Most of this Fight Against Climate Change on the Xinhua site is old, but there’s a mention specifically of the Olympics as part of the Chinese efforts to mitigate global warming. The “Backgrounder” information is interesting as an effort to make up for historically weak environmental education in China.

Matt Drudge carried a story a few days ago that initially ran on Xinhua (in Chinese, new speak–which sounds super communist) called Marked changes in world’s political, economic landscape.

The article outlines how the global economy is changing–according to Xinhua, “peace” and “development” are the prevailing themes of the news this past year–but towards the end, the article mentions the financial crisis in the United States as a harbinger of the world’s changing economic landscape. Xinhua reassures that, “As long as it joins forces, the international community will be able to tackle all political, security and economic challenges and continue to advance the world further toward justice, peace and prosperity, observers said.” First, the collaborative tone should be reassuring to anxious readers in the West, but also, “joining together to advance towards justice, peace and prosperity”? This is not threatening.

Also I read on Xinhua that next year China will launch the country’s first human rights campaign. big news.

I always said that being in Beijing was like being in the future. I don’t pretend for a second that Beijing and Shanghai are similar, but this is along those lines. This source is also interesting to me.

The International Herald Tribune carried this article this morning. It says, “Rebecca MacKinnon, a specialist in Internet restrictions at Hong Kong University, said that the Chinese authorities had recently resumed blocking access to her blog from mainland computers.

‘It does appear that in the last week a lot of things got reblocked that were unblocked during the Olympics,’ she said, adding, ‘I have not written about the two Chinas issue arguably in the past year; it is not what I focus on.’”

A specialist in Internet restrictions?

Concerning internet restictions, the international attention that came to China with the Olympics did have a positive impact. However, this is a hint that certain restrictions imposed for the Olympics are not sustainable.

Recently I scheduled an interview with Greg Ingram at the Lincoln Institute for later in January. Ingram’s credentials are outlined on the Lincoln Institute’s web site: “Before leading the institute beginning in June 2005, he was Director-General, Operations Evaluation at the World Bank, where he also held positions in urban development and research and was Staff Director for the World Development Report 1994, Infrastructure for Development. I’m interested to hear about economic and environmental projections concerning subway renovations, and projections about investment in energy infrastructure in Bejing. Hopefully this will be our last interview.

This has been a tab open in my browser for days and I hadn’t looked at it yet, but today I’m going to contact the Green Dragon Media Project because I like their work. It’s focused on the building industry, but the attitude of the project extends beyond the construction industry.  On the site: “[China's green building movement, valued at] 4 million square meters of green building construction (not including sustainable development), is a story worth telling… and for reference, the U.S. now has 12.5 million square meters after 30 years of a green building movement.”

Charles McElwee, an Environmental lawyer in Shanghai, talks about changing attitudes within the Central Government in China. McElwee, like a few others that we’ve connected with, chooses to focus on the “opportunities that have been created by China’s environmental situation” rather than the challenges. There are two sides to every problem. All of McElwee’s interviews are interesting.

David Zhou, an architect in Beijing, mentions that driving the environmental movement in China is environmental education–which is what we saw as well, and will be highlighted in our film–and that people in China are acting now with a consideration of how their kids are going to live in the future.

Intellectual property is an issue in China that has hindered innovation, and several Green Dragon interviewees mention this. The issue is that if an innovation saves energy and decreases pollution, many feel that it should be a public good, and that there should be a public fund provided by governments to provide an incentive to innovate in these ways. I think that in China the tendency to consider public goods is still much stronger than it is in the West.

I just revisited the article on the Yale Environment 360 forum, Under Sooty Exterior, A Green China Emerges, that I left a response to last week. It seems like we have tapped into a voice that was not represented previously, and so it seemed like I was alone in my championing of China’s environmental movement, but once this voice gets tapped, there’s something there. If it started for me with Tisha and Rambo and, later, Jack in Tiger Leaping Gorge in 2005, remembering these feelings and holding strong to them is what is making this happen.

That is what is making this happen for me, but perpetuating and strengthening it is tapping into a network of people who are also not jaded by Western preconceptions about What Is China–people like Fred Pearce, who wrote the above article, and Jim Fallows at the Atlantic Monthly, mentioned previously. Adding to these represented voices are people like Zn Huang, who posted on the Yale forum. Zn writes, “We are very grateful for all those who are creating awareness through positive documentaries and education. It is the first step to change for a greener and more sustainable future. I am looking forward to the documentary and hope it gets released either through national tv or through other mass distribution channels. I hope it becomes part of the curiculum in Chinese education.”

This is exciting!