summer camps and weekend activities for young children. The WS’s flexible
linkages with the business community, however, make it an atypical ENGO.
Other ENGOs labeled WS pro-business instead of pro-environment. The WS
itself claims that the different forms of environmental protection reflect a new
division of labor in Taiwan’s ENGO community.^75
In China, we noted the recent organization of 100 entrepreneurs and firms
into the ALXA SEE Ecological Association, to mitigate ecological
degradation in Inner Mongolia. Multinational corporations doing business in
China contribute often to biodiversity conservation projects. For example, the
HSBC Group invested millions in a WWF project to restore natural
connections between now disconnected lakes and the Yangtze River.
Moreover, IKEA has joined with the WWF in projects to maintain and
enhance high conservation value forests.^76 The TNC’s China programs benefit
extensively from joint ventures of multinationals such as Kodak, Cargill and
Pepsico. Indigenous ENGOs such as FON also receive funding from business
firms. A Director of FON acknowledged sponsorship of a series of programs
by China Shell. When asked whether Shell’s international reputation affected
the ENGO’s interest in partnership, he remarked: ‘We are only concerned with
how corporations work in the Chinese environment, and Shell has been a good
environmental citizen’.^77
Environmental NGOs in China, like other social associations, do provide
training in political participation for leaders and members. They bring together
individuals on a voluntary basis, individuals who are not kin, and they work
together on common objectives. In the process, they learn to value the
contribution that each person can make to a common enterprise. Yang
comments: ‘They provide the rare opportunity for their participants to acquire
the skills and habits of self-governance’.^78 They develop skills in communica-
tion, and learn how to organize resources and apply them to the attainment
of group objectives. This is an essential step in the development of civil
society.
However, China’s ENGOs do not yet form a coherent environmental
movement in the sense in which this concept is used globally.^79 At the current
stage, they are not integrated nationally, and do not share a common discourse.
Ma summarizes: ‘China’s NGOs may always have closer relations with the
state than do their western counterparts’.^80 Thus, they are a weak reed in the
growth of civil society in China at present, but may grow stronger.^81
In ‘hard authoritarian’ societies like China, civil society in general, and
ENGOs in particular, operate in ways different from the western concepts of
the third sector in society. In China, scholars argue that working class activism
is presently sporadic and isolated, tending more toward passive resistance
than active participation. Deprived of broad-based organization and coherent
intellectual leadership, the political power of the working classes remains
184 Governance of biodiversity conservation in China and Taiwan