about to begin. Small groups of workers who are unable to travel home for the holiday because they haven't been paid their wages are protesting in the streets of Shenzhen. "Guangdong Province," says Liu Kaiming, a slight man with thin hair, "is an economic predator that devours its workers."
Liu receives support from international organizations like the US's Ford Foundation and the World Bank. His organization now offers its training programs to company executives, not just workers, in an effort to convince them that treating their employees according to an international "code of conduct" is also in their own interest. Liu's teaching materials include employment contracts and social insurance documents. "You increase productivity by giving workers dignity," he says. Liu astutely invokes the Chinese constitution, which states "workers have the right to organize."
But the Communist Party doesn't exactly see eye-to-eye with Liu and his kind. In a region that has become the world's low-cost producer, officials are opposed to anything they believe could jeopardize the steady hum of business.
Helping the autistic
Twenty children are standing in a circle in Dongxu, a small, not particularly attractive village outside the Chinese capital, Beijing. The children have autism. They isolate themselves from their surroundings and are barely capable of social interaction. Ignored by the official healthcare system, the children have Tian Huiping, 49, to thank for founding the first school for parents of autistic children in 1993. It's called the "Star and Rain Institute for Autism." A petite student of German studies with a dyed-red, pageboy haircut, Tian read professional literature, corresponded with doctors and researchers, developed her own therapy methods and contacted other parents of autistic children. Her own son, Taotao, 21, is also autistic.
She has since converted a former restaurant into a classroom, where several teachers, educators and even two Germans doing community work in lieu of military service attend to a group of about 80 families who have come here from all across China. The rooms are ice-cold. In an effort to reduce pollution, the Beijing government has banned heating with coal until the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Parents pay 4,000 Yuan (about €400) for a three-month course at the institute. Tian counts German aid organization Misereor among her donors, and each year the German Embassy's school donates the proceeds from its Christmas bazaar to the institute. Far from receiving government subsidies, Tian pays about €6,000 in annual taxes.
The Beijing leadership, eager to encourage China's great leap forward, now recognizes that groups like Tian's can be useful, because they help reduce social tension and also serve as barometers for the general mood within Chinese society. But other initiatives are less to its taste. China's leaders see independent worker groups as a threat to stability and AIDS volunteers as troublemakers who only draw attention to a problem the party would prefer to ignore.
NGOs seen as a threat
The Chinese Communist Party also hasn't failed to notice that popular revolutions in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia received moral and monetary support from Western NGOs. Fears of similar revolutions taking shape in China have prompted authorities to allow only one organization to register in each rural or urban district. In other words, an environmental organization cannot open shop in a district where another environmental organization is already active.
The government also requires each group to team up with a government agency, ministry or research institution. This forced partnership is meant to prevent activists from shaking the foundations of one-party rule. Organizations that are unable to find a partner must register as business enterprises and pay taxes. The government also charges a fee of up €3,000 per registration, and groups are not allowed to recruit members.
"Everything is legal and, at the same time, everything is illegal," says Wen Bo, one of the most energetic members of the nascent Chinese NGO community. Even as a middle school student growing up in the port city of Dalian, he tried to emulate the tactics of environmental organization Greenpeace. On World Non-Smoking Day, he climbed onto the chimney at his school and unfurled a banner that read: "Less Chimney Smoke!" Just how Greenpeace started out, more or less.
Wen Bo formed environmental groups, posted signs, collected signatures and in 2001 founded the first Greenpeace office in Beijing. Today he represents "Global Greengiants," a US-based organization that distributes up to $100,000 to grassroots environmental groups in China each year.
"The state needs the NGOs, but it also sees them as a threat," says Dorit Lehrack, a German who works as a foreign consultant for the "Chinese Association for NGO Cooperation" (CANGO) in Beijing. From her office in a small hotel room in Beijing's Third Ring, Lehrack advises about 100 groups on how to secure government subsidies. "We teach them bookkeeping, for example, and how to write project proposals," she says.
Is the party right to be concerned about the development of a civil society that could spin out of control? Lehrack doesn't think so. "Many good people in China do not see themselves as a challenger to government's authority." Wen Bo agrees: "The government should not fear the NGOs. They stabilize the system. China would have many more problems without them."
Of course, there are also those who dream of sweeping change, of a strong civil society forming the cornerstone of democracy, and some see NGOs as a means to an end. They include 67-year-old Wu Qing, a women's rights activist and a professor of American studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Twenty-two years ago, Wu was elected district representative and later became a delegate to the National People's Congress in Beijing. Every Tuesday evening she holds office hours at the university and listens to complaints. "The farmers, who are not getting enough compensation for their land, have the greatest problems today," says Wu. "Whenever I hear a watertight case I write a complaint." She affixes her delegate's number (DB 06365) to the complaint, sticks it into a brown, official envelope and mails it to officials in the People's Congress, who are required to respond within three months. "I can't even count how many times I've done this," she says. "And about half of my complaints have been successful."
But that's about all popular representatives in China can do. The people's congresses have no power, with the Communist Party dictating its decisions. But that hasn't deterred Professor Wu, who persistently holds her weekly citizens' office hours and is probably the only politician in all of China who stands behind her activities.
Wu is a unique and courageous woman. When she and her fellow delegates were told to praise the Tiananmen Square massacre in the summer of 1989, in which hundreds of young people were killed or arrested, "I was the only one who refused," she says. But as the daughter of a highly respected writer, Wu enjoys special status. "I constantly remind them of the constitution, where it is stated that human rights must be protected," she says.
In her small apartment in Beijing's university district, Wu picks up the constitution, bound in red, and reads her favorite passage, Article 5, aloud. It states that "organizations and individuals are not permitted to enjoy privileges beyond the scope of the constitution and the law." But this is far from the truth, says Wu. "The party officials consider themselves the law. The party is merely continuing 2,400 years of Chinese feudal rule."
Making the government notice
These are powerful words, words that Yu Xiaogang, 55, a grey-haired professor of anthropology from the southern province of Yunnan, would not repeat. "We are interested mainly in good government and public participation," he says. Yu has traveled to Beijing to attend an NGO conference where about 100 groups are presenting their projects to combat poverty.
Yu, wearing a brown windbreaker, stands next to young women in colorful outfits at a booth operated by the Dai minority.
The state-owned energy conglomerate Huadian, which enjoys excellent ties to the political leadership, wants to build a series of dams on the pristine Nu River in Yunnan Province, at a cost of about $10 billion. The project would displace about 50,000 people and possibly devastate the region's tropical ecology. "We are not fundamentally against the project," Yu insists. "But we want the consequences for the environment, for the people and for the economy to be assessed first, just as the law requires."
China's young civil society has reached a new stage in its Nu River initiative. For the first time NGOs have banded together to form a network opposing a state-owned company. They are coordinating their approach, getting the media involved and hiring experts. The government has recently responded aggressively to similar initiatives, and arrests and repression occur frequently.
Attorney Gao, the man who represented farmers and taxi drivers, was arrested. And on August 24, blind civil rights activist Chen, who spoke out against forced abortions, was sentenced to four years and three months in prison. Bitter proof that the first sprouts of a civil society in China are not guaranteed to grow and blossom.
Translated from German by Christopher Sultan
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