Yiliang (谊良) county, in the pink, lies within Kunming prefecture (yellow), in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, in light grey (Wikipedia)

In addition to teaching me the basics of water quality monitoring and treatment, my short stint at the Western Water Group water treatment plant in Yiliang, Yunnan introduced me to the lifestyle of rural Chinese officials and businessmen. I reflected on the experience recently.

“Did you make that bong yourself?” I joked to the vice-secretary of Shizong, Yunnan, pointing at the 3 feet tall bamboo water pipe resting on the floor between his legs, an exhausted cigarette limply sticking out at a curious angle toward the bottom.

“This?!” he said, a jovial smile creeping across his face. “No, it was a gift,” he said in the rough Yunnan dialect while exhaling a plume of smoke, which merged with the clouds trapped at the ceiling and stung our eyes red, adding to the brown stains that ran the width of the walls.

The Yiliang plant's two tanks that use bacteria to adjust the chemical makeup of the water (WWG)

I was seated at the chair closest to the door, the position of lowest hierarchy, in a room of Shizong officials and my various superiors at the water treatment plant at which I was working. The CEO of the water treatment company was visiting to discuss with the local officials in an attempt to urge the officials to adhere to the contract–to pay their overdue bills sooner than later, so as to avoid the late fees from the plant. Nevertheless, after discussing the “payment topic,” as my superiors would phrase it in order to minimize perceived discord, the vice-secretary of Shizong took us to a lavish meal outside of the city and toasted every one of us several times, drinking more baijiu, or sorghum alcohol, than the rest of the table combined. After he was done eating and drinking, he convivially and succinctly stated that we were all friends and that he would look into the problem. This experience, masquerading with local officials and how it contrasted with my understanding of stuffy governmental and business meetings in the United States, impressed upon me how business and governmental affairs are conducted in rural China, and perhaps in many other rural areas of the world.

These photos, from the Beijing EPA, of air quality in an urban area of the Chaoyang district of Beijing demonstrate that while infrequent precipitation may temporarily wash away air pollution, the rate of emission is so high, that after a few days, visibility is again reduced to nil, and harmful particulate matter is back up rapidly. 

A Beijing road sign warns drivers about the "thick fog," the official way of referring to air pollution (CCTV)

December has arrived in Beijing, bringing with it the harsh Northern Chinese winter weather and the seasonal increase in particulate matter that results from coal combustion for higher heating needs. Users of Weibo, the Chinese twitter, have complained the presumable dishonesty in the Chinese government’s air pollution monitoring body, which has repeatedly reported acceptable/moderate air quality when eye-witnesses accounts disagree. Moreover, official agencies continue to refer to the pollution as fog or haze (雾). Anecdotally, I have seen many more locals wearing pollution masks, suggesting that awareness of the resulting respiratory problems has risen.

The Beijing air quality situation has long been complicated by the US Embassy’s monitoring of Beijing air quality and subsequent posting of the results on the twitter account, @beijingair. The chart below demonstrates the discrepancy between the US Embassy and the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data. Notice a pattern?

A Beijinger checks the air quality on her phone. While the official Beijing station reports "slight" air pollution, the US Embassy reports "toxic" air pollution (Global Times)

Though blocked in China, many Chinese have means of accessing this data. In response, the Beijing EPA has lashed out at the US, requesting the Embassy refrain from publicly releasing this data, and suggesting to compare monitoring instrumentation (Chinese). The US Embassy measures particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers (1 μm=.000000 m) in size, PM2.5, and only from one point in the city. Assumably as a result of political concerns, the Beijing EPA does not currently release measurements of PM2.5, only the larger PM10, but Beijing EPA records measurements around the city (sometime very far from the polluted center of the city). Though recent announcements have committed to realeasing measurements of PM2.5, as well as other new environmental standards (most prominently, ozone), nationally by 2016, and earlier in key regions, the government has been unclear on the specifics. Both Beijing and Shanghai EPA have full capacity to measure and release this data, they only lack official permission.

The smaller particulate matter is more capable of penetrating through the lungs and damaging other internal organs such as the heart. While the Chinese government didn’t experience much difficulty reducing the larger PM10 by prohibiting primitive coal stoves in urban Beijing. PM2.5, on the other hand, arises from automobile emissions and other more advanced industrial practices, and has thus, proven to be more of a pickle.

I won’t comment further on the story as it has, admittedly, been over-reported in the foreign press, but I refer interested readers to Steven Andrews’s comprehensive report at China Dialogue, which gives a realistic appraisal of how Chinese air quality evaluation compares internationally.

/////

Drying persimmons into disks (柿饼)

As a result of the reality of living with constant environmental harm, references to the current environmental situation weave through conversations in Beijing unlike elsewhere. “It’s snowing” I said to my neighbor as I ran out for a bite of breakfast on the first day of snow, adopting the polite Chinese conversational technique of stating the remarkably obvious.

“Jinghua kongqi” she replied, “it will purify the air.”

Later, as I returned with a breakfast snack, “so cold” I complained.

“You know, we have a phrase in Chinese,” she said, before laying down an old rhyming adage, similar to the English (American?) “apple a day.”

(Liu Jing for AFP)

多吃萝卜｜[if you] eat more radish

多吃姜｜eat more ginger

不用大夫｜no need for the doctor

开处方｜to fill out a prescription [for you]

Perhaps, that’s all we Beijing residents need to struggle through the winter, just a bit more radish and ginger, and just a bit more friendly neighbors.

UPDATE (8 Jan 2012): Beijing will release PM2.5 air quality evaluation by Spring Festival.

A few tourists walking down the path from the Mingyong Glacier (left). The path was funded by the Nature Conservancy (TNC).

A former professor recently contacted me to advise a current student of his on their interest in interning at an NGO in China, which lead me to relate some of the experience I’ve gleaned in the past year. This experience brought to mind the usefulness of a chart I created in my research of NGOs working here in China.

I have posted the list below. By no means do I consider it comprehensive; I invite additions and criticism. I have listed only those organizations with offices in China, which excludes several important organizations doing environmental projects in China such as China Green of the Asia Society, the Pacific Environment Institute in San Francisco, and the Washington D.C.-based China Environment Forum of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I have seen a couple of other lists elsewhere, but they seemed out of date.

If the name is only in Chinese, the organization has few, if any, English resources, and thus would not be helpful for someone without Chinese skills.

List of Organizations Doing Environmental Protection Work in China

• International*

1. The Mountain Institute, Beijing with field offices in Shangri-La and Chengdu
2. World Resources Institute
3. Natural Resources Defense Council
4. Greenpeace
5. World Wide Fund For Nature with ~10 field offices and Beijing
6. The Nature Conservancy office in Lijiang and Kunming
7. China Sustainable Energy Program (BJ, SF) under the Energy Foundation
8. Clean Air Initiative (UN mandate)
9. Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation (iCET)
10. Environmental Defense Fund (office in Beijing)
11. China Greentech Initiative (run primarily by foreigners, though based in China)
12. International Fund for China’s Environment Based in DC, branch offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan as well as the Yunnan Natural and Cultural Heritage Conservation Council.
13. Clean Air Initiative
14. Institution for Transportation and Development Policy office in Guangzhou. GZ BRT project, projects in Harbin, Lanzhou, Wuhan. Several international offices.
15. Conservation International
16. Save China’s Tigers (Hong Kong)
17. United Nations Environment Programme
18. WildAid
19. Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots Shanghai; youth-based activism.
20. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)
21. US-China Environmental Fund (Panda Mountain)
22. Institute for Sustainable Communities China division based in SH, offices in BJ and GZ as well

• Beijing

1. 公众环境研究中心 (Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs IPE)
2. 绿色之星环保人合作组织
3. 自然景象环境保护协会 (CNature Conservation Association)
4. 绿色北京
5. 曾经草原

Local folk-lore lines the trail to the Mingyong Glacier, signs from TNC

1. 山水自然保护中心
2. 北京国仁绿色联盟
3. 长江黄河国际文化交流中心
4. 北京地球环村境教育中心
5. 自然之友
6. 国际爱护动物基金会
7. 大学生绿色营
8. 北京天下溪教育咨询中心
9. 新疆自然保育基金 (Xinjiang Conservation Fund)
10. 北京富平学校 (Fuping Development Institute)
11. 绿家园志愿者
12. 道和环境与发展研究所 (Institute for Environment and Development)
13. 福群环境研究院
14. 全球环境研究所 (Global Environment Institute: GEI) Initial partnership with a US NGO, but US partner dissolved in 2011. Sustainable development, capacity-building.
15. 中华环境保护基金会
16. 北京人与动物环保科普中心 (BHAEEC)
17. 绿色记者沙龙
18. Wetlands International

• Yunnan

1. Yunnan EcoNetwork
2. Yunnan Environmental Development Institute (YEDI) German affiliation
3. Green Watershed
4. Green Kunming Run by owners of Salvador’s-American affiliation. Focus on organic food.
5. Center for Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge (云南省生物多样性和传统知识研究会)
6. Yunnan Health and Development Research Association (云南省健康与发展研究会) description of their work here (Eng).
7. Initiative Development biodigester CDM, French-affiliation

• Sichuan

Environmental organizations in China have made a powerful push for the formation of national parks such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge

1. Chengdu Urban Rivers Association
2. Sichuan Green Rivers (四川省绿色江河环境保护)
3. 济溪环境交流网络
4. 甘孜州生物多样性与生态文化协会

• Gansu

1. Green Camel Bell (绿驼铃) education, desertification, water

• Anhui

1. Green Anhui

*Main office in Beijing unless otherwise noted.

movement | life & work from tim quijano on Vimeo.

A man in clean maoist attire strolls by inquisitively. A middle-aged woman walks behind me, and looking at the camera screen displaying the video I am shooting says, keyi le, “that works.” A man comes up to me and asks why foreigners like filming so much. Various people walking by bundled up with puffy eyes, clutching plastic bags of fried Muslim breakfast treats. A constant trickle of commuters on bikes and e-bikes move by.

A woman stumbles up to a fruit vendor, “what are you selling the pomellos for?”

“Three and a half kuai per jin.*” She stumbles away with a confused look on her face as he yells ok to her, “ok, three kuai! Fine!”

A tiny Pekingese obediently trots next to their owner, unconcerned with the organized chaos of the hutong in the morning.

 ///

I was recently required to create a short video about life in China. I chose to focus on the idea of movement, as this concept can capture so much of what is going on in China today. Please view it fullscreen. I will share the unedited version with the original audio if anyone is interested.  In case the embedded video above does not work, an alternate link is here.

I apologize for the incredibly sparse posting of recent, I have found myself caught up in the day-to-day.

*One kuai is equal to one Renminbi or Yuan. The word “kuai,” however, is more colloquial than the other words for money in China, similar to the word “buck” in American English, but more widespread in its use. One jin is equal to 500 grams. This word was taken from a traditional Chinese measurement that would not have corresponded with the metric system so smoothly.

A hawk at the Nanning Bird and Flower Market, there was a wildcat pup next to it, but the seller stopped me before I got a shot lined up

A friend told me that it’s so clean there (in the US), when you get a new pair of shoes, after a week, the soles will still be clean as the day you bought them.

-A Chinese teenager, who is preparing to study in Boston for a year

Train Ticket for Hong Kong (Kowloon) -> Beijing. Photo by Tim Quijano.

I have been in Hong Kong for the past few days to resolve a visa issue. Upon arriving in Beijing, I will be returning to a more regular posting schedule. Below I have listed a few things I have been thinking about and seeing recently. A few of which, I will likely write on further in the future.

1. This is not an inexpensive city. The cheapest bowl of noodles I saw costs 30 HKD (3.80 USD). This may sound cheap, but it’s remarkably more expensive than cheap noodles in China.
2. There are a lot of foreign-born ethnic Chinese and emigrated Chinese here. I overheard many parents speaking to their kids in Cantonese, and the children replying in another language (usually English). I also heard many conversations moving between several languages. Hong Kongers seem to pride themselves on their international identity.
3. There are a lot of very nice cameras here.
4. Gentrification is rapidly marginalizing the parts of the city that I like most–the dingy ones.
5. There seems to be some distrust among the residents of the HK government‘s collusion and dealings with the mainland/Communist Party.
6. Learning simple Cantonese would not be as hard as I had originally thought, but it’s not a very “practical” language. After having lived in a Cantonese-speaking area, Guangxi, and having become used to how Cantonese speakers speak Mandarin, Cantonese seems much more within reach than before. That being said, advanced speakers of Cantonese are famous/notorious for speaking in a very poetic and metiphorical manner, thus reaching a high-level of the language would likely be impossible for me.
7. I would like to see on a report on the amount of energy that is lost due to air-conditioning units being kept on with doors open. While walking through the streets and sidewalks of Hong Kong, and this applies to Chinese cities as well, you can feel the air-conditioned air escaping into the streets. Most stores do not close their doors, and many don’t have any doors, possibly hoping the air-conditioning will attract customers into their stores.

The Beijing Energy Network (BEN) is a grassroots organization that facilitates discussion of energy issues. A couple of enterprising members of BEN, interested in the burgeoning start-up community in Beijing and seeking to apply business oriented solutions to environmental problems, established the Environmental Challenge open or ECO-BEN for the acronym-inclined.

The organizers, Ms. CC Huang and Mr. Daniel Enking, saw an opportunity to bring the entrepreneurship and energy of the start-up community to BEN; they chose six teams of three members (Full disclosure: the writer was a participant) to compete in creating and presenting a business-oriented solution to an environmental problem. The event worked to “create a space for innovation and discussion and provide new perspectives on environmental and energy issues in a Chinese context.”

The day of the event brought the groups together at 6:30. The organizers introduced the schedule of the night: first, advice from the judges; secondly, the groups would take one hour to formulate their business plan and create a presentation to explain it to the audience; next, each group would present their plan to the audience and judges for five minutes before answering the questions from the judges for five minutes; lastly, the judges would pronounce the winning group.

Ms. Huang presented the challenge, create a business plan that uses technology to solve an environmental problem. The judges, Kunal Sinha from Ogilvy and Mather, Kaiser Kuo from Baidu, and Darrell Barnes from Climate Action, offered some very valuable advice to the participants. Mr. Sinha summarized some information from Ogilvy’s recent fact-finding report (PDF) on marketing sustainability in China, suggesting that many Chinese consumers do not want to want to be the first in their social circles to be thought of as “environmentally progressive,”* and that the marketing of environmental products should focus on money, energy or time saved, instead of the environmental benefits. Mr. Kuo emphasized the reality of the level of development for most Chinese–about half of the Chinese population lives in rural areas with minimal access to sophisticated technology. Mr. Kuo also deemphasized the current trend of game techniques, as well as socializing and localizing every electronic tool (through social network interfaces). Mr. Barnes offered advice related to his years of experience on environmentally-related start-up businesses.

After the words from the judges, the teams were given an hour to create their business plans and create their presentations. Audience members filled-in empty seats and crowded behind busy groups, frantically trying to put the last edits on their presentations as Ms. Huang shoot her flash drive-holding fist at them.

The presentations fell into a few categories: group one and four presented Groupon-inspired services, group three and five presented digital traffic-avoidance solutions, group two presented a environmentally-focused charitable search engine, and group six presented a tool to track ones carbon footprint.

After the presentations, the judges convened for ten minutes to discuss the groups. The judges decided on group five’s plan (Full disclosure: the writer was a member of group five) to create a program to dispatch a sytem that estimates the length of trips with respect to real-time traffic updates taken from state-run traffic information services to taxi drivers who make up two percent of city vehicles but twenty percent of city traffic. This plan would later be rolled out to include services for regular drivers.

BEN aims to host more of these events in the future.

More thoughts and pictures from Mr. Sinha’s blog at Ogivy Earth here.

A mural on a wall of the Guangxi University campus directs viewers to "Love Socialism." Photo by Tim Quijano.

UPDATED: This post was updated on 20 August 2011 to improve readability.

While teaching at Guangxi University’s Sino-Canadian International last fall, I noticed a remarkable transition between the way the students of my class acted at the beginning of the semester and the way they carried themselves toward the end. They had transformed from stereotypically timid high school students, self-segregated by gender in their seating arrangements, into students who were much more outgoing, speaking out when I asked them to… and increasingly when I didn’t. As our relationship developed through the year, they became comfortable expressing more personal topics with me. The following relates a story that reports on the difficulty of negotiating the fine line of what is and is not acceptable in contemporary Chinese society.

At the end of class one day, a student (student A)* came up to me.

“Tim, do you know who Han Han is?”**

This was student A’s way of bringing the topic of human rights to me. We touched on popular topics deemed sensitive by the Communist Party such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and last year’s fire in Shanghai. The human costs of these incidents are widely understood as being greatly exacerbated by mismanagement on the part of the Communist Party. Both student A and a friend, student B, expressed their irritation with the “Great Firewall,” or the firewall the Chinese government has erected to separate Chinese internet users from sensitive topics and international social media websites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. After expressing their annoyance with the firewall’s restrictions, the students assured me that they had capable software to “climb over,” or hack through the Great Firewall.

Student A told me that s/he had come to ask me advice. S/he wanted to use a school project to question human rights issues. “Be careful,” I said. “I’ll talk to you about these issues, but there are a lot of things that I would not suggest saying in public.”

S/he reacted in angst, and began telling me a story.

Early in the freshman orientation, the dean of the International College gave an introduction of the International College to an assembly of all of the college’s students, many of whom had not seen foreigners in person before–as an economic backwater, Guangxi Province does not witness many of the signs of a modern Chinese city. During the speech, the dean directed the student body, “if any of you students have a disagreement with a foreign teacher about a political issue, you students should return to your Chinese teacher to discuss the issue. Do not continue to discuss the political issue with your foreign teacher,” effectively instructing the students to keep their teachers at arm’s-length.

“But now I’ve realized,” student A went on, “that I feel more comfortable discussing politics with you than with my Chinese teachers. You challenge me, and don’t try to control the discussion.”***

Several Generations of Chinese Communist Party leadership, from Left, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin instruct the people of Nanning to vigorously work to revitalize the city. Photo by Tim Quijano.

Later, I received an email from student B, one of my smartest and most creative of students, obviously worried for student A’s well-being, and coming to terms with some issues of his own. I have edited the text to improve readability; the original is available here (pdf).

I think student A is now really excited about and interested in political and human rights in China. I held similar feelings when I was in middle school. When I was growing up, I discovered many many things that made me really angry.

Today, I still don’t like the government and the party, but I have realized that it shouldn’t disturb my personal life as it did before. It’s just the way it goes. I’m not able to change it. What I should do is avoid doing the same thing in the future. Now many college students here and all over the country apply to be active party members. I know that few of them actually like the party, but being party members will help them get jobs in the government or other public institutions. I will never do that–I have already decided not to work for the government. I just want to be myself. I am sick of saying things that I don’t agree with, and glorifying things that I hate. I don’t want to be so fake as to join the party.

My feelings about the government and party are complex. On the one hand, it really makes my life better. I still remember what my home was like 10 years ago very clearly. We only had a TV and a DVD player. When I compare what my life was like then with what it is now, I have to admit that it’s really a great change. We have really become richer and live a more comfortable better life. On the other hand though, the government has done so many bad things. The party has changed a lot. It’s no longer what it used to be decades before.****

These are the realities that must be confronted as these young adults are coming of age in China. Signs of change are visible, sure, but democracy is still inaccessible–too inaccessible for most Chinese youth to bother with caring, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.

/////

*The identities of my former students are obscured for their protection.

**Han Han (韩寒) is a young man from Shanghai who became well-known while working in the car-racing circuit. Today, however, he is famous for his internet personality, and relative frankness on issues considered sensitive for many to comment on publicly.

***Paraphrased from a conversation in person.

****Copied from an email message.

A Snowy Beijing Hutong Alley. Photo by Liz Phung.

I live in one of the few neighborhoods of Beijing that has not seen the bulldozers as much as the others. Chinese people are surprised when I tell them my address, replying, “I thought there were only pingfang there.”*

“Yes,” I reply, “I live in a pingfang“.

The best part of living in this  neighborhood, aside from the quiet alleys and the beauty of the architecture, is talking to neighbors. Most of the residents here are relatively poor elderly “old Beijing” people. Their apartments have no bathrooms. It is interesting to see how the gentrification plays out as more boutique stores come into the neighborhood and the older people come out at night to sit and watching things going on (看热闹). My conversations with these older residents are always enlightening. In general, they are very uninterested in moving into a high-rise “unnatural” apartments, where people don’t talk to your neighbors and feel trapped (their words). While conversing with a woman in our courtyard as I was running out to the market, she said, “you know we have a phrase in Chinese,”

人是铁 | people are iron

饭是钢 | rice [food] is steel

一顿不吃 | [if you] miss one meal

饿得很 | [you'll be] very hungry

She then trailed off with laughter, taking her wheelchair down to the nearby Houhai lake, where she sits every night, hanging out as the sun sets.

More on the Hutongs of Beijing at Asia Society China Green’s, The Fate of Old Beijing.

*Pingfang, literally “flat house,” refers to the one-story  buildings that make up the preserved neighborhoods of Beijing.

Localnoodles is a reader review website through which users can rate and review Beijing restaurants, bars and other venues. Localnoodles recently introduced the “Write to Give” initiative, which contributes a donation to your choice of a group of six organizations carrying out sustainable development work in China. These organizations run projects dealing with environmental advocacy, microfinance, women’s and children’s issues and public health. Users are now able to contribute to Greening the Beige, under the 51Give project, through “Write to Give.”

To donate to Greening the Beige through this platform, users must fill out a short sign-up form and write a review of at least 150 words. Localnoodles will donate 8 RMB to your choice of six organizations per review; however, the donation amount is liable to increase as Localnoodles receives more sponsors. Write to Give has raised over 9,000 RMB for the charities since its start in February 2011. Help Localnoodles and Greening the Beige by spreading the word about this initiative.