When a Billion Chinese Jump (49 page)

“In the space of just two or three years, farming on the Sanjiang Plain has become profitable for the first time in more than fifty years,” said Ma. “Wetland conservation cannot compete.” The math is simple. The value of wetland rises more than thirtyfold once it is converted into farmland.

Yet Heilongjiang’s best soil is being degraded. The province once boasted the most carbon-rich earth in China. The black soil was so valuable that it was protected. Under provincial regulations, townships were not supposed to build factories unless they first removed the loam and laid it down elsewhere. But this rule was usually ignored. The topsoil has thinned and paled as a result of overcultivation and excess use of fertilizer.
In some areas in the southwest of the province, the land is suffering the same fate as much of Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia and turning into desert. Local journalists told me this was now a bigger problem for the province than water pollution.

More of Sanjiang’s wetlands will be converted in the future to compensate for the loss of topsoil and to ensure the nation’s farmland stays above the 120-million-hectare baseline that the government set for food supply stability.
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It is a matter of national security. As the state media has pointed out, the Three Rivers area provides enough food for three cities—Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin—as well as the entire People’s Liberation Army. Madame Qian Zhengying, the former water minister, told me she believed this had large potential to be expanded further in the future. Against such powerful forces, conservationists like Ma can only hope to limit the damage.
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I left Heilongjiang unconvinced that the world could solve its environmental problems by being “China for a Day.” Strong government is important. Many of the politburo’s declared measures are ambitious and commendable. But they are not enough. Implementation is dire. More nature reserves are being established, more animals are being bred in captivity, and more trees are being planted, but wetlands, forests, topsoil, and wildlife are declining more precipitously than ever.

It is not a question of democracy or dictatorship, but of demographics and culture. As long as there are more people demanding more food and bigger buildings, the pressure to clear more wetlands and forest will grow. Despite its dictatorial reputation, the Chinese government seems even less able to prevent an environmental meltdown than leaders in democratic nations because it is more addicted to growth. When it comes to protecting the environment, the authority of the authoritarian state looks alarmingly shaky.

I had looked at top-down, supply-side, scientific solutions and found them wanting. It was time to consider the grassroots, demand-side, cultural alternatives. And where better to view them than the massive, sparsely populated northern region where more and more of China’s problems were being dumped.

To Xanadu

The more I engaged in environmental protection, the more I
understood the importance of democracy and the rule of law.
—Pan Yue, deputy environment minister, “Thoughts on Environmental Issues”

The driver was hurtling us toward Inner Mongolia at a reckless speed. His handling was good and he was familiar with the roads, but he could not possibly have known what was coming in the other direction as he overtook slow trucks on rising, winding bends through the outer dregs of the Loess Plateau. His only precaution was to keep his hand on the horn almost as often as his foot was on the accelerator. “I’m coming through. Get out of the way!” the horn blared. One accident was averted at the last moment by a sudden spurt of the accelerator and a yank of the wheel, another by sharp braking and indignant honking.

I was initially fatalistic. But after the first near miss, I became worried enough to ask him to slow down, which he did for a couple of minutes, then roared back to video-game speed, talking away the whole time about his side businesses in a strong local accent. For him, time was obviously money. Either that or he wanted to make me pay for haggling down the fare. I took some comfort in the landscape, which was swiftly shifting from winding loess slopes to flat gravel desert. The scenery was getting uglier, but at least it was easier to see what was coming on the road ahead.

Inner Mongolia announced itself with a smoke-belching power plant, piles of coal on the roadside, and a gust of sand-filled wind. I swapped
vehicles at the first opportunity and was soon on a minor road into the Hetao grasslands, relieved to be progressing at a less suicidal speed, with a quiet driver inside the car and empty open plains outside.

I had been looking forward to this trip for some time. A year earlier in Mongolia, the country to the north, I had been awestruck by the beauty of empty space, high, translucent blue skies, and endless green steppe that you could drive or gallop across for hours without seeing a single fence or building. Outside the cities, the only signs of habitation were the white
ger
tents of the nomadic herders who scratched a living on the grasslands.

Few Han care to acknowledge the enormous influence of Mongols on China’s history. Much of the country’s current territory, wealth, and status are owed to Genghis Khan and his successors. In the thirteenth century, this Mongol led a small army of nomad warriors across Eurasia, bringing almost the entire continent under their thrall and smoothing the way to increased trade between Europe and Asia along the Silk Road. His name has since become a byword for brutality, but he was also a scholar, poet, and philosopher who was sufficiently broad-minded to challenge his own shamanistic upbringing by inviting Christian, Muslim, and other scholars to explain their beliefs.
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Genghis Khan was also aware of the need to conserve his home environment. Even while pillaging central Asia, he introduced laws to protect the grasslands of Mongolia. Hunting was permitted only in winter. Burning or excavating the grasslands without permission was punishable by death. Under his rule, the Mongols were said to conserve wildlife better than human life.
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Such beliefs lasted far longer than the nomad warrior. As in Tibet, Mongolians are Buddhists who revere nature, which is a major reason their economy has been slow to develop and their environment has until recently been among the least spoiled in Asia.

But Inner Mongolia, the Chinese region that spans most of the country’s northern border, was very different. Modernity and Han influence were evident in the factories and white-tiled buildings. Large areas of grassland, the traditional home of nomadic Mongol culture, had been converted to agriculture or fallen victim to the desert. Under low gray skies, the landscape looked drained of color.

This was the last leg of my journey across China. What had started with a search for a mythical natural paradise in the southern mountains of Yunnan was finishing with an all-too-real man-made crisis in the flat
northern grasslands. This was where the environmental buck stopped. Two hundred years of carbon-driven, capital-financed development had been deferred and outsourced to places like this. The West had pushed its waste and dirty industry on to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They, in turn, had dumped the same problems on China’s coastal provinces. From there, the ecological stress was transferred to remote inland areas. At each stage, the impact grew bigger. By the time the world’s environmental trauma reached Inner Mongolia, it had swollen to staggering proportions.

Polluting factories that cannot satisfy the increasingly stringent environmental regulations of the newly rich coastal regions have found a welcome home in Inner Mongolia, where itinerant local party bosses are anxious to make their mark before moving on to new posts. Clusters of heavy industry have spread up from Shanxi, Ningxia, and Gansu, clogging the U-bend of the Yellow River, which is here so contaminated the water is consistently ranked as unhealthy even to touch.

It is also the new center of fossil-fuel production, taking over from Shanxi’s depleted mines even though the quality of coal in Inner Mongolia is poorer and the region has even less water for cleaning and processing the fuel. Engineers have also moved in to exploit the biggest natural gas field in China. Huge wind farms are rising up on the pastures. The land of the nomads is rapidly transforming into a hub of heavy industry. Thanks to these trends and its low population density, Inner Mongolia now has the highest per capita carbon emissions in China.
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Most dramatic has been the change in the land itself. Desperate to feed a growing population, the Chinese government tried to cultivate the grasslands. As in Xinjiang, it was a disaster for the environment. Nomads were driven off the plains; settlers moved in and applied the same inappropriate irrigation techniques.
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The fragile grassland ecosystem collapsed, lakes dried up, and wide areas turned to desert. Inner Mongolia became the main source of the dust and salt-alkaline storms that plague northeast Asia every spring. Mixed with pollution from the growing number of heavy industries in northern China, the particles create photochemical smogs in Korea, Japan, and toxic winds that blow across the Pacific to the west coast of the United States, adding the problem of “global dimming” to that of global warming.
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In places the plains had surrendered to sandy dunes. Elsewhere, defensible areas were bolstered with lines of trees and shrubs. Mostly, though,
the surface was low grass, gravel, or scrub, hence the generic name
gobi,
which means “stony desert” in Mongolian.
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Despite fears of sand encroachment on cities and farms, the gravel was more mobile and often more of a threat to habitation.
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Inappropriate human activity often paved its way. As I had seen in Shandong, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Heilongjiang, overgrazing, overfarming, overpopulation, and misuse of water resources had taken their toll.

If tended well or left completely alone, grass will protect the soil. But beyond a certain point, overused grassland degrades irreparably, and soil becomes as much a nonrenewable resource as oil.
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Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute considers this one of the greatest environmental problems facing the world, far bigger than the dust bowls that devastated the wheat production of the United States in the 1930s. He fears that China faces a calamitous loss of arable land in Inner Mongolia and other northern regions that will lead, at best, to rising global food prices and tensions and, at worst, famine, instability, and war.
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This is not only a problem for food security. The world’s peaty grasslands contain huge amounts of greenhouse gas. If they deteriorate and these gases are released, the effect on the climate could be catastrophic.

In 2002, the State Council warned that 90 percent of China’s usable natural grassland had suffered some level of degradation.
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A huge greening campaign was set in motion in an attempt to repair the damage. Depending on the area, it combined elements of the “Great Green Wall” tree planting I had seen in Heilongjiang, the “grants for green” incentives for farmers to cease cultivation I had admired in Gansu, and the mass resettlement of nomads I had witnessed on the Tibetan Plateau. But government money and mass mobilizations tend to deal with the consequences rather than the usual cause: excessive economic exploitation of areas ill-fitted to agriculture and industry. This was recognized more clearly at the grass roots, where the budding NGO movement started to advocate a different approach.

Among those most familiar with Inner Mongolia was Chen Jiqun, who worked with communities of former nomads who had been resettled into concrete houses on the steppe. Having spent more than thirty years in the area, he told me the problem of land degradation was ultimately one of
culture.
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“China’s production system has totally destroyed the northern grasslands and lifestyle. The Han just don’t understand the steppe. We should stop sending people into the wilderness. We are not just destroying our own ecology, we are damaging others.”

An artist by training, Chen moved to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. The situation for students who “went down to the countryside” here was different from those who went to Heilongjiang or Xinjiang. In Inner Mongolia the political violence was bloodier while the war against nature was relatively subdued, at least in terms of land reclamation.
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Between purges and factional fighting, Chen spent long enough among herders to develop a lasting respect for their understanding of the grasslands.

He believed modern efforts to resettle them were misguided. By taking the nomads off the prairies both here and in Tibet, the government aimed to ease overgrazing. But instead of moving seasonally and relatively lightly across the land, the herders’ flocks were now penned in smaller, fixed areas that they quickly chewed into dust. The grass could not recover, so the flocks moved on to destroy other areas.

Alarmed about the impact on milk, beef, mutton, and cashmere, scientists from Beijing were asked to restore the productivity of the grassland. Among their solutions was to douse the prairie with rodenticide in the mistaken belief that the slaughter of pika, rabbits, and rats would leave more nutrients for the cows and sheep. But the rodents were vital to the ecosystem. By burrowing into the earth they made the grassland moister and healthier.
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When they disappeared, so did many other animals, such as snakes and birds, higher up the food chain. The rodent-control officials belatedly learned that biodiversity was not a luxury but a vital element to sustainable productivity.
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Many grassland plant species were in decline.
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More land was being given over to monocultures of wheat, corn, and grain, but they did not naturally produce more food without massive inputs of fertilizer and diverted water.
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Nor were cows and sheep fattening up as they once did.
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Such problems were sometimes blamed on climate change, but it was clearly not the only reason. Just across the border in Mongolia there had long been far better protection of biodiversity of both plants and animals (though in recent years, it too was suffering as a result of the demand from China and other countries for land, minerals, and ingredients for traditional medicine).