From International Herald Tribune:
For as long as he can remember, Du Jianhua’s dream has been to find a way to contribute to his society.
Starting small, the glass cutter began by cleaning up litter around this town (Lushan). Later, he began tracking the way garbage was dumped into the Nansha River, fouling the waterway he’d played in as a boy. Soon he began looking into mining and the clearing of forests in the hill country of Henan Province, where he grew up, and finally, hoping to spur the local government to action, he presented it with a report on his findings.
In the space of 15 years, China has gone from having virtually no independent groups of any kind to having more than 300,000 NGOs by official count. Counting groups not registered with the government, some estimates place the number as high as 2 million. And as Du’s experience attests, NGO- type activism has spread out of the big cities and well beyond the intellectual class that gave rise to the movement in the early 1990s by taking on what were politically less risky issues, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, such as environmental protection.[Full Text]
