Wang Yanan walked across southern China this summer, staying in rundown hotels and speaking out in village squares about saving the environment.
Galvanized by China’s promise of a “Green Olympics,” the 23-year-old student and thousands of other university students joined the Green Long March. It covered 26 provinces and took its name from the famous trek of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Communist forces during China’s civil war in the 1930s.
Large non-state-sponsored activities like hers are rare in China.
But the Games have given her and others in China an opportunity to publicly raise awareness and push the government to change its policies, whether it is for the environment or the rights of the disabled.
Public involvement on a variety of issues is on the rise here, with the government in a few cases viewing activist groups as partners rather than groups that need to be controlled.
But critics say the government’s desire for control means there are limits to how much it will work with activists.
“It is very difficult to say at this point whether, after the Olympics, Chinese society will become more open,’’ said Yang Guobin (楊國斌), an associate professor at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York.
“There [are] always back and forth struggles between the authorities and the grass roots and citizens,” said Yang, who studies social movements in China. “There’s still a lot of tension, and the grass roots need to push their work forward. It’s never easy.”
By many measures, the Olympics have not brought about hoped-for changes in China, from its policies on human rights and Tibet to its support for outcast governments such as those in Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Myanmar.
Wang, whose native Shanxi Province is dotted with small coal mines, knows it will take more than marches to clean the environment. But she credits the Olympics with an important first step: raising awareness.
“It has played a great role. Whether it’s about banning disposable chopsticks or sorting trash, everyone at the mention of the Olympics said they should do a better job,” she said.
The environment has been a focus at the Olympics since the early 1990s, and Beijing promised a host of ambitious environmental programs when it bid in 2001 to host the Summer Games.
The Olympics helped Future Generations, a US group, win government permission to hold the Green Long March, which covered 26 provinces, said Frances Freemont-Smith, executive director of the organization’s China branch.
The government is normally wary of such non-state-sponsored mass events, fearing they could become a cauldron for anti-government activity. Future Generations also partnered with the Beijing Forestry University.
Without the Olympics, Wang said that local governments would not have been so cooperative with her group on the Green Long March as it carried out surveys and organized games to promote recycling.
Wang, a masters student at Beijing’s Forestry University, said the government would have gradually tried to balance environmental protection with economic development.
“But since the Olympics is already here, the government had no choice but to move the agenda ahead,” she said.
The Olympics provided China’s environmental groups with their best chance to interact with the government since they first started appearing in 1994, said Wang Yongcheng (王永成), the founder of Green Earth Volunteers.
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