About Our Project

Our training method was featured on “Easy Talk,” a video program of China Daily.

BEIJING – These are no ordinary stories. This is storytelling with a purpose. Storytelling to make a difference. Storytelling for impact. What kind of impact? Minimally, a change of attitudes. Ideally, even a change in behaviors.

In Autumn 2016, an American Communications Consultant and Journalism Educator, Michael J. Jordan, launched this unique Advocacy-through-Storytelling project from his new base in Beijing: The Chinese Champions of Environmental Protection.

China, the world’s most-populous nation, can also lay claim to a remarkable human achievement: over the past four decades, its transformation into the world’s second-largest economy has, according to the World Bank, also “lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty” – well over 10 percent of our planet’s entire population.

Yet that development came with a cost, and the Chinese are paying the price: today, they also inhale some of the world’s most dangerous air. So, on the heels of Jordan teaching a journalism course in Environmental Storytelling at Renmin University of China, this project continues his efforts toward Youth Environmental Education.

Funded by the U.S. Embassy in China – and in partnership with two local NGOs, the All-China Environment Federation and China Youth Climate Action Network – Jordan’s trainings for grassroots activists and university students produced the 20 stories you see published here. Each spotlights two key components:

*Their personal “great awakening.”

*The steps they took to make a difference in their own home, school or society itself.

On the one hand, our stories are strategically aimed at an internal, Chinese audience: to not only raise awareness, by championing the issue, but perhaps inspire more Chinese youth to take action, with a virtual how-to guide that demystifies how to do so.

On the other, you’ll notice our stories are published in English, not Mandarin. Which points to our second Communications objective – targeting YOU, a primarily external, foreign audience. We imagine you to be curious to learn something meaningful about a China that, simply put, matters … in every way, on the international stage.

For those of you who for some reason care about universal issues like climate change, global health, sustainable development, and other such topics, the latest CNN or BBC report and images of China’s toxic air might make you wonder:

Do the Chinese even care about their pollution, their environment, their health?

If so, are they doing anything about it?

This project answers both questions – with a resounding YES. However, we don’t expect a smart but skeptical audience to simply take our word for it. To persuade you, we should show you, not just tell you. Which is what these 20 stories aim to do.

See Our Strategy for more. But perhaps you’ll detect that each of these stories contains several subtle messages: this person cares about the issue; is impassioned to do something about it; and even optimistic about their potential impact. Individually, one story may stir a reader’s emotions; collectively, though, they do more than suggest a trend. That’s also a form of evidence – that more Chinese are now making a difference. For you, our intended audience, do these messages resonate? Did we effectively “hit our target,” to touch hearts and minds, perhaps even change your attitudes about how “ordinary” Chinese are responding to environmental pollution?

Overall, ours is actually a pilot-project. We see great potential for “scale-up” in China: translation into Mandarin; expansion to activists/students in other Chinese cities, beyond the capital; and training of even more Chinese “on the front-lines,” but online, through the sort of instructional, distance-learning videos (access code: 12345) that Jordan recently produced about Food Waste in China, on behalf of IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, and its Beijing office. (See our Distance-Learning section for more.)

If you would like to join us, as a generous sponsor, please contact Jordan at mjjordan2016@yahoo.com. Xiexie!

Meanwhile, for more on this project, click here to watch the 10-minute video program produced by China Daily, a global source of English-language stories about China.

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