Positive Improvements on the Planet

In April 2006, an historic event took place in Shanghai. Broadcast around the world on CNN, Chinese environmental leaders came together in the Shanghai Concert Hall and spoke openly about the environmental crisis in China.

While such an event would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, it epitomizes the rapid emergence of a massive environmental movement in China. The new movement is a result of wise leadership in China. The State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), which was only elevated to ministerial status in 1998, recently announced plans to spend 156 billion USD over the next 5 years. Most remarkably, several months ago SEPA and the US EPA signed an agreement to work together to solve environmental problems. This created a truly unprecedented coalition of the world’s two biggest economies and biggest polluters.

The SEPA-EPA agreement demonstrates the recent openness on the part of the Chinese government to working together with different parties to solve environmental problems. SEPA now also works closely with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, which were not even legal 15 years ago. In the last decade, the number of environmental NGOs in China has jumped from 1 to over 2,000. These groups gained sudden prominence in 2004 after environmentalists successfully blocked construction of a major dam in the Nu River, an action that inspired grass-roots involvement across China.

Currently, all of these governmental and nongovernmental forces are coming together to clean up Beijing  in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. This promises to raise environmental standards across the nation, as previous Olympic Games have done in Japan and Korea.

The possibilities for large-scale environmental progress in China are almost limitless. Both within the central government and for the individual, China is experiencing a profound rise in environmental consciousness. There is widespread optimism among the Chinese people that the new millennium will bring to full fruition the ancient Chinese ideals of well-rounded prosperity existing in harmony with nature.