I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Beijing with a small group of China's leading environmental activists. It was early 2006. The hotel's easy chairs were slightly too widely spaced for comfort in a conversation that was conducted in low voices, occasionally dropping to near whispers.

China's civic environmental movement was still young. The men and women in that small group had been seasoned in the early resistance to China's powerful dam builders who were moving westward to dam the still unspoiled rivers of Yunnan and Sichuan. Many of these early leaders were journalists who organised group visits to dam sites and used their reach in the media to challenge big hydro interests and to stimulate public resistance, in the hope of persuading the government to think again.

This kind of activism was new, and nobody really knew where the government's limits of tolerance were. That day, they were worried. There had been signs that the government line was hardening in threats against several of the activists, who were aware that they could expect little in the way of official protection. What none of them knew was whether this was the end of a season of tolerance or only a temporary setback.

The Chinese government, they explained, had one eye on the environmental resistance that was challenging important economic interests inside the country, and another on the recent wave of 'colour Revolutions' beyond its borders. The Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2004 had ended Eduard Shevardnadze's regime, the Orange Revolution in 2004 had helped Viktor Yushchenko's opposition to power in Ukraine; the next year brought Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution on to the streets after a disputed election.

While none of these was an environmental protest, many authoritarian governments believed they saw the hand of foreign NGOs in this series of civic protests. Western NGOs were also supporting China's nascent environmentalism. It was enough for China's Communist Party to conclude that things risked going too far. My guests that day were right to be anxious: to get in the way of a big economic project was one thing; to be labelled a movement of disguised subversion was trouble of a different order.

The government's 2006 report on the state of China's environment, published the next year, featured a photograph of President Hu Jintao planting a tree in an official re-forestation drive. The image was reminiscent of a notorious photograph of Mao Zedong posing among the labourers who were building a reservoir in the valley of the Ming Tombs near Beijing during China's disastrous Great Leap Forward. It was one of many failed engineering works that the government promised would solve China's deepening water crisis. A few years later, the reservoir was abandoned.

Hu Jintao's symbolic tree might have had a better fate, but Beijing's Forestry University recently concluded that 85 per cent of trees planted in these much-publicised re-forestation campaigns subsequently die. To say so in 2006 was to risk official retaliation: such remedial campaigns were gestures towards alleviating a profound environmental crisis. They were not intended to divert the country from the contradictory but more important task of rapid development. China could, in the official view, develop first, clean up later.

Not everybody agreed. A vice-minister of the environment, Pan Yue, had put the reality of China's environmental condition in stark terms in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel: 'Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 per cent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs for health. Then there's the human suffering: In Beijing alone, 70 to 80 per cent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment. Lung cancer has emerged as the No. 1 cause of death,' he said.

The Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had put it slightly less bluntly in a conference speech that year, stressing that China needed to change its single focus on economic growth to 'equal attention on both environmental protection and economic development,' to ensure real-time environmental protection and to shift from relying only on administrative measures to an 'integrated approach of legal, economic, technical and necessary administrative measures'. That this was regarded as a 'guiding, strategic and historic transformation' was one indicator of how big the resistance to a sustainable approach would be.

The group in the hotel lobby all survived the chill of government disapproval that year and went on to become leaders of an increasingly mature activism. The 11th Five Year Plan came and went, its environmental targets of pollution control and energy efficiency - to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 per cent and total emissions of major pollutants by 10 per cent by 2010 - missed, but not by much. Come its successor, last year's 12th Five Year Plan, the language was bolder and the vision more strategic. Six years on, the ideas that Pan Yue had floated so provocatively have moved to the mainstream.

The Environmental Protection Agency has become a fully fledged ministry, albeit still so weak and understaffed that is has little prospect of effective action unless supported by bigger hitters in government. Getting that support could be easier under the 12th Five Year Plan: the plan is both a strategic bid to dominate the advanced clean technologies that China recognises as the technologies of the future, and a recognition that the road back from the environmental crisis that China's industrialisation has created will require an important shift in priorities.

As any visitor to China can attest, there is a long way to go to. Visible air and water pollution are the most obvious problems; invisible pollution - 20 per cent of China's farmland, for instance, is contaminated with heavy metals - is the most dangerous. An equally intractable threat to China's continuing prosperity is the country's deepening water crisis, one that a series of ever more costly engineering projects has failed to resolve.

In the six years since that hotel lobby discussion, China's civil society activism has taken off in many directions, from citizen-testing of air pollution, to organised resistance to the siting of chemical plants and demands for transparency of data that have obliged the authorities to make statistics on major pollutants publicly available. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, whose founder Ma Jun has just won the Goldman Prize for protecting the environment, has pioneered the use of public data to identify persistent polluters in multinational supply chains and assist big companies to clean up.

A clean China is a long way off, but the government has recognised that pollution imposes real and growing costs on the economy, estimated by the World Bank in 2007 at US$100 billion annually, or 5.8 per cent of China's GDP. They have also acknowledged, as Pan Yue warned, that pollution is the source of a series of public health emergencies, most notoriously in clusters of cancer villages, and that, unabated, it will continue to be the focus of mounting public discontent.

To translate that into effective action against powerful economic and industrial interests remains a challenge that is unlikely to be met without other policies that the government is reluctant to implement.

Effective legal sanctions against polluters, a freer rein for civil society activism and a loosening of press censorship would undoubtedly help. There is little sign as yet of government enthusiasm for such measures, but there is at least a clear central government commitment to get China on to a more sustainable development path.

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