When a Billion Chinese Jump (51 page)

There was a nationalist bent to his argument. “It is a matter of survival,”
said E. “The main aim of our center is to change the way people think. To educate people, to show them that protection of the environment is a life-or-death issue for humans … It is a matter of ethnic protection.”

A broader yet more pessimistic view was espoused by Tang Xiyang, a veteran of the green movement. Among the 300 or so people I interviewed for this book, Tang was one of very few Han to describe nature as a participant rather than a resource: “In China when people make policies, we don’t ask if nature will allow it or if nature agrees. We should. I have witnessed how China has cut down many forests. At each movement of Chinese history, the forests are the victims.”

He believed civilization was fundamentally bad for the environment and had had an increasingly adverse impact in recent centuries, not just in China but across the world: “Humans do not respect nature and history anymore. They think they can do anything they want. That is not the way to respect nature. Nature will take its revenge on mankind.”

Tang was an inspiration. I met many other brave, intelligent, and effective environmental campaigners, some of whom worked closely with the authorities such as Ma Jun, Sheri Liao, and Xie Yan, and others such as Dai Qing and Hu Jia who believed the system was the problem. They all made enormous contributions toward raising awareness of environmental issues. But Tang was the most intuitively persuasive, perhaps because he had traveled the world writing about the environment, while most of the others focused only on China. But his beliefs were as traditional as they come. Tang was fond of quoting lines from Zhuangzi:

The universe and I came into being together;
I and everything therein are one.

It is not, he said, that the ancient Taoist sages were smarter than people today, just that they lived closer to nature and understood it better. Since then, he felt, the distance has grown. “The problem is culture. We will never solve anything until we change the way we think.”

The search for a new ideal was a central theme of
Wolf Totem,
a bestselling novel about Han pioneers in the Mongolian grassland. The author, Jiang Rong, used his experience of life among the nomads during the Cultural Revolution as a parable for the ecological ignorance and political timidity of modern Han culture. It was one of the most influential Chinese
novels of the early twenty-first century, selling more than two million copies, translated into twenty-one languages, and winning more than a dozen awards, including the Man Asian prize, the regional equivalent of the Booker. Yet it is filled with cultural self-loathing.

Far from the image of a confident, modernizing China, Jiang paints a picture of a destructive and insecure race that has neither the liberties of the West nor the natural wisdom of the Mongolian nomads. The semi-autobiographical tale is based on his own experience as a Red Guard sent to East Ujimqin Banner in Xilin Gol, Inner Mongolia, in 1967. From getting lost on the grasslands and finding himself terrified and alone among a pack of wolves to tenderly raising a young wolf cub, the events in the book are based on his life.

The protagonist, Chen Zhen, is a Han Chinese who leaves Beijing in disgust at the Cultural Revolution. He is assigned a job as a shepherd and given a
ger
tent among a family of Mongolian herders. He quickly grows to respect their freedom, natural wisdom, and worship of the wolf totem. By comparison, Chen feels that he is as “gutless” as a sheep:

He was saddened to have been born into a line of farmers. Farmers had become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors, going back to the legendary Yellow Emperor.

Jiang draws on the contrast between the two cultures that were traditionally divided by the Great Wall: the agrarian Han in the southern plains and the nomadic Mongols on the northern steppe. In Inner Mongolia, the Han majority’s modern triumph is portrayed as a disaster. Development has devastated the habitat of the wolves and turned the grasslands into desert. There are few bleaker visions of the ecological peril created by modern China’s development.

It is a provocative work. The book’s emphasis on competition, survival, and slaughter went down well with military and business leaders, prompting overseas critics to label Jiang a fascist and a symbol of the rising nationalist sentiment in China. Others dismissed
Wolf Totem
as sentimental and romantic. The idealized portrayal of the nomads has much in common with the “noble savage” motif found in much Romantic literature in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europe—like China now—was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization.

When I met him, Jiang (whose real name is Lu Jiamin) looked anything but lupine. His thick glasses, thinning hair, and a schoolteacher pullover made it hard to imagine him braving the wild. But the appearance was misleading; when he closed in on one of his passions—politics, nomad culture, or wolves—his delivery grew more animated and a predatory glint came into his eyes. He was a radical liberal who lived his values.
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As well as being a former artist, Jiang had been a Red Guard, shepherd, political prisoner, radical news-sheet publisher, Maoist lecturer, and Tiananmen Square protester. He was now defending what was left of the Mongolian grasslands: “China’s agricultural traditions are about taking from the environment without giving anything back. This is unsustainable, which is why we are frequently beset by disaster. Our thinking about the ecology is so weak that it has held back the progress of our nation. We need to pay more respect to nature. In my book I wanted to show that nomad culture is very protective of ecosystems.”

When he won the Man Asian award, Jiang donated the $10,000 prize money to Chen Jiqun, the grasslands activist noted above. They had been comrades since the Cultural Revolution. They both knew and respected the grasslands and Mongolian culture. The author saw China’s current environmental crisis as a turning point. The problems of pollution, sandstorms, water shortages, and disease were so acute they could not be ignored. For the situation to improve, he believed China needed to move away from meek Confucian deference to authority. Officials at the top were still focused on economic growth. Jiang wanted people at the bottom to be more assertive about improving their living conditions. Yet, for all the idealism of Jiang and efforts of NGOs, the reality in Inner Mongolia was that the landscape was being shaped not by grassroots activism but by ever-bigger industrial projects.

On the outskirts of the grasslands, the empty road gave way to a vision of China’s future. Ordos rose up out of nowhere in smart rows of tower blocks, new industrial parks, and construction cranes. Built almost from scratch in the desert, the city was so perfectly arranged that, from a distance, it looked like it was constructed from Lego bricks. There was none of the
clutter, chaos, and vibrancy of other cities. The streets were deserted. I put this down to the biting minus 20°C winds that cut in from the Gobi. But it soon became apparent that humanity has not yet fully embraced the future that has been built for it by the architects of “Scientific Development.”

Ordos is industrializing faster than Huaxi and urbanizing almost as quickly as Chongqing. Its economy is surging at such a speed that the average salary here is higher than in Shanghai.
³⁵
Below its surface lies the biggest gas field in China; on its outskirts is an open-cast coal mine that dwarfs anything in Shanxi. Industrial-scale experiments that will shape the world are under way here. Ordos plans to build a huge wind farm and the world’s largest solar plant, which will cover an area bigger than Manhattan and generate enough electricity to power three million homes.
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This is also the proposed site of an algae plant that would soak up carbon and convert it into biofuel or feed for animals.

But, as elsewhere in China, these green experiments are dwarfed by the investment in fossil fuels. Ordos is the new capital of carbon. Inner Mongolia has overtaken Shanxi as the nation’s biggest coal-producing region. Heavy industry has followed the fuel. That trend has given the region the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions that are more than twice the level in the UK. Yet this region is considered a training ground for future leaders. When President Hu’s protégé, Hu Chunhua (no relation), was made governor of Inner Mongolia in 2010, it was taken as a sign that he had been put on a fast track toward leadership of the country in 2022.

The most advanced colliery in the world sits on the outskirts of Ordos. Contrary to the dirty, dangerous, and insufficient image of coal in China, the Shangwan pit churns out more than a million tons per month with just 300 miners and claims a 100 percent safety record. On the outside it was indeed remarkably green. With trees and lawns and barely a speck of coal dust on the ground, the state-owned company’s model mine resembled a garden more than a pit.

Before going down, I had to put on a miner’s coverall, helmet, and boots. The changing rooms are like those of a five-star sports club. Valets took me to the crisply laundered outfits, white gloves, and a satchel containing an emergency oxygen supply laid out on a cushioned chair. The mine’s cheerfully pudgy Communist Party secretary, Wang Tianliang, stripped down to his long johns beside me and extolled the virtues of what was, he said, the most productive single face in the world.

To get to the pit face, we had only to board a comfortable minibus and drive 10 kilometers through a tunnel that was wider and cleaner than the London Underground. There were just a handful of miners at our destination, 355 meters underground. They worked with remote-control devices that changed the direction, position, and speed of a German-made cutting machine that sliced back and forth along a 300-meter coal face. Giant hydraulic supports kept the tunnel stable. “This hydraulic system is one hundred percent made in China,” Wang told me with evident pride.

Back on the surface, Wang showed me the control room where a bank of computers ran the operation, all monitored on a wall of CCTV screens. One screen tracked the position of every worker in the mine. Another showed the rail depot, where carriages were filled at the rate of a ton a second before they trundled east to the power plants and factories on the coast.

The mine is run by Shenhua, a state-run firm and the world’s biggest coal company. By 2015, it plans to almost double production at this super-colliery. Most of the extra output is earmarked for a nearby experimental facility that could determine the future of China’s greenhouse gas emissions and the world’s efforts to tackle climate change.

In the glow of a Mongolian sunset, pink and white smoke billowed gently from the gleaming silver pipes of the Shenhua-Ordos coal-to-liquid facility. There was no smell and so little noise from the machinery that the most audible sound was the flap of the red national flags outside the entrance. The facility was as clean and beautiful as industry gets, yet this plant was also an environmentalist’s worst nightmare.

Coal liquefaction is a process that is historically associated with desperation. It was developed in Nazi Germany and enhanced by South Africa when antiapartheid sanctions were threatening the country’s fuel supplies. Japan, the United States, and several other nations also launched small-scale trials after the oil price shock of the early 1970s. Most were abandoned due to environmental and cost concerns.

But the industrial-scale experiment at Ordos had already produced a million tons of liquid coal in its first year of operation. It used a direct liquefaction technique to “crack” black carbon with hydrogen extracted from water to produce clear diesel. The demands on resources were immense. For each ton of diesel, six and a half tons of water had to be piped from an aquifer more than 70 kilometers away, and more than three tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air.

For many years, the government hesitated about adopting this technology because the production of liquid coal results in almost twice the emissions as producing a comparable amount of oil. But Shenhua planned to expand production fivefold and to build a similar facility in Xinjiang. In nearby Ningxia, the South African firm Sasol was tying up with a local partner to make an indirect liquefaction facility.

As he showed me the plant, Shu Geping, the chief engineer, said cost and insecurity had prompted China to develop liquid coal as an alternative to imported oil. The coal substitute was competitive when oil hit $40 a barrel. In the future, as technology and economies of scale improve, it will be even cheaper. Ultimately, liquefaction technology was a form of insurance against oil price rises, trade conflict, and embargoes.

“This is strategically important for China because we have abundant coal but little oil,” Shu explained. “I’ve read that if the output of coal-to-liquid plants could reach 50 million tons a year, then China’s energy problems would be solved.”

But it could also completely undermine efforts to put the country on a cleaner growth track. By cheaply filling gas tanks with the world’s dirtiest fuel, liquefaction technology could kill efforts to develop electric cars and other forms of clean transport. If adopted on the massive scale envisaged by Shu, it will extend the life of collieries for decades. The world’s biggest carbon emitter will have found a new way to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gas.

Shu, though, insisted his facility could be good for the environment because it is equipped to capture and condense carbon dioxide for possible storage. His plant was about to launch one of China’s most ambitious carbon-capture and sequestration projects. In conjunction with a United States partner, it would store 100,000 tons annually in a nearby saline aquifer. That was small beer, less than a thirtieth of the plant’s emissions. It was a pilot project that could be scaled up in the future, but I had heard from several scientists and policymakers how reluctant China was to accept the costs of dumping carbon underground when it was far cheaper to pump it into the air.