More 'green heroes'

The Green Chinese campaign is not the only indication of the grassroots development of environmental awareness.

"I think we have more green heroes in this room than the campaign [of the Green Chinese of the Year] could ever find," said Mu Guangfeng, a senior official of SEPA, pointing to the people sitting around him during a small ceremony to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Green Earth Volunteers, a grassroots environmental protection NGO in Beijing. Mu has been a member of this organization almost since its inception.

The celebration, in a northern Beijing primary school classroom on the last day of 2006, was intimate and cozy. During the ceremony, as slides of members planting trees, collecting trash and watching birds over the last 10 years were shown on a big screen, one member exclaimed in surprise over the growth of her son from a toddler to a handsome youngster, as seen in the photos.

Her comments were immediately echoed by other people present, who also had motivated their whole family to join the organization.

Mu said he was proud of his identity as an NGO member and talked about it so much that he once confused a visiting foreign environmental official over whether he was a government official or an NGO activist. "I told him I am both; I am a government official during eight working hours and an NGO activist beyond those eight hours," said Mu.

In 1996, when China's first group of NGOs faced a deadlock in development because of a bottleneck in government registration policies, Mu drafted the first document of the State Council that requires governments at all levels to offer support and guidance for environmental NGOs, which ushered in a spring of grassroots environmental activity in China. According to a survey by the All China Environment Federation released in 2006, 12 years after the registration of the country's first environmental NGO, China has 2,768 such organizations.

"Many issues can never be solved by solely relying on the government and their solution requires the strength of the whole society, especially the active role of NGOs," said Mu. This view has been echoed by Pan Yue, Vice Minister of SEPA. According to Green Earth Volunteers founder Wang Yongchen, Pan on different occasions called environmental NGOs the natural allies of government environmental agencies.

A critical stage

Yang Dongping, a founder of Friends of Nature, China's first environmental NGO, said the development of environmental NGOs in the country is at a critical transition from educating the public on environmental protection to promoting public participation in the government's decision-making.

Mu said an important role for NGOs at this stage is to raise the quality of public participation and arm themselves with expertise in certain fields. "We sometimes have to fight powerful interest groups when any loophole in our logic could be used by an adversary as an excuse to deny all our arguments," he said.