About Friends of Nature

Friends of Nature

Friends of Nature, known by the abbreviation FON and in Chinese as Ziran Zhiyou, is China's oldest environmental non-governmental organisation and the first environmental NGO to be officially recognised by the government of the People's Republic of China. It was officially registered in Beijing on 31 March 1994, under the name Green Culture Institute of the International Academy of Chinese Culture, by the historian Liang Congjie together with three colleagues from the Academy for Chinese Culture — Yang Dongping, Liang Xiaoyan and Wang Lixiong. Deliberately non-confrontational, it set out to build grassroots environmental awareness in a country that had no tradition of independent environmental organising, and it is credited with incubating the first generation of Chinese environmentalists.

Liang Congjie, who led the organisation until his death on 28 October 2010, came from one of modern China's most distinguished families: he was the grandson of the reformer Liang Qichao, exiled for fourteen years after the failed Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, and the son of the architect Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin. A Ramon Magsaysay Award laureate of 2000, Liang chose education over protest as his method — teacher training, rural environmental education through the Green Hope Action, China's first birdwatching group — while FON's campaigns helped save the Tibetan antelope, protect the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey and old-growth forests, and put the Nujiang dam cascade on hold.

Founding in 1994: China's first legal environmental NGO

The founding moment is precisely documented. On 5 June 1993, World Environment Day, a group of socially concerned scholars, teachers, artists, students and retired workers sat on the grass near a disused pagoda in a Beijing suburb, discussing China's environment and what responsibility ordinary people should take for it. The informal discussion bore fruit the following year. Liang had learned from television coverage of Greenpeace that other countries had home-grown environmental groups, and he and three colleagues at the Academy for Chinese Culture concluded that China needed a corresponding organisation of its own. A change in Chinese rules in the early 1990s made it possible, with government permission and oversight, for citizens to register their own organisations.

Friends of Nature was officially launched and registered on 31 March 1994 as the Green Culture Institute of the International Academy of Chinese Culture, an affiliate of the Academy, under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. It is routinely described — by the Magsaysay Foundation, by China Development Brief and by the international press — as China's first legally recognised environmental NGO. Global Village of Beijing followed in 1995, and the sector that FON opened has since grown to more than 3,500 environmental NGOs in China; historians of the movement divide its development into periods beginning with FON's founding era of "saving nature" between 1994 and 2000.

Liang Congjie and the non-confrontational method

Liang Congjie (4 August 1932 – 28 October 2010) was a historian by profession, and an environmentalist by conviction formed late in life. The New York Times and The Atlantic, in obituary coverage in 2010, called him the godfather of China's green movement, while noting that he was a reluctant crusader: his family history — a grandfather exiled for reform, a father persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for defending Beijing's old city walls — had taught him the personal cost of taking stands in China. Environmentalist Ma Jun described Liang as having "incubated the first generation of environmentalists in China", and FON's own Li Bo credited him with building the movement on a "constructively critical" basis, working in conjunction with the government to ensure enforcement of existing environmental law.

The method followed from the man. FON eschewed Greenpeace's more confrontational techniques, choosing instead to develop grassroots concern about nature through fostering environmental awareness in schools and through painstaking documentation — photographs, video and first-hand reporting — placed before the public and the authorities. Liang was recognised in 2000 with the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia's premier prize for public service, which cited his ability to advance environmental issues while navigating the constraints on Chinese civil society. He died in a Beijing hospital on 28 October 2010, aged 78, of complications from a lung infection; Friends of Nature continued under the generation of environmentalists he had trained.

Environmental education and Green Hope Action

Education was FON's chosen instrument from the beginning. Its Green Hope Action programme carried environmental education into rural schools, training teachers and supplying materials in areas far from the urban centres where environmental discussion began; academic case studies record the programme operating across 27 provinces. Teacher training more generally — equipping schoolteachers to teach nature study — was treated by the organisation as the multiplier that could change a society's habits within a generation, and it remained a core activity alongside the better-publicised campaigns.

Birdwatching and the membership model

The organisation also founded China's first birdwatching group, a seemingly modest innovation that mattered: birdwatching gave urban members a direct, pleasurable experience of wild nature and a reason to defend the wetlands and parks the birds depended on, and it modelled the membership-based, activity-centred form that later Chinese environmental groups widely adopted. FON is a membership organisation funded mostly by membership fees and by international foundation and domestic public support; its membership grew from no more than about 200 in its early years to more than 2,000 within its first decade, with members drawn heavily from the press, teaching and cultural worlds — connections that amplified its educational message.

Saving the Tibetan antelope

FON's first public campaign voice was raised in 1995 for the Tibetan antelope, or chiru, of Kekexili — Hoh Xil — on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. The antelope's underwool, shahtoosh, fetched high prices in Europe and North America, and poaching had expanded since the 1980s into large-scale killing; the animals' skinned corpses dumped on the grassland became, through photographs and film circulated by FON members and allies, a national scandal. FON supported and organised members to travel to Hoh Xil to monitor the situation and help build reserve protection stations, supplying the first-hand information that brought the antelope's plight to the general public.

The campaign's international arm is its best-documented episode: in 1998 Liang Congjie wrote an open letter to the British prime minister, Tony Blair, calling for a ban on the trade in Tibetan antelope cashmere, Europe being a major market for shahtoosh shawls. The letter exemplified FON's method — moral suasion addressed to a decision-maker, backed by evidence gathered by volunteers — and the antelope campaign became the founding story of Chinese public environmentalism, retold in every history of the movement. FON colleagues recalled that the organisation "made our voice heard for the first time in 1995 when calling for protection of the Tibetan antelope".

Snub-nosed monkeys and the end of natural-forest logging

In the same founding years FON joined the defence of the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, one of the world's most endangered primates, whose old-growth habitat in Deqin, Yunnan, was being commercially felled. In 1995 the photographer Xi Zhinong exposed the destruction of natural forests in Deqin; the story was picked up by media outlets and by Friends of Nature, and commercial felling in Deqin was eventually halted. The monkey campaign is treated in movement histories as China's first coordinated environmental protection effort, and it built the skills and networks from which the later movement grew.

FON's forest work reached its climax in western Sichuan, where its members filmed the cutting of old-growth forest stands. The videotaped evidence of logging, placed before the authorities and the public, contributed to Premier Zhu Rongji's 1999 order prohibiting the cutting of natural forests — the national natural-forest logging ban that stands as one of the era's most consequential environmental decisions. It was the largest policy outcome of FON's first decade, and it was achieved by the organisation's characteristic means: citizens with cameras, documenting a violation of the spirit of existing policy, and a government persuaded to act.

The Nujiang campaign and the maturing of the movement

In the mid-2000s FON helped coordinate the national campaign against a cascade of dams proposed for the Nujiang — the Salween — river in Yunnan, one of China's last free-flowing major rivers. Environmental NGOs including Green Earth Volunteers launched the public campaign in 2003, and in 2004 Premier Wen Jiabao announced the shelving of the development plans, an outcome in which FON's coordinating role among the participating groups is recorded in movement histories. The Nujiang campaign marked a transition: where the 1990s campaigns had defended charismatic species and forests, the dam campaign contested a major infrastructure programme, and it did so through a coalition of the organisations that had formed in FON's wake.

By then the sector had entered what movement historians call its second and third periods — broader participation, professionalisation and policy engagement — with more than 3,500 environmental NGOs registered by the late 2000s involving some 300,000 participants. FON's role within that mature sector was that of elder and incubator: the organisation whose 1994 registration had proved an environmental NGO could exist legally in China, whose education programmes had trained the people who staffed the newer groups, and whose founder's constructively critical stance had defined one durable model of Chinese environmental advocacy.

Legacy

Friends of Nature remains a membership organisation headquartered in Beijing, and its name is inseparable from the history it made. The Atlantic's and the New York Times' obituaries of Liang Congjie in 2010, the Magsaysay Award citation of 2000, China Development Brief's editorial record and multiple academic case studies in English all treat FON as the point of origin of China's environmental movement — the organisation that turned the discussion on the grass by a Beijing pagoda on World Environment Day 1993 into the country's first legal environmental NGO.

For a directory of Chinese organisations, Friends of Nature is a landmark entry: registered on 31 March 1994, first in its field, and consequential out of proportion to its modest membership — teacher training and Green Hope Action rural education across 27 provinces, China's first birdwatching group, the Tibetan antelope campaign and the 1998 letter to Tony Blair, the snub-nosed monkey and Deqin felling halt, filmed evidence behind the 1999 natural-forest logging ban, and coordination in the campaign that shelved the Nujiang dams. Its history is the founding chapter of organised environmentalism in the People's Republic of China.