IN THE main room of the small, old-fashioned house, stacked full of books, an old fan scarcely moved the stuffy air around. Wu Dengming’s daughter kept pleading for air-conditioning. Elsewhere in Chongqing, China’s fastest-growing inland city, where 10m people lived in a battery of skyscrapers, almost everyone had it. Mr Wu would not hear of it. It was expensive, and was not green. He had a dream of making everyone in the city turn their coolers to 26ºC, and no lower. Why not? He had managed to organise Chongqing’s first no-car day, in 2006, and as a result—perhaps—you could sometimes glimpse blue sky through the smog that blanketed the place.
Green, green, green, was all he thought about, the family grumbled. In 1997, at 57, he had retired from his security job at the university; but rather than slowing down he had revved up, racing round the city and the region to track down polluters of air, water or earth and report them to the authorities in Beijing. He was hardly ever at home. A row of shoes, many times mended, stood under his bed; most of them were still dirty from when he had sploshed around on the muddy banks of the Jialing or the Yangzi, pointing out to the world’s press where the outlet from a battery factory had stained the rocks yellow, or where the pipeline from a chromium plant had killed all the vegetation.
His business card listed five titles and six awards, including “Top-ten Person, China Legal News, 2007”. The most important title was “Founder, Chongqing Green Volunteer League” (motto: “Action, not words”). He had set this up in 1995, originally as a campus group that planted trees, picked up litter and lectured people on their environmental duty. It had grown fast, and had notched up big successes. In 1998 he had taken a TV crew to film illegal logging in the wild forests of Sichuan outside the city; the film was a sensation, and logging was banned. Some 15,000 students signed his petition to stop the Nu river dams. His was one of the few NGOs to be recognised officially by Beijing, and in 2011, for the first time, a court admitted his suit against a factory that had dumped 5,000 tons of chromium waste in Yunnan province. No wonder he had a spring in his step, a smile on his face, and burst so readily, if hoarsely, into the old songs.
It was all so dangerous, though, said his wife. What if she lost him? In the Sichuan forest, when he first went, the loggers had smashed the crew’s equipment. Factory owners frequently sent hoodlums to beat him up. Well, risk-taking was necessary, Mr Wu said. He was tough enough, having done his bit for Mao in the People’s Liberation Army; he also practised t’ai chi every day, to calm himself; and when security guards started towards his car he would just roar away, laughing.
But the money he spent! At home he was a miser; the few clothes in his wardrobe cost 15 yuan at most, except the grey-and-white favourite jumper in which he liked to meet the press. Why wear fancy clothes? he would say. Why build fancy mansions? Why drive cars? He used one himself, though, to race back and forth, with a GPS to track down the factories and an MP3 player to record conversations. So extravagant, his family complained; the government gave almost nothing to NGOs, so he had to fund much of it out of his tiny pension, his savings and his grandson’s lottery winnings. What was left for them? Well, countered Mr Wu, he was frugal on his trips, making stale pancakes last several days and drinking from roadside taps.
The people’s voice
He had disappointments, for sure. Companies and local government were too deeply in cahoots for much to change. Factories that were meant to be closed down just kept going. Court cases mysteriously ran into the sand. Petitions were ignored. His chief worry was the huge raft of rubbish and sewage in the Three Gorges reservoir on the Yangzi, but the project was so entangled with national pride that nothing was being done. China was so hell-bent on growth and prosperity that it had lost its sense of moral obligation.
The old days had been better: the days when Dragon Spring and Clear Stream, two half-dried-up and polluted creeks, had run with pure water, and he had grown up as a farm lad in green paddy fields and forests that stretched beside the Jialing. (He still swam in it, though it was now dense brown and lined with factory chimneys.) He missed old Chongqing, with its gossipy warren of houses and gardens, and preferred to drink his green tea in cheap teahouses in the old style.
There he would listen to the environmental horror-stories of ordinary working people, and teach them how to cope. No one else would. The party had placed itself too far above the woes, and rights, of common folk. As a farmer who had moved to the city himself, he spoke the language of the peasants forced from their plots by landslides, the fishermen whose stocks were dead, the weeping, terrified villagers whose livers had been enlarged by strontium in the river water. China, he kept saying, needed to know about these things. Thanks to him, one of the first forthright voices, it began to. Even his daughter, after years of griping at him, was suddenly moved by the tales of the sick, displaced and dying to become a green activist herself; and, at last, understood him.