Liang Congjie passed away, IFCE sent condolence

honglake

One of pioneers in China's environmental NGOs development, the founder
of
Friend of Nature in Beijing, Mr. Liang Congjie passed away on Oct. 28.
Ping He on behalf of IFCE
sent a letter of condolence to FON on Oct. 29. Attached is the letter in
Chinese.

More info can be found from this New York Time news below.

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October 29, 2010
Liang Congjie, Chinese Environmental Pioneer, Dies at 78
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Liang Congjie, who was one of the founders of China’s first
legally recognized environmental group and who came to be honored by
international agencies and the Chinese government alike, died here on
Thursday. He was 78.
Friends of Nature, the group he established, announced his death on its
Web site. It said he died of a lung infection in a Beijing hospital.
Mr. Liang was a historian and teacher at the privately run Academy for
Chinese Culture in 1994 when he and three co-workers decided that
China’s rapid development merited the creation of a citizens’ group that
would work to solve environmental problems. “We knew from television
about Greenpeace, but there wasn’t anything like that in China,” he told
Asiaweek in 2000. “My friends and I began wondering, why not here? We
decided to try.”
Unlike Greenpeace, which is known for its aggressive tactics and
high-profile protests, Friends of Nature took a low-key approach,
generally choosing to urge the national government to use existing laws
to address environmental issues. It established the nation’s first
bird-watching group and recently focused on environmental education in
primary schools in western China.
Yet the group also won national recognition for sponsoring daring, and
sometimes dangerous, efforts to promote environmental protection.
In the 1990s, Friends of Nature helped to produce an undercover
videotape of officials who were proposing to illegally cut down a stand
of virgin forest. The video was broadcast nationally on China’s CCTV
network and helped lead the prime minister at the time, Zhu Rongji, to
order a ban on logging in virgin forests in 1999.
Friends of Nature also worked to stop the hunting of a rare Tibetan
antelope. Hunters killed the leader of antipoaching patrols in the
region, but the crusade has drawn worldwide attention; the antelope
population tripled to 60,000 animals from 1998 to 2008.
“His relationship with the government was one of being constructively
critical,” Ma Jun, a friend and fellow environmentalist, said in a
telephone interview on Friday. “He was always pushing for a bigger space
for civil society in environmental protection, but in the meantime he
did try to work with the system to promote this course. It isn’t easy.
It’s still a pretty hard course, but I think some progress has been
made.”
Mr. Liang “actually incubated the first generation of environmentalists
in China,” he added.
Liang Congjie was born into a family known for its reformist bent.
His grandfather, the journalist and scholar Liang Qichao, was exiled to
Japan for 14 years in 1898 after proposing to Emperor Guangxu of the
Qing dynasty that China become a constitutional monarchy.
Mr. Liang’s father, Liang Sicheng, was an architect who began an
unsuccessful campaign to save Beijing’s ancient city walls, which have
since been replaced by a freeway, and to preserve the historic character
of its old city. His home was saved from the bulldozers and designated
an “immovable cultural heritage” by China’s cultural heritage
administration in January.
Mr. Liang is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter.
Friends of Nature said on its Web site that Mr. Liang’s family, “hoping
to follow his austere nature,” planned to hold the simplest possible
funeral.
Zhang Jing contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/world/asia/30liang.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y