Arriving Beijing

I arrived in Beijing today. It was actually nice to be arriving in the evening, because I could adjust more quickly to the time here. Since I hadn’t slept much during the 14 hours or so flight, I kept myself awake for a few more hours and then let myself sleep past midnight. I went to bed at 9 am San Francisco time, by the time I woke up at 9am, I was a Beijinger!
Beijing was wet and grey this morning. There was no chance for a blue sky! It made it easy to stay in my hotel room and start working. I started making calls to people; confirming meetings; and reading up on background infos. Today I’ll be meeting Yu Zhijiao of CLAPV, the short name for Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims and Alex Wang, a senior attorney of the Natural Resource Defense Council.
Established in 1998, CLAPV is the foremost legal aid center in China for victims of environmental pollutions. The center is involved in a wide range of programs to promote China’s environmental laws: it conducts legal research; produces popular guides to increase public understanding of environmental laws; trains lawyers, judges and NGOs on legal advocacy; it also runs a hotline for pollution victims. The center is almost completely fund by foreign foundations and entities. Yet it is registered with Ministry of Justice and affiliated with the University of Legal and Political Science where it is located.
I came and met with Yu Zhijiao, the Assistant Director of CLAPV. She was a short, baby-faced woman recently completed her PhD at the university and just started working full time at the center. Like many Chinese students who spent most of their life in the academic world, she was confident and plainly dressed. She spoke very softly and even when she was being critical about something, her voice seemed to convey the opposite.
The center is doing some really good work, representing victims that have no where to turn for their grievance. There’s a victim’s hotline staffed by volunteers 5 days a week to take reports. People can also write letters or send emails, faxes, etc. I asked her how many complains they received on a daily basis. She said an average of 6-7. I was shocked. For a country of 1.3 billion people and with such notorious environmental record, I would expect the country’s only hotline for victims of environmental pollution to be receiving hundreds of calls. But then again the center is staffed by one volunteer a day, using one phone line. Yu explained to me that when she first started, the phone would ring off the hook throughout the day. She realized that it was because the center got a lot of publicity when it first got started. Their director Wang Canfa was constantly being interviewed by newspapers and televisions programs. But the center proved unequipped for the massive amounts of complains it was getting from across the country. Since then, they’ve limited their publicity and the calls gradually went down. Now the center is dealing with about 14 active cases with an additional 4 cases pending further investigation to determine their eligibility.
My main question today was regarding the new Public Disclosure of Environmental Information Law that went into effect in May of this year. The center has been utilizing it on behalf of the alleged victims of environmental pollution. Yu showed me an information request form for one of their clients. Two fish farmers from Henan province was suspecting that a shoe factory nearby the farm was polluting the river and killing their fishes. They called the center and this form was filled out for them. I looked at the form and found that it contained fairly technical terminology. One has to know what information to request in order to get the right information. An ordinary person would not know how to request the right information. Yu then explained to me that this is a case that has already been accepted by the center and two lawyers from Henan province is now dealing with it with funding from the Center. The plaintiffs in this case, the fish farmers were suing for compensation of their lost fishes. I asked Yu how does this type of litigation lawsuit fair in China’s legal culture? She said it is still very rare that judges would grant financial rewards to victims of environmental pollution. More often than not, the judges would order the polluting factories to stop its practice. That is the best they could hope for.
By the time our meeting ended, the rain had started again. Yu gave me very detailed directions on a piece of paper on how to get to my next meeting and walked me to the gate. She offered to give me the umbrella and I politely rejected. As I waved goodbye to her after getting into the cab, I saw again the bright and optimistic smiles of Yu.
My next meeting was with Alex Wang, the senior attorney of the Natural Resources Defense Council. I just recalled that there is a large poster in the hallway of my apartment in San Francisco from the NRDC which I collected many years ago in a Green Festival. It aptly pronounced, “Because the earth needs a good lawyer”. I would not have thought that one day I would be stepping into the office of NRDC’s Beijing office.
The NRDC office was located in a very different part of town. It is inside the International Center in Chaoyang district, where all the major embassies and western hotels and venues are located. It is also right across the street from Xiushui Shopping Center, the center for China’s counterfeit industry. I joked to Alex upon arriving at his office on the 16th floor that he’s getting a very good view of Beijing’s polluted skyline. With 15 staff, the NRDC office occupied half of the floor spanning three offices. It was a shining contrast to the CLAPV’s two staff office with dimmed lights and crammed space.
Wang grew up in the States and has been living in China for four years. He came here like many, to experience all the exciting changes that were happening in China. Knowing that he’s a busy guy I jumped right into business. “Greening China” has become one of the NRDC’s top priorities. Being a country that has overtaken the US as the top emitter of Greenhouse gas and one of the U.S’s top importers of low cost goods, the NRDC saw a critical need to directly engage in China to increase its energy efficiency and foster a strong legal culture of environmental governance.
Wang was a hesitant spokesperson for the state of China’s environmental law. With a legal background and lots of experience working with the government on a policy level, he often refrained from jumping to conclusion on a given topic. I asked him how the Public Disclosure of Environmental Information Law is doing, he said he heard a lot of resistance and implementation is being assessed. Regarding the question of whether if the government is prepared to risk its short term interest of rapid economic growth to pursue the kind of restructuring that’s necessary for long term sustainable development, he said it’s difficult to say at this point. Wang explained that the Council focuses on public engagement in environmental governance. That is why it promotes training for lawyers but also journalists and disseminates information about current environmental laws and trends that are accessible to the public. They work very closely with CLAPV on a policy level, primarily to help assess the effectiveness of environmental laws and their implementation.
Our meeting was cut short because Alex had to run to another conference call that he needed to prepare for. I hastily gathered my belongings and thanked his time. As I walked out of the International building, the rain had turned into drizzles. It was rush hour and I struggled to even get into the subway station along with hundreds of others getting off work from their envious jobs in Beijing’s glitzy high rises in the commercial district.