The 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service

BIOGRAPHY of Congjie Liang

Liang Congjie was born with a heavy burden. He bore an illustrious family name, both his paternal grandfather and his father having made history in China as catalysts for change in their respective eras. It was an inheritance Liang Congjie could not but honor, and a legacy he could not but carry on.

He was born on 4 August 1932 in Beijing. His paternal grandfather, Liang Qichao, was a Confucian scholar and an ardent reformer from Guangdong Province who belonged to a small group of intellectuals of nationwide fame in the late 19th century. Educated in the Confucian classics from the age of four or five, he became a juren (the equivalent of a masters-degree holder in traditional China) at the age of 16. The title was given after a student passed the imperial examinations based on Confucian texts. Liang Qichao also tried to become a jinshi, a scholar of the very highest rank, but he failed.

Examinations under the imperial system were so rigorous and intimidating that they drove some examinees to illness, others to nervous breakdowns. But passing the tests was the only way bright young Chinese boys in those days could hope to improve their lot. Only those who achieved juren and jinshi status were appointed to official positions in the civil service. This examination system produced the forty thousand officials who headed the Chinese civil service as well as the million or so lesser degree holders who composed the scholar gentry. This system proved to be so effective that it was adopted by neighboring kingdoms in Korea and Vietnam.

In 1891 Liang Qichao became a student of the famous scholar Kang Youwei. Kang studied Western civilization, particularly its political, economic, and social institutions, and sought ways to use the knowledge he acquired to introduce changes in China. Liang encouraged Kang to set up a school in Guangzhou, where the older man lectured using Western examples for comparison and illustration. Liang himself became an instructor at the school.

Progressive, reform-minded scholars like Liang and Kang were few in China and their understanding of the Western mind was limited. But their influence would have a great impact on China's national life. This was especially true after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. China's defeat shocked the country and led China's scholars to examine what was "wrong" with China's traditional system and culture. In this atmosphere of national urgency, Liang Qichao helped Kang Youwei establish the Society for the Study of National Self-Strengthening (Qiang-xue hui) in mid-1895, along with related newspaper. Liang became the secretary of the Society.

The two men tried to change the nature of Confucianism to make Western learning acceptable. Not surprisingly, their efforts were met with opposition and hostility by the old regime, and after just one year the Society was banned. Kang was forced to leave Beijing and move to Guangzhou. In later years he became the leader of the Chinese reform movement.

As the 19th century drew to a close, Liang held a post in Beijing, and he and Kang succeeded in influencing the emperor to introduce reforms. These were designed to effect radical changes in China's political, economic, military, educational, and cultural life, and were contained in decrees issued by the emperor based on memorials submitted by Liang and others. Between June and September of 1898, some forty or more reform edicts were issued, giving rise to the term "Hundred Days of Reform." Liang and the emperor's other progressive advisers made many enemies, however, and in 1898 Liang was forced to flee to Japan after being warned by the emperor that he and other intellectuals would be arrested following a conservative countercoup to protest the reforms. The Empress Dowager sentenced him and his teacher Kang to death. They both escaped, but six of their comrades were executed.

Subsequently, Liang's ideas fueled the debates about political reform and revolution in China that accompanied the fall of the Qing Dynasty and subsequent attempts to establish a Chinese republic. Years later, looking back at the events of 1898, Liang wrote that he and Kang had hoped to found a new school of learning that would not be either Chinese or Western but, instead, Chinese and Western. Their ideas were profoundly influential and helped to shape most of China's twentieth century political thinkers, including Mao Ze-dong.

Liang Congjie never knew his grandfather, for Liang Qichao died a few years before his grandson was born. Nor did Liang Congjie learn much about his grandfather while he was growing up, for his father, Liang Sicheng, did not wish Qichao's fame to give his two children an air of superiority. He admonished them not to speak of their famous grandfather to their schoolmates.

Sicheng was born in Japan during his father's exile. Liang Qichao wanted his son to go into politics, and suggested that the young man study political science. But Sicheng's girlfriend, Lin Huiyin, saw his talent and potential as an artist and advised him to take architecture or social sciences instead. Although Sicheng never had formal training in art, he became the arts editor of the student newsletter at Qinghua School (later Qinghua University), a preparatory school for Chinese students who planned to go abroad. All the subjects, including the sciences and mathematics, were taught in English.

Lin Huiyin herself was a remarkable woman. She was, by all accounts, not only very beautiful but also immensely gifted and famous as a poet and writer. Her father, a well-known politician, took her to England when she was sixteen. There she attended boarding school and was known as Phyllis Lin. In England she discovered architecture. Her roommate, an architect's daughter, invited her home one day, and the visit turned out to be the Chinese girl's introduction to architecture. In China in the early 1900s, architecture as a profession was unheard of; houses were built by carpenters. Many years later, when she had become an architect, Lin would tell her son, "To combine creative art with people's daily life-that was the kind of work I wanted to do."

Liang and Lin went to the United States together to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Girls were not accepted in the architecture department at the time, so Lin had to settle for the School of Fine Arts where she was allowed to take architectural subjects. She must have impressed her professors because she was invited to become a teaching assistant in the department.

Liang Sicheng went on to become a famous architect. He is best remembered for his work in preserving the old Beijing Wall and other ancient relics of Chinese architecture. He also discovered the Tang Buddhist temple Fo Kuang Su in the remote Wu-T'ai mountains. His book, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, was published by MIT Press in the United States and is still recognized today as the most scholarly analysis of China's architectural development. Outside China, he is best remembered as one of the designers of the United Nations Building in New York. His name appears on one wall of that building's assembly hall.

Liang Congjie was born on the fourth year of his parents' marriage and three years after the birth of his sister, Tsai Ping. As is customary among Chinese families, even highly Westernized ones, the arrival of a son was greeted with much rejoicing in the Liang household. The boy was named Tsung-chieh (Congjie in pinyin), meaning "follower of (Li) Chieh," after the architectural genius of the Song Dynasty whom both his parents idolized, and nicknamed Shao-di (little brother).

Chinese intellectuals at the time were held in high esteem and earned well. Liang Congjie recalls that his family led a comfortable bourgeois life before the Second World War. The house that his parents acquired was not beautiful but it had a spacious courtyard with trees and flower beds, so typical of Beijing homes. The couple favored simple and spare furniture, mostly antique pieces they bought at the market and tastefully arranged. Seven servants, including two cooks, a chauffeur for the black Chevrolet, and a personal maid each for Lin's mother, the two children and Lin herself, attended to the family's needs.

Liang and Lin spoke Mandarin to their children but followed the Western, i.e., liberal and democratic, style of parenting, with no preference given to the son. Liang Congjie says, "They treated us as adults, they respected our personalities, they never tried to dominate us, like most parents did. They always asked our opinions." Not for him and his sister fairy tales and silly stories; Congjie recalls that his mother read to them A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh in English. Lin told her children about the books she herself was reading and shared her impressions of them. In particular, Liang remembers a biography of Michelangelo and the short stories of Ivan Turgenev. With awe she told them how painstakingly Michelangelo had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and how vividly Turgenev had described the sounds of the forest and the light shining there! So impressed was Lin with Turgenev's style that she asked her son, who was then in primary school, to write an essay describing what he himself could see outside their house.

The family's idyllic life abruptly ended with the outbreak of World War II. Liang Sicheng refused to cooperate with the Japanese after their conquest of Beijing. Rather than serve the invaders, he decided to evacuate his family to Kunming, leaving behind everything except clothes and beddings which they packed in two suitcases. The comfortable life would never be theirs again.

Liang Congjie was only five then, but the events of September 5, 1937 remain vivid in his mind. That was the day his family left Beijing for Tientsin, the first stop in an escape route across China that would take them six weeks. With them were Lin's mother, a philosopher-friend of the Liangs, and two Qinghua professors. Liang Congjie can no longer remember if his parents explained to him why they had to leave Beijing. What he does remember is that it was a long trip and that they took trains and boats alternately until they reached Changsha, the capital city of Hunan province.

He recalls, "We took a train from Beijing to Tientsin. The train was packed with fully armed Japanese soldiers. My father was dozing in his chair and I think he felt very uncomfortable sitting in the middle of so many soldiers. But I was attracted to the weapons. One of the soldiers smiled at me and waved at me to come closer. I did. He showed me his gun and let me touch it, and he gave me a piece of candy. Suddenly my father woke up and saw me playing with the Japanese soldier. He was so angry. He shouted at me. 'Shao-di i, hwe la!' That means 'come back.' I had never heard him speak so harshly to me. I was scared. I immediately ran back to him and my mother."

In Changsha the Liangs and their friends rented a house because Sicheng had not yet decided on a final destination. It did not take them long to realize that Changsha was unsafe. It became the target of the very first Japanese air attack on China, and they were among its victims. The bomb was dropped at midday and landed only fifteen yards from the Liangs' house. Congjie cannot forget the "sound of the crashing of all the glass, and the feeling of pouring down on the house." He and his sister were sick that day, according to a letter Lin later sent to John and Wilma Fairbank, her friends in the United States. She took Shao-di in her arms while Sicheng carried Tsai Ping.

Lin wrote to the Fairbanks:

"No one knows how we managed not being blown to bits. Our house was in pieces just as we hurried down stairs after hearing some hellish crash and boom from the two bombs first dropped further away from us. By sheer instinctive action each of us had picked up one child and rushed for the stairs. But before we reached the ground, the nearest bomb exploded. It blew me up with Shao-di in my arms and then threw me down again on the ground unhurt. Meanwhile the house started to crack and every bit of the much-glassed door and panels, roof, ceilings, all came tumbling, showering down on top of us. We rushed out through the side door and were on the street choked with black smoke."

They all ran down to the courtyard which was surrounded by two-story-high houses. Lin was only halfway down the staircase when another bomb was dropped. She flew from the landing directly into the courtyard. Miraculously, both mother and son survived. They rushed out into the street through a narrow door. Sicheng would tell his son much later that at the sound of the plane about to dive and drop a bomb, it dawned on him that they should stay close together so that they would all die together rather than have one or two of them survive. To the family's great relief, the second bomb did not explode.

The following day, they returned to the debris that remained of their house and dug up all their possessions from under the rubble. Liang remembers this very clearly because "the only thing I was eager to try to find were the wooden blocks of different colors that I had used to build houses or bridges." Among his sharpest memories of wartime is the sight of dead bodies littering the streets after the bombings.

Before then, Lin had written the Fairbanks that despite the war her family had managed a semblance of normalcy in their home life: "We still gathered to eat together, not in restaurants but enjoying my own cooking on a little stove in that three-room suite in which we did practically everything… Much laughter and sighs over the past were exchanged but as a whole we still kept up our spirits."

A few weeks after the bombing of Changsha, the family traveled by bus southwest to Kunming with a group of professors from Qinghua and Beijing Universities. The trip took a month. Every night the bus would stop at a small village and the travelers would have to find an inn. Sicheng, the famous architect and professor, would climb to the top of the bus to retrieve his family's beddings and clothes and take them inside the inn. In the morning he would roll them up again, and put them back on the roof of the bus.

The trip to Kunming was too taxing for Lin. She developed a 40-degree fever. As Sicheng searched for a comfortable place for her, he met a group of young cadets , university students who had given up school to join the air force. They invited the Liangs into their spare room. Thus began the family's friendship with the young officers, all of whom later perished in the war.

The Japanese did not spare Kunming, however, and so the Liangs were forced to flee again. Their next stop was Li-juang, a small village near Yibinju, in Sichuan Province, which was a most unlikely Japanese target because it had no industries to speak of. In fact, it was so small it could not accommodate bicycles, or even a wheelbarrow. People moved about on foot and transported things using a pole balanced on their shoulders. Home to the Liangs in Li-juang was a poor peasant's house with no running water and no heating system. Lin's health deteriorated there, and from that time until her death at the age of 51 she never regained her strength. In a memoir of her friendship with Sicheng and Huiyin, Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past, Wilma Fairbank writes that "the Liangs were reduced by the war, the inflation and the primitive life-style, to poverty."

Liang Congjie attended school in Kunming for a year, and then in Sichuan. Since his family was too poor to buy him shoes, he went to school barefoot except in winter, when he wore shoes his grandmother made for him. He has only vague memories of his teachers except for the rural woman who was his first science teacher and in whose class he performed his first experiments.

Lin wrote the Fairbanks that her son was "hard and ruddy with a pair of wide-awake-looking eyes, as much a boy as I have wished," and that he had become "quite an artist, drawing elaborate airplanes, anti-aircraft gunships and motor lorries, and thousands of other war inventions."

The Liangs lived in Li-juang until 1944. Sicheng supported his family from his meager earnings as head of a private institute which was receiving government support. He became so poor he could not even afford to buy film with which to photograph old buildings he needed for his work. He had to draw them instead. Lacking money for pens with which to prepare documents and articles, he had to memorize them. (After the war, Liang Sicheng founded and led the architecture department of Qinghua University, the foremost polytechnic university in China.)

Congjie was too young to understand the cruelty of war. To him war was an adventure; it also introduced him to nature. In front of the family house in the village was a paddy field, and behind the house, a hill planted to tangerines. Accompanied only by his puppy, which he got from a neighbor and christened Mongzi, he would go off to the hills and forests on Sundays and holidays. He pretended to be Tarzan, the hero of his favorite book at the time. The adventurous streak in him must have been inspired by two other book characters he liked, Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood.

When he was twelve, Congjie was sent to the famous Nankai Middle School, a private school in Chongqing, a three-day boat trip down the Yangtze River. He had actually finished primary school the year before, but his mother, thinking he was too young to be living away from his family, made him stay at home for a year. Nankai was founded by Zhang Bolin, a renowned scholar during the Qing Dynasty. It was a badge of honor for a child to pass Nankai's entrance examination, which was so competitive that only two hundred students were accepted out of twenty-five thousand who applied. Liang Sicheng was very proud of his son, especially because he came from an obscure village school and had to compete with children from the big cities. A friend of his parents was impressed enough with Congjie to remark, "His IQ is very high and the naughty boy has developed into an eager student."

At Nankai Middle School, Congjie lived in the dormitory and went home only once a semester. In his first few weeks there he cried out of loneliness for his family and out of helplessness, for he knew nothing about taking care of himself and doing chores. He wrote to his mother several times a week. But as time wore on, he wrote only once a week. A year later, he had become so settled both in school and at the dorm that he had time to write only one letter the entire semester.

Congjie remained in Nankai for two years, until the end of the war. The truth was, he was not happy at the school. It gave him an inferiority complex because, he says, although his father was a scholar he himself was just a boy from a very poor, unknown village; most of his classmates were children of the rich and of high officials in the Chiang Kai-shek government in Chongqing. On weekends, private cars would arrive to take the other boys back to their homes, while he would walk for two hours, through muddy roads and driving rain at times, to get to his uncle's house in the countryside. Sometimes Congjie, too daunted by the long walk, opted to stay in the dormitory, alone amidst hundreds of empty beds.

The Liangs lost all their material possessions during the war. Worse, they suffered two personal tragedies. Lin had contracted tuberculosis. Lacking medicine and medical attention and nutritious food and having worked herself to the bone in the absence of servants, she became seriously ill by the end of the war. Her younger brother, a pilot in the Chinese air force, was shot down by the Japanese in 1942 in Chengdu.

In July 1946 the family returned to Beijing where Congjie entered Yanjing (Yenching) University Middle School and then Furen University Middle School. The first was a protestant Christian school; the second, a Catholic one. The Liangs' old home was gone, so Sicheng, now a professor at Qinghua University, moved his family to a house on the campus. The move was a milestone for them because all throughout the war Liang and Lin had comforted themselves and their children with the promise that "when we go back to Beijing, something will happen." At Qinghua, they longed for the good old Beijing days all over again.

That promise was not to be fulfilled. The economic picture in the city was grim, and Lin, very ill by this time, had been given no more than five years to live by an American doctor. In a few years, too, civil war would disrupt China's newfound peace.

The Fairbanks suggested that the Liangs consider moving to the U.S., for Lin's sake especially. But Liang and Lin would not entertain thoughts of leaving. Congjie says that both his parents had a strong sense of patriotism and that their attitude was, "If our country is to face a tragedy, then we would rather go through it with all our compatriots."

Lin continued to work from her sickbed. She was happiest when she was busy. Her condition called for complete rest, but she refused to listen to her doctors' admonitions. Lying still, she argued, was punishment for her. And so her students came to her room for their classes, and sat on chairs around her bed as she lectured. She was also her husband's professional partner. Because her English was better than Sicheng's, she wrote and edited articles for his Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture. After her death in 1955, Sicheng took his son aside and confided, "The eyes of all my articles were painted by your mother." The statement was a reference to the Chinese saying, "When people draw a dragon, the spirit or life of that dragon is what paints its eyes, and it is what gives spirit or life to the dragon."

Like many of his contemporaries in high school in Beijing, Congjie detested the Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT) and was sympathetic to the communists. The young people believed that the KMT was corrupt and reactionary, in contrast to the communists who were "progressive, fresh, innocent, sincere, and opposed to the KMT." Liang and Lin, like other liberal-minded intellectuals of their time, perceived the KMT to be a very corrupt organization.

In 1949, there was great jubilation in China when the communists forced the Guomindang to flee the country. "We were so happy," Liang Congjie recalls. "We all thought we were communists, whether we were party members or not, and we were thinking that China would have a bright future. Everybody would share the same welfare and live in ideal conditions, and all men would be treated equally." He fervently believed this, as well as the hope that the Soviet Union would be the Chinese people's tomorrow. In the propaganda of the times, he says, "Everything was so good, so bright, in the Soviet Union."

Congjie tried to join the Communist Party as a young student but was rejected and told that he had to educate himself more. He was, he says, "always a rebel," and concedes that the Party must have seen that he would "never be an obedient party member. I will always have my independent faults and independent ideas." His rebellious nature had manifested itself in the three middle schools he attended. In each one he was punished with demerits for his habit of quarreling or arguing with his teacher, which in traditional China was considered insolence but which in his case was a natural outcome of having grown up in a Westernized Chinese home where the children were encouraged to have discussions and even arguments with their parents.

Conjie's sister, Tsai Ping, however, toed the Party Line, and in 1949 joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA). She subsequently became a reporter for the communist Qinghua News Agency.

After high school, Congjie wanted to study architecture but to the family's disappointment he failed the entrance examination at Qinghua University. Although he had not pressured his children to excel, Sicheng nevertheless felt that his son's failure caused him to lose face as a famous architect. Congjie turned to his second choice, history, and vindicated himself by placing first in the entrance examination for Qinghua's history department.

His fascination with history had its roots in his family background. "My family always had a very strong interest in history," he says. Sicheng's work combined history and architecture, and one uncle was an archeologist. Lin had once dreamed of writing a play in English on the life and loves of a famous Han Dynasty emperor, Han Wu Di. As a child, Congjie had enjoyed reading his father's book about the explorations in Central Asia and northwest China of a Swede named Swen Hadin.

After high school, Liang Congjie studied history at Qinghua University and then, up to 1958, took graduate studies in contemporary world history at Beijing University. He was unable to finish his doctoral thesis, however, because of the chaos arising from the movement known as the Great Leap Forward. His thesis on the American labor movement during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal administration of the 1930s would have been quite revolutionary for a Chinese student.

The turbulence in China during these years of violent political transition could not but affect the entire Liang family. In 1949, for example, just before the Guomindang surrendered Beijing to the triumphant Communists, the chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army went to the Liang house and showed Sicheng a large military map. He was asked to encircle all the important cultural sites that should not be destroyed; the Communists promised they would not attack those places in the ensuing battle for the city. Sicheng was deeply moved and impressed, his son recalls, because he said he had never seen a war in which the lives of soldiers would be sacrificed for the protection of cultural artifacts. But the Communists later reneged on their promise. Sicheng and Huiyin became the target of attacks after he tried to stop the Communist government from tearing down Beijing's old city walls. Because of situations like this, Congjie was torn between continuing to support the Communists and turning his back on them for what he believed was the stupidity of some of their decisions.

A private sadness in Liang Congjie's life was his beloved mother's long, debilitating illness. Lin Huiyin lay on her sickbed for fifteen years before passing away in 1955. By this time, Liang had married May Chow, a friend since high school days and the daughter of one of his father's colleagues at Qinghua University. Their son Liang Jian was born in 1955.

In 1958, after having finished his studies, Congjie was sent to Kunming to teach. It was a university assignment he and May were happy to accept. They had lived in Kunming as children and welcomed the chance to return. Congjie began his career as an assistant and after a year became a lecturer at Yunnan Univeristy. May, who spoke English fluently because she had studied briefly in America during the war, worked in Yunnan Academy as an interpreter.

It was a very difficult time to be in Kunming, the period of the Great Famine. Rice was rationed every month, and no one could ask for more than their small allotment. The Liangs could not complain about the meager resources, for everyone received equal treatment. As a university lecturer, though, Congjie was entitled to ten packs of cigarettes a month. He had never been a smoker but, not wishing to squander this privilege, he now became one. Before long, however, he had to admit he did not enjoy smoking and quit before it became a habit.

As a university instructor, Liang was expected to toe the Communist Party Line. For example, he was not allowed to tell his students that the living standards of American workers were much higher than those of their Chinese counterparts, or even those of professors in China. The university authorities wanted him instead to tell his students how miserable the workers' lives were in Western capitalist countries. As a compromise, he would assure his students that having running water and electricity was no guarantee that the people in the West were happier than the Chinese who lacked those amenities.

Situations such as this were a source of deep conflict for Liang Congjie. But there was no escaping them, because he was required to submit written reports of his lectures and classroom materials to his supervisors. In secret, however, he could express his doubts and frustrations with the Communist Party to a small circle of friends and trusted colleagues.

After teaching in Kunming for some five years, Liang's request to move back to Beijing was approved. On his own initiative, he had applied-and had subsequently been accepted-to be the assistant to a former professor of his, Chen Han Sheng, who now held a senior post at the Institute for International Relations in the capital city. The Institute, an affiliate of the Academy for Social Sciences, conducted research for the Foreign Ministry and other offices. Liang worked on a number of projects there, including a study of the American Food for Peace program. Because of his independent nature, however, he felt confined at the Institute. Government research institutions, he learned, too often reached their conclusions well before the research was conducted. Food for Peace is a good example. Liang was instructed to show that the program had deflated commodity prices in India to the detriment of Indian peasants, this despite statistical evidence to the contrary that he uncovered in his research.

By 1966, Liang and his wife May had separated. Moreover, the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution now brought new problems. He was accused of being a counterrevolutionary because he was the son of a "number-one reactionary academic authority" (Sicheng, for having tried to preserve artifacts of old Beijing, the city of the emperor) and the grandson of a "number-one monarchist" (Liang Qichao, for having preferred a constitutional monarchy to Sun Yat-sen's republic). Sicheng himself was publicly humiliated and called a "contemptible pile of dogshit." He and his family were forced to leave their six-room, two-story house and squeeze themselves into one small room. He had to burn or sell most of his books and was forbidden contact with outsiders, including his son. The government tried to force his second wife to divorce him, but she refused. Qinghua University, where Sicheng taught, became "a small temple with bigshot gods, a small pond overrun with perverted turtles" in the words of the now-ascendant radicals. He was humiliated and openly criticized on a stage in a public hall while wearing a sign that identified him as a "reactionary academic authority." All his students were ordered to criticize him. In an essay on that period, Liang Sicheng's wife (Congjie's stepmother) wrote, "To us intellectuals, hardship in livelihood was not the most terrible thing. The most unbearable thing was personal humiliation and nasty mockery."

The worst was yet to come. In 1969, along with other intellectuals at the Institute, Liang Congjie was sent off to Jiang Hsi in the countryside, to be "reeducated" through hard labor. Rather than lament his fate, he welcomed the experience as an opportunity to further his education. In time he came to enjoy his new life as a peasant. From the villagers who lectured at the May 7 Cadre School he learned not only how to plow the fields using a water buffalo and how to harvest rice but also, and more importantly, how peasants lived and how their minds worked. Alone in Jiang Hsi, in 1972 he entered into a second marriage. Fang Jing, his new wife, was a Protestant minister's daughter who had been his schoolmate in middle school. In 1974 they had a daughter whom they named Phyllis Fan Liang, after her paternal grandmother.

Liang Congjie spent nine years in Jiang Hsi. Every year for five to seven months he attended the cadre school which was run by the Foreign Ministry. The school had an underground library, and the "students" were also free to bring their own books. It was there that Liang read Barbara Tuchman's landmark book, The March of Folly, and discovered Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Liang was told that he was free to return to Beijing, but that he would need a new job because he could no longer go back to the Institute. He stayed home for a year doing the chores while his wife taught at a school. One day in 1978 an old acquaintance of his called to say that a new publishing house needed trained interpreters, historians, and writers, and that he had recommended Liang for a job. The office was called Encyclopedia of China Publishing House. Liang went for an interview and was immediately hired as one of two chief editors of a monthly government-subsidized general-knowledge magazine called Encyclopedic Knowledge. (The other editor was Yi Xiao Ye, a woman whose expertise was in the sciences.)

Liang occupied his post at the publishing house for some ten years while also branching out to other activities as China's political climate shifted ever so tentatively in a liberal direction. In 1986, for example, he was invited to become co-editor of a quarterly Chinese magazine published in New York called Chinese Intellectual. The chief editor was a friend of his who had immigrated to America. The magazine, which was supported by the Reform and Opening of China Foundation set up by American philanthropist George Soros, was outspoken on political, economic, and social issues. For the next two or three years, several thousand copies were circulated surreptitiously in China. Liang's involvement in the magazine enabled him to generate a network of contacts. He also became Soros's personal representative in China.

Liang's endeavors at this time exemplified the beginnings of a new movement to promote democracy in China. In another manifestation of the burgeoning movement, a few prominent senior professors at Beijing University received permission from the general secretary of the Communist Party to establish the Academy for Chinese Culture, a private organization dedicated to promoting cultural exchanges between China and academic communities abroad. Most of the founders had once been Liang's professors and in 1988 they invited him to join them. Without hesitation he quit the publishing house, although it meant losing valuable benefits, including a pension, health care, and a home subsidy. To this day he has no regrets; despite all he lost, he says, "I gained my freedom." Besides, he was convinced that nongovernmental organizations (or NGOs) like the Academy had a bright future. (In just a few years, he became its vice-president.)

Shortly after joining the Academy, Liang was also invited to become a member of the population, resource and environment committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a prestigious consultancy group serving both the central government and the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In the 1950s his father had been a member of this by-invitation-only organization, whose ranks included famous artists and theater persons. Liang Congjie was reluctant to join the Conference, knowing he would be expected to follow the party line, but after consulting with his wife he realized that membership in such a prestigious group would be an asset to his work. Now in his third four-year term, he continues to be a member of good standing despite his outspoken nature.

The traumatic events of Tiananmen occurred during Liang's first year with the Academy for Chinese Culture. In April and May of 1989, more than a million students and other pro-democracy advocates demonstrated in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in defiance of the government's warnings that they would be severely punished. The stand-off came to a end on the second and third of June, when the PLA broke up the demonstration and killed some seven hundred protestors. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre, one of the Academy's professors was arrested and many others were subjected to severe criticism for their support of the democracy movement. Liang says that, without a doubt, had he been in Beijing at the time, he would have joined the Tiananmen throngs. As it happens, however, he left China for San Francisco, USA, a few days before the demonstrations began, to attend a joint meeting of intellectuals from China and Taiwan and to speak before Chinese students at the University of California in San Diego and Los Angeles. The message of his lectures was that if China was to achieve democracy it had to learn to compromise. "Democracy," he told them, "is not to put your will over others. You cannot get democracy out in the streets. No compromise, no democracy." He returned home as tensions were reaching a climax, only a few days before the crackdown. By then, he says, "the situation was already very clear to us, to all of us." Prudently but sadly, he stood aside.

Liang's introduction to the cause that has come to define his life-China's beleaguered environment-came while he was still the editor of Encyclopedic Knowledge magazine. One day he received an article warning about the danger that rapid economic development posed to the environment. In particular, the writer cited Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's strategy of setting up small industrial enterprises in the villages to solve unemployment in the countryside among peasants who had lost their lands. The author warned that the plan would result in the pollution of lakes and rivers and become the "origin of pollution" all over China. That writer, whom Liang never met, became his first teacher in the importance of protecting the environment.

Liang acknowledges that, at the time, he was "ignorant about the environment and knew nothing about the techniques of environmental protection." Although he was familiar with the meaning of pollution, he had never heard the phrase "origin of pollution" before. Until the article came his way, he had paid scant attention to stories on the environment, for it was a subject far removed from his own as a historian.

From then on, however, Liang read every article he saw on the environment and the pollution of lakes and forests. He recalled with regret the times during the Cultural Revolution when, out of ignorance, he caught snakes and birds and ate them.

Liang had begun to feel the "weight of his ancestors on his shoulders." He was growing old and he still had not made what he felt was a solid contribution to society, although he held significant posts such as vice chairperson of the China Culture Relics Society and board member of the Center for Chinese and Foreign Philosophy and Culture Studies in Shanghai. He decided that his special contribution would be in the field of the environment. His father, an expert on city planning, had strongly opposed the development of heavy industry in Beijing and was severely criticized by the Communist Party. Party officials insisted that environmental problems could not exist in socialist countries because pollution was "an evil inherent in capitalism."

The West, Liang learned, had taken the first steps toward a broad popular movement for environmental protection in the 1960s, thanks to Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring. China at the time was "convulsed in political turmoil," says Liang. "Few people had time to notice that the sky, rivers, and lakes had become severely polluted, the forests were disappearing, the grasslands were facing desertification and biodiversity was being drastically reduced."

The government of the fledgling People's Republic paid little attention to pollution because it was seen as a sign of "the decadence of the western capitalistic society." This attitude began to change as preparations started for the Chinese delegation's position on environmental protection in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. Following that conference, in August 1973, Beijing hosted China's First National Environmental Protection Conference. Its most important achievement was the acknowledgment that environmental problems existed in China and that environmental concerns should be factored into economic development planning. As an offshoot of the conference, China set down its first regulation for environmental protection, State Council Directive No. 158: "For any new projects, improvements or expansions, environmental protection devices should be designed, installed and operated simultaneously with the main body of the project."

Today, the highest government body dealing with environmental issues in China is the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). It is directly affiliated with the state council. Each province also has an Environmental Protection Committee under its related Provincial People's Congress, as well as an affiliated functional body called the Environmental Protection Bureau.

Environmental degradation is a serious problem in China. As one observer has written, "It is like a time bomb ticking away, and people working on environmental issues are alarmed to the point sometimes of hysteria. Areas which used to be fertile now have polluted waters that stunt crops. In some areas the incidence of cancer is disproportionately high. Animal habitats have changed so drastically and become so fragile that it has become difficult to see the wild species. As a result of overgrazing in Inner Mongolia, China had ten sandstorms within a four-month period in 2000, compared with two or three in a year in the 1970s." With the improvement in living standards and livelihoods, hunger has ceased to be a serious problem, but emerging prosperity has brought in its wake a new problem: garbage disposal.

Liang Congjie observed that although "China finally admitted that environmental problems existed in its socialist sphere, Beijing did not launch a general environmental education program for the public, nor did it establish a social mechanism that would encourage people to participate in environmental protection. That work was basically limited to a government department that had nothing to do with the broad masses." On this score, Liang was impressed by the stories of young Chinese who had returned from studies abroad. They spoke of the tremendous work being done in many countries by NGOs to clean up and protect the environment. That kind of work, Liang thought, was a manifestation of good citizenship; in it, he saw an analogy between the government and citizens, on one hand, and a wife and her children, on the other. Just as government is responsible for the well-being of a nation, a wife is in charge of keeping the house clean. Government needs the participation of citizens; wives need the participation of other members of the family. Liang saw no reason why private organizations that spurred government to act-like many in the United States and Japan-could not be started in China.

A casual conversation with three friends in 1993 gave rise to Liang's pathbreaking environmental organization, Friends of Nature. All three were influential in their respective fields. Yang Dong Ping had authored several books on education and the environment, as well as a comparative study of the subcultures of Beijing and Shanghai. Wang Li Shung was a writer best known for his book on the fate of Tibet. Liang Shiao Yen had outraged Chinese authorities for her public critique of the Tiananmen incident.

What can we do to change the environmental situation, the four asked themselves. Their country had no tradition of independently run environmental NGOs. Their discussion turned to the possibility of starting one themselves. Their first question was: Would the government allow them to do so? The only way to find out was to try. When they finally decided to take the first step, Liang says, "We had to start from a point corresponding to the 1950s in the West."

First the four friends had to draft a charter that would define what they wanted to accomplish. In 1993 they sent the charter for approval to SEPA, the state environment agency. After ten months of waiting, they were told they had been rejected on technical grounds. Why, they were asked, did they want to call themselves China Environmental Culture Association? And were they qualified to represent all of China's environmentalists?

An alternative was suggested to them: they could apply to become an affiliate of an existing NGO. Liang Congjie took up the suggestion. Since he was already a member of an NGO, the Academy for Chinese Culture, he asked his former professors at the Academy if he could set up a branch to be called Academy of Green Culture. The professors said yes. This time, Liang went not to the SEPA but to the Ministry of Culture where the Academy was registered. The people at the ministry did not understand what "green culture" meant. Liang had to explain that it was "the harmonious relationship between human beings and nature in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy." His application was approved.

The chosen name, "Affiliate, Academy of Green Culture under Academy of Chinese Culture," was too long. Liang shortened it to Friends of Nature, or FON, since the new organization's philosophy was to promote friendship with nature. FON was formally established as an NGO in March 1994. It was the first citizens' environmental organization permitted to incorporate by the Chinese government. But although the government gave Friends of Nature permission to operate, it also imposed limitations on its activities and membership, stipulating among other things that it could not establish formal branches outside Beijing (aside from affiliated student groups).

Even before Friends of Nature was finally approved, the founders began their work on environmental education. They called for a get-together on 5 June 1993 to discuss the environmental situation in China. To Liang's surprise, sixty people turned up at Ling Long Yuan Park, a small park outside Beijing. They sat on the grass and joked that if the police came they were to say they were celebrating Liang's birthday, even though not even water was being served.

In its charter the Friends of Nature defines its main mission as environmental education. "We are not technicians. We are not engineers. We are not addressing the environment in the technical sense," Liang says. The charter expresses support for the Chinese government's efforts to protect the environment. However, it also states that it is the duty and the right of Friends of Nature as an independent NGO to monitor and to offer suggestions and even to criticize government when it is doing wrong. Friends of Nature emphasizes that it is not a formal lobbying group, but that among its activities is writing letters to government officials about environmental problems.

FON adopted the following objectives: (1) to work with social organizations, private individuals, and all levels of government to improve the environment through educational activities; (2) to publicize, reveal, and criticize acts that are detrimental to the environment; (3) to work with environmental organizations dedicated to improving international awareness of environmental problems; and (4) to create a workable model of membership-based NGOs in China, for replication across issues.

Lacking funds, the founders had to use their own money to cover FON's initial expenses. With no money for an office, Liang offered his home, his computer, and his xerox machine. His wife, Fang Jing, functioned as secretary and receptionist, keeping a record of each day's events and taking phone calls. She is, Liang says proudly, "my first and most loyal supporter and volunteer." But she has been careful to stay out of policy decisions, reminding herself and her husband that FON is "not a husband-and-wife organization."

From the beginning, FON realized that education was crucial to its advocacy. Environmental education is part of the curriculum in Chinese schools, but FON discovered that it was being handled the same way chemistry was; for example, a premium was placed on memory work. This approach did not ensure that students would apply their lessons to daily life or alter their own attitudes and behavior toward the environment. FON's response was to initiate teacher-training programs that take the relationship between man and nature beyond the realm of technical knowledge alone.

FON targeted middle school teachers and invited experts to lecture on such subjects as recycling garbage. Some 500 teachers went through the program in between 1994 and 2000. Liang himself conducted many of the lectures. He was also invited to lecture in many universities and institutes in and outside Beijing.

FON also popularized tree-planting trips as part of its teacher-training course. Teachers as well as students have been encouraged to plant trees in the capital city and throughout the country. When FON heard that an elderly Japanese man, Ikuo Hirayama, who was planting trees in Inner Mongolia with the help of hundreds of volunteers from Japan, it organized the first group of Chinese volunteers to join his effort. Together, they planted a million trees in the forest. (Ikuo Hirayama was himself recognized as a Magsaysay Awardee in ______ for _________) xxx

On another front, FON set up the first bird-watching group in Beijing as an alternative to the Chinese tradition of keeping singing birds in cages. FON learned that most of the caged birds had been captured in the wild; worse, for every captured bird sold in the market, at least twenty (mainly females, which do not sing) were sacrificed-since bird catchers simply killed birds that they had captured but could not sell. FON's bird-watching group, which was led by an ornithologist, attracted all kinds of people, among them retired teachers and office workers who enjoyed the picnics that went with the trips to the wild.

FON's organizers decided from the outset that they would not be restricted by any single agenda or program. Liang explains, "When we are facing a situation, I always try to choose the battlefield. The only principle is that we must be sure we can win the battle if we choose to fight. We are such a small group and in the Chinese political system it's very hard for us to survive. So if we get involved in a very long and unsuccessful struggle, mainly with the government, we cannot afford that. We always want the battle to be clear-cut and short. Then we can achieve something."

FON's first big battle came in the mid-1990s. A wildlife photographer named Xi Zhinong had been photographing the golden monkey, an endangered species, and other wild animals in Deqing County in the southwestern province of Yunnan. The golden monkey is native to that area. By 1996, half of the large tropical rainforests there had been lost to rubber planting and slash-and-burn farming; as a result, the golden monkey population had dwindled to two hundred. When local officials decided to open thirty-eight more square miles of the golden monkey's habitat to logging, Xi Zhinong alerted FON.

Until his letter came, Liang had never heard of the golden monkey. Reacting quickly, however, FON not only wrote to the central government, it also called the attention of the print and broadcast media to the issue. It was a crucial first test for FON. Reactions to the issue by both the public and the government would be a gauge of the organization's impact.

FON need not have worried. China's vice premier himself gave the issue his personal endorsement. The media came out in support of FON, as did "green clubs" in the country's universities. Thirty students, journalists, and ecologists set out on a "long march" to save the golden monkey's habitat. FON also coordinated a letter-writing campaign that forced the government to ban further logging in Deqing.

Several months later, on a follow-up visit to the area, FON members discovered that illegal logging was still going on. Liang persuaded Focus, the influential newsmagazine program of China Central Television, to run a story on the endangered golden monkey. Premier Zhu Rongji reportedly saw the program and ordered a halt to the logging. Not only that, the government issued a preservation order blocking a local logging project. Beijing would later offer to pay local authorities US$1.8 million a year if they stopped logging in the area. Unfortunately, Xi Zhinong's exposé cost him his job at the Bureau of Forestry in Yunnan: He had exposed the local government's plan to allow commercial logging by a state-owned timber company.

FON's success in Deqing proved to be short-lived. As of early 1999, the golden monkey was still in danger. County officials in Deqing, confronted with a $1 million budget deficit, refused to abandon their plan and instead challenged FON to find them another source of revenue. Environmental protection, Liang emphasizes, is supposed to be a policy of the Chinese government. In this case, the local government violated basic state policy. When FON accused the local government of this violation, the central government had nothing to say in its defense.

FON has learned that it is wise to keep the central government and, as much as possible, the local governments, on its side. "We try to cooperate with them first," says Liang. "Only when they refuse do we give them a hit at the last minute." A "hit" usually involves using the leverage of the central government against the local executives.

FON made more dramatic use of this technique in 1998 following a flood in Chongqing. One of its members reported that the local government was still logging the forest in the western part of Sichuan. After the flood of 1998, the central government decreed that natural forests should no longer be logged and the premier himself emphasized that not a single tree should be cut. FON contacted the central television station, which welcomes "politically correct" news.

It was in fact big news in China. Accompanied by local FON members, the TV station sent a crew to the affected area with cameras hidden in their jackets. Posing as tourists, the crew taped a conversation with local officials. Liang recalls, "They boasted that they could deliver as much timber as we wanted in a few days' time. They even showed off how they could use an electric saw to cut a 1.2-m diameter, thousand-year-old tree." The culprits were caught red-handed. When local government discovered what the TV crew had done and confronted them, the latter claimed they were merely tourists. Despite their explanation, the local government tried to arrest them. The crew, however, had anticipated such an action. They placed all their video tapes inside the bag of a woman who had been made up to look like a man, and she was able to escape. She reached Beijing with the tapes. In a preemptive move, the local government called the central government and said that what the TV crew shot was only part of the story and should not be taken at face value. The local government tried to stop the airing of the story, but the TV station beat them to the draw. Before the Bureau of Forestry could react, the story had been aired, causing embarrassment to the local government.

Another endangered animal species that FON focused on is the Tibetan antelope. Also called chiru, it is found only in western China, five thousand meters above sea level in a no-man's land called Kekexili in the Tibetan highlands of Qinghai province. In 1979 the chiru was included on an official list of species protected from trade. The Tibetan antelope is highly valued for the fur taken from its neck and processed in India into silk-fine wool called shatoosh (meaning "king of wool"). Shatoosh came into fashion in the West in the mid-1980s and became much sought after in Europe; in 1996 a shatoosh shawl could fetch $17,000. The market for shatoosh demands two thousand kilograms every year. Each antelope can produce a maximum of 150 grams.

Most of the antelope poachers, FON learned, were members of a Muslim minority group lured by the promise of quick money. The policemen, on the other hand, were mostly Tibetans armed only with pistols, in contrast to the poachers' rifles and imported jeeps. In 1992, in a gun battle with a group of eighteen poachers who had already collected two thousand Tibetan antelope hides, a member of a small, poorly funded anti-poaching team called the Wild Yak Brigade was killed.

When Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair visited China in October 1998, Liang wrote him a letter warning that if poaching continued at the present rate-twenty thousand antelopes killed each year for their fur-the species would be extinct within twenty years. Liang told Blair, "Traders have spread the myth that the fur is shed naturally with the changing seasons, and collected by local herdsmen. But this simply is not true. The reality is that all the fur is taken from the bodies of Tibetan antelopes poached in China, with each animal yielding a mere 125-150 grams. Over the last few years, the Chinese authorities have caught nearly one hundred groups of poachers and confiscated thousands of Tibetan antelope hides. In 1997 the Tibet Forestry Bureau intercepted over 1,000 kilograms of shatoosh destined for export."

FON subsequently donated two top-of-the-line army jeeps to the Wild Yak Brigade and a supply of spare parts to help the brigade patrol in the wilds of Kekexili. The jeeps were bought with money donated by FON members. It was the first time in the People's Republic of China, public security officials said, that ordinary citizens raised money and bought vehicles for public security use. The donation brought tears to the eyes of the brigade members, who had never seen such new vehicles before. Liang himself, along with Fang Jing and other FON members, visited the Wild Yak Brigade to witness the burning of Tibetan antelope skins. FON had specified as one of the conditions for its jeep donation the destruction of all confiscated antelope skins, knowing that if this was not done the hides would still make their way to the international market.

On their way to Qinghai for a follow-up visit in May 1999, Liang and three other members of FON were seriously injured when their car was hit by a truck. All of them were hospitalized. Liang suffered a dislocated arm, which still causes him pain.

FON, however, cannot claim victory in the shatoosh case. The organization admits that it is difficult to stop the trade outside China and that it needs the cooperation of other countries. Liang himself says, "Just like drugs, the money in the trade of shatoosh is so big it is hard to stop the industry. All shawls are made in [India-governed] Kashmir. There are thousands of workers and the government earns from this industry." In one case, Liang says, a judge kept a hoard of confiscated shawls for two years before reaching a decision.

But there is some good news, says Liang. The shatoosh trade has been outlawed in England and Prime Minister Blair has alerted Scotland Yard since receiving an appeal from Liang. In Kashmir the supreme court has declared the shatoosh trade illegal and ordered the government to confiscate not only all shatoosh products but even the raw material. FON, however, is realistic enough to know that, as in the illegal drugs trade, prices go higher as penalties get stiffer, and that, given the incentives to engage in the trade, people will risk their lives for it.

Liang wrote this appeal in the FON newsletter: "But in the end, so long as the international market for shatoosh exists, it is impossible for us to put a complete stop to Tibetan antelope poaching. We desperately need international support and cooperation. The reason the Tibetan antelope is facing extinction is because people in other countries want to wear these shatoosh scarves around their necks. But the price of these scarves is the extinction of an animal species. We appeal to the international community to work with us to save the Tibetan antelope. The slaughter of this animal is happening because a few people want to be fashionable. We must all work together to put an end to this."

FON has been equally vigilant in other aspects of environmental protection. It complained to the Chinese government that Capital Steel, which produces eleven million tons of steel annually, was one of the major pollutants in Beijing. FON recommended that the company be closed down and moved out of Beijing within twenty years. Going a step further, FON found an alternative site for the plant near the sea. The concerned ministry thanked FON for its concern for the environment but rejected the proposal.

In 1999, the ten-year anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre and the 50th anniversary of the founding of communist China, FON came out in the open with critical questions about the environmental consequences of the ambitious Three Gorges Dam project. The dam, touted as the largest in the world and costing $24 billion, was designed to "tame the upper reaches of the Yangtze River" and to produce 100 billion kilowatt-hours of energy a year. Its construction would involve the relocation of more than a million people and a number of industries. Seven years earlier, Liang warned that at least 10 percent of the ancient artifacts in the area would be submerged upon completion of the dam. As his father had done before him in similar circumstances and, for his own part, as vice chairman of the Cultural Relics Association, Liang pushed strongly for the preservation of the artifacts.

Liang is hopeful that Beijing's successful bid to be the site of the 2008 Olympics will lead the Chinese government to be more receptive to suggestions to clean up the environment. As an invited consultant to the Bidding Commission for the Olympics, he made FON's voice heard on a number of environmental issues. Among other things, he suggested that Beijing invest in an improved transport system with subways and light track trains as a way of minimizing the use of private transportation and raised again the issue of Capital Steel. He also proposed the establishment of a new garbage collection system and a better waste water treatment system in Beijing.

At the township level, FON is affiliated with the Friends of Nature Green, which works in cooperation with the Chinese Youth Development Foundation, a government-initiated NGO with branches all over China. The latter organization established Project Hope, which runs some eight thousand primary schools in the countryside called Hope Schools. FON has linked up with the schools in order to spread environmental education to the countryside. It now sends volunteers to the rural areas for a week at a time to educate the people on the need to reduce pollution and stop the degradation of the environment through unrestrained logging. "We cannot ask the people to stop commercial logging completely," Liang says. "But we can ask them: Now that you have trees, if you log them for money, what will you leave your children and grandchildren? They will be even poorer than you are."

One thousand six hundred people are regular members of FON today. They are mostly from Beijing but from all walks of life, including prominent intellectuals, doctors, and lawyers as well as government officials who are also Communist Party members; there are also ordinary people such as a bulldozer repairman and the seafood peddler who walked into the FON office one day and enlisted. Diane Ying Yun-Peng of Taiwan, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts in 1987, is a member. Besides its regular members, FON has more than three thousand corporate members, often called the Green Group, who are students from various universities.

Many members of the press have also joined FON. Liang has taken pains to befriend the media, a strategy that he has found quite effective given the government's fear of them. He is proud to say, "We have the greenest media in the world. You never see as many reports on the environment in U.S. papers." When reporters interview him, their last question often is, "How can I join?"

People in other cities have tried to apply for membership, but Liang's usual reply is that since the headquarters is in Beijing they may not be able to participate in many of its activities. He suggests instead that they organize small groups in their own city or town. Some twenty such organizations had sprung up by 2000.

The requirements for membership in FON are simple. One simply writes a letter of application and must show honesty and sincerity. Besides paying an annual membership fee of fifty yuan, members are required to adopt a nature-friendly project or activity. It could be something as simple as refusing to use disposable chopsticks and plastic bags.

Liang emphasizes that membership brings with it neither money nor glory. He has turned down the suggestion that FON issue ID cards to its members because he is afraid these might be misused. In contrast to the typical Chinese organization which is formal and hierarchical, FON is one big family where everyone is equal and positions outside the organization do not matter. Although group meetings are no longer held, members receive copies of the newsletter and other reading materials to update them on the activities of the organization. FON encourages "self education" among its members and regularly invites experts both from China and abroad to give lectures. One of these, by Jane Goodall, the famous expert on primates, attracted five hundred members.

Liang is not interested in leading a mass organization. He is afraid he will lose control if FON becomes too big and unmanageable. There are those who say that keeping FON small is a political decision, so that it will not pose a threat to the government. But Liang says this is not the issue and points to FON's partnership with government-friendly organizations such as the China Youth Development Foundation-through which FON's influence extends to elementary schools across China.

FON receives no funding from the government. Dues paid by members are sufficient only to cover the costs of telephone calls and of printing and mailing the quarterly newsletter. Besides the membership fee, FON's main sources of funds are domestic and foreign grants and individual donations. It has received funds from the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, Caritas Hong Kong, and a small family foundation in the United States.

FON has been linking up with environmental groups outside China. In 1995, it participated in the World Bank's Conference on Environmentally Sustainable Development. It is an active member of several regional networks, among them an India-based environmental education committee and East Asia's Atmosphere Action Network. It has touched base with the Environmental Defense Fund, with which it has discussed opportunities for possible cooperation and assistance in building a strong NGO community in China.

Recognition is starting to come. In 1995, FON was among the first recipients of the Asian Environmental Award given by the Mainichi News of Japan and the Korean Daily. In December 1999 Liang himself received the Panda Award from the State Forest Bureau for his work in protecting endangered species of animals. Friends of the Earth-Hong Kong also recognized him in 2000. In the same year, the Chinese government nominated him for the Global 500 Award of the United Nations Development Program.

Despite international recognition, Liang and Fang Jing continue to live simply and frugally. Home is in an ordinary apartment building in downtown Beijing. Liang works seven days a week, usually starting his day at nine in the morning and staying on until six in the evening. His staff of three, Fang Jing still among them, is a dedicated group who stays at the office for as long as he is there. The office, which was in Liang's home during the first two years, is run on a "volunteer mentality," Liang says, because staff salaries are small and do not cover health insurance and a housing allowance. Many people assist FON on an entirely voluntary basis, including students who help out at the office in their free time.

Liang edits the newsletter himself because he says everyone else is too busy to do the job. He would like to train a younger person to take over his work at FON but the search has not been easy. He explains, "Especially in China, you have to have skills in dealing with the government, with the Party, and with the media, and then with foreigners, Westerners. It's difficult to find someone with all these skills, especially good English." Liang spends at least a third of his work time dealing with the media and visitors from the West.

Besides the newsletter, FON publishes environmental books and other materials, and has established a center for environmental literature, reference works, visual materials and up-to-date environmental information not only for its members but also for the general public. In the future it plans to publish more books, among them Diqui Jiayuan (Home Earth), which will contain concrete suggestions for students and parents alike on caring for the environment.
,br> Despite his heavy schedule at FON, Liang has found time to either edit or author several other publications, most of them about Chinese civilization. One of these is The Great Thoughts of China: 3000 Years of Wisdom That Shaped a Civilization, of 1996.

Liang has made extensive use of his connections, not only to the Communist Party but also to the media and other institutions with which FON (and Liang personally) enjoys good relations. He has won over the Ministry of Environment and has adopted a strategy of critical collaboration with it, as he has with the rest of the government. This means FON cooperates with the Chinese government but reserves the right to criticize it. The government, in turn, has been encouraging of FON's activities. In 1994 and 1995, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences invited FON to contribute to its China Social Blue Book. The national TV network has honored Liang as one of the "Sons of the East," a national figure of the week. At the Fourth National Environmental Protection Conference, the State Commission of Environmental Protection and the National Environmental Protection Agency of the Chinese government formally praised FON for its "good work in conducting environmental education and advocating for public awareness."

FON has been invited by various departments of government to their activities and meetings concerning environmental protection. The most telling indication of government's recognition of FON's work was its response to the campaign for the golden monkey. The Ministry of Forestry sent a team of inspectors to Deqing County and after receiving the official report, both the governments of Beijing and Yunnan Province ordered a stop to the logging plans.

Liang reciprocates the government's support of FON by expressing full understanding of the problems that officialdom has to cope with. When he is asked how his country is doing on the environmental front and how NGOs are faring in China, his carefully worded reply is: "It's a very crucial time for China because the population and the scope of economic development have never been this big. The capability to change or alter nature through technical knowledge has never been so powerful. The excitement and impulse of having a better life and being a so-called instant millionaire has never been so strong. So you can see the pressure we are facing. But the NGOs are like a green seed, but with a different voice."

To raise national consciousness on environmental issues, FON undertakes research projects and publishes its findings. Its first major research, in April 1996, was a "Survey on Environmental Reporting in Chinese Newspapers 1996." The study found that only .46 percent of the news articles in the seventy-eight major Chinese newspapers included in the survey had to do with environmental issues. The newspapers have since improved their coverage.

FON continues to work for the protection of wild animals and to undertake environmental education programs. With assistance from a German NGO, it has acquired a mobile classroom for environmental education for children. In May 2000 FON launched an environmental awareness program for primary school pupils in 20 countryside schools operated by Project Hope. The program was handled by trained volunteers from among members of FON. FON has also organized volunteers to plant trees in the Kupuqi and Gobi deserts.

There are those who say that Liang has been able to accomplish much because of his pedigree and powerful connections, factors which carry tremendous weight in China. Liang does not deny that he has supporters in the government, but to his credit he has never used his connections or his influence to advance his personal interests. He is also aware that there are limits to what the government will allow FON to do. For example, a nationwide letter-writing campaign against polluting factories is out of the question. The government's handling of environmental questions may in fact be criticized, but no details may be given.

Given China's population of more than a billion people, the full impact of FON's work in preserving the environment will not be felt until decades from now. What is already visible, however, is FON's contribution to the development of civil society in China, thanks to Liang's inspiring personal commitment and the undeniable success that FON has achieved. FON has given rise not only to a green movement in China but also to an NGO movement. Since its founding, at least forty other NGOs, focusing on causes from the environment and wildlife to consumer protection, have been established in China. In 1997 the National Committee on US-China Relations put the number of NGOs in the country at two hundred thousand. FON remains the larger, and the more popular, of the two high-profile environmental NGOs in Beijing today. (The other is Global Village.)

Liang Congjie has arrived at the right formula with FON. He has established strong working relations with both the central government and the local governments, and he has been careful to espouse causes that will not alienate them, given China's centralized political structure. At the same time, he has scrupulously kept FON independent of government, demonstrating to other NGOs that in China it is possible for a private organization to work with the government and yet be free.


Lorna Kalaw-Tirol
References:

Books

Fairbank, John K. and Edwin O. Reischauer. East Asia: the Modern Transformation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

Fairbank, Wilma. Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.

Vohra, Ranhir. China's Path to Modernization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.


Periodicals

"Can China Be a Clean Tiger? Growth Strategies and Environmental Realities" by Weijiong Zhang, Ilan Vertinsky, Terry Ursacki and Peter Nemetz, Pacific Affairs, 72 No. 1 Spring 1999

"Most Polluted City on Earth," by Liang Congjie, Asia Now-TIME Asia, Dec. 21, 1999.

Friends of Nature Newsletter, Vol. II 1999.


Reports

Interviews with and letters from persons acquainted with Liang Congjie and his work. Other primary documents and reports in the possession of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation.


Interview

Interview with Liang Congjie by James R. Rush and Lorna Kalaw-Tirol. Tape recording, 27 August 2000. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila.