May 2001
"Many thanks for accepting our proposal and giving us a grant to facilitate this survey.
"Up to now, 94 higher education student environmental groups in China have returned their questionnaires and all the information included in the returned questionnaires has been input into a data base also. The final findins on the process should be finished by the end of June.
I am more than happy to let all of you know that, I think, this year is kind of a milestone for the development of student environmental groups in China. Besides three student environmental groups getting "Earth Award" and the biggest survey on student environmental groups in China being conducted, there are two other exciting events occurring.
"The first one is CEC (the Center for Environmental Citizenship, based in Washington DC) successfuly getting a grant ($20,000) to conduct a six-month research in China for Greening Chinese Campuses. The second one is WWF (World Wildlife Fund for Nature) and Chinese Youth Newspaper are jointly making a wet-land protecting program along the down-stream of the Yangtze river during this summer break of school. This is specially initiated to have all higher education student environmental groups design their own action plans and then the winning groups with good designs will be trained and sponsored to implement their plans.
"The above events are very important for others (general public, government, domestic NGOs and international NGOs) and student groups themselves to identify the strength, weakness and the potential value of higher education stsudent environmental groups to prompt environmental movement in China.
"Meaning, my proposal for starting a new elective course, on capacity building for student groups, for undergraduate students at Sichuan University, was accepted."
July 2001
"Please have the following message as my mid-term report for the 2001 student survey:
"We found 184 student environmental groups in China. They are distributed in 176 universities.
"Our survey team sent out 156 questionnaires, and 97 were returned. The final findings of our survey were produced based on these returned 97 questionnaires. The final findings have been documented at the end of June; about 200 copies of these survey findings with some suggestions have been sent to student environmental groups in China at the end of June also.
"Our upcoming work is as follows: