Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

7. Between 1.6 billion and 3.9 billion tons of sediment are discharged into the river every year.

8. With each breach of its banks, the river can also change course. Few waterways have twisted quite so dramatically across continents. Though it now empties into the Bohai Sea, the Yellow previously had its estuary hundreds of miles south and discharged into the Yellow Sea.

9. Dikes had to rise higher and higher to cope with the sediment. In some places, this has created an elevated river, as high as 10 meters above ground level in Henan Province’s Kaifeng City. The Yellow’s main environmental claim to fame is now that it is the only river in the world that flows high above the heads of tens of millions of people.

10. Several floods have killed more than a million people, most recently in 1931.

11. In 1956, Soviet engineers adapted a Japanese military blueprint for Sanmenxia, the first megadam on the Yellow River and almost exactly halfway along its curling length. Wide tracts of land were flooded, forcing the resettlement of 280,000 farmers. They were told their sacrifice would be worth it to ensure flood controls and hydroelectric power for millions of others. But the dam silted up within ten years, making the turbines redundant.

12. For a more detailed description of the philosophy behind Sanmenxia and other efforts to tame the Yellow, see Rob Gifford, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, 2007).

13. Agriculture is by far the biggest drain on the river, accounting for 90 percent of the diverted water (interview with Yellow River Conservancy officials), some of which is taken hundreds of kilometers into the desert.

14. In 2008, four billion tons of industrial waste and sewage were discharged into the river system, leaving 83 percent of the water too contaminated to drink without treatment. In 2007, the authorities revealed that a third of the 150 fish species that once swam the murky waters are now extinct and fishermen’s catches are down by 60 percent.

15. The spectrum of pollution was most vividly seen in October 2006, when a half-mile stretch of river in Gansu ran pink after the Lanzhou Tanjianzi No. 2 Steam Heating Station flushed 2,000 liters of tainted liquid from a broken boiler into the river. To the company’s credit, they had added the dye to prevent the water being mistaken for drinking water, but it was not supposed to have found its way into the Yellow. Other firms have no doubt done worse, but not made half the splash because their deeds were colorless.

16. Alarmingly, the definition of this water quality grade (level five) does not say it is too dirty to use for irrigation.

17. Jim Yardley, “Rules Ignored, Toxic Sludge Sinks Chinese Village,” New York Times, September 4, 2006.

18. Ibid.

19. A raised cement floor heated by burning coal underneath.

20. The government provided a special stipend of 55 yuan for each mu of land affected. Yang’s area covered 12 mu.

21. Jonathan Watts, “Silk Road That’s Paved with Gold,” Observer, August 3, 2008.

22. Tom Scocca, “The People’s Weather: Officials Are Betting Weather Modification Can Keep the Sun Shining on the Olympics,” Plenty, April 17, 2008.

23. Ibid.

24. The immensity of China’s weather modification forces were evident during the Beijing Olympics, when the sky was assaulted as never before to ensure rain did not put a damper on director Zhang Yimou’s elaborately choreographed opening ceremony. As storm clouds approached, the rings of anti-rain defenses around the city were ordered into action. Over eight hours, they fired 1,104 dispersal rockets in what was described by the domestic media as a “successful interception” of the rain belt heading for the stadium. With stratospheric rivals out of the way, Olympic organizers frazzled the sky with a 30,000-rocket pyrotechnic display.

25. The city expected a downpour of more than 100 millimeters but, after interception, had to make do with less than 30 millimeters (Jonathan Watts, “Cities Fall Out Over Cloud,” Guardian, July 15, 2004).

26. He estimates the losses at 54 billion yuan per year.

27. The former director Zhu Zenda was influential in persuading the government to adopt this policy. Wang considers him a mentor.

1. This quote is from a speech that Lord Stern gave at Renmin University on September 11, 2009.

2. Interviews with Yao Tandong, glaciologist at the China Academy of Sciences, and Shi Yafeng, a member of the team. At least six of the locations were in Gansu, according to Shi.

3. Interview with Shi Yafeng.

4. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (Holt, 1998), p. 77.

5. The first measurements of Urumqi Number One were taken by explorers in 1953, but it was not until after 1959 that systematic studies of the glacier were undertaken, according to Yao Tandong.

6. I was not alone in my ignorance. One newly arrived colleague from another newspaper admitted that he had never before heard of the Uighurs—the region’s ethnic majority—whose name he initially assumed was from a Monty Python sketch.

7. The strategic concerns of empire clearly outweighed the Christian piety of the Victorians. Britain armed and financed a failed Muslim uprising in 1862 led by Yakub Beg, a notorious tyrant. For Younghusband, see Ch. 2.

8. 5.8 billion cubic meters (Ma Jun, China’s Water Crisis [Eastbridge, 2004], p. 205).

9. Together, they cover 60,000 square kilometers and account for 15 percent of the planet’s ice.

10. Jonathan Watts, “Highest Ice Fields Will Not Last 100 Years, Study Finds,” Guardian, September 24, 2004.

11. Ma, China’s Water Crisis .

12. Rob Gifford, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, 2007), p. 240.

13. Mongolia, the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

14. The unidealized version of the story is told by the journalist and blogger Huang Zhangjin, who was born in Xinjiang: “When the first group of female soldiers arrived, it was as if there was a whole pack of wolves fighting over scraps of meat. The middle and lower level officers didn’t see so much as the shadow of a woman, and this made them even more desperate than before. So, there was a large assembly, during which a high-level officer—a new groom himself—made a grand promise: Mao will make good on his word, you can be sure of that. Everyone will certainly be distributed a wife!” Translated by China Digital Times as “The Tale of Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens Going Up Tian Mountain.”

15. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 160.

16. Ibid., p. 140.

17. Xinjiang came to produce a third of China’s cotton.

18. Nicholas Bequelin, “Xinjiang in the Nineties,” China Journal 44 (2000): 65–90.

19. Richard B. Harris, Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China’s Wild West (East Gate, 2008), p. 136.

20. Ma, China’s Water Crisis, p. 111.

21. The diversion of the Tarim (Lop Nor’s source river) led to the total collapse of the dense poplar forests downstream that had thrived in the area for thousands of years. The roots of these hardy trees go down 10 meters—which allows them to survive in even the worst climatic dry spells. But once the river dried up, the water table fell 14 meters, dooming even these most drought-resistant of trees.

22. Across stretches of Xinjiang there are similar cases of disastrous ecological mismanagement by the settlers. Lake Manas was once a giant body of water covering 550 square kilometers, but it dried up completely after bing-tuan teams built a reservoir on its main source. Abi Nur, on the border with Kazakhstan, has shrunk by more than half from 1,200 square kilometers since the 1950s as a result of an eightfold expansion of farmland. White salty dust from the exposed bed is carried across the Heaven range all the way to Urumqi, more than 600 kilometers away, eroding the quality of land in between, causing diarrhea in livestock and posing serious risks to human health. With less water to keep the desert in check, sand dunes threaten to take back farmland. In several areas, such as Jinghe, many farmers have abandoned their homes. Sand on the tracks repeatedly forces stoppages on the transcontinental railway that links Beijing with central Asia (Ma, China’s Water Crisis ).