Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 3/3

March 10, 2012

In another post at Greenpeace.org, we learned that Greenpeace activists went undercover in China up to a year to infiltrate and investigate factories that were releasing hazardous chemicals into China’s waterways.

Greenpeace said, “Two weeks after we released our report, Puma came out with its promise to eliminate toxic substances from its supply chain. When we heard that, we were overjoyed. Since then Adidas, H&M, Nike and Li-Ning have all followed suit.”


Climate Voices from China

“More than 3,500 environmental organizations now have legal status in China,” Andrew Grant said. “While activists there are not as vocal as their counterparts in Europe or the United States, they have made an impact by encouraging transparency and pressuring local governments and industries to adhere to (China’s) new national regulations.

“Through a program called the Green Choice Alliance, environmental groups publish lists of companies in violation of environmental regulations and offer to conduct a third-party audit if a company chooses to clean up its act.

“Last year, under the supervision of environmental groups, independent auditors found that Fuguo’s Shanghai leather factory had rectified its major violations and reduced gas emissions.”


Yangtze River, China

“The local and national Chinese press has been very aggressive in uncovering environmental problems and mobilizing forces to go after polluters. Local newspapers have broken stories about cancer villages, which have been picked up by television networks and broadcast nationwide. In some cases, the revelations have been praised by government officials. In other cases the revelations have been embarrassing or hurt investments by officials, and the sources of the stories have been harassed or jailed.” Source: Andrew Grant, Discover magazine, March 18, 2011

Return to Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note from Blog Post — This post is iLook China’s fifteen-hundredth (1,500) post, and with it this Blog will be cutting back from posting daily to two or more days a week. The next post (1,501) will appear March 12.

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Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 2/3

March 9, 2012

When The Diplomat.com asked Li Yan, head of Greenpeace in East Asia’s Climate and Energy Campaign about China, Li Yan replied, “China has made impressive efforts to cut back its carbon emission growth, and it’s fair to say that China is doing much better than many other countries, including industrialized ones. However, with the rapid growth of emissions, China needs – and has the capability – to do more…”

“According to a recent U.N. Environment Program report, China has surpassed the United States in renewable energy investment in 2010, making it now the world’s largest… In 2010, China’s wind power installation capacity was about 42GW, which places China as the biggest installation country globally.”

In addition, a recent post by Ma Tianjie on the Greenpeace East Asia Blog said, “As early as 2009, after a series of lead pollution cases, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (China) had called for a ‘blanket inspection’ of heavy metal pollution facilities. This means, in theory, local governments should already have an inventory of local industrial facilities that release heavy metals, with basic information on who is discharging what…”


Gloria Chang is Greenpeace China’s key campaigner on climate change – June 2007

“It is clear that the government’s environmental protection apparatus, low in capacity and short in manpower, cannot fight this battle alone,” Ma Tianjie said. “The public, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working for the protection of the environment, has a role in contributing to such efforts.

“In August 2011, the ministry (in China) made an unprecedented move by releasing detailed pollution information on more than 1,900 lead-acid battery facilites across the country. It was the first time that information on an entire industry’s environmental performance was made public.

“Reactions to the initiative were overwhelmingly positive. A close scrutiny of the data by the media, environmental NGOs and the public resulted in corrections and a dataset of improved quality, which would only help the ministry to better supervise the listed facilities.”

Ma Tianjie recently appeared on China’s CCTV news program “China 24” to discuss the recent toxic metal contamination of water supply in Guanxi Autonomous Region. You may learn more of this CCTV appearance at Greenpeace.org.

However, China is often criticized by its critics/enemies for censorship and controlling what the state owned media reports without any mention of broadcasts such as this one on CCTV with Ma Tianjie of Greenpeace East Asia.

Continued March 10, 2012 in Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 1/3

March 8, 2012

The list of Chinese democracy activists that have been arrested is not long considering there are more than 1.3 billion people in China. Wiki lists 30.

I studied the list of Chinese dissidents and saw that none was executed although there were several alleged to have committed treason and revealing state secrets: Bao Tong (1989), Shi Tao (2004), Wang Bingzhang (2002), and Wei Jingsheng (1979).

Unless I missed something, no dissidents was in jail at this time and a few had been kicked out of the country. Wei Jingsheng, an electrician accused of passing military secrets, was deported to the US in 1997 after spending some time in prison.

If found guilty of these crimes in the United States, the result may have led to a death sentence or life in prison. When I checked the list of people convicted of treason in the US, I saw that 10 have been executed. The United Kingdom had a longer list of executions for treason, while China’s list has only three names on it, which were Zhou Fohyai (executed 1948), Chen Gongbo (executed 1946), and Wang Jingwei (executed 1944).

However, when it comes to environmental activists, such as members of Greenpeace being detained in China, the list is short, while in the West the list of environmental activists being arrested is long.

In 2007, six Greenpeace protesters were arrested for breaking into the Kingsnorth power station in southeast England.

June 2008, two Greenpeace activists were arrested in Japan for exposing a whale meat scandal involving the government sponsored whaling program.

May 2010, seven Greenpeace activists were arrested in Port Fourchon, Louisiana in an anti-drilling protest.

In May 2011, six Greenpeace campaigners were arrested in Durban, South Africa.

June 2011, eighteen Greenpeace activists were arrested after climbing aboard an oil rig off Greenland’s coast to protest deepwater drilling in the Arctic.

August 2011, Daryl Hannah and 70 other environmental activists arrested at a Tar Sands Pipeline protest outside the White House in Washington D.C.

In November 2011, three Greenpeace activists were arrested in South Africa over coal power plant protests.

However, in China in 2006, Greenpeace East Asia was the only NGO to be consulted on an early draft of a renewable energy law by China’s National People’s Congress. In fact, before Greenpeace opened offices in Guangzhou and Beijing in 2002, activists from the Hong Kong office ran several campaigns on the Chinese Mainland and have even been interviewed on CCTV.

In addition, Greenpeace activists have recently gone undercover in China to catch industrial polluters, and it appears that this operation may have had the blessing and support of the CCP’s Central Committee.

Continued March 09, 2012 in Greenpeace and the growth of environmentalism in China – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 4/5

September 25, 2011

Kier clearly does not know what he is writing about when he said,  “At least those in Taiwan and Hong Kong don’t need to worry about their masters keeping SARS/bird flu/ environmental disasters/fake eggs and milk etc. state secrets because their deaths would be of less worry than the danger of inconveniencing the Party.”

If you were to read Punishing Food Fraud in China, you would discover that cover ups of tainted food products have happened in the US too, and the people responsible are seldom if ever punished by the legal system, while those that are caught in China may face long jail terms and the possibility of execution.

As for the attempt to hide the  SARS/bird flu, a high-ranked Party official, who was also a Western trained doctor, leaked the news to the world, and he wasn’t executed or tossed in prison. He did get in trouble, but he lives at home enjoying his family, his life and his retirement.

There is no secret that China is suffering from pollution due to becoming the factory floor of the world after 1980.

In fact, many American manufacturers moved to China so they wouldn’t have to pay the price to be environmentally clean in the United States, which means since they couldn’t pollute legally in the West and/or America, they moved their operations to China where strict environmental laws did not exist at the time.

However, a few years ago, China consulted Greenpeace for advice on where to start cleaning up the environment and have passed laws to start the process.

Continued on September 26, 2011 in No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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