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ing, the legal right to file lawsuits. In 2012, the Civil Procedure Law was amended to allow
“government departments and concerned organizations as designated by law” to engage in
public-interest litigation, and this will likely result in a dramatic increase in the volume of
environmental lawsuits in the near future (Ngo 2012; see also Wang 2007).
I have already alluded to the local activism that has taken place in the Nu River basin,
which has remained sporadic and small in scale, due to a lack of information about how
projectsareproceeding,alackofcapacitytomountacampaigninthefaceofeconomicand
cultural marginalization, and the high political risks involved in any opposition strategy.
Chinese NGOs, however, have been quite vocal on the topic, though they must generally
approach policy advocacy in strategic and circumspect ways or risk serious political con-
sequences. As a case in point, Green Watershed, the first Chinese NGO with a specific fo-
cus on water-resource issues, was founded by Dr. Yu Xiaogang in 2002 with a mission of
representing the rural people whose livelihoods and cultural practices are intimately tied
to southwest China's rivers. Yu, who was educated at the Asian Institute of Technology in
Thailand, worked as a researcher at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences; he also had a
long track record of collaboration with Western NGOs, including The Nature Conservancy
and the Ford Foundation. Unlike many of his academic peers in China, he used concepts
such as “indigenous identity” and even “comanagement” to advocate for the rights of local
people, which likely further alienated him from political officials who continued to toe the
official party line that these groups constitute “minority nationalities” rather than “indigen-
ous people” (Hathaway 2013, 2010).
In a bold move, Green Watershed organized trips for villagers near the Nu River dam
sites to visit the Manwan Dam on the Lancang River, where they could see for themselves
how resettled villagers lived, a picture that was likely quite unfavorable. Yu and his col-
leagues also arranged for Nu River villagers to voice their concerns at an international hy-
dropower conference in Beijing that was jointly sponsored by the UN and the NDRC. This
move raised the ire of both private hydropower-development interests and NDRC officials
and ultimately resulted in the temporary revocation of Yu's passport. Green Watershed also
came under close scrutiny by central and provincial government authorities.
DomesticactivismintheNuRivercasewasaidedbytheChinaNationalRadiojournalist
and environmental activist Wang Yongchen, who founded a Beijing-based organization
called Global Environmental Volunteers. She organized a petition in opposition to the Nu
River dams that was signed by leading figures in science, journalism, the arts, and environ-
mental protection (Mertha 2008). A major part of Wang's work involved alerting the gen-
eral public to the fact that local people in the Nu River watershed were neither informed
nor consulted about the projects (Chen 2006).
4
Hydropowercorporationofficialsrespondedswiftlyandpubliclytothisaffrontbyenlist-
ing Dr. Fang Zhouzi, a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who gave a speech
at Yunnan University with the unsubtle title “A Direct Attack on Fake Environmentalist
