‘GODDESS’ TO THE RESCUE
Former venture capitalist turned green tech advocate Peggy Liu aims to help China, one of the world’s biggest polluters, go green.
She has been hailed as a “Green Goddess” in China in recognition of her leading role in environmental activism. The allusion to an otherworldliness about American-born Chinese Internet entrepreneur and clean energy advocate Peggy Liu is built upon the widespread impact she has had over the last decade.
Since founding the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE) in 2007, Ms Liu has, among her many achievements, helped introduce a smart electricity grid in the mainland, prompting an initial US$7.2-billion investment by the nation’s key electrical grid company. Her non-governmental organisation has also facilitated the training of more than 1,000 Chinese government officials in building sustainable cities and promoting greener lifestyles.
She attributes her drive and JUCCCE’s successes to her “superpower” — her ability and desire to connect people.
“Everybody has a way to be in service of humanity. My gift is to see very clearly. Where people see blockages or depressing statistics or … only obstacles, I see a system that can be better,” the JUCCCE chairperson tells The Business Times in Hong Kong, where she was attending The Economist Innovation Summit 2017 as a speaker.
“And what I can do very uniquely … is bringing people who want to work together to manifest this reality. I’m a convenor, I’m a connector, I’m a cultural bridge … the glue to manage disruption.”
Her fearlessness in leading the charge for causes she believes in comes largely from her upbringing, guided by her father, Leonard Liu Yingwu, himself a household name in the American and Chinese technology industries.
Dr Liu and his wife moved from mainland China to Taiwan, before making their way to the United States, where Ms Liu was born.
A Princeton graduate, Dr Liu spent years as a top executive with IBM, with a reputation for coming up with innovative solutions. Growing up, his daughter was exposed at an early age to the power of technology and creativity as she witnessed her father’s contributions to global computing developments, be it creating computing languages or managing groundbreaking software piracy cases.
“Whether it was the first IBM PC off the factory line … I got to play with those at home and learn programming basics back in the day ... so I was not afraid of computers or technology, and I saw how there are many large changes you can make based on one invention,” says Ms Liu.
“One of the biggest influences on my life is my dad. He’s basically trained me as a warrior to become a CEO at an early age. … What my dad taught me is to see the forest but also be able to plant the trees. … He was very focused on seeing the complex systems, having grand schemes, but also knowing how to execute.”
By about age 12, she knew she wanted to pursue further studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“I wasn’t afraid of applying to MIT, my very clear goal was to go to MIT, build robots,” she recalls. “My fascination was always with like, ‘Wow, what if you had AI (artificial intelligence) with robots?’ and ‘How much could you improve humanity in the world?’ That is still at the heart of everything that I do — how do you make an impact at the humanity level?”
Years later, Ms Liu was accepted into the school, and found herself right at home in classes that allowed her to tinker with machinery and develop her creativity.
“MIT is really a super super-intense place, they call it ‘drinking out of a firehose’; everything is easier after you graduate than at MIT,” she says. Her resume would appear to reflect that. After college, she worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, then as a product manager for Symantec and later with NetManage.
By 1996 she became a CEO at the age of 26, heading the e-commerce company Channel A, one of the earliest outfits of its kind in Silicon Valley that Ms Liu says “basically invented ways to do ‘impulse buys’”.
In 2004, she relocated to Shanghai — where her parents and brother now also live — to help her then-husband start a venture fund to invest in Chinese startups while also taking time off from her corporate ascent to be a new mother.
REDISCOVERING ROOTS
It was during this transition period of juggling parenting and rediscovering her Chinese roots that Ms Liu ended up founding JUCCCE in 2007 “by complete accident”, after helping MIT to organise a Sino-US green energy conference that connected top officials from both countries.
“I didn’t plan for this, it just fell into my lap,” she says. “And I said ‘Yes’. There was a need for an NGO supported by the governments but not handicapped by being a part of these governments.
“It was a calling, the universe is telling you to do something.”
Attempting to take on environmental issues in China, one of the world’s biggest polluters, entailed being innovative and managing disruption, which motherhood helped prepare her for, says Ms Liu.
“Women are innately suited for doing that because if you hear a baby cry, we immediately run to the baby, we hold it and try to feel what the problem is. ... You do that while trying to cook in the kitchen or trying to find time to pee, so talk about managing disruption,” she quips.
“The shadow side of innovation is disruption and change, and very few people like change. I love change, I thrive in change. ... So women, because of our innate ability to manage disruption, are the key to faster and faster adoption of innovation.”
With that in mind, she built an organisation where 90% of the members are “women who are bridges and communicators and the glue” holding various projects together.
In the last decade, JUCCCE has played a key role in significant green initiatives around China, run by a nimble group of about 10 staff and a vast nexus of interns and voluntary experts around the world.
“We are essentially micro-delegating to this humongous worldwide network of people who want to help China go green,” explains Ms Liu. “For example, we wanted to learn about London’s greening programmes, so we got the deputy mayor of London to come and talk about their climate action plan.
“There is unbelievable willingness because they know that if they can help China go green, that’s the biggest impact they have, period, because of size and scale, but also because China is going green faster than anybody else in the world.”
‘FOOD HEROES’
Beyond training Chinese government officials and helping to accelerate the adoption of an energy-efficient electrical Smart Grid, the organisation has also been involved in large-scale projects to replace millions of incandescent lightbulbs with fluorescent ones, reducing long-term energy consumption.
JUCCCE’s latest initiative is Food Heroes, a programme aiming to change dietary habits to reduce personal emissions and benefit the environment.
“If somebody can help China go green, those innovations can then go to Southeast Asia, they can go to Africa, they can go to other developing nations much faster than if they were invented in the US and stayed in the US,” says Ms Liu. “This is because China is building new cities all the time, a lot of sustainability things have to happen at a village level, at the neighbourhood level, at the city level, and America’s not doing that, Europe is not building new cities.
“So we get to experiment with how these innovations work very, very rapidly. … China takes one technology and says five cities are the pilot cities. If it goes well, then there will be 20 smart cities, then 400 smart cities. This is just how China works, very systematic, very businesslike. Whereas a country like America is so fragmented, and they don’t have land to experiment on for infrastructure-related things. In the US there’s infighting, they are competitive and there’s no national plan to go green, especially now.”
She adds that although JUCCCE does not work with the administration of US President Donald Trump — “It doesn’t make sense at all,” she says — her organisation is doing more work with private American companies or institutions and associations such as the American Nutrition Association.
For her efforts in catalysing the greening of China, Ms Liu has earned a long list of accolades, among them the title of Time magazine’s “Hero of the Environment” in 2008.
She was also the Hillary Laureate of 2010 for climate change leadership, and dubbed one of Forbes magazine’s “Women to Watch in Asia” that same year. In 2012, China Business News Weekly named her one of China’s top 50 innovative business leaders.
Ms Liu says that her work is founded on a single question: What is the greatest impact on creating and using energy in China? “You can catalyse societal change within three years or less if you figure out where the pressure points are,” she adds.
One such area with increasing relevance is food consumption, she says.
With Food Heroes, JUCCCE is trying to educate people, in particular children, on how food habits affect the environment and to promote diets that are healthier for the consumer and the planet.
Says Ms Liu: “The reason why this is so important is that food contributes to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions … so it’s the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing food waste and having a plant-rich diet and growing things in permaculture ways — that’s the solution.”
Citing statistics that highlight China’s burgeoning youth health problems — about one in five Chinese children today are overweight — she believes that the time is ripe to be pushing for change in food consumption.
“What I’ve realised is that talking about climate change, talking about ‘eco’, talking about going green, talking about saving plastics, reducing plastics, talking about saving the Earth — actually only 10% of people care about that, and out of that maybe 1% or 2% are actually doing something significant,” she says.
“It is difficult to get people to change their behaviour, but when you talk about healthy food, almost everybody cares about being healthy. Whether you are a parent in China and care about your kid being better (in school), or you’re a new mother and you care about your baby’s health, or you’re a pregnant mother and care about your own health, or you just love food ... everybody likes food, everybody wants to talk about food, so it’s actually a Trojan horse, a gateway to talk about all these potential issues of the world, and certainly climate change, without addressing them directly.”
To support the Food Heroes programme and its free classroom food curriculum, JUCCCE has shifted from non-profit grants to consulting and speaking engagements, social enterprises, and investing in product lines to sell for revenue.
These include educational toys and flashcards, as well as membership kits with games that can be bought by parents.
‘RIVER OF LIFE’
For Ms Liu, her life today is nothing like what she envisioned it to be in her earlier years, when she was perhaps more eager to replicate her father’s corporate accomplishments.
“When I was younger, I always thought there was this ladder that you climb … a very rigid way to success,” she says.
“You can actually fulfill your true potential if you view life as a river stream, like a delta. It’s not one river, it might branch off. You need to just listen to the river, you need to sit in it, float in it, and let it take you around the rocks, the obstacles … to really live your full potential, you need to listen and flow with the universe.
“I do believe there is, I’m not going to say a greater plan, but there’s a lot more at work to bring you to your goals if you flow rather than force.”
Business Times, Singapore
“If somebody can help China go green, those innovations can then go to Southeast Asia, they can go to Africa, they can go to other developing nations much faster than if they were invented in the US and stayed in the US”