Cool response in China for Greta Thunberg’s global warming speech at UN’s Climate Action Summit
- Chinese young people prefer tree planting and other activities to street protests
China’s online community was largely unmoved by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s emotional message to the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York this week.
Thunberg, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, criticised world leaders for failing to take action on climate change. “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said at the UN meeting on Monday.
Thunberg on Wednesday won the Right Livelihood Award – sometimes called the alternative Nobel – for “inspiring and amplifying political demands for urgent climate action reflecting scientific facts”, according to the Swedish Right Livelihood Foundation.
But while she was lauded by most of the world, Thunberg’s achievements – which included founding the Youth Strike for Climate movement and inspiring millions of people to join last Friday’s global climate strike – did not win majority support in mainland China.
“She is a poor girl kidnapped by the thought of white leftists and she herself doesn’t know that,” wrote one user on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform.
“What this girl is doing is just talking the talk. She started to go on strike at age 14. How much knowledge does she have? Without much knowledge in her mind, how can she propose solutions to deal with environmental problems? I think this little sister’s problem is that she studied too little and thought too much,” another user said.
“If the economy doesn’t grow, what do us people living in developing countries eat?” a third person commented.
The Weibo topic “16-year-old Swedish girl accusing at UN” had been viewed more than 44 million times, and attracted about 4,000 comments by Wednesday morning, most of them similarly negative.
On WeChat, another popular social media app in China, one person wrote: “She is just a performing artist. I’d like to say to her don’t talk, show some action. In the western part of China, many people have planted trees to save the planet. They are more entitled to receive the Nobel Prize than her.”
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Some Chinese internet users did stand by Thunberg. “I’ve watched this girl’s speeches and her words touched millions of people, including me. I admire her for caring about this global issue at such a young age,” one WeChat user wrote.
Zhang Boju, chief secretary of Beijing-based environmental NGO Friends of Nature, said Thunberg expressed the urgency felt by the young generation to protect the Earth and her ideas – that we are borrowing from the next generation by exploiting the planet’s resources – were in line with those of many environmentalists.
“She is expressing a strong message that we are very concerned and anxious. If you don’t take any action now, our generation maybe has no chance to alter the worsening situation,” Zhang said.
While it was common in the West for students to take to the streets – around a million young people responded to Thunberg’s call in March to join the global climate strike for the future – it was not often seen in China, he said.
“Chinese young people express their attitudes through other channels, such as social media, to let the public hear their voices,” Zhang said. “The form – whether going on strike or talking on social media – is not important.”
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Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, said Chinese primary and middle schools also taught “green living and low carbon transportation”, but students took part in public affairs through communication and sending proposals, not through protests.
Public rallies on the Chinese mainland must be approved by the government beforehand. “Greta’s radical ways – like school strikes – are not practicable in China,” Xiong said.
Chen Ting, an environmental campaigner at a Shanghai-based NGO, said her organisation – which she preferred not to name – shared the “same big goal” as Thunberg, although it took different approaches.
“Greta is an extraordinary young person, but I don’t want to comment on her way of doing environmentalism,” she said.
Chen said there was a higher awareness of environmental protection than previously among the current generation of young people in China, and many of them preferred to improve the situation by making small changes in their lives.
Zhang, from Friends of Nature, said climate change was not a mainstream issue in China at the moment and environmental groups should pay more attention to popularise it among the public.
“Greta inspires us that environmental education is not limited to adults educating minors, but that young students who have knowledge on environmental protection can teach their peers,” he said.
