Liang Congjie

Liang Congjie was born in Beiping (now Beijing) on August 4, 1932; his ancestral home was Xinhui in Guangdong. His father was the architect Liang Sicheng, his mother was Lin Huiyin, and his grandfather was Liang Qichao, a reformer of the Qing dynasty; the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography describes the family he was born into as one of great intellectual distinction. A 2016 article in the Beijing Youth Daily calls him Liang Qichao’s eldest grandson.⁠[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

On October 1, 1931, Xu ZhimoXu ZhimoXu Zhimo (1897–1931) was a modern Chinese poet, essayist and translator, the principal founder of the Crescent Moon Society and the author of “Second Farewell to Cambridge”. After studying in the United States and England he taught at several universities and edited literary journals; he was killed in a plane crash in 1931.Open the full entry wrote in a letter to Lu Xiaoman that Lin Huiyin looked as though she would soon have another baby; a 2025 Red Star News article writes that Lin Huiyin’s second child, Liang Congjie, was indeed born in August of the following year, and that the obstetrician who delivered him was her fellow Fujian native Lin Qiaozhi.⁠[8]

His elder sister, Liang ZaibingLiang ZaibingLiang Zaibing, born in 1929, is the daughter and first child of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin and spent most of her career in international reporting at Xinhua News Agency.Open the full entry, was born in August 1929. She recalls that after her brother’s birth in 1932 the family of four spent a relatively settled and comfortable period in Beizongbu Hutong in Beiping, when their parents were young and healthy and not yet touched by war; she says their parents loved and cared for both children, and that her own and her brother’s childhood was very happy and warm.⁠[9]

The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily article writes that his young mother, Lin Huiyin, wrote a poem for the newborn Liang Congjie; the lines it quotes call the child the April of this world, whose laughter lights up the winds on every side, and love, warmth and hope. A 2025 Red Star News article writes that Lin Huiyin published You Are the April of This World in the journal Xuewen in April 1934; that Liang Sicheng once said she wrote the poem for Liang Congjie; that some have speculated it was written for Xu Zhimo; and that Lin Huiyin herself never said for whom it was written.⁠[7][8]

When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident broke out on July 7, 1937, his parents were absorbed in the excitement of having found the Foguang Temple on Mount Wutai, a building of the Tang dynasty. The family then moved repeatedly under fire, living in Kunming and later in Lizhuang in Sichuan; Liang Zaibing says that their parents still did their best to give the children a good education, and that by the light of a small kerosene lamp Lin Huiyin explained to them famous texts such as the Zhuangzi story of the butcher carving an ox and the Zhanguo ce piece on Tang Ju. Liang Zaibing’s memoir, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin: My Father and Mother, contains a photograph of her and Liang Congjie at Lizhuang.⁠[9][10]

Liang Zaibing recalls that she, her brother and the children of the Liu Dunzhen family played outdoors all day long, and that their mother prepared many good things for them to eat; whenever their father was away on field surveys in western Sichuan he sent the children thick bundles of comic strips he had drawn of his travels, and she, her brother and their mother laughed over them until they doubled up. The year 1942, the hardest stage of the Second World War and of China’s war of resistance, was also the darkest period for the family after it left Beiping.⁠[9]

On March 14, 1941 Lin Heng, Lin Huiyin’s much-loved third younger brother, who had recently graduated in the tenth class of the aviation school, was killed in the air over Chengdu during a Japanese air raid on the city. In the section “The Wartime Drawing Room” of his memoir of his mother, Fleeting April in the Human World: Remembering My Mother Lin Huiyin, Liang Congjie later wrote that when the news reached his mother on her sickbed she was almost unable to bear it; he also recalled his third uncle Lin Heng, killed just after graduating in the aviation school’s tenth class, in his essay In Memory of the Chinese Air Force Heroes of the War against Japan. A 2025 article from the Shuangliu district media centre quotes his recollection that his father hurried to Chengdu, took charge of Lin Heng’s body and buried it in an unmarked grave.⁠[11]

In July 1947 the family of five flew back to Beiping, which they had left nine years earlier.⁠[9]

He sat the entrance examination for the department of architecture at Tsinghua University and missed admission by two or three points, and went on to study history. In 1950 he entered the department of history at Tsinghua University, which was merged into the department of history at Peking University in 1952. He graduated from Peking University in 1958 with a master’s degree in history. The Guangming Daily obituary of 2010 likewise says that he received a master’s degree from the department of history at Peking University in 1958; the China Reading Weekly article of 2010 says instead that he studied in the department of history at Peking University from 1950 to 1958.⁠[5][12][13][2]

After graduating he took up teaching and scholarship; during the Cultural Revolution he laboured in the countryside, including at a cadre school, and afterwards became an editor at a publishing house. The China Reading Weekly article of 2010 writes that after his studies he worked first in the department of history at Yunnan University and then at the Beijing Institute of International Relations Research.⁠[6][5][2]

From 1978 to 1988 he was an editor at the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House in Beijing; in 1979 he co-founded the periodical Encyclopedic Knowledge, and he became chief editor of the magazine Intellectuals. In the 1980s he also contributed to the work of the editorial review board of the Chinese-language Concise Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry. The China Reading Weekly article of 2010 writes that from 1978 he was an editor at the publishing house and took part in the early preparation and compilation of the Encyclopedia of China.⁠[1][2]

In the 1980s, while still an editor at Encyclopedic Knowledge, Liang Congjie learned from a manuscript submitted to the magazine that township and village enterprises were becoming a major cause of environmental damage alongside economic growth. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that, alerted in the 1980s to China’s looming environmental catastrophe, he began to study the problem and to discuss it with young Chinese familiar with the growing environmental movement abroad.⁠[5][6]

In 1979 and 1980 he twice interpreted in Beijing when American delegations met Deng Xiaoping.⁠[7]

The Guangming Daily obituary of 2010 writes that from 1988 he was a professor at the Academy of Chinese Culture; a report in The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry describes him as a historian and teacher at the private Academy for Chinese Culture. From 1989 he served as a member of the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth National Committees of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and as a member of its Standing Committee.⁠[13][12]

On World Environment Day, June 5, 1993, Liang Congjie and three friends, Yang Dongping, Wang Lixiong and Liang Xiaoyan, sat on the grass beneath a ruined old pagoda beside the Jingmi Canal in the western suburbs of Beijing, worrying over China’s worsening environmental problems; the meeting later became known as the Linglong Garden gathering. The Liaoning Daily article introduces the four as follows: Liang Congjie, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a tutor at the Academy of Chinese Culture; Yang Dongping, a researcher at the Institute of Higher Education of the Beijing Institute of Technology; Wang Lixiong, a freelance writer and explorer; and Liang Xiaoyan, then an editor at Dongfang magazine.⁠[5]

The scholar Guobin Yang writes that in 1993 Liang Congjie and his colleagues Yang Dongping, Liang Xiaoyan and Wang Lixiong began to lobby government officials to establish such an organization. In his Ramon Magsaysay Award acceptance speech in 2000, Liang Congjie said that a group of intellectuals with a profound sense of social responsibility had come together in 1993, and that seven years had passed since the four initiators’ first meeting. The Liaoning Daily article writes that after the National Environmental Protection Agency and other bodies turned him down, he placed the organization under the Academy of Chinese Culture as its Green Culture Branch, which people affectionately called Friends of Nature.⁠[14][6][5]

On March 31, 1994, Friends of Nature (the Green Culture Branch of the Academy of Chinese Culture), a national membership-based environmental organization, was formally established; its founders were Liang Congjie, Yang Dongping, Liang Xiaoyan and Wang Lixiong. A 2017 presentation by Friends of Nature states that it was “Founded on March 31, 1994 by Liang Congjie.” The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that in 1994 he gained official permission to set up a voluntary society dedicated to environmental education, and that sixty people attended its first meeting. China Development Brief writes that in March 1994, in response to China’s growing environmental crisis, he, already in his sixties, gave up his research in history and founded Friends of Nature with three peers. The Guangming Daily obituary of 2010 likewise says that on March 31, 1994 he founded Friends of Nature together with several other founders and became its president, and the China Reading Weekly article of 2010 says he founded it in 1994. The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily article, by contrast, writes that in 1993 Liang Congjie began to take an interest in civil environmental protection and led the creation of Friends of Nature, China’s first wholly privately run environmental organization; the official website of Friends of Nature also gives 1993 as its founding year and calls it one of the earliest environmental civil-society organizations founded in China.⁠[15][16][6][17][13][2][7][18]

Encyclopædia Britannica calls Friends of Nature China’s first government-approved conservation group and writes that he established the country’s environmental movement; the Wilson Center calls it one of the first environmental NGOs officially registered in China; a report in The New York Times writes that he founded China’s first legally recognized environmental organization.⁠[1][4][12]

After Friends of Nature was founded he resigned his public post and gave up its benefits. He served as president of Friends of Nature. In a 2000 interview with Asiaweek he said: “We knew from television about Greenpeace. But there wasn’t anything like that in China,” and “My friends and I began wondering, why not here? We decided to try.”⁠[7][6][12]

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that he channelled these efforts into seminars, teacher-training courses, slide shows and lectures, bird-watching and tree-planting outings and wilderness camps for young people, produced new educational materials and opened a public resource centre; Friends of Nature criticized customs such as keeping wild songbirds as pets and opposed the takeover of China’s cities by automobiles.⁠[6]

Encyclopædia Britannica writes that, in order to avoid antagonizing members of the conservative Chinese government, he took a gentler approach to preserving nature, which included urging officials to use existing laws to deal with ecological issues, launching the country’s first bird-watching group and instituting environmental education in primary schools. A report in The New York Times writes that the group later concentrated on environmental education in primary schools in western China.⁠[1][12]

The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily article writes that after Friends of Nature was founded he led work to protect the natural forest of Hongya in western Sichuan, the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey in the primeval forest of Deqin County in north-western Yunnan, and the Tibetan antelope. China Development Brief writes that he and his colleagues initiated efforts to protect the natural forest in western Sichuan and the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that he orchestrated a national campaign to halt logging in the rainforests of south-western Yunnan, the unique habitat of the endangered snub-nosed monkey, and that similar campaigns by Friends of Nature exposed illegal logging in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia.⁠[7][17][6]

The Liaoning Daily article writes that soon after Friends of Nature was founded, the Yunnan environmental volunteer Xi Zhinong informed it that the government of Deqin County, to ease its financial difficulties, planned to log more than 100 square kilometres of primeval forest there, the habitat of the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, an animal under first-class state protection; Liang Congjie at once had the group’s media members cover the story in the press and wrote directly to the relevant central leaders, the logging was soon stopped, and this was the first time Friends of Nature intervened successfully in a specific public matter.⁠[5]

Ron Gluckman wrote in Asiaweek in August 2000 that in one of the group’s earliest coups its members secretly videotaped local officials in western China who offered to supply illegal lumber from a sensitive monkey habitat; the footage aired on national television. Liang said that Premier Zhu Rongji quickly put a stop to it, but that the local officials were outraged. Encyclopædia Britannica writes that his group helped to publicize illegal logging in virgin forests, which led to a government ban of the practice in 1999.⁠[19][1]

In 1997 he submitted a proposal at the session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference titled Proposal That Shougang Halt Its 2160 Project and Move Partly and Gradually out of Beijing, which was not adopted. China Development Brief writes that he used his position as a member of the National Committee of the CPPCC to push for the relocation of the huge Capital Steel (Shougang) plant in Beijing, and that when he rode his bicycle to CPPCC meetings he was sometimes stopped by guards.⁠[5][17]

The Liaoning Daily article of 2010 writes that what truly made Friends of Nature famous was its involvement in protecting the Tibetan antelope in Hoh Xil: poachers hunted the antelope across the plateau to sell their wool, endangering the species, and the local Wild Yak Brigade fought a long struggle against them; Friends of Nature put the brigade in touch with the media, and its story spread across China.⁠[5]

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that he bravely exposed and helped to curtail huge poaching operations against the protected Tibetan antelope, the source of shatoosh, a silk-fine wool used in the world’s most expensive shawls. China Development Brief writes that they started an anti-poaching group to protect the Tibetan antelope. Ron Gluckman wrote in August 2000 that in the previous year a Friends of Nature newsletter had been dedicated to Liang’s friend Gisang Sonam Dorje, a member of the Wild Yak Brigade who was killed in a shootout with poachers.⁠[6][17][19]

In May 1999 he stood at the Suonandajie Protection Station, about 4,000 metres above sea level, and lit the torch that set fire to Tibetan antelope skins seized from poachers; China Development Brief gives his age at the time as 67.⁠[17]

In 2000 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service; the foundation’s board of trustees cited “his courageous pioneering leadership in China’s environmental movement and nascent civil society.” The foundation’s biography writes that the 67-year-old Liang remained the guiding hand of Friends of Nature, which had some seven hundred dues-paying members plus thousands of affiliated students organized in local clubs; in his acceptance speech he said that Friends of Nature had nearly one thousand individual members and more than 3,000 corporate members across the country.⁠[6]

In the speech he said that the Chinese government had also found an ally in Friends of Nature and had given him awards several times in his capacity as its president, and that on the eve of International Environment Day in 2000 it formally gave him the title “Environment Envoy,” which, he explained, meant a social inspector.⁠[6]

In early 2001, as ecological and environmental adviser to the Beijing Olympic bid committee, he raised the relocation of Shougang again. In March 2001, at the Beijing municipal government’s dialogue on the management of the Jingmi Canal, he and other environmentalists stood firm in their discussions with city leaders.⁠[5][17]

In 2003 the Southern Daily published Liang Congjie’s recollection that in 1955 his mother, Lin Huiyin, already gravely ill, argued with the mayor in person, telling him that what they were pulling down that day were genuine antiquities 800 years old, that one day they would regret it, and that when they did they would build fake antiquities.⁠[20]

From 2004 he deliberately withdrew step by step from the work of Friends of Nature; Zhao Yongxin, a board member of Friends of Nature, recalls that in the summer of 2007, when the new board held a strategic planning workshop, Liang, no longer its president, came gladly to talk at length with old and new board members. On December 20, 2004, the scholar Guobin Yang interviewed him in his office in Beijing.⁠[5][14]

In 2005 he was named one of the Green China Annual Figures.⁠[5]

That year he heard from foreigners living in Beijing that the city was being called a second-hand Hong Kong and was overcome with grief; in an interview with China Newsweek he lamented that Beijing, with so long and deep a history and cultural lineage, had not made good use of it and had come to be called a second-hand Hong Kong, and asked how it could have come to this.⁠[20]

In March 2009 he attended the forum marking the fifteenth anniversary of Friends of Nature, his last public appearance, at which he appeared ill.⁠[17]

Liang Congjie died in Beijing at about 4 p.m. on October 28, 2010. The Wilson Center, China Development Brief, The New York Times and the Guangming Daily give his age as 78; the Liaoning Daily and China Reading Weekly articles give 79. The Guangming Daily, drawing on the obituary notice of Friends of Nature, writes that he died of internal organ failure; the Wilson Center writes that he died of an undisclosed illness. Friends of Nature announced his death on its website.⁠[5][4][17][12][13][2]

The Guangming Daily obituary writes that the homepage of the Friends of Nature website used his favourite photograph, a candid shot taken at work in which he turns sideways and looks back laughing, and that he had asked his devoted wife, Fang Jing, to use this photograph after his death.⁠[13]

The scholar Guobin Yang writes that obituaries appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic and other major English-language publications, and that the web portal Sina.com dedicated a special section of its site to him.⁠[14]

Friends of Nature said that his family, hoping to follow his austere nature, planned the simplest possible funeral; the Liaoning Daily article writes that, in keeping with his and his family’s wishes, the funeral arrangements were to be low-key, plain and simple. A simple and solemn farewell ceremony was held on the morning of November 2, 2010 in the farewell hall of Beijing Shijitan Hospital; the obituary notice declined wreaths and flower baskets and asked those attending to come by public transport if possible, and his wife, Fang Jing, and their children stood to one side. On December 5 Friends of Nature held a memorial service attended by more than 300 colleagues and friends.⁠[12][5][17][13][3]

His father was Liang Sicheng, his mother Lin Huiyin, his elder sister Liang Zaibing and his grandfather Liang Qichao. The New York Times report calls him the third generation of activists in a family known throughout China for its reformist bent. The same report writes that his grandfather Liang Qichao was exiled to Japan for 14 years in 1898 after proposing to the Guangxu Emperor that China become a constitutional monarchy, and that his father, Liang Sicheng, a renowned architect, began an unsuccessful campaign to save Beijing’s ancient city walls, since replaced by a freeway.⁠[12][9]

The 2016 Beijing Youth Daily article writes that Liang Congjie once joked at his own expense that three generations of his family had all been failed heroes, defeated in battle after battle and fighting on after every defeat.⁠[7]

His wife was Fang Jing. In his Ramon Magsaysay Award acceptance speech of 2000 he also spoke of his wife and of all the devoted and hard-working members of Friends of Nature. China Development Brief writes that at home he recycled water and that when he ate out he took his own chopsticks and spoon.⁠[13][6][17]

Ron Gluckman wrote in Asiaweek in August 2000 that Liang had met U.S. President Bill ClintonBill ClintonBill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician and lawyer, a Democrat who served as attorney general and governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.Open the full entry and British Prime Minister Tony BlairTony BlairTony Blair is a British politician who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007 and Labour leader from 1994 to 2007. His government pursued devolution, a national minimum wage and the Northern Ireland peace process, while its Iraq War decisions drew sustained scrutiny. After leaving office, he worked in Middle East diplomacy and policy advisory services, founding the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where he is executive chairman. He became an advisor to the Skydance board in October 2026.Open the full entry, and that he had also been outspoken on the controversial Three Gorges Dam and on industrial pollution throughout the country.⁠[19]

In May 1991 the China Architecture and Building Press in Beijing published a bilingual Chinese–English edition of A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, catalogued as written by Liang Sicheng, edited by Wilma Fairbank and translated by Liang Congjie; in January 2001 the Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House in Tianjin published another bilingual edition, also translated by him.⁠[21][22]

The China Reading Weekly article of 2010 writes that his writings include Non-Overlapping Circles, that his translations include selections from Diderot’s Encyclopédie and A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, and that his honours included the Earth Award, the Giant Panda Award, the title of Outstanding Contributor to Environmental Protection and the Green China Annual Figure award. He also wrote a memoir of his mother, Fleeting April in the Human World: Remembering My Mother Lin Huiyin.⁠[2][11]

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s biography writes that his famous lineage gave him a certain useful celebrity. The Wilson Center calls him a pioneer of the civil environmental movement in China. The scholar Guobin Yang describes him as a professor of history and the founder of China’s first environmental NGO, Friends of Nature.⁠[6][4][14]

His friend and fellow environmentalist Ma Jun said that “His relationship with the government was one of being constructively critical” and that “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,” adding that Liang “actually incubated the first generation of environmentalists in China.”⁠[12]

Friends of Nature: Official website: https://fon.org.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]