When a Billion Chinese Jump (48 page)

Previous visitors to the border told me the densely populated Chinese side of the river was bare of trees and birds, while the sparsely habited Russian banks were covered in thick forests full of birds’ nests. I could not see such a big difference. But local Chinese fishermen shamelessly used this ecological disparity as a selling point. “Buy my fish,” said one seller. “They are good. The river is clean. Look over there. That is Russia. No pollution.”

But China’s environmental problems are spilling over the border.
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Since the introduction of domestic logging controls in 1998, Chinese demand has destroyed more forest than ever. The only difference is that the trees are being felled—usually illegally—outside its borders, in Siberia.
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From nothing, the timber trade across this border has suddenly become the most important on the planet.

Since 1998, the volume of wood entering China has risen ninefold, pushing the country up from seventh to second among the world’s forestry importers. Already tops for industrial roundwood and tropical logs, China is on course to overtake the United States as the number-one timber importer in all categories.
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Following a pattern set in the West, but on a bigger scale with fewer self-constraints, China is snapping up more wood overseas even as it introduces domestic controls. This has accelerated illegal deforestation in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. But the biggest supplier by far is Russia, which provides 60 percent of the logs entering China.
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Much of it is used on construction. As buildings go up in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, the vast taiga boreal forests of eastern Russia are being flattened.
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Siberia is suffering the same fate as China’s Great Northern Wilderness. At the harvesting rates of the early twenty-first century, the Russian Far East is on course to be logged out within twenty years.
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Day and night, long trains and convoys of trucks bring Siberian logs to China through gateways in Suifenhe, in Heilongjiang, and Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia. Wood is the main freight on the Trans-Mongolian Railway. In China, the imports are used for everything from doorframes to concert halls. When the monks at Wutaishan rebuilt their temple to bolster their bid for UN World Heritage status, they used Russian redwood because no domestic supplies were available.
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Wen Bo of Pacific Environment, an NGO which operates on both
sides of the border, told me that China has put huge ecological pressure on Russia. One side effect of timber smuggling, he said, was an illegal trade in wildlife. Tiger bone and skin, musk deer, ginseng, and even bears were sometimes concealed under the logs. He predicted the timber trade would diminish simply because there was not much top-quality forest left to cut, even in Siberia. The two countries had repeatedly pledged cooperation to tackle the problems, but governance was even less joined up across borders and languages. There was very little incentive for China’s bureaucrats and customs officials to act. The country’s economic growth was dependent on deforestation in other countries. There were even tax incentives for cross-border traders.
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Given these trends, even the toothpicks might one day be made with Russian wood. Import rules and logging bans in China had completely failed to halt the depletion of the world’s forests.

I left in the morning for the Shuilian wetland reserve to see if the government’s efforts to protect nature were more effective in a concentrated area. The first impression was bleak. The white flatland stretched off to a distant horizon. Reeds pressed through the frozen earth only to quiver in the icy wind. Hundreds of small birds flocked back and forth from telephone wires to tree branches. They were the biggest nonhuman population I had seen in a week. But the landscape felt more suburban than wild. Advertising hoardings, pylons, and farmhouses shared the outer fringe of this sanctuary.

That was the norm. Throw a stick in Heilongjiang and there was a one-in-seven chance it would fall in an area designated as a nature reserve, though much of this land was actually used for farms, yards, or roads.

Judged purely by statistics, the government is doing all the right things. China has more protected reserves covering a far wider area than any other country. A fifth were wetlands spread across an area roughly the same size as England.
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In theory, they offer wildlife the full protection of the state.
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But, in practice, definitions of reserves are vague and penalties for violations so low that rules are easily circumvented by developers. Local governments are often hostile to reserves because they have to pay a share of the running costs while forfeiting the tax revenue that would come from turning
over the land to farms or factories. As a result, most reserves are under-resourced and understaffed, often with people who care little about the environment.

Even the better-maintained wetlands are threatened by pesticides and herbicides and drainage for farmland. A 2005 UNESCO field survey at Lake Xinkai, the biggest lake in northeast China, found that the number of species had declined by 10 percent and wetland by a third. At Zha-long, another of the region’s most important reserves, poachers continue to prey on endangered species such as the red-crowned crane. The story was similar across the country. While I was in Heilongjiang, the domestic media reported the slaughter of protected swans in Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province, one of the world’s most important wintering wetlands for migratory birds. The poachers were on a killing spree to satisfy the demand for exotic dishes ahead of the spring festival banquet season.
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Government protection is no match for seasonal market forces.

I asked one of China’s leading conservationists why reserves were so ineffective. Xie Yan, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, had been trying to persuade policymakers and the public to boost protection for more than a decade. She said the problem was that the top-down system of establishing reserves floundered on a weak cultural and financial base.

“It is good that China has established so many reserves, but the capacity is very low. The employees’ awareness about conservation is very low. They just want a job. They don’t love wildlife,” she said.

With the exception of Tibet and a few other places where Buddhism was strong, she felt reserve managers had little passion for their work. In many cases they were poorly educated, badly trained, and underpaid. Jobs were often secured through family connections in the party or government, which allowed the staff either to do nothing in terms of patrols or, in the worst cases, to poach themselves to supplement their incomes. Access to exotic dishes and valuable ingredients for traditional medicines became a perk of the position. Xie had visited reserves where the welcoming banquet included dishes made from protected local species.

“If I had power, I would make an order that all government officials should not eat endangered species. They are the biggest consumers. Whenever they have an official banquet, they eat rare animals,” she sighed.
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Outside of wartime, leaders in all political systems struggle to rein back
demand. Efforts to trim excess often prove temporary, ineffective, or politically suicidal. Supporters of slower growth or more concern for the environment are often marginalized or defeated. As noted in earlier chapters, this was true two thousand years ago of Liu An, the Taoist naturalist who is thought to have compiled the Book of the Prince of Huainan. Modern Chinese history contains similar examples.
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The most prominent was Liu Shaoqi, the former president of China who was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Among his supposed crimes was
paxingzhuyi
or “reptilianism,” a reference to his cautious, gradualist approach to development. While Mao demanded grand plans and immediate results, Liu held up a project to dam Dianchi Lake, and in 1961, expressed alarm at the scale of logging in Heilongjiang, saying, “How can we face future generations if we clear-cut all these wonderful Korean pines? We should leave some trees for them.”
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Those words sound inspired today. But future generations never had a chance to thank Liu. In 1968, he was condemned as “China’s number one Capitalist Roader” and died in prison a year later.

That murderous age is over, but for the environment the situation has become worse as the power of consumers has grown. After Mao, each successive generation of leaders had less authority than their predecessors. Hu and Wen do not rule by charisma and fear, but by pulling together coalitions within the politburo. Local governments have more autonomy than ever. Industries operate with minimal oversight. The media, the courts, and the electorate are too weak to hold them to account.

As a result, while there is no Mao at the pinnacle of politics in China today, there are hundreds or thousands of little Maos in local government and industry, each with a personal fiefdom, each trying to build an empire, and each desperate to make their mark with a big project. They appreciate the central government’s attempt to restrain them as much as Mao liked being lectured by foreign powers. China’s political system now exhibits the worst elements of dictatorship and democracy: power lies neither at the top nor the bottom, but within a middle class of developers, polluters, and local officials who are difficult to regulate, monitor, and challenge.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection is too weak to act as a counterbalance. Even after securing full voting status in the cabinet it lacked the clout and resources of other government bodies.
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Control over 11,000 lower-level environmental bureaus is patchy at best and in many cases
nonexistent.
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Only a tenth of China’s environmental laws are enforced, according to one legal expert.
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Only half the funds dedicated to environmental protection are actually spent on legitimate projects.
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Data that might strengthen the ministry’s authority are withheld.
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Most conservation programs are not under its control. Instead, reserves are usually run by the State Forestry Administration, which favors rare-animal breeding farms, and by local authorities, which often want to use the land for business.

Gradually Pan Yue, the ministry’s most visible driving force and one of its main theorists,
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has been sidelined.
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In 2006, the “green GDP” programs he established were quietly shelved. A year later, he told friends he had to lie low for a while after being pointedly passed over for promotion during the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress. In 2008, he was stripped of both his powers to enforce environmental assessment impact regulations and his role as a ministry spokesman.
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The pollution disclosure laws he initiated are now ignored by most local governments.
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There are other advocates of change. China’s leaders have long been aware of the dangers of waste, inefficiency, and environmental degradation. Government officials constantly talk about policy turning points and new directions. In the 1990s, Premier Zhu Rongji tried to make environmental protection more of a priority.
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His successor, Wen Jiabao, went considerably further and is widely credited among environmental activists for pushing a green agenda, but he lacks a strong power base compared with other politburo members. His place is likely to be taken by Li Keqiang, who is being handed many of the portfolios relating to the environment and climate change. But authority is diffused. Unable to claim either an imperial mandate from heaven above or a popular mandate from the people below, China’s leaders often follow rather than guide development. Laudable laws and praiseworthy policies are not enough. If conservation is to stand any chance of working in China, the government needs to be either a lot more dictatorial or a lot more democratic or, more realistically, needs to secure the support of the market, the media, and a nascent civil society centered around NGOs and the Internet. Without them, the authorities have the power to expand but not the power to conserve. Waste and environmental destruction are inevitable.
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The emphasis on efficiency of “Scientific
Development” reads just like any other propaganda slogan painted on a village wall: it highlights the fact that reality is the complete opposite.

Even Ma Zhong, the pioneer of Heilongjiang’s first wetland nature reserve, is fighting a losing battle.
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Despite international and central government support, his efforts to make the Sanjiang area an example of conservation management failed to win widespread support among locals who preferred to put their land to greater economic use. Demand for food and land is still growing. As farming becomes increasingly profitable, people move in and the government’s commitment to the environment is compromised yet further. The population of the three provinces that once encompassed the Great Northern Wilderness is now well above 100 million. The region is a bastion of the state’s food security policy. Wetlands and wildlife don’t really stand a chance.
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“This is the most difficult time to be a conservationist,” Ma said sadly. “Few people agree with me. Although it’s nice in principle, when people are given the choice of food on the table or the protection of birds, they all choose food. That is understandable.”

New cold-resistant hybrids, modern technology, and global warming had turned the Sanjiang area into the rice capital of China. The marshes that Ma helped to convert into dry land for farming during the Cultural Revolution were being reflooded and turned into rice paddies. Nature reserve managers approved the massive expansion of the cultivated land on the dubious grounds that paddy fields are a form of wetland.
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Far from blocking this expansion into what little was left of the wilderness, the government has encouraged land conversion with tax incentives and price subsidies.
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Heilongjiang has become the biggest grain producer in China, with a surplus so great that much of it is turned into ethanol.
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