The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia by Tom Cliff Tessa Morris-Suzuki & Shuge Wei

Author:Tom Cliff, Tessa Morris-Suzuki & Shuge Wei
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

The Informal Grassland Protection Network

The two dimensions of the network considered so far link herders and those concerned with grassland protection to the institutions of formal politics and to the justice system, thereby enabling effective resistance to the pressures of the formal political and bureaucratic order. A third dimension of the network operates differently, creating a free and loosely structured space for new forms of ecological understanding, and thus new approaches to grassland protection. The informal grassland protection network is an open network, so theoretically it has many entry points which allow us to understand it. But from a practical perspective, I will choose as an entry point Chen’s website “Echoing Steppe.” The history of Echoing Steppe goes back to the 1990s when Chen was selling his artwork in France with a help of a Malaysian Chinese dealer who was conducting his international business mainly through the Internet. It was then that Chen realized the potential of the Internet for faster and more convenient communication. After returning to Beijing, Chen went to the China Central Post Office to ask how to set up an Internet site.

In China, setting up a website required two steps: first you must register a domain name, then register the URL (web address) with that name at the Public Security Bureau. Once the web address has been registered, it allows one to upload text, image, and video clips. Chen successfully got the domain name 163art.com and registered it at the Xicheng District branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. The registration requires the website to be identified either as commercial or public welfare. Chen’s is a public welfare website in nature, so he is not required to pay tax, only to pay the hosting fees. After completion of all formalities, the Public Security Bureau provided a registration number which has to appear in the lower right corner of the website.18

Chen named his website “Echoing Steppe” and started to upload information related to grassland protection. The name came from a joint artists’ exhibition of the same name held in 1999. Chen said that at that time the Internet was just emerging in China and almost no sites existed specifically for grassland protection, so soon after it was established the Echoing Steppe website started to attract visits from many individuals and organizations. Due to the openness of the website, the people who made contact with Chen were diverse in terms of occupation, ethnicity, and nationality, including herders, urban white collar workers, professional translators, lawyers, and university students and professors; among them were ethnic Mongolians, Han Chinese, and foreigners. Many well-known environmental NGOs, such as Greener Beijing19 and Friends of Nature,20 also made contact with Chen through the Echoing Steppe website. As they established a cooperative relationship with Chen and jointly implemented projects to protect the grasslands, a loosely structured, informal grassland protection network gradually emerged, connected through Chen’s site. The network is characterized by concern for grassland protection and sustainable development, and is made up of multiple diverse entities that were, in many cases, previously unconnected.

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