China's Growing Awareness of the Costs of Pollution

I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Beijing with a small group of China’s leading environmental activists. It was early 2006. The hotel’s easy chairs were slightly too widely spaced for comfort in a conversation that was conducted in low voices, occasionally dropping to near whispers. China’s civic environmental movement was still young. The men and women in that small group had been seasoned in the early resistance to China’s powerful dam builders who were moving westward to dam the still unspoiled rivers of Yunnan and Sichuan. Many of these early leaders were journalists who organised group visits to dam sites and used their reach in the media to challenge big hydro interests and to stimulate public resistance, in the hope of persuading the government to think again.