On China Beat, Yang Guobin writes about environmentalist Liang Congjie, who died in October, and his influence on civil society in China:
Professor Liang’s role in the founding of Friends of Nature is well known. In my view, the significance of this event can only be fully appreciated by putting it in its historical context. Liang and his colleagues (Yang Dongping, Liang Xiaoyan, and Wang Lixiong) began to “lobby” government officials to establish such an organization in 1993. Still in the dark shadows of June Fourth, Chinese intellectual life at that time was quite dull. Between the aftershock of June Fourth and the rising tide of commercialism and market economy, the Chinese intellectual world was splintering. Many university faculty and graduate students left academia to “jump into the sea” of business, as others desperately tried to give meaning and relevance to a life in the ivory tower. In magnitude, the collapse of this intellectual world had few historical parallels. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that it comes close to the collapse of the Confucian world as captured by Joseph Levenson.
It was under these circumstances that Liang Congjie and his colleagues started to plan an environmental NGO. In a sense, the idea was perfectly natural: it was a logical way of seeking meaning at a time of intellectual crisis. Yet to choose neither money-making nor the proclamation of new manifestos, but such mundane action as building a small NGO working on environmental issues, was a radical step. China had long had environmental problems and intellectuals had long used their pens to lament them. In 1988, for example, Xu Gang’s work of environmental reportage literature, Woodcutter, Wake up! (Fa mu zhe, xing lai!), had had enormous impact. Yet environmental campaigns had always been organized by the government, and environmental protection was supposed to be the government’s responsibility. When Liang Congjie left the comfortable zone of using words to understand and change the world and turned instead to grassroots citizen organizing, he became a new type of intellectual, a public intellectual. In so doing, he changed the meaning of being an intellectual in China. By launching an environmental group independent of the government, he and his colleagues also changed the meaning of the relationship among citizens, the state, and nature. The message of this action is that citizens must participate in the governance of their own affairs.
