China discovers its inner tree-hugger Chinese children spend less time playing outdoors than any kids on earth - and everyone from their parents to their political leaders is starting to get worried about it. According to a recent survey of the children of 14 nations by Gymboree, a US company that teaches children how to play, and gets paid for it, Chinese kids under six spend less than an hour outdoors every day, only a quarter of the global average. Spending time in the great outdoors is, apparently, a luxury that most Chinese parents think their children can ill-afford (along with sleeping; China also places third to last in the tiny tot sleep rankings). Notebook But these days, nature is a lot more popular in China than it used to be. Some of the same middle class parents who keep their kids inside studying when they could be outside chasing fireflies have turned out in their tens of thousands to protest when chemical factories threaten the environment in Xiamen, Dalian and, last week, in Ningbo. Indeed, as China's political leaders meet in Beijing tomorrow for the most important Communist party congress in recent memory, the political ramifications of this new fondness for nature will be high on their agenda. Many of this year's biggest street protests have been not-in-my-backyard environmental revolts. Beijing wants to make sure the Nimbies stay on message (and do not stray into broader politics). So China's middle class is finally discovering its inner tree-hugger. But it may take the children of China a while to catch up. Zeng Lan realised that when she took her small son on an outing to the Shanghai Botanical Garden organised by Friends of Nature, a local charity that is working hard to overcome what is sometimes known in China as "nature deficit disorder" (Sir David Attenborough seems to think British children have a touch of it, too). "At first he kept complaining that everything was dirty," she says. He thought it wasn't clean because it wasn't a shopping mall. And when it got dark, he was scared because in a shopping mall, it's always daytime. By the end of the outing, her son was getting down with the insects - just like little boys everywhere, though he remains none too keen on the unclean. According to a McKinsey survey, China's children may soon be seeing less of the inside of shopping malls anyway. The proportion of Chinese consumers who identify "retail-tainment" as a favourite pastime has fallen from more than half a few years ago to about 40 per cent now, and will be less than a third by 2020. That leaves a lot more time for fireflies. Shanghai resident Chen Hong says she and her 12-year-old son Jack Xie normally spend Sunday mornings reading ancient Chinese poetry. That is the closest Jack usually gets to nature on a Sunday morning: the mountains, streams and forests of traditional Chinese poetry. One recent weekend, however, she and Jack went instead to nearby Chongming island, to the Dongtan wetland nature reserve, on another Friends of Nature outing for kids with concrete overload. Jack, like normal tweenagers everywhere, had zero inherent interest in a spot of tree hugging. And to make matters worse, it was his 12th birthday, a day he would have preferred to spend at the karaoke bar. Instead he found himself rousted from bed before sunrise to watch a pre-dawn avian opera performed by the egrets and grebes, the sandpipers and kingfishers of the Dontan salt marsh. His verdict on the outing? Anything is better than doing homework. The weekend was not quite free of the dreaded H-word even so: Jack had to work until 11pm on Friday night to sneak away for a weekend with the birds. And on Saturday night, when the rest of us went out with a flashlight scouting out copulating crickets, silkworms munching mulberry leaves and frogs that swell up alarmingly to help them croak louder, Jack stayed back at the hotel swotting. Still, he was there on Sunday morning at 6am, the first to spot the white wagtail - a bird that he learnt to recognise, ironically, by reading an article in which Lu Xun, the famous modern Chinese writer, complains that too much schoolwork inhibited his own enjoyment of nature. Jack soon had nature overload so he spent the rest of the morning chuckling over a comic book or ostentatiously checking his watch. When he grows up, however, he might at least remember that there is more to life than shopping malls - and that it gets dark at night outside the Louis Vuitton store.