When a Billion Chinese Jump (69 page)

87.
Migration accelerates this trend. Old residents of formerly wild areas know what has been lost and often support a limited degree of conservation, but the influx of newcomers means most of the population have no memory of the ecological past. They compare Heilongjiang to the degraded cities and farmlands they left behind and see a land ripe for exploitation. Migrants also tend to be poorer and in a greater hurry to make money. Without a belief in sustainability and no sense of ownership or responsibility, they tear into the black soil, the wetlands, and the forest (Pickles, “Implementing Ecologically Sustainable Development in China”).

88.
Heilongjiang became the first province in China to move 100 percent to this form of fuel in 2008. The three northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning were among the first to use ethanol. The government estimated that, nationwide, half of the fuel sold for cars would be ethanol by 2010 (Xinhua, “China Enlarges Bio-Ethanol Fuel Coverage,” April 1, 2008).

89.
Remote-sensing surveys show that China’s cultivated land area plummeted between 1988 and 2000, from 1,307,400 square kilometers in 1991 to 1,282,400 square kilometers in 2000—or from 1.8 mu (0.0012 square kilometer) per head to 1.5 mu (0.0010 square kilometer) per head. Construction accounted for 56.6 percent of the decrease, 21 percent of land was forested, 16 percent was flooded, and 4 percent became grassland. Jasper Becker says the shortage of land is used by the government as an excuse for wasteful agricultural practices. “China feeds 20 percent of the world’s population on seven percent of the planet’s arable land. This fact is often cited by government leaders to excuse rural poverty and the widespread use of chemicals to squeeze more value out of the land. But Japan and South Korea have far higher population densities relative to arable land, yet their economies are considerably stronger and greener than China’s” (Becker,
Hungry Ghosts,
p. 262). The former water minister Qian Zhengying has advised Premier Wen to increase food production still further in the area to replace the degraded lands of the northwest.

90.
Ma is now going back to the drawing board to try to find a compromise that will allow the area to develop, while minimizing the ecological impact. He is shifting his focus from the top level of government to the local people and local governments—that middle band of China where power now lies. Ironically, to win them over, he once again finds himself advocating the conversion of wetlands to dry field production. It is another turning point, back toward the activity he was doing as a fifteen-year-old pioneer. It is the lesser of two evils. What he helped to do during the Cultural Revolution had a bad impact, but not as bad as what is being done now.

1.
He was so impressed with the Taoist monk Qiu Chuji that, after sacking Beijing, he reconstructed the White Cloud Temple in the city in his honor.

2.
Scott Mills,
Conservation of Wildlife Populations
(Blackwell, 2007), p. 14.

3.
Presentation by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, based on estimates of CO
₂
emissions from energy consumption and cement production using data from the China National Bureau of Statistics, IPCC, the World Bank, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

4.
See
ch. 12
.

5.
Three aerosol clouds struck Beijing during spring and early summer 2008, dashing hopes that the “Great Green Wall” of poplars and other trees (see
ch. 15
) might protect the Chinese capital before the Olympics. NASA satellite images showed the worst of them, on March 1, completely obscuring a 150,000-square-kilometer area of land stretching from Beijing down to Xian and halfway across the Bohai Sea. The following day, it hit South Korea, where several schools were closed amid health fears. A day later, Japanese newspapers were warning the year’s first
kosa
(yellow sand) had arrived in Okinawa and was heading northeast toward Tokyo, obscuring the sky as it traversed the archipelago. It then made its way toward the Pacific and the western coast of the United States, where millions of tons of dust and other airborne pollutants from China are deposited each year. By one estimate, half the airborne dust in the world comes from China (L. Ochirkhuyag and R. Tsolmon, “Monitoring the Source of Transnational Dust Storms in Northeast Asia,”
International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
37 [2008], Beijing).

6.
China has eight distinct gravel desert zones to which the Mongol
gobi
is applied, and four sandy desert zones designated by the Chinese
shadi
or
shamo.
(In
gobi
the dunes are more mobile.) The eight gobi regions account for about 42 percent of China’s total desert areas (Dee Mack Williams,
Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia
[Stanford University Press, 2002]).

7.
Ibid.

8.
Lester Brown,
The Earth Policy Reader
(Norton, 2002), p. 31.

9.
Ibid., pp. 28–31, and personal interview.

10.
Cited in Richard B. Harris,
Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China’s Wild West
(East Gate, 2008), p. 38.

11.
Though the extent of the degradation is difficult to assess, because there is no quantifiable definition of “degradation” and hence no accurate statistics.

12.
Kerry Brown cites Chinese government figures showing that between 1967 and 1969, 16,222 people died and over 340,000 suffered physical injury during the purge of an alleged Mongolian independence party that later communist leaders admitted had never existed (Kerry Brown,
The Purge of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1967–69: A Function of Language, Power and Violence
[Global Oriental, 2006]). Judith Shapiro notes that the amount of land cleared in Inner Mongolia was about a twentieth of that in Heilongjiang and a fortieth of that in Xinjiang (Judith Shapiro,
Mao’s War Against Nature
[Cambridge University Press, 2001], p. 40).

13.
Interview with John MacKinnon, head of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme.

14.
By a quirky coincidence, the rodent control headquarters is located next to China’s Wildlife Conservation Society.

15.
According to Chen, a team of botanists discovered 697 species of plants on the grasslands during a survey in 2005.

16.
Speaking more broadly on the entire western and northern grasslands, Harris observes, “It is safe to conclude that many western Chinese rangelands no longer produce the abundance of palatable vegetation they formerly did, have lost soil matter or productivity, and are less efficient at facilitating quick weight gains in domestic livestock” (Harris,
Wildlife Conservation in China,
p. 38).

17.
This was seen as a factor in the 2008 milk-contamination scandal. Wholesalers added melamine to watered-down milk to make the protein levels look higher during inspections. At least six infants died after drinking the contaminated milk.

18.
See
ch. 15
, n. 24.

19.
South Korea’s largest environmental NGO was given funds by the government in Seoul to try to reduce the degradation of the grasslands because the resulting sandstorms are a major problem on the peninsula.

20.
According to Dai Qing, on her advice.

21.
Among the other leading groups are Global Village of Beijing, whose founder Liao Xiaoyi won the Norwegian Sophie Prize in 2000, and Green Watershed, led by Yu Xiaogang, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2006, the same year that the environmentalist Ma Jun, author of
China’s Water Crisis
and founder of another green NGO, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, was named by
Time
as one of 100 people who shape our world (Nick Young, “International Fillip for Chinese Greens,”
China Briefing,
May 6, 2006).

22.
He added, “When I started out in 1983, there was only one environmental law. It wasn’t even a real law. It was a pilot. Now there are twenty-five or more laws and hundreds of regulations. But the environment is still deteriorating.”

23.
Only 4 out of 113 gave an adequate response, according to a survey carried out by Ma and leading academics (Jonathan Watts, “Local Governments Keep Chinese Public in the Dark about Pollution,”
Guardian,
September 4, 2009).

24.
Ibid.

25.
The NGO newsletter
China Briefing,
published by Briton Nick Young, was banned in 2007, partly because it linked disparate activist groups.

26.
Zeng Jinyan (wife of Hu Jia), Xu Jiehua (wife of Wu Lihong), and Yuan Weijing (wife of Chen Guangcheng).

27.
Similarly with Tan Zuoren and Chen Guangcheng. Tan won the approval of Premier Wen for his reports on dams and petrochemical plants in Sichuan. But he was arrested after he turned his attention to the shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 earthquake. Chen started out by organizing a campaign to get clean drinking water in his home province of Shandong. Later, his exposure of brutal and illegal techniques to enforce the family-planning laws led to his being abducted from the streets of Beijing by plainclothes officials, put under house arrest, and later imprisoned. Others I met who were later locked up include Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zisheng, Sun Xiaodi, and Liu Jie.

28.
Music charts in China are even less reliable as a guide to popularity than in the U.S. and Europe, not least because almost all music is pirated and
downloaded for free. At a Climate Change gig at Mao Livehouse, for which he arrived onstage in a white biohazard suit and goggles, Xiao sang to acclaim:

When you’re young and
When you’re green
Save all the beautiful things
With pride and love we sing
“See we can show you!”

29.
It occupied the top spot from December 8 to 14, 2008. Mongolian Cow (Mengniu) Sour Yogurt has a strong association with pop music.
Super Girl
or
Super Voice Girls,
the hugely popular Chinese version of
The X Factor,
is also sponsored by the Inner Mongolia–based firm.

30.
This is an unusual but reasonable approach to easing the pressure on the planet. Eating vegetables directly is a far more efficient way to take in energy than consuming meat, which has to be fattened up with grain.

31.
Several major NGOs told me they approached Chinese celebrities about fronting wildlife conservation activities, but were turned down so often they gave up.

32.
The two are, of course, not mutually exclusive. The challenge is how to rebalance the relationship between man and nature.

33.
“Eco-Civilization” research is apparently the new communist orthodoxy. The institute was set up after President Hu made it a key goal.

34.
Few lives so vividly illustrated the turbulence that has racked China for the past sixty years. Jiang was born in 1946 in Jiangsu Province to a politically red-blooded family. His parents were former Red Army soldiers, heroes of the war against Japan, but his mother died young and his father was almost beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution as an accused “Black Gang Capitalist Roader.” Jiang was nevertheless completely enamored of Mao. He joined the student Red Guard and rose to become deputy head of the revolutionary core group in his college, the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. He was sent to Inner Mongolia along with the wave of “educated youth” who went to the countryside in 1967, but the air of the steppe failed to soften his rebellious nature. Jiang was jailed for more than three years and narrowly escaped the death penalty for criticizing Communist Party number two Lin Biao in 1970 just before his demise. He founded the “Beijing Spring” reform publication during
the Democracy Wall protests in 1978 and played a prominent role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, for which he spent another eighteen months behind bars.

35.
The economy is racing forward at the staggering rate of 38 percent a year. Local authorities expect the size of the economy to triple between 2007 and 2012. If their projections prove correct, Ordos is on course to be a wealthy megacity by 2020 (“Ordos: A Land of Opportunity,”
China Daily,
August 25, 2008). According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the city has the greatest growth potential in China.

36.
“The World’s Largest Solar Plant Is Planned for the Mongolian Desert of China,” United Press International, September 10, 2009.

37.
Interview with Sun Lixia, director of the Ordos eco-town project.

38.
The pilot eco-town project covered forty-two buildings and fifty-five hectares in one of the city’s many new districts.