SCMP

Shi Jiangtao in Beijing

Debate helps China’s civil society to grow

If there has been a winner from global warming on the mainland, it is the NGO movement.

Growing public awareness of the issues surrounding climate change has galvanised environmental groups, helped raise their profiles and even allowed some to present policy recommendations to the government – big advances for a movement that was once starved of media attention and whose activities officialdom has severely restricted.

Dr Liu Bin , a climate researcher at Tsinghua University since the 1990s who is a member of China’s negotiating team at the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, said there had been a clear change in public attitudes…