Description

The world seems in awe of China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse: a spectacular Olympics and Shanghai World Expo, rapid growth in gross domestic product, huge government foreign holdings, expanding cities and city skylines, the world’s largest dam at Three Gorges, and a new consumer might have all fed the impression of success. But what kind of “rise” is it and at what cost has China’s “rise” occurred, asks Dai Qing, China’s most famous environmentalist and investigative historical journalist. China’s natural legacy of wealth – forests, minerals, rivers and fields – have been plundered, she argues and instead of greatness, China’s rise rests on rotting foundations, strained by official corruption, moral bankruptcy and a social environment simmering with anger and unrest.

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Dai Qing is a Chinese freelance journalist, environmentalist, and investigative historian who has published more than 20 books in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, UK, the US and Canada. Her 1989 book on the controversial Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River, Yangtze! Yangtze!, was hailed by the Far Eastern Economic Review as a “watershed event in post-1949 Chinese politics, representing the first use of public lobbying by intellectuals and public figures.” Dai Qing continued her pioneering use of environmental investigative journalism in China in a 1997 follow-up book on the dam project, The River Dragon Has Come! After publicly denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she resigned from the Chinese Communist Party and was later imprisoned for 10 months. She was a 1992 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is the recipient of the 1992 World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen for Freedom Award, the 1993 Goldman Environmental Award, and the 1993 Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award. Dai Qing was a 1998-99 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. She is also a Probe International Fellow, a Toronto-based environmental think-tank with whom she has collaborated since her release from prison and with whom she has written, translated and published three books, oral histories and countless articles. Probe International is the sponsor of her current trip to Toronto.