When a Billion Chinese Jump (52 page)

Unless such attitudes change, it is likely the carbon storage project will end up as another fine-sounding small step toward a cleaner future while the economy as a whole continues to take giant strides toward heavy, coal-fired industry.

The government is still making up its mind on whether to expand liquefaction. Plans for other facilities that would result in Inner Mongolia converting half of its coal—about 4 percent of China’s total energy resources—into liquid are on hold. In favor is the oil price. Against are environmental concerns and fears of unsustainability. Ordos’s economic growth has been predicated on massively ramped-up consumption of carbon and water. Ordos is surrounded by desert and more prone to drought than Gansu. Up until 2003, water was rationed and residents could use the taps for only three hours a day. Now there are no restrictions because enough water is pumped here from the Yellow River and elsewhere to allow each citizen 130 liters of water per day.
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While the rest of North China endures devastating droughts, rich Ordos is siphoning off more water than ever.

Elsewhere in the city, I examined another very different eco-project that attempted to address criticism that Ordos was wasting scarce resources. The local government had teamed up with the Swedish government and European scientists to build the world’s first dry-latrine multistory housing complex.
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Six hundred families were using toilets that flushed sawdust instead of water. It was a tricky business. The technology was far from perfect and users needed to have a good aim to make it work.

The technique was explained by Chen Furong, a smart young official from the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau who was only occasionally embarrassed by the subject under discussion. In the exhibition center she showed how instead of flushing water the cistern discharged sawdust or wood chips. This covered the waste, which then tipped automatically into a bin in the basement. It was collected once a week and composted for use as fertilizer.

Environmentally, it was brilliant. The apartments in the eco-town used just a third of the water usually required for homes of the same size. Scientists claimed they were the first in the world to mass-compost human waste, which was an efficient use of energy and a good source of potassium, nitrates, and other nutrients for the soil. Professor Jiang in Shandong would have been proud.

But the experiment had a problem: It stank. On some days, the smell was so unbearable that a number of families had moved out. German experts from the World Toilet Organization had been called in for advice. But there was no easy solution.

We visited a group of residents playing cards in a ground-floor apartment.
Song Guoying, who lived on the top floor where the smell was worst, felt she was a rat in a toilet laboratory: “When we bought the apartment, the former owners never told us about the special toilets. We just got it because it was cheap. I would never have moved here if I had known about the eco-project. The smell is sometimes so bad I can’t sleep.”

Most of the residents were content, but officials told me privately they did not expect the eco-project to move to a second phase, once the Swedish planners handed control back to the hosts.

Even if the experiment were to succeed, the unflushed savings would be tiny in comparison with the lakes of water being gulped down by mining and the coal liquefication facility a short distance up the road. The small, resource-conserving international project looked like failing while high-emission, resource-consuming industrial complexes were expanding. Ordos encapsulated the contradictions of “Scientific Development.” It was black power, red power, and green power rolled into one. The most successful experiments in Ordos looked great, but they necessitated the consumption of ever more carbon and water. The vision it offered of the future was clean rather than sustainable.

The final full day of my longest journey across China was spent making a 600-kilometer taxi ride through grasslands. The roads were flanked by rolling fields, stretches of barren scrub, and rows of saplings and seedlings. We passed small villages of packed-earth huts daubed with family-planning propaganda and China Mobile adverts. Pulling onto a minor road near Qahar shortly before dusk, we bumped through the most spectacular Mongolian scenery I had seen so far: a broad valley between two knobbled mountain ridges. At the end of a long day, the sun seemed to be in a playful mood, appearing and disappearing behind the peaks like a doting parent playing peekaboo. The twilight lingered for another hour or so, then the stars brightened as we cruised through a sea of grass to our destination—Xanadu.

For three years from 1260, this was the summer capital of the greatest land empire in human history. Kublai Khan held court here in a palatial
ger
on the grasslands to escape the heat of his adopted home in Beijing. A gourmet and lover of the exotic, the great khan required constant stimulation and entertainment. Wealthier than anyone in the world at that time, he sponsored some of the finest theater in Chinese history and invited
Tibetan lamas, Kashmiri magicians, Arabian astrologers, Nestorian Christians, and other great thinkers from his empire to share their philosophies. Poetry of that Yuan dynasty era describes three-day feasts for a thousand guests and dancing girls writhing sensuously in a “heavenly demon dance.” Visitors to Xanadu witnessed the most magnificent and cosmopolitan spectacle of the age. Marco Polo, the Venetian trader, was awestruck: “No man since Adam has ruled over so many subjects or such a vast territory. Nor has any possessed such treasure or such power.” His imagination may have got the better of him. Many historians suspect the Venetian trader never visited Xanadu.
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It was hard to equate any kind of grandeur—real or imagined—with Shangdu, as the disheveled town is now called in Chinese. The small town, which I reached late in the evening, was very much a Han community of orthogonal roads, square white-tiled buildings, tinted windows, pink-lit massage parlors, karaoke bars, and a giant billboard from which Dashan, an enviably fluent Mandarin-speaking Canadian, entreated people to buy mobile phones. The biggest development in the area was a new power plant. The second biggest was the Summer Palace Hotel, where we checked in for the night. It was a giant concrete
ger
, a modern pleasure dome.

I felt like celebrating. I had made it all the way from Shangri-La, the longest land journey of my life. It was a moment to celebrate. I asked a taxi driver to take me to the best restaurant in town.

Functional and fluorescent-lit, the Eastern Cloud Attic looked much like any other restaurant in the town, but it offered a slightly wider selection of food. I told the waitress I was in the mood for a feast and ordered frog, snake, pigs’ ears, mushroom, mutton, and baijiu. I gorged myself, taking pleasure from consumption rather than the grim surroundings.

The owner, a chubby florid-faced Han, was delighted at the business and the rare foreign visitor. He told me he too was a newcomer to Shangdu: “I have three restaurants in my hometown, but I decided to move here because it has a new power plant. That will bring many opportunities.”

He invited me to join his table, where he held court with a dozen friends and hangers-on. There was a cook, a businessman, a driver, and a minor official. We drank baijiu, then toasted each other, then drank more baijiu.

“You are my first English friend. Drink with me in the spirit of international friendship,” he said. Then he looked around at his friends and cracked a joke: “You are not Japanese, are you?” he laughed. The hangers-on
grinned. “If you were I would kill you here and now. I hate Japanese.” Guffaws erupted from around the table. I was reminded of the patriot on the train across the Tibetan Plateau. Was it the harsh environment or did the pioneers of China’s remote regions get their sense of humor from the same joke book? My celebration was over. I had eaten and drunk too much and had more than my fill. It was time to return to the hotel.

Kublai Khan was a big man with a huge appetite. The portraits of the Yuan emperor, as the Sinophile styled himself, show him to be the most corpulent ruler in China’s history. He was a brilliant leader but a troubled man. Under his rule, China’s territory was expanded to include Tibet, Yunnan, and much of Southeast Asia, paper currency was introduced, and water was diverted to Beijing, which he established as the capital. Yet he was never embraced by the Han as one of their own, and many Mongolians hated him because he took on Chinese airs. In later life, the mighty khan overstretched his empire, overconsumed, and increasingly retreated to the grasslands where he felt most comfortable.
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After the death of his son, he began binge eating, eventually dying in 1294, massively overweight and suffering from gout. His political legacy was short-lived. The Yuan dynasty ended less than a century later in famine, corruption, and war. “Toward the end of his life Kublai became depraved” read the final inscription of a Chinese exhibition on Mongolian history. “So go all emperors.”

Xanadu is a symbol of his confused cultural legacy. Built around 1256, it was a walled capital the size of Beijing’s Forbidden City that encompassed a park, trees for his falcons, and two homes. As well as a permanent marble structure, the khan-emperor also constructed a palace fit for a nomad: a round, domed structure made of gilded cane that could easily be taken down and rebuilt elsewhere.
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Historians have speculated that he moved between them according to the seasons, but he may also have been pulled from one to the other depending on whether he was in a Chinese or Mongolian frame of mind. It cannot have been easy to span a cultural divide marked so tangibly by the Great Wall. In the West, however, Xanadu is not associated with confusion or decline. Far from it. The name is synonymous in the English-speaking world with the ultimate escape, a manmade
paradise. This is largely thanks to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” In 1798, the poet dreamed of an all-powerful ruler who ordered the creation of “a stately pleasure-dome.” Bursting with sexual energy, the verse explored the power of creation and destruction and man’s futile efforts to control chaotic nature. It was a dark vision, prophesying floods, war, the eruption of mountains, sunless seas, and lifeless oceans. But it was also ripe with images of fertility, of savageness and magic, of an earth so alive it almost seemed to be breathing:
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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
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It was pure romanticism. Like James Hilton with Shangri-La, Coleridge never set foot in the Oriental paradise he imagined so vividly. He is believed to have written “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced reverie at a farmhouse near Exmoor in the southwest of England. He never finished. Of the two hundred lines he composed in his dream, he wrote down only a quarter. They were published as a fragment, subtitled “A Vision in a Dream,”
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which has since inspired—and sold—countless stories, films, and pop songs. Coleridge’s incomplete fantasy is now far more powerful than the imperial citadel on which it is based.

The next morning, I visited the ruins that were all that was left of the Great Khan’s stately playground. For several decades the site had been completely neglected. During the Cultural Revolution it was part of a closed military region. Such was the panic over imaginary Mongolian independence movements in those days that even the mention of the ancient khans would have been enough to warrant imprisonment or worse. A local farmer told us the land was owned back then by the May 1st Collective.
Most of it was now privately farmed. The owners grew potatoes for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sand breaks suggested they too were having to fight the encroaching desert.

All that was left of the powerhouse was a square mile of grassy banks and stones on a windswept plain. There was no sacred River Alph, only a trickle on the largely dried-up bed of a stream. If there had ever been “sunny spots of greenery,” they had shriveled up or been submerged under the scrub. The only sign of natural life or human activity were a snake asleep among the rubble and some empty beer bottles. There could be few more striking examples of how empires fall as well as rise.

No single factor can explain the fall of dynasties, but environmental historians believe individuals or civilizations often bring about their own annihilation by losing touch with their roots, overconsuming or failing to recognize ecological limits. Initial success often proves the origin of later failure. Perceived strengths turn into fatal weaknesses.

Take the Maya of Central America, whose culture was so prodigious that they expanded to the point of destroying the dense rain forests where they lived and hunted.
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The fall of Sumerian civilization has been blamed on overrapid urbanization and a bronze industry that polluted their farmland. Alexander the Great might not have been driven to ultimately destructive conquest were it not for the deforestation of his Macedonian homeland.
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But perhaps the most disturbing case was that of the Easter Islanders, who outgrew the capacity of their small isolated territory in the South Pacific. Initially successful in food gathering, they had an advanced culture for their age and gave thanks by making giant statues called
ahu.
Logs were felled as rollers to move the giant stones to ceremonial sites. But as the population expanded beyond the carrying capacity of the island, competition for food and materials to build statues intensified. When the islanders’ fortunes began to fail, they started to fight and were more desperate than ever to erect statues to regain the favor of their ancestors. The once densely vegetated island was completely stripped of trees. With no wood left for homes, the islanders retreated to the caves. They died out soon after.
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Such, at least, is the explanation offered by environmental historians. There were other possibilities. But civilizations, it seems, tend to fall much more quickly than they rise. By the time people realize they have hit a tipping point, it is too late to do anything.