Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old who led school strikes and spurred a new wave of climate debate, has finally broken through on Chinese social media.<\/p>\n
Her four-minute speech at the September UN climate summit in New York, along with video of her glaring at President Trump, were widely shared in China. Internet users started to ask: \u201cWho is she, and what does she want?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fridays for the Future school strike movement she leads began in August 2018, with her solo protest outside the Swedish parliament. Now it involves 150 countries, and in one week last month an estimated 6 million people took to the streets<\/a> to call for action on climate change. This March, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize<\/a>. It\u2019s fair to say this new climate movement is led by the young.<\/p>\n But despite this global trend, and the fact that China is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries<\/a>, China\u2019s youth seems to be remaining silent. Is this because they are not used to confrontational tactics? Are they unconcerned by climate change? If so, why?<\/p>\n No survey has asked this specific question, but it\u2019s reasonable to say climate isn\u2019t one of the issues university students care most about. In February this year, a survey by Youth.cn found<\/a> their top concerns to be education (79.8%) and employment (77.1%), followed by housing, healthcare and entrepreneurship. The environment was sixth of the nine topics. Climate change wasn\u2019t even specified.<\/p>\nWhat do young Chinese people think about the climate emergency?<\/h2>\n